Sorry to hear that. Why were you working nights and weekends?
I'm sure that most of stripe work reasonable hours
And even at that point, my team doubled in size over the next few months with no increase in work. Stripe over-hired badly. Very badly. I also wish I got laid off today. The 14 weeks severance would have been a godsend for me.
This is why I feel no guilt over letting my teams down repeatedly. It doesn't matter unless you are bad enough to fire.
Source: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Stripe&track=Software%20Engi...
Can you explain this? Do you mean working three jobs at once?
In what world do you read this and think "doing the job well enough at all 3"?
He is saying that if I am not getting fired, I am good enough to continue working there.
There is a difference between being good and efficient enough to handle number roles, and the borderline scam of "get a remote job and try to stay under the radar and drag it out before they fire you".
I'm honestly not 100% sure which of those you are advocating for.
Cashiers can have second jobs working in a different store. Factory workers can work in other factories (it's hard on your body but overall okay).
No one would similarly complain if an Google software engineer was also 'forced' to make ends meet by working in an Apple retail store.
Yes, it's hard on your body and mind to work more than 1 job, but if you need the money then what choice do you have?
If they signed a contract to the effect they would work exclusively for one company, their choice to lie is unethical. It might be profitable as well, but "not their fault because it's profitable and they can get away with it" shamelessness, writ large, is making everything worse.
This is exactly the point.
The if's don't matter because they weren't addressed. You can't assume that person is breaking contract law. You have no idea.
Nobody owes their employer any more than the minimum that is guaranteed by the employment contract. Sucks, but that's life.
If you feel like the quality of your coworkers that give minimum effort is screwing you over, talk to your employer.
If an employer can be picky enough that they require you to only have them as your only employer, they would need to specify that in an employment contract (it's not enforceable, you have a right to privacy from your employer).
If you want to be "ethical" (ie, servile to your employer) to the detriment of your economic survival, that's fine. That's your choice. Everyone else is going to play the game to the rules.
Just in October? Has this happened before?
Are there any companies aside from Twitter that would fall under this? Because that's the only one I've seen mentioned in the news that way, but you make it sound like there are plenty others. So I was curious if I simply missed something.
Of course, when it inevitably doesn't they axe a few and the rest go back to work.
Overarching thesis is the people who work to live don’t want to be dragged by those who live to work.
Something to remember, especially if you have anyone working under you - your work level will be seen as the minimum for your team members, not the exception.
Generally speaking though, companies should value output and results over hours. Easier said than done. Additionally, value should be placed on what one commits to do and delivers on. So if somebody is constantly having to pull late nights to complete work, they may be overcommitting. It's also possible a manager will consistently push people to overcommit: this is a problem because that can indicate poor boundaries, bad planning, poor resourcing, and so on.
Sure. And if the culture of the company/team is working 40 hours a week max and calling people out when they work more than that, then maybe it isn't the right fit for you.
At the same time I can accept some nuance here, e.g. working nights and weekends because you're taking some time back during the day in the week.
Similarly with remote working, if there's a wide enough timezone difference you might shift your routine to maximise overlap with the team.
I'm strongly in favour of maintaining harmony between work and life such that you're able to comfortably do both, but would not insist on a hard and fast rule.
If someone even further up the ladder says X does nights and weekends, so should the rest of the team, then the buck stops with that person, and they are contributing negatively to the culture.
If not by law, then because almost noone is happy working 60-70h and it puts pressure on others who feel like they also need to work similar hours. Additionally the efficiency gets worse as the weekly hours increase.
Young people have to work hard. I don’t expect my reports to work on any evenings or weekends and if they even suggest it, I tell them not to and give them more lead. At the same time, if they override my decision and work through the evening, I am ready to answer questions over IM if I’m free too. I’m not going to say “why are you working evenings?”.
People online are daft.
I'd not recommend 23yo to stay chill in job, particularly if they have some ambition. At the same time, don't devoid yourself of other experiences in life if possible. Honestly, there is plenty of time in a day. If we have good discipline and prioritize correctly, lot can be done. That's what I struggle with personally.
Harrison Bergeron much?
Why? Surely it's doable within the 9-5 schedule (plus some people for the on-call rotations), it would just take a bit longer?
It isn't just the 9-5, but the idea that your job stops when you leave the office. If people see it as a transactional relationship only, it means there's less investment in the product
If people have to work hard to make a good living in the 21st century that we are now in, then it means that whatever society they are in has failed.
I could work 10 hours a week and easily afford a 1920's lifestyle. But I prefer 21st century healthcare.
Perfectly viable anywhere without privatized healthcare.
Today, we are able to have only ~10% of the population work, and keep all the living standards of the 90% majority.
We are beyond 'self sustaining society'. We are throwing away food to protect market prices, we have planned obsolescence that makes perfectly fine devices to be thrown away to force people to buy new devices, we have more empty houses than the number of homeless.
The existing scarcity is artificial. Not something real.
Lol the best part though is thinking we are post scarcity. I thought this place had more brains than reddit or other idiotic forums.
As a manager I find their really curious. I guess they were trying to avoid leaks. I wonder how they chose who to lay off. Most recent performance rating? Next level managers impression?
"Ideally", your layoff strategy dictates some cuts regardless of performance: Say we're shutting down the self-driving car division, folding up recruiting, or choosing to accept the risk that comes with getting rid of the whole security team; sadly, the performance of the individuals involved isn't really considered.
Tenure, seniority, and comp are also factors that can come into play & are straightforward to establish without lower-level involvement.
Did you intend this to be a spit take? The sentence read about the same as “Say you’re taking a stroll around town, visit a few cafés, or decide to end the day by jumping into an active volcano.”
The point was more that layoffs can take out big slugs of staff without considering the individual, in a few different ways: initiatives we can just cancel completely (self driving cars); people we will likely need later but less in the shorter term (recruiting); or places where we consciously take on added risk (losing security).
I do think that for the company that sacked their security team, the executives may very well have had a full understanding of the risks it created — but couldn’t easily say so publicly (“we chose to 10x our risk of a security incident, so we keep 1 more product initiative staffed which might save us”). Just speculation. Not a situation I think many of us would be comfortable in.
What was it Steve Yegge said in that legendary platforms rant?
"But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network."
Even if you get bit by a huge data leak, it's just not going to matter that much (from a business perspective) if you already managed to become a big, significant part of the world (like PSN or Equifax - they're still around today, largely unimpacted by their screwups).
If you don't manage to become a big, significant part of the world, security successes or failures just won't matter that much. You don't have a lot of value, because you don't have a huge treasure trove of data, so you're not a primary target for most attackers. You'll sit there being irrelevant, and if there is a breach someday, probably neither you nor any of your handful of customers will actually notice."
Am I content that the world functions this way? No.
But I think it's important to recognize that it does.
When a layoff is known to be coming, the best and most employable people will often head for the doors quickly... leaving the company with a greater concentration of less desirable employees.
If it's by surprise then you'll lose fewer of the people you wanted to keep.
But in this case, nobody is worried about Stripe's long term trajectory or viability. I doubt the best and most employable people are leaving Stripe.
Our managers also had no idea until day of. The entire day was spent watching co workers google calendars and slack accounts. Once they got a meeting booked with HR, their meeting titles all turned into "busy", so we would know who is getting cut and who wasn't. It was a brutal day.
In our case I don't think they were picking people based on performance whatsoever. It seemed to just be about who was paid the best and who in the org structure could have their job removed and someone else take over. Really weird.
What a bullshit corporate apologist take on mass firings you have there @pc86
If the ship requires "righting" then management -the entire team- should be the first to go. And, yet, those positions never are the first layed off. Instead, it's the ones that need the monies, and had no decision making power at the company.
The 'righting' came because of shitty financial decisions made from top-down. The top should be fired first and foremost. The company wouldn't be in the position its in if management were doing their fucking jobs.
When I was part of a mass lay-off, it was big enough to trigger CA state law where they had to detail everything. You could clearly see that it was strictly based on who was paid the most (below the managerial level).
>The 'righting' came because of shitty financial decisions made from top-down. The top should be fired first and foremost. The company wouldn't be in the position its in if management were doing their fucking jobs.
Should but rarely, if ever, happens. Some even get a larger bonus when meeting next quarter targets or some other short-term indicator.
And when someone responds with so much misguided anger it's not even worth the effort to respond.
The "(below the managerial level)" part is the problem and the reason it is outrageous to people invested in a company but not in a position of power (such as the actual developers/engineers, even in a tech-centric company, at least once it has grown to a given size).
So if younger employees are saying it's cutting low performers, and the rest are left as the younger and lower paid workers to pick up the slack, where senior levels are cut indiscriminately or based on salary, because they are higher paid and the goal is to cut expensive workers.
This is totally not true. Usually they make jobs redundant not people. If there's a pool of people doing the same job and that headcount is reduced then it will often be the lowest performers that go however some places have done LIFO or cut the most expensive.
However if you're doing layoffs and you reduce your frontend team the it's likely low performers from the backend team get to stick around.
The one exception might have been when the entire browser division was dropped back in Netscape - everyone was chopped there - but I can't say with certainty whether low-performing Server Division people were impacted (though IT and HR positions were chopped). So - fair, when a division or operating group is cut wholesale, low-performers in other divisions might not be dropped - but knowing the mindset of management - they really like to take advantage of a layoff as a "get out of jail free" card to let someone go. Much less stress, and way, way less paperwork.
That's interesting, but how would you know? suppose you're in a protected class, and suspect some form of discrimination. How would you fight it?
The EEOC investigates workplace discrimination, so if you suspect it, it would help to file a complaint with them. They can gather evidence to determine if discrimination took/takes placr and hold the employer accountable.
If lucky and done right, performance will (inversely) correlate with probability of layoff.
Of course that isn't as easy because of morale, team cohesion, performance evals rarely being comparable across teams, and people being not as fungible as the above suggests. Not to mention all the work this takes, in a time when you probably have other worries. So maybe it's not "really weird", just "not immediately obvious"
ones at my company were decided by the next level manager, based on the most recent perf review
That's something I don't quite get. This adversarial relationship between employees and employers and management is stupid. Why not tell the workforce you have to cut costs, so if you're thinking of changing careers now is the time. Whoever is left presumably wants to stay.
To answer your second question, because the ones who leave are often the ones with the most options and lowest risk to themselves if they are unemployed, which highly correlates with those who are the ‘best’ (in most hiring managers minds).
So it’s pretty common for all the ‘high performers’ to bail (happens anyway, but to a lesser extent on it’s own the moment ‘growth’ isn’t the first thing on peoples minds), and the folks left behind to be those that don’t feel comfortable finding another position.
Either because they have a mortgage hanging over their heads, or don’t feel confident in their skills, or are preoccupied with other responsibilities (kids, older parents, etc) and have less free time/are less interested in doing extra hours, or just hate interviewing, etc.
It’s basically the equivalent of a hot/pretty boyfriend or girlfriend. They are able to find other options easier, so tend to be the first to bounce if they stop getting what they want.
If you’re a manager, that’s obviously not great. Especially if you’re shallow.
Maybe, but some of these "best" people might just leave after a round of layoffs anyway right? And now you're even more short-staffed than you wanted to be.
Though the issue they are trying to solve appears to be having too many staff (overall).
Understaffing is almost always a local/team level concern.
As long as nothing important implodes after the cuts, it’s working as intended from their perspective.
The line and middle managers are the ones who always get really screwed in these situations, as they’re the ones responsible for figuring out how to keep who they need and keep things running (and growing!) while having the rug pulled out from under them staffing wise (and probably in other ways too).
This is when you figure out what (if any) power they have, how well they can prioritize, and what their personal character really is.
Will they level with people, cut things that don’t matter (as much), even if it’s a hard decision, give people flexibility where it matters, go up to bat for folks who it’s important that be done?
Or will they deflect, throw people under the bus to avoid making hard calls, and emotionally manipulate who’s left to keep things afloat while burning them out and underpaying them?
You may not get the number of volunteers you need, so you still have to do layoffs. Except now, more people have been stressing about it for a longer period of time.
The "low performers" who will have a hard time finding a new job elsewhere are unlikely to voluntarily leave. So you offer a buyout package to derisk the decision for them. But then the "high performers" who you'd rather retain might decide that yeah, it's easy to get a new job, so they'll take a sack of cash and go do something new.
So what I'm suggesting is that you announce ahead of time and let people who were considering a change go ahead.
Then when that deadline is reached, you offer those buyout packages to the low performers or others you don't want, until you reach your target.
Is the idea that the company tells the affected employees, "Hey, we're planning on firing you in 6 months. We'll pay you severance then, unless you've already quit and found a new job. Or, if one of your peers-who-we're-not-planning-to-fire finds a new job, we'll keep you."
If I'm the company, that doesn't seem very attractive to me -- I've told the employee something that's going to taint the business relationship and make the next six months very awkward.
If the idea is that the company says generally "We need to reduce headcount by 14% in 6 months", I'm not convinced this changes the stress factor much. During those 6 months, a bunch of employees will be seeking assurances that _they_ won't be in line to be fired. This will create a bunch of tension among colleagues. In 6 months, a whole bunch of people are still going to get fired. They'll have had 6 months in which they could perhaps have saved more money, but they're still getting fired. The trauma is still going to be significant.
However, I think a lot of people really struggle with uncertainty. During these six months, especially in a large corporate environment, there would be a lot of horse-trading. Employees will seek assurances they won't be fired. They may avoid projects or people they think are likely to get cut.
At the same time, the business likely has an idea of where they want to go. The "in" managers will navigate their preferred people to safe projects. But there isn't room in the boat for all of their employees -- after all, the business has announced the target for layoffs.
This was my experience when I was at Microsoft during their horribly ill-conceived layoffs in 2009. They basically announced that there would be 3 rounds of layoffs tallying up to 5,000 people over the next several months. It was... incredibly demoralizing.
I still remember one fellow on my team who got fired in the 2nd or 3rd round. He took it poorly (understandably!) and then ripped into the people who didn't get fired (also understandable, but still really shitty).
I don't really know that the advance warning helped him. I think he knew he was likely to get fired when layoffs were announced. Being a dead man walking... not very good for anyone, really.
Uncertainty is important in general but right here right now I’ll take it.
(1) you're fired immediately, with 3 months severance pay
(2) 6 months notice, at the end, you're fired with no severance pay
you'd prefer the second choice?
That's reasonable!
The uncertainty I was describing in my comment applied not only to the fired employees, but to the ones who were being kept. From the company's perspective, there's value in providing clarity to those employees. That's why they'd rather pay 3 months severance (and get no labour from the employee) vs paying 6 months notice (and, theoretically, getting 6 months of labour from the employee).
Sure, but if people are going to leave after cost cutting is announced, then you can often shuffle people from those areas into other areas without dealing with whole hiring rigamarole.
Far better for everyone involved to do it quick rather than perfect. Those getting let go shouldn't see it coming and those staying shouldn't find out before it's all been done.
In effect noone will lose their job quickly unless there is a bankruptcy.
There is probably way less confusion in that way since you know that security guards wont escort you out any minute ...
Imagine the mechanics if they involved every single low-level manager in decision making. You'd never find 15%. Everyone would justify where a person on their team or their team as a whole deserves to be saved. So you apply broader rules (eg certain products, certain types of jobs, performance based). The upside is that you can avoid people-specific favoritism. The downside is that you lose good people in those areas as you're not distinguishing good from bad.
It definitely allowed management to cut a few people that had been on their short list for a while.
I work at one of the mega-cap tech companies and manage a large team of engineers. It's extremely clear to me based on various pieces of information that I have access to that we'll be having a significant round of layoffs sometimes in the next quarter or two, yet I have zero involvement in the process. I suspect that at some point I'll be officially "told" that it's happening; perhaps the morning of?
But in every case, I was either consulted for input, or at least given a courtesy heads before the actual layoffs occurred.
In one case I was looped in a few weeks out and asked to help narrow things down. In another case I was simply shown a list of names the night before and offered a token opportunity to object. The list was sound, and I'm pretty sure my boss was doing me a solid on that one by sparing me the hardest decisions.
Line managers aren't always looped in for a few good reasons. Mainly, to prevent leaks. But also I think it can go a long way towards maintaining morale in a post layoff environment. There are countless anecdotes in these threads with people claiming their managers had no idea. Those same employees are now far less likely to be resentful of their managers for laying off their friends.
Best of luck. I don't envy being in your position.
Ha! And, you believed that? They were "told" not to "tell" about it to anyone until official announcement.
During mass layoffs, your immediate manager is often not told in advance in order to stop leaks and also because he/she may be one of the people laid off. (You cannot tell only some managers and leave others out, because managers of the same level talk among themselves. The ones left out would know why).
The corporation is not your friend, and it can quickly turn on you. The bigger the corporation is, the less your realistic impact above replacement is. You may think you can climb the pyramid but it is very difficult to do so in a meaningful way at the mega corps.
If you want to work nights and weekends, do it for yourself or a small company where you can make a difference in outcomes.
The weird bit is that company policy is to award a generous notice period during which... you're not allowed to do anything.
It's been half a year now - most of the benefits of that period(like salary) are gone. He still appears to have access to the office, but nothing to do there.
I don't understand how a company which has such a program for laid off people doesn't bother to notify them in advance.
It shouldn't be the case that people can be laid off just like that - particularly if their work was obviously needed.
Usually, these 14% lay off happens to get rid off weaker folks. It is data driven.
When firing 14% staff like more than 1000 and decisions are made by handful of people it’s not about who performed better or worse it’s about firing whom will have more impact on reducing spendings and less disruption in software delivery.
Cost of keeping talented high performing, highly paid engineers is lesser than letting go low performing engineers.
But I'll share that I've been on the other side - months and months of talk of layoffs, then 6 months later announcement that layoffs will be rolled out over 3 months. Then finally hearing almost a year after rumors started.
I'll say getting it over with has a certain appeal.