Engineers doing their work in 2 days and being blocked for the next 5?
A trend of "everyone's constantly waiting on <blank>" should trigger the manager to think "if we could make <blank> not a bottle neck, we could raise our sprint utilization factor by x%" and thus set prioritization accordingly. Engineers still have to figure out how to do that.
The engineers need to surface information about where their processes suck, but they need prioritization to implement fixes
They'd be furious and would be raising hell about it. Very few people want to just warm their seats, especially engineers. They want to do things.
I have a hard time believing that most of the affected engineers haven't raised the problem to management.
Example scenario: hand off a task, describe it fully, ask it be prioritised. Let me know how it goes, please raise any issues. Come back a week later to check in: employee hit minor obstacle, couldn't proceed, waiting on X or Y to do Z, almost nothing has progressed. No communication to me. Instead: spent time refactoring favorite library to do C which was not asked for and now is going to land on me to do code review before it can merge.
It's a low responsibility culture that many staff have and yeah - I can invest a lot of time and effort nannying these people or I can put even more effort into culture shift. But boy it is easier if you just don't have these people in the team to begin with.
I have literally never seen this happen at any place I've worked. I think I must be doing it wrong!
that hasn't changed, and has nothing to do with layoffs. projects move at whatever speed they move at, and fires will pop up to steal the attention of others.
Do you have more info about the job. I keep seeing this, i did some interesting and hard work and it doesn't match what im coming across.
like remote ok? how much are you paying? whats the tech and problems being worked on?
I don't like sitting around waiting for PR feedback, and will typically find other ways to be productive when this happens, but I'm unclear what you expect people to do in this situation.
If you have some code that needs to be reviewed, and the available reviewers aren't reviewing it after you requested their review, then you have three options:
- Remind them. Always a good idea, but you can only do it so often. Sending someone daily reminders over a non-urgent PR is a great way to get your PRs reviewed even more slowly next time. Also, once you're senior or above, your reviewers tend to be busy. You can't wave a magic wand and clear their calendars.
- Escalate to your manager. May or may not be effective. Will make you unpopular if you do it too often, especially if the two of you have the same manager.
- Escalate to their manager. May or may not be effective, but you just irrevocably burned your bridges with that person, hope it was worth it.
And this is just for code review. If QA is involved then you have a whole other layer of bureaucracy to deal with, except with a different reporting chain.
There's a reason engineers at large companies seem so unproductive and it often has nothing to do with their work ethic.
I keep seeing folks say this but I don't know if it is true. I just looked at some layoff lists from Twitter on layoffs.fyi and the vast majority looked to be Software Engineers of some shape or form.
Layoffs in the companies I personally know about have affected software engineers but have massively affected back-office staff and other business functions.
I think when people are planning for the future, they need to be realistic about what actually may happen rather than hoping for their preferred ideological outcome to happen. Don't write yourself off from ever getting a job, but at the same time understand that the job market of the medium term future will probably look radically different from the job market of the past. Very little of it will have anything to do with location. In fact, most jobs will probably be in the same places they've always been, it's just likely you won't get paid as much to do them. There will be more people vying for them. And they won't be quite as secure as they used to be.
Nor are they on the same timezones.
Nor are they comparatively cheap to fly out, if needed.
There is a big reason why offshoring has been tilting more and more to Mexico City... or Alabama.
Keep in mind that If I want to hire:
A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup OR
A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop [0]
my only path forward is H1! They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that make any sense to anyone?
Of course, my odds of getting a lottery spot for the former are dramatically lower, since we all know body shops and consulting firms won't hesitate to file 4-5 applications per seat they plan to fill out (so one can hopefully get a spot in the lottery and not get any RFE).
[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...
The legitimate users of the H1B program are really looking for specialized skills and hard-to-find talent. Especially for software, it's not even cheaper to hire qualified candidates from abroad...
This is me. But I had at least one round of phone interviews with about 40 companies before I landed one. Maybe I'm bad at interviewing. A couple of places put me through ~8 hours of interviews all for nothing. I will also add that 3-4 of the places I interviewed with have since had a chunk of layoffs right up to discussions here about them. Maybe I actually got lucky? It sure didn't feel like it after that many failures in a row. Luckily I landed a new role that I'm finding I like.
Just wait till you get grey hair!
I wouldn't worry too much if I were you. Worst case scenario you can spend time intensively prepping for interviews. :shrug:
It does seem to be the common factor. Then again the industrialized interview processes some companies (some of which have since had bulk layoffs) suggests another possibility.
I hate having to develop interviewing as a skill. I'd rather develop my development skills.
Sometimes they're less sure of their plans than an interviewee might think.
There were anecdotes like this (and worse) even during the supposed hiring boom of 2021-2022. It was never a walk in the park as the prevailing narrative seems to portray.
I had multiple job openings for my team throughout the pandemic and I dont think that people who are not constantly exposed to the hiring side really understand how wonky things were.
You had this confluence of both whole sectors of the economy completely shutting down and tech experiencing a big boom. This caused A LOT of people to try to make a transition to tech.
I had a job listing for a Senior Dev. I was completely inundated with resumes from recent bootcamp grads. No indication that they had any experience whatsoever or that they even knew what a variable was prior to the start of their bootcamp 6 months ago. I got resumes from people who were waiters, mechanics, construction workers, fast food workers, etc.
Most of these people are not going to make it in the industry long term (assuming they ever even got the first job). I wasn't around during the dotcom boom but I read stories about people landing six figure jobs because they learned HTML. Landing a 6 figure job by going to a 6 month React bootcamp is the modern day equivalent of that. Most of the 1999 HTML guys are no longer around. The bubble popped, the tech jobs were less plentiful and they moved on. I suspect the same will be true for most of the JS bootcampers.
It's almost as if you couldn't seriously be hired at a law firm after a 90 day Law bootcamp. Shocking.
I'm just angry at the people who run these bootcamps and lure "students" into cutting them big checks, promising them 70-80K jobs that never materialize.
> I had a job listing for a Senior Dev. I was completely inundated with resumes from recent bootcamp grads. No indication that they had any experience whatsoever or that they even knew what a variable was prior to the start of their bootcamp 6 months ago. I got resumes from people who were waiters, mechanics, construction workers, fast food workers, etc.
That was for dev jobs. Imagine all the "tech adjacent" jobs out there (PM, tech recruiters, something something diversity). The signal to noise ratio during the pandemic was catastrophically bad. No wonder there are so many layoffs happening right now.
Why aren't there any entry level positions? We don't need any, we have 100M people with degrees everyone else in the world banging down the door to work here, so there's no incentive for corporations to train junior developers.
I never got any FAANG interviews until I'd had a developer job for a couple years. I got to a final round at Facebook, but didn't get hired there.
Still doing ok at that first job, though.
And yes, I agree, I am happy that I am not hitting the job market out of a bootcamp today.
Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp and trying to find a job? Oooof, good luck.
Have a BS in Comp Sci and work on backend/distributed systems with several years of experience? You'll have no problem finding a gig.
The vast majority of over-hiring was with engineering-adjacent roles, think project managers, recruiters, hr, etc.