> Your job is NOT safe.

Nothing will make execs happier than having this line of thought popularized amongst engineers. It will allow them to hire cheaper, and exploit existing engineers more.

I think a better way to put it is:

"A job is not your family, and a job is not your identity. You must rely on yourself"

This line of thinking still means diversifying your options, building an emergency fund, have a fulfilling life outside work, keep doing interviews from time to time, spend some cycles thinking about "what would I do if I where to build my own startup", etc. But it will not put you in the "oh my I need to accept whatever they offer me right now" path.

Especially on FAANG companies, it very easy to "get lost in the technical work" and to "offshore your life's direction to the company", so to speak. If you think this might be happening to you, I recommend involving someone else - a coach, a therapist, a friend, a brother or a priest. Whatever works for you. Someone from outside the company. It might be scary and uncomfortable at first, but taking the driver's seat of your life is worth it.

It means that you need to be responsible for yourself, and not allow thoughts like "I'm a valuable employee", or "I have too much seniority", or "my manager and I get along great" to convince you management won't lay you off or fire you or that they owe you anything.

As others have said, the employer-employee relationship is first and foremost a business relationship, i.e. transactional: you work and they pay you. When that relationship doesn't work any more for one side or the other, it ends.

It does often happen, of course, that professional friendships or even personal friendships develop. You are, after all, spending a lot of time with your co-workers. But don't think your good relationships or friendships will help if the business decides a layoff is necessary.

In my opinion it should mean that you not only consider the relationship transactional, you consider yourself as an independent business operating within a business transaction, an LLC or sole proprietorship if you will. Remove yourself from emotional attachment this way.

This line of thought leads people to naturally adopt the exact same sort optimization (exploitation) strategies businesses (your employer) does with the same justifications they use. As such you should focus on diversifying your employment or making sure you’re diversely employable should you need new revenue streams, have savings and cash reserves for economic downturns, and focus on your profit margins (time invested vs paid) and so on and optimize around these sort of criteria.

Obviously if you have a good transactional relationship and are to some degree dependent on that relationship you don’t do everything possible to undermine it (just as employers have limits they’ll stop at before employees start to flee) but never consider it at any sort of emotional or attached level, it’s merely a strategic relationship and be ready to optimize wherever you can for your LLC depending on its goals (i.e. your goals).

But that’s exactly the kind of relationship it is. Instead of maintaining some fantasy, you should call a duck, a duck.

I've seen family members fire other close family members, because a business is a business. Nothing special about it.

You can be friends with your colleagues, but when you understand that their role at a company is separate from your personal relationship - you may just get friends that transcend your employment.

My personal attitude towards employment - "I work for you while our goals align". Businesses most definitely treat any employee the same way.

I was once in a meeting with an SVP who was going over what he was going to say in an upcoming all-hands meeting. He kept referring to employees as “resources” and I told him he should call them people or team members as resources was dehumanizing and made it sound like we’re just line items on a spreadsheet and pawns on a chessboard. He looked at me and said you’re right - that is how they look at things, but thanked me for reminding me of his audience. He was candid with me only because I was also high up in the org.

Companies are not your friend. The people above you in the org are not your friend. You are not special or different or immune or safe. Ultimately, you do have to look out for yourself. If a company is able and willing to terminate your job for financial reasons, you need to be willing and able to terminate your job for financial reasons too - on your own terms and with a better higher paying job lined up. It’s just another business transaction. Loyalty is dead. Act accordingly.

The classic comeback for this is to refer to management as "overhead."

Companies pay taxes, operate in a community, and employ people. Shareholders may not care about such trifles... until the race to rot is complete.

It’s barely real, it’s hardly law, and the more we say it, the worse companies will act because we’ve all accepted fate.

Companies exist in our society. They don’t have a right to profits. Any profits is a result of patronage and goodwill of the population. We can change laws, and cultural norms, and worker and environmental protections. We don’t need to be victims of greed like it’s some inevitable consequence of capitalism.

Google is cutting a few hundred R&D jobs out of their 180K employees, and countless ventures. These people could be repositioned, these people could be absorbed elsewhere. Google is wildly profitable, with record profits, which by definition means what they’re not falling on hard times.

Loyalty is dead.

Something that has never existed cannot die.

But the myth, and the brainwashing, of "employee loyalty" is still very much alive. Some even buy that crap.

There is absolutely still some loyalty in the other direction. Lots of people here would say it's misplaced. When it works out for you (cachet in the org, seniority, whatever) it can pay off, but for lots of people it only gets them burned when they get laid off with outdated skills in outdated tech because they were a "company man" for the last decade.

A particular person above you in the management chain may actually be your friend. It does not mean that that person would be able to protect you from a layoff; that could be a conflict of interest. That person might give you an earlier warning so that you could start looking around ahead of time. That person could give you a glowing review and references for prospective employers. That person might introduce you to someone who might be interested in hiring you. But that person operates the machine, and plays by the rules of the machine, to which you have agreed when you have signed your offer.

Build good relationships with coworkers; this can be helpful, and is just more pleasant. But don't try to build a relationship with a company; you can't.

- never assume that just because it’s obvious to you (and your coworkers and boss) that it would be really stupid to lay you off or fire you, that they wouldn’t do it anyway.

A lot of what is going on IMO is burnout and disconnection from the on the ground reality at the executive layer.

That means short sighted, stupid, long term self harming decisions.

But just because what someone is doing is clearly stupid, doesn’t mean they won’t do it. A hard lesson to learn sometimes.

Or, you may have a division that is profitable, but it takes an outsized attention in the organization relative to its profitability and the loss of revenue is made up for focus in the rest of the organization. (Ideally, you would find a way to spin that off or sell it, but there are times where the tight integration makes this unfeasible.)

And yes, there is disconnection from the on-the-ground reality too. (and all sorts of things) - but this all goes to say that layoffs, when executed, often are not correlated with individual performance.

There is that, and it does happen that way often.

There is also sometimes people just do stupid, self harming things. Either because they are not able to properly process/know/understand what the consequences will be, or because their short term incentives encourage them to at their long term detriment.

Or because the organizational incentives make it worthwhile for them to harm the actual organizations long term interests, and they will be rewarded for screwing over the organization this way.

It’s easy for engineers in particular to look at 2+2 and assume that everyone else knows 4 is the obvious answer, and hence will act appropriately. and they just need to be shown the truth if somehow they don’t understand this

But that isn’t how people often work, especially when dysregulated, stressed out, under outside pressure, etc.

Often, there are many people between the decision makers and the folks who know the actual truth and the inevitable consequences who have incentives that will make them actively hurt anyone trying to tell the decision makers the truth - often because the decision maker implicitly or explicitly wants it that way.

even engineers, though it’s often hard to ‘know’ that when you’re in the middle of it.

Many people will burn their lives to the ground until everyone agrees 5 is the correct answer. Or happily reassure their boss 5 is the answer while burning everyone else’s lives to the ground.

That can make many real life situations very surprising and frustrating for engineers in particular.

Because how could someone do that based on ‘wrong’ (usually just not the same) information? It’s stupid!

Because sometimes for many people, the individual/self interested ‘smart’ thing is to be as ‘stupid’ as possible. And that strategy is not something someone can just change on a dime. It’s inherent.

And sometimes people are just stupid. Even otherwise really smart people.

Also, sociopaths exist and they are often in management.

But in both cases, the key insight is that layoffs are often past the control of the engineer.

With the caveat that everyone responsible is also going to attempt to deny/deflect/reverse victim and offender, etc.

It’s amazing how ‘helpless’ some management/execs get when unpleasant decisions need to be made.

The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go.

And yes, value yourself, absolutely. And your job is not your family or your identity, and manage risk, and there are bad bosses and bad company cultures. But it's not uniform.

But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.

Even at big, bureaucratic companies like big investment banks, if you're at a certain level (not that high), eventually you'll mostly be taken care of. Not everyone and not always, but e.g. if you're an ED at an investment bank, you can have a job for life, maybe not at your current place forever, but the industry will take care of you. Similarly if you've been at dunno, Mercedes for 15 years and you're not the bottom 20 percent in terms of performance, then it's kinda guaranteed that you'll have a job in the auto industry forever.

People who have been let go from Google today can have an extremely lucrative job forever in the industry.

This is compounded when 75% of the team is made up of consultants.

I do agree though that its pretty awful but the thought of moving my family to a big city, doubling my cost of living and having to commute is also pretty bad. I live in a not tech city and would have to move to get a comparable salary at an in person job.

I have said that while other companies I have worked within would be sympathetic, they definitely would not have been empathetic; however, at my current company, EVERYONE from the CEO to interns have been so very empathetic, helpful, and thoughtful.

We are all remote and have been since the pandemic. These are people who are reaching out regularly, coming to visit, offering support in whatever way possible, and being genuinely good human beings. It's simply a work culture when you don't have this, but you CAN find it.

Don't lose hope. Good companies and great people within them are there, remote or not.

I’m not saying you have total control over it… but it depends on how people interact.

I've seen first-hand organizations shift from 100% employed teams to being majority consultants, and the majority of those consultants on 1-2 year contracts then leaving. Code quality goes to absolute shit. The name of the game is spending the first half of your contract not getting fired and the second half looking for the next contract. Zero documentation. Refusing to do turnover meetings. Not showing up for the last day/week of the contract because their next contract wanted them to start earlier so they didn't care if they got paid for this one or not. Most egregiously someone just brought in their next contract's laptop into our office with over a month left on their contract.

None of this happens with employees. Sure you'll occasionally have someone quit with minimal or no notice but that's the exception. We had to basically assume that any time we got in the last month of the contract was a bonus. Consultants work for their recruiting firm, not for your org, and they behave accordingly.

I will know if I am going to leave in a couple weeks, 2 things need to happen for me to stay; I get promoted this month and half the consultants leave. If both don't happen I think I am gone.

Whereas in an office environment, we'd naturally run into folks at the proverbial water cooler, and slowly develop more of a relationship with some folks — and similarly for camaraderie with the folks sitting around you — that just doesn't exist in remote.

In my experience, it is still possible to build these kinds of relationships, though. But it requires actively building them. It requires intentional effort, which doesn't come naturally to many of us, and especially so since many of us have not been used to having to do that, having come from office settings pretty recently. I was able to build meaningful friendships with remote colleagues, some of which have lasted beyond my time at the company, by intentionally making the time to ask and care about their lives outside of work, by setting up recurring 1:1s to just chat, etc. This can sometimes feel like it's "wasted time" that's taken away from your work, but I believe it's really important in order to feel better about where you're working and who you're working with, feel less like a cog in a machine, and as a result (at least for me) end up doing better work.

I wonder if, as the tech world becomes more accustomed to remote work, we'll eventually get better at this as an industry. My hope is that it'll get easier, or at least more natural as a result.

I think after a point, it is up to us to create the culture we want to see in a team. Someone has to start sharing more things, start talking about more things so others will feel like the same. Have a pizza session after every few successful sprints. Share puzzles and other things regularly so people have more things to talk about. It is easy to feel detached when everyone only uses a group channel, but a lot of meaningful connections happen when you do talk 1-1 in private.

I mean I have worked at places where no one even exchanged email ids when they are about to leave the company, and lurked in online places where people whom I have never even met employed me immediately when i mentioned that my day job company was going bankrupt.

Likewise, there is a huge bias in hiring against older developers. Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again, and you’ll be lucky to find employment.

Be ready to retire by 50, because anything else is both risky and improbable.

Tech skewing young and being ageist is also partially an artefact of tech being a new hot growing rapidly changing field. That is waning over time.

Is low-level expertise going to continue to skew older? Or are things like Rust and embedded AI going to bring in a bunch of new blood?

AI product dev hat on for this comment. My take is AI will continue to give solid first drafts, and expertise, creativity, and curiosity are required to take it the rest of the way. Maybe, just maybe, we get beyond the GPT architecture and embed a reasonable state of the world for wider use cases similar to a CoPilot.

I don't think there is an inevitable general decline of cognitive abilities with age, or the effect isn't strong enough to matter. At least, I haven't really seen them.

What I have seen is older people who are just tired of the constant personal improvement that any career needs to continue to flourish. People often find their niche and just want to stay there. That's a different thing entirely, though.

I'm a very senior IC in a FAANG and almost my whole job is going around and sharing 30+ years of wisdom with people on everything from "dealing with people" to architecture to pull request reviews.

Also, while I'm at FAANG now, I'm there because I was previously at a startup that was acquired by said FAANG, and if anything, there is even MORE of a need for this sort of wisdom intelligence in a startup. :)

This is a real issue at say 85, not at 45. You almost certainly aren't quite as quick as you were when you were 25, but on the other hand you typically know a lot more and the experience probably means you actually make far fewer errors overall...

Going from 800K-1.2M down to 200K-300K total comp is not that devastating I'd say :)

If you've built up a 1.2M a year lifestyle, then going back to 250k a year lifestyle might feel like a "death sentence", at which point you will hear the world's smallest violin playing for you.

Hance why you shouldn't keep extending your lifestyle proportionally with your paycheck growth, and learn to stay humble and frugal and not spend to 'keep up with the Joneses'.

Unless you're in the same league with John Carmack or Andrej Karpathy where top companies are begging at your feet, you should treat jobs with very large TCs more like short therm lottery wins rather than cashflows guaranteed to last, since there's a high chance you're not that special as you think, and that there's probably others out there who can and are willing to do your work better and for cheaper when the crunch comes and the layoff axe starts to swing towards those non-exec workers responsible for company's biggest paycheck expenses. Those who've lived thorugh the 2008 days will know and remeber what I'm talking about.

If you're actually making $1.2 million a year, invest at least $500k/yr.

Then if you need to take a pay cut later, hopefully the dividends from your investment accounts brings your total income close to where it once was.

Also if you're reading this wondering if people actually make this amount of money coding... the answer is no, with the exception of an incredibly small percentage of people. Expecting $800k comp is not realistic for 98% of people.

So, mumble mumble, something about diversifying.

I'm sure the layoffs are likely to lead to a short-term bump because the markets will interpret it as Google adulting. But if they're signalling that they're afraid of AI eating their market share, then you probably want to be proactive about that.

I always chose option 1. This is like personal finance 101.

And for the company the purpose of RSUs instead of cash is to not deplete cash reserves.

You'd be surprised by people's poor spending habbits. Aquitances of mine when they got their first SV job out of college at Facebook, they immediately bought brand new Porsche 911's.

I think a token of "I've made it!" is fine. Maybe we all need that once in our life.

The problem is if it persists. (Worst, if somehow gambling, etc. becomes involved.)

You get a signing bonus for the US militrary? Damn that's pretty sweet.

If you're living this way, feel free to reach out. I have loads of advice you don't want to but need to hear.

Ideally, your standard of living should cost you a fraction of what your income is.

I got a job at Amazon and was making $x+$100K

I was Amazoned last year from a remote position. By then, I had paid off debt, downsized from my big house in the burbs to a condo one third the size in state tax free Florida and could easily live off of $x- $30K even though I’m making around $50K more than I was making 3 years ago.

Guess how much I stressed when Amazon started Amazoning?

My career went in to the toilet in my 40s, and it has never really recovered. However, I'm an introvert and on the spectrum, so I lack good networking skills and never moved up the career ladder.

Even so, among my circle of friends there is a consensus that many of us were struggling around age 50, and now I am 60. The only jobs I've had in the last 5 years have been contracts. My current gig, I haven't seen a raise in 3 years, despite 20% inflation. I've been told that the company I work for has a freeze on raises, so I will have to start job hunting...

Perhaps in some of the "trendy" "bro-culture" startups you'd have a more difficult time as an older developer but even in those places, the level of experience and skills older devs bring can be extremely valuable.

But say you were laid off in your 40's, now what? Well, there are so many bigger, less volatile companies out there with solid pay that are desperate for senior people with experience. There's also consulting for those who have spent a career building up a network of contacts. You can still leverage those old contacts for future opportunities as well.

Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern. Here I agree you might not make as much money but employment is always available to developers who are skilled, experienced and flexible.

Why only single out government/public sector jobs as palces for all-age job stability?

Aerospace, defence, semiconductor, automotive, industrial, medical, healtchare, banking, insurance, manufacturing, naval, rail and freight, logistics and transportations, basically all legacy businesses, all are hiring SW engineers and are staffed by mostly older workers, but HN mostly snuffs at these fields because they're not in SV, are seen as un-cool, boring, old and crusty and don't pretend to change the world through innovation and paying millions in TC for 10h/week of pretending to work from home like Google does, but it's not like you will starve to death and be homeless if you work as a dev in those kinds of fields for a lot less than what Google pays, going from 1% top earners to 5% top earners.

This might sound harsh, but perhaps the last ~10+ years of hyper-growth in the VC funded SW sector has warped many devs perspective on their own value and what the rest of the real world is like.

Not where I live you can't build a house on a dev wage. Average dev wages is ~55k/year and average house price is 800k+.

Well I guess the idea is that all the "best" engineers would have already made millions by the time they hit 50 and so therefore those who are left are...

I must admit though that I've only seen one newly hired in their 60s, but probably the very few that find themselves involuntarily out of a job at that age can afford to and choose to retire a little bit earlier than planned.

The ones who are in it just for the money rarely become the best engineers.

To avoid being unemployable in your 50’s learn COBOL so you can work for a big stupid company or government.

Once out of the umbrella of the FAANGS, there are tons of jobs for SWE, just not at the eye watering salaries.

East Coast, tons of jobs at the 100K range.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/10/09/budget-breakdown-of-a-co...

And if you talk to the people who strongly identify with the MAGA movement, their main concerns are guns, illegal immigration, “persecution because of their Christian beliefs”, and for some strange reason - Disney.

People who know me and one of my friends calls us the “odd couple”. I’m a Black mostly agnostic bleeding heart libertarian capitalist pig who works in tech (including a stint in BigTech), my friend is a White former military high school dropout who is an evangelical Christian, gun loving and rural, who rails against those “illegals”.

But he attends a predominantly Black church and has been married to a deaf Vietnamese woman for two decades who he loves dearly.

I also use to live in a famous “sun down” town in Georgia made famous by Oprah. I’m often in conversations with modern “conservatives”. I don’t argue, I just listen.

To the contrary, this is the very finest distilled HN for you. I wouldn't expect less.

Must retire? No, of course not.

I worked through most of my 50's though and definitely saw "the writing on the wall". I don't want to scream "Ageism!" because I think people are often too quick to pigeon hole a thing that has much more complex roots.

For example, because of my white hair, beard, I'm probably not the guy you would go to and ask a Swift question to. And I don't blame anyone for having that ... instinct.

But it was a combination of things like that began to inform me that my better days in the industry were behind me.

Believe me, I tried to act as mentor when I knew I was probably within a year or two of heading out of the industry but I found the young'uns didn't want a mentor either. Oh well. I think I would have at their age but not everyone is the same.

I have talked to literally hundreds of people in my life who have suffered through illegal workplace discrimination and I've honestly never met a single one who prosecuted a discrimination case successfully. Things are only illegal if you can prove them, and most managers don't go around yelling "holy shit I hate old people".

These companies have a big influence on what is legal or what is a priority for governments.

This is literally RTO /s

This just isn't true as a broad statement, although I don't doubt it's true for some parts of the industry. Big picture, though, older engineers are no less employable than younger ones. In the right company, experienced engineers are valued more highly, even.

In the rest of the industry, not many software workers make enough to realistically retire by 50, anyway. Not without living like monks their entire lives. (recall: you need a lot more money to retire at 50 than at 65) And older workers mostly do OK in the rest of the industry, at least until age 60 or so.

I got my first job in BigTech at 46 - working at AWS in Professional Services

When I got Amazoned last year, I had three offers within three weeks.

One of those offers was from a former coworker who is now a director at a well known public company. It would have paid about $50K more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs at AWS. I didn’t want the stress.

The other offer was for a “staff architect” position at the company that acquired the company I worked for before going to AWS.

The third and the offer I did take was a for a senior full time position at a consulting company that should lead to staff position as we grow the AWS specialty that I know inside out from working with the team.

Unless I’m completely misreading the market - and I seriously doubt I am - there is no reason that if I cared to I couldn’t increase my total compensation by 30-40% inflation adjusted over the next few years

That's just not true. In my mid (ugh, getting to be late) 50s and I've been laid off in most of the downturns since the dot-com bust, including this recent one. Getting a new job at comparable compensation has rarely been a big problem. I suppose if you let your skills get rusty or work on a VERY specialized tech stack and don't want to do something else, then sure, you'll have problems.

But in this market, I'd rather be a grizzled veteran with demonstrable skills in a variety of areas than a new grad.

There are for sure exceptions, but I think most people would be very surprised at how little control the decision makers at the top actually have. They have a duty to make the best decisions for the company, and most of the time that is not ambiguous. The real difference I believe comes in how they handle it. Companies that provide generous severance, for example, are deserving of gratitude.

No doubt, it can really hurt when you have busted your ass and put your blood and sweat into a company, and they discard you. Many people tend to identify themselves with their employment, which I think lent very well to the idea of it being a family, but it won't be helpful to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side. Many people get a lot of fulfillment from their identity with the company, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's very natural, in fact. Humans are group-based animals that look for group associations and identify with them. Yes, it is great for people to use families and friends for that, but the reality is not everyone has that option.

A much healthier approach in my opinion is to find a good balance. Understand how the system works. When you see the sausage being made, and try to empathize and put yourself in the decision makers position, it can help take the sting off and give you a more realistic outlook on life.

The worst thing you can do for your mental health and life satisfaction, is embrace bitterness. You don't need buy into a delusion that things are great, that you are loved for you, or that the company is a big family, but you also don't need to buy into a delusion that the company and upper management are just evil heartless people figuring out how best to use and abuse you before tossing you out the door when they are finished with you. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Try to find that truth.

> The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go.

> ...

> But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.

That's true, but the problem is the psychopathic organization exploits those relationships ruthlessly. It will use well-meaning people to lean on those relationships to get more out of employees, but then turn around and shit on them when it suits the org.

Corporations can be and (and usually are) psychopaths, even if they're made exclusively from well-adjusted, interpersonally-kind people. The whole is different from its parts.

I found this to be a very obvious reality in the companies in which I worked. And not in the sense of "poor me, nobody loves me": on the contrary, I found that I was more indifferent than expected even toward the departure of colleagues with whom I had a good relationship.

For example, in the current group of about 40 people in which I work, two directors who had moved up the ladder, were quite well-liked, and had a long tenure with the company, left to work for other companies. Their colleagues, including me, forgot about them within 2 weeks at most.

Another colleague was forced to retire after 40 years with the company: a month before his (forced and unexpected) retirement, he sat down with me to explain what he intended to do in the company over the next 3 years. But he was forced to retire and disappeared from people's minds within a few days.

Despite an excellent memory, I forget the names of most of my colleagues after a month's break. If I leave the company, they are never mentioned again. Apart from the usual exceptions, "standard" working relationships, especially in large companies, are tenuous, easily broken, and easily forgotten.

I think this is just normal human self-regulation. Extreme example, but people are mostly OK and functional a month after their mother passes away. If the best and most critical person in my team would leave today then I would focus on filling the gap, etc. and I would not think of them very much after a few days, but this doesn't mean that all that they're a fully fungible cog.

To me, it sounds like the definition of a fungible cog, where "fully" depends on whether a replacement with the same skills can be hired. One is expected to be functional at some point after losing their mother, but the mother's name and role in the org/family is unlikely to be forgotten, even after decades.

I feel like it would actually drive salaries up as people move to higher paying roles and companies scramble to keep people that they would have otherwise expected to remain for years.

For context, I once worked at company A for 2 years then got a new job offer for 20% more than I currently made. I accepted the offer and then told my VP that I got a new job and the offer was 35% more. He matched the 35% so I stayed for another year and then got a new job for 25% more than that. A little after that, Company A started doing layoffs. If I had been loyal I would have likely been laid off, instead I left with a much higher salary because I was loyal only to the money.

Companies used to be loyal but no longer are, your job is not safe.

Perhaps we actually are on the same page in principal as I agree with all of your other suggestions "diversifying your options, building an emergency fund, have a fulfilling life outside work" just a different take on the original comment.

For SWEs at Google and almost anywhere else, the wind has blown very favorably for you and that’s something to be celebrated.

The direction of the wind has shifted, but we can never expect it to stay blowing in one direction forever, even if others get lucky and catch one like that.

You will no doubt set your sail and take it to new and wonderful places.

Let’s take a minute and be grateful for how good SWEs have it - we are frequently so insanely disconnected from the realities and struggles of the normal working class and we should remember and express some gratitude for it regularly.

[0] well, probably not he alone, but he is the figurehead of a group that put him there and keeps him there, and at Alphabet that group shits the wind

All the "wind", "sails" and boat metaphors won't change the fact that loyalty is a virtue that fits very poorly on both sides of employment.

Why? The lay-offs are so broad, not selective at all. You're just as likely to get cut if you're working hard or not, if you're overpaid or underpaid. It's completely out of the employee's control, so why would it change the employee's behavior?

Employees don’t have visibility into their peers actual performance. They see a silver of it and infer. This makes layoffs look random. Then, we rely on publicly reported “I was given a great review and still let go!” posts — which are all self-interested. No one wants to hire or refer someone who was doing poorly so there’s an incentive to fib or have selective amnesia.

The whole cohort of folks let go are incentivized to keep up the fiction that it was random.

All things being equal, there is no reason to layoff someone high performing over their less capable peer. I’ve never seen it done randomly, and I’ve sat in these meetings.

This is not to say whole divisions or companies haven’t been let go, but that’s not the same situation here. We’re talking about selective cuts across the entire company where core, or advertising lost some folks, while others remained. That is not random.

Sometimes you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time--and maybe it's even the impetus to do something different.

> Your job is NOT safe.

in service of

> Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.

Overtime, long commutes, and thinking about the job at home can make it seem like all you do is work, but it’s possible to spend 40 hours a week having fun while you also have a full time job. Remember use your vacation and sick days, and say no to excessive unpaid overtime.

If you’re mentally exhausted from work then going for a walk through a park is relaxing enough to regain some energy. If you’re depressed then you would still be vegging out on the weekend.

Which isn’t to say vegging out sometimes is a bad sign. Watching TV is fun in moderation.

> People can always find a reason to rationalize why they’re not doing what they say they want to be doing.

Believing that's true can help you decide if you are responsible for not reaching your goals or if you truly are the victim of circumstance.

I understand that people can be legitimately held back by circumstances outside of their direct control. That is also true.

I believe that on average people tend to like to take credit for their accomplishments and find someone/something to blame for their lack of accomplishments.

Ask the people who would've gone pro if their high school coach hadn't been a dick. Or who got passed over for a promotion because of work politics.

Saying "The sun rises in the east" over and over doesn't make it true. It's true because it's true no matter how many times I say it.

Perhaps internally they are taking accountability but all the evidence I have says that many do not.

But if you’re not accomplishing the things you want to accomplish you should deeply consider the possibility that you’re lying to yourself before you accept that your circumstances are at fault.

> You can always find a reason to rationalize why you're not doing what you say you want to be doing.

I did say:

> People can always find a reason to rationalize why they’re not doing what they say they want to be doing.

That statement is true.

That's a good way of putting it. I've let it happen to me in the past, and I've seen it happen many times.

Your comment is solid advice.

How is that? If a job is less secure, typically commands more pay. If you know you will be out of work in 6-12 months, your pay better include some cushion to cover time between jobs.

> Your job is NOT safe.

Nothing would make me happier than to eradicate this line of thought, but laying the responsibility of that on the employee is poor management at best, malicious bullshit at worst.

We EMs do nothing to re-assure our employees that they are valued co-workers and not "resources" to be managed.

When one of my valued employees comes to me and says "I got another job offer and the increase in TC will change my life," most of the time they are a top-performer I want to keep, so I go to my manager asking to match their comp. But...they have to ask their manager, then their manager, so on and so forth. Even HR sometimes steps in with excuses why we cant. By the time a decision is made, if one is ever made, the employee I wanted to keep is already at their new employer.

So I would recommend my employees look out for themselves, bc I (and my management hierarchy) certainly won't (though they can, they just don't want to).

And if you are still looking to lay responsibility on to someone, look in the mirror.

This is so important.

It sucks and it's a symptom of risk management being a leading consideration to the process of a layoff, more so than performance optimization or culture change, but that's how it "makes sense"

The more you earn, the higher the risk that at some point somebody decides that they want to spend less / smarter. So, your risk increases with your salary. That's fine because it enables you to mitigate such a scenario by having savings.

I've been part of a big layoff round once. It wasn't personal. That was just my employer rounding up a large group of people to cut some meaningful chunk out of their salary expenses. It wasn't the last round either. The company, Nokia, ultimately got out of the phone and map business (I was in the maps unit). The final head count reduction was in the tens of thousands. A lot of those have since had successful careers and the Nokia implosion spawned quite a few successful companies.

But getting layed off is a bit of a rough ride. You feel bitter, angry, insulted, etc. But on reflection I actually got a fair deal and honestly I needed the wake up call that job security is a big illusion. I was just coasting in my career and a bit too comfortable. The moment was perfect as I was still in my thirties. This stuff gets harder as you get older, less flexible, and more dependent on job security. I've been doing startups and freelance work ever since. Which means I'm my own boss now and I've learned a lot in the decade since that happened.

You should be reliable, you should help everyone in your "family". If you leave your "family" abruptly it is a kind of betrayal.

Also funny is brainwashing employees to think that HR is their fried, that HR can help with issues at work.

It is a business. Do minimum amount of work you've been hired for, get your paycheck and focus on your private life!

Your line of thinking seems to be common in the IT industry and I wonder if it’s a good industry for me to be in long term. I only was at one company so far where we had a really close-knit team.

I don't think of it as depressing to act as if a fictional entity like a corporation isn't part of your family. By all means, be friends with your coworkers, show up and work hard, but don't get emotionally invested in a relationship with an LLC or a C Corp that can't love you back.

Also, you are incorrect about corporations not being fictional entities. Try googling the phrase.

Ditto!

A business is made of employees, but the employees are not the business. Sometimes that means decisions have to be made in favor (sometimes arguably) of the business over you.

Understanding the ephemerality of the situation can help you appreciate when it's going well and the people you work with, while helping you be prepared if and when something happens. Hopefully you will have gained a lot more experience, a bigger network of good friends, and have a decent nest egg to take you to the next job.

It's important to differentiate between colleagues and the business. The people you work with can become friends, but ultimately the business will do whatever sociopathic thing makes the number go up the faster/helps to deal with the crippling emotional turmoil of the execs.

You can be friends with the people you work with/for, but if there comes a time when the business and the people's interests diverge, the business will normally win. As long as you are aware of this, you can be OK throughout it (sortof, getting laid off really, really sucks).

It is extremely important (to me) to form some kind of relationship with the people I work with to stay motivated. It doesn’t have to be everyone and super close friendship - but that certainly helps if it comes naturally.

And yea businesses are like a form of “slow AI”. They will do what is necessary to survive even at the expense of the people who built them. And it is important to be mindful of that. But I can’t work with a Damocles sword hanging over me constantly. At some point I have to lie to myself and assume the business will also act in my interest if I do good work - even if it’s a naive and arguably stupid belief which has bitten me a couple times already. It wasn’t anyone’s “fault” or anyone acting with evil intent.

In the end I live after Juicy J’s eternal philosophy: “Everything is business Ain’t shit personal.”

I've got bad news for you about pretty much every other industry. They'll throw you away at the first opportunity to make the CEO a few more bucks too. It's the Jack Welchification of the American economy

At first place of work I had really nice team of young engineers, we've been students without kids, with lots of energy. Job was quite boring, but days were full of jokes and friendship.

And yes, I would like to exit this industry but am not ready to switch to x0.2 salary. Golden handcuffs!

There are people who recognize the game being played, and people who get their souls crushed because they failed to properly recognize how the pieces in the game move.

While this is a respectable way to see employer / employee relationships, it does not apply to every company / employee out there.

In particular, I think this is very true for BigCo, where most people are seen as fungible cogs.

The smaller the company, the better.

In fairness, anyone can leave at any time. Your employer, regardless of size, has to be prepared for the possibilty that you'll quit for a better job, or for some other reason. It would be inadvisable to get emotionally attached to employees.

The reason you're less likely to get laid off at a small company is that small companies don't have the capital to hire indiscriminately, so they're less likely to have large inefficiencies. The number of employees is already as low as they can get away with, given their current revenue, so only a significant downturn in revenue would justify layoffs.

I disagree. There is a lot of variance in small companies. There is a lot of variance in large companies as well (the famous "it will really depend on which team you belong to").

I really think there is little correlation between company size and your experience at such company. The predictive variables (if they ever exist) are elsewhere.

If those people are assholes, the size of the company doesn't matter, your employment in that company will suck.

I stand by my original point: no obvious correlation between company size and quality of life inside it.

In my network we keep joining the same (relative small) companies because we roughly know the culture we can shape and create an environment

To everyone their poison so, I guess. I learned that I am a large company guy, by a nature and nurture. Other people I know are the complete oppossite. One thing I learned so, no employee ever is safe. Not even lifetime employed state / public servants.

I think the posters who remind people that the employer/employee relationship is a business one have it right. We as engineers should strive as best as possible what our specific value is to a company. We should not delude ourselves into thinking we are more to the company than that. When we cease to have that value, or they cease to desire going down that path, they might end the relationship.

I work at a company of roughly over 200 employees that is part of a much bigger org. Layoffs never happen where I am working. And one factor may be that HR has a different, in some cases personal relationship with their employees. That is certainly not the case in the parent org where large-scale layoffs happen every few years.

Edit: And I would not even attest that my company is one of those with a "heart", as you say.

There's a high chance you're just a "sweet summer child" who wasn't there the last time things were REALLY bad.

Might be survivorship bias though because the people that could have been laid off in the first few years cannot be there to tell the tale, of course.

Many people fall for this and as long as you are an employee, no job is ever secure.

> I've been doing startups and freelance work ever since. Which means I'm my own boss now and I've learned a lot in the decade since that happened.

This gives some hope that there are those that have learned from the illusion and are now realizing that these companies do not care about you.

So in my experience, don't get too attached to company (or coworker either), and go out if things start to go south or if there's better opportunity out there.

Spoken like a man who never needed healthcare, who never had dependents, who never lived under the cage of a visa.

US is just simply has a system that's very cons for employees, especially with visa and right to work law.

And it applies to everyone up to the CEO.

At my company a new CEO came in to much fanfare. A year later they were unceremoniously turfed out because the board decided they weren’t up to the “new direction” the company needed to go.

And not to mention the people under the CEO who road her coattails. They were all turfed in quick succession (or smartly saw the writing on the wall and bailed first).

It’s a business relationship. That’s all. Treat it as such. Get as much money as you can. Don’t kill yourself in the hope your sacrifice will be repaid, it probably won’t.

Basically take the emotion out of it. When management talks of “our big family” they are just saying that because people like to hear it. It’s not true.

And once you’ve gotten enough years under your belt you start to see through the talk pretty easily. Trust your gut. If the company starts to look wobbly, be the first out the door, not the last. Or at least plan according and don’t assume your job will be there next year or even next month.

For individual contributors leaving isn’t always that easy as most interviews now require Leetcode prep. If you haven’t already been practicing, it can take a few months to get prepared for the grind. This is even worse for folks who work and have obligations outside of work such as children or sick family members.

It doesn't work both ways. They only get the benefits. You do not.

I didn't actually mind. It was completely anticipated, and we (me and my team) were pretty much ready. I think the company made the correct decision, but the reason they got there, was because they made a whole cascade of rotten choices, that painted them into a corner they couldn't get out of, easily.

I really wish that they would have involved me in some of the really dumb decisions they made, because I'm actually pretty good at strategic thinking, and could have easily advised them of alternatives.

But what is done, is done.

The really annoying part, was coming out of a 27-year "silo," into the current tech industry zeitgeist.

Nasty culture shock.

Backend of the backend.

The shock was encountering the value system of modern corporations and even individual ICs.

I’m not going to get more specific, but let’s just say that I have a value system that does not mesh well, with today’s tech culture.

They go in to public companies, they hire MBA's, and they try to improve profitability of company by letting engineers go.

Your money have come a full cycle :)

£6 for a pint of beer (outside of London) is 'the new normal'.

The UK inflation rate was 3.9 percent in November 2023, down from 4.6 percent in the previous month. Between September 2022 and March 2023, the UK experienced seven months of double-digit inflation which peaked at 11.1 percent in October 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/306648/inflation-rate-co...

Bank of England inflation calculator at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in... says it should be £1.34

So much for the inflation numbers.

But that's not what happens. What comes down in electronics. If you exclude food, shelter and medicine (things you need to live) the numbers are in line with govt estimates. But most people would bristle at this approach.

"This item looks different to me", "this category looks different to me", and "this basket looks different to me" are real feelings, but the government isn't straight up lying about inflation measurements.

Agreed. The government publishes the methodology and the source data the final numbers are based on are generally publicly available. However, the methodology slowly changes with time. And whatever the rationale is (there is always one that sounds good) its effect is always lowering computed inflation numbers. And lower inflation numbers give government ability to keep printing and spending money -- a dream for most officials.

So while I do not think the government is straight up lying, it is slowly twisting the methodology due to seriously misaligned incentives. My 2c.

aka, some folks on HN don't know about statistics.

But either way, I've lately become convinced to ignore inflation. The real thing we should be reducing is printing of money, no if buts or maybes.

If you are of the belief that the monthly inflation figures "stack", you are saying inflation is much higher than the 18% in 2 years that GP reported.

If you are not of that belief, then the figures you cite are fairly consistent with the 2 year rise in prices being in the +18% neighborhood.

Nov 2021 - 114.1

Nov 2023 (latest value) - 130.0

So, 14%. 18% slightly out of date figure.

Cash in the bank, even at 5% rates, hasn't kept up.

Central banks want to incentivize investments.

In real terms US bills have returned 0.4%/yr over the last 120+ years

This was not a term deposit, but a regular account, either itself with check-writing privileges or linked to a checking account with 1-3 day transfers. I think MMFs with check-writing paid similar interest, although not 100% sure as I never put my money there. Those were cash accounts as I could withdraw any amount, up to 100% of the account any time without any penalties.

They borrow short at base rates and lend long at a margin

Anything else will fall short.

“Montly” inflation rates are usually expressed in terms relative to the prior year, not prior month.

When we look at another data source, annual inflation rates for the UK don’t appear to be 18%: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/inf...

Until the huge bubble around tech companies explodes.

Google's PE is 25 today compared to the S&P of the 1990s 15 https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio/table/by-year

That said in the 1990s the US had access to a huge new market (the USSR market), something that US companies don't have today.

For those reasons avoiding companies that pay significant dividends is a superior investment strategy (because it means more competent management or management that doesn't consider the stock overvalued).

Apple, Microsoft, Meta priced for modest growth.

Do we live in the same metaverse?

AAPL priced for modest growth? The $3tn company???

Share buybacks decrease supply of shares relative to demand, so share prices increase.

Share buybacks are likelier to happen the more profitable a business is.

A higher share price at time t+1 than time t means the shareholder can earn a profit if they buy a share and then sell later.

Ergo, profits mean something.

Edit: as a reply to the comment below this, please take a moment to look around and identify anything providing you utility that was the product of a publicly traded company.

Companies will cut you in a random layoff at the drop of a hat. I've seen this enough times in my career. It doesn't matter if they promise its the only/last/whatever cutoff, or it was for performance only, or whatever..

People in your network will pick you up and refer you / hire you on at the next gig.

My prior employer just did a wave of deep cuts and the stories I heard out of management were pretty crazy. Directory level people were basically given an hour to cut $X Million off their people budget from their directs and all their skip level staff. They then begin laying them off the same day. This was not a well planned or thought out process. So obviously the people I saw getting laid off were a mix of underperformerss, great-but-expensive, random personal grudges from the director, and unfortunately biased towards a lot of "lifers" who'd been there a long time.

I have ex-coworker friends I've gotten regular drinks/meals with for close to 20 years now. Our average tenure at any shop meanwhile is 5 years. Who cares what company name is on the door.

You wouldn't catch me dead at any sort of company sponsored drinks/social thing.

I would also observe that some of the people most slavishly "living the brand", reposting stuff on LinkedIn, joining all the work social groups, etc.. were some of the first to get whacked in the last few rounds of layoffs at the old shop.

Which way does the causality go is a good question, but their time would probably have been better spent on having an organic network of people in the industry they genuinely enjoy the company of.

Your job never has been safe. Well, not in "big tech firm" territory anyway. I've not gone more than 3 years without seeing some kind of downsizing or shift in strategy or whatever. I swear that companies are like dogs, they roll over and scratch every once in a while, and have layoffs.

Sometimes it's just a distant boom over the horizon ("I hear they're getting killed over in Consumer"), sometimes it's like they line everyone up everyone in your division and boop! every fifth person and it sucks pretty hard.

I won't pontificate on another boring survival strategy, except to observe that I've nearly always switched jobs and technologies after five years anyway. I would be scared for my career if I spent ten years working on one thing.

Sometimes you're saved by smart, sometimes you're saved by lucky, and most of the time you'll be wrong about which one it was. :-)

I'm another long-termer too, not as long but I aspire to! I haven't thought about it, but staying current, and switching techs is probably why I still love it and think I'll be ok in the next round of layoffs.

Right now it's cloud and serverless in python, next, I bet it's LLMs or something in that space. Before that, it was protocol-level C++, UI C++, Java middleware. It just keeps changing, and that's a good thing! I can't imagine working in a dull static changing world.

Our organization has a policy that it hires developers on 3-year contracts, and renews them no more than two times. So when you have reached 9 years in the org; when you have become intimately familiar with the domain, and the codebase, and the way the org works etc., you are out.

I am still incredulous that someone has thought that yes, this is exactly how an organization should manage its software engineers.

the idea, i suppose, is to prevent anyone from becoming so integral and important that they will have negotiating leverage over the business.

Cogs needs to be replacible. It's also the core reason why thorough documentation, procedures and runbooks are encouraged.

Why work for someone who clearly doesn't align with your professional values?

I'm not I have literally heard a software engineer which was since recently responsible for hiring just saying just a few sentences apart:

- oh we shouldn't hire this person they only ever worked for the same company so they must not interested in learning and improving themself

and then

- oh we shouldn't hire that person they have switched companies every 2-3 years so they must be bad at their job and jump companies before they get fired

... wtf

and that person didn't get that opinion due to being crazy or so but from spending ~2 days to read up on what you need to look out for when hiring people, i.e. from other software enginers, software project managers and people which founded startups

the problem is not only is there a lot of nonsense out their there are multiple different conflicting engineering cultures out their each insisting only their way is the right way and convincingly pursuing people why the other way is supposedly terrible. Not few of them also pushing a rather toxic culture or a live style which only work for a singles with workoholic like traits or people which at some point in their live had the luck to get rather wealthy and no assume any software enginer in the world is in their position. It's just shit.

If on the other hand you are just saying "well it is unlikely you will get to 9 years" the problem with that thinking is that the closer you get to 9 years and the more you have invested the more likely you will want to stay for 9 and being forced out for no reason is silly. It is a job, not the presidency.

This is exactly the disconnect between people's salary expectations and their actual salary. It's not really based on how valuable your work is, but how easily replaced you are.

Now I also prefer startups and my carrier isn't yet that old (like ~8 years) so never is still the answer.

Through companies being often way less likely to give a trusted long term employee a payrise or trust them with more responsibilities then they are to do so with a new hired employee they have hard times to properly judge the skill of is still an (absurd but not IT specific) issue.

I've seen a manager at a large company make "once in 10 year cuts", then the next year make similar cuts. This was maybe 5/10 years ago and they still cut like this today - how on earth they are still operating I don't know.

One of the tricks they pulled was to sack a senior role and simply add the entire senior role to a junior role, but keep pay, etc, the same. The sell the idea to the junior employee they told them that it would help with promotions. 5 years of no promotions and insane stress they were out.

They are also legally required to have some positions filled with qualified people, but they have unqualified people working those positions with "on the job training".

The company itself has declared internally it will be bankrupt as early as next year without some form of financial assistance. COVID just about killed them with excessive borrowing to make up for missed revenue, to survive and come back into a poor economy.

I know two people working for this company, one is looking for another job, the other is stuck in the company as they did a deal with University support in return for being retained for some years.

> Never get invested emotionally. SWEs in particularly no longer live in a world where you can expect to have a rewarding career working for >=5 years at any given firm.

How many people work for a company now that they believe will be around in 10, 20, 50, 100 years time? There's an extremely high chance you will far outlive the company you work for.

> Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.

Given how things are going, I would suggest tangible assets that can be easily liquefied, even if in a poor economy.

I’ve worked at the same company now for 14 years. If I chose to, I feel like there’s a good chance I could work another 15-25 years at the same firm. My company sells software to local, state, and federal government customers. There are competitors in this space, but no company dominates any particular sector. There’s ample room for growth. Our software is critical to government operations and is necessary even during economic downtimes. Working with employees who have been at the company for 30-40 years isn’t uncommon. I work on 911 systems and find the domain interesting, rewarding, and important. We can help save lives and help government work more effectively.

But still your point about the absurd uncertainty of big company roles, even under glowing performance gauntlets as you so aptly say is well taken.

you highlight a paradox between the values the company espouses, and the ones they actually keep. In where it appears that, no loyalty is returned to the employee from the company in which the employee invested their loyalty so heavily.

Indeed, folks may quibble with this characterization, or even strongly disagree, but when cuts are made like this, even when valuable people could afford to be kept, that’s what it really comes down to.

Poor Google. The pain! What have they done to deserve this, oh heavens?

This has happened to me twice in my career and both times its like you're talking to a whole different person.

In my cynical opinion, being that different person is the number 1 trait companies look for when selecting managers

In summary: Patty McCord helped create the company culture in Netflix not ever holding on to people, if your position becomes slightly redundant or your performance falters for a bit, you're out. She apparently called herself "the queen of the good goodbyes". She says that she does not like the word "fired", that people are just "moving on" and that this is good for everyone involved. At one point in the interview, she remembers gleefully recounts admonishing an employee she let go for crying about about it.

The twist being that she herself was eventually fired as well. The interview does not go very deep into this because "she doesn't like to talk about it", and just says that leaving Netflix was "terrible, painful and sad".

I mean, is this impostor syndrome or is it something else?

You likely won't see redundancy coming. Chances are you'll be dismissed out of the blue one random day.

If they are indeed superior engineers, and your company is bad at evaluating talent, then they did a huge favor to these engineers by laying them off. Trust me.

No, because when large corps want to reduce head count/payroll, it often comes as a top down directive for every group to trim by X%...

In this type of environment being good at your job doesn't help - after a few cycles of these types of layoff all that are left are the better people, and the next X% layoff will be them.

I don't get why people get offended by it. we are not living in a "fair world" whatever that means.

You can die tomorrow or live another 50 years, nobody knows why. All of it is just luck.

Your advice is sound: exchange your expertise for money, invest the money, leave.

The big cultural change happened in the early 80s as MBA culture became the norm, with a shift towards zero sum neoliberal extremism and the uncoupling of pay from productivity.

Friedman popularized an idea that shareholders should be prioritized above all else and Jack Welsh implemented it at GE, showing just how much profit can be made when you care only about the money/stock.

I've been an executive and every position along the chain in the lead up to that within my industry. If I took anything away from my time in it (I have since moved back to practical hands on roles) it is that your above statement is sadly, quite accurate.

My time as an executive has left me soured on the industry full stop long term now i've realised its shit all the way up. I just kept thinking i'd get high enough to find people who like me, had morals or beliefs which they may apply to their decision making. But no, morals have no belonging it would appear in the executive class, which to be fair, I should have known about in advance, but my continued promotions were really quite accidental over the years and I am obviously niave.

Very sane advice, but unfortunately not always an option.

The likelihood of making real (not paper) life-changing money in a few years has considerably decreased in 5-10 years.

It will only come back with a good pace of IPOs and investor-positive acquisitions.

There is a difference between "save, build an emergency fund" and "get into some get-rich-quick scheme".

The goal of emergency funds and saving, for most people, is to prevent life-changing events, not create them. You don't need a ludicrous paycheck to have a rainy days fund, and to put money aside, and you shouldn't count on IPOs and acquisitions to build it.

The world needs sustainable businesses, not IPO jackpots for a few and looming redundancies for the rest.

I expect in the next 2-5 years to see a dynamic flourising of innovative companies started by these unshackled workers.

People wanting to build stuff to their hearts desire long left or didn’t start at google in the first place

Consider that that's only a part of the picture. Revenue minus costs, combined with the growth dynamics and constituent nature of both tell a fuller picture. Top line alone is almost meaningless

jeff+hn AT nimbleprecision DOT com

To your point, I can't make any promises that folks will be able to work at the company forever, but I can say that the ambition is to build a company for the long term and I do think there's a lot of value in having a long tenured engineering team insofar as the context folks build up for the problem set, the code base, and the team can be immense.

Second this, because it so hard. You pour yourself into something, and then management changes, direction changes, and suddenly your baby turns into crap. Your creation probably isn't even put out of its misery, it is allowed to live, but gets tortured, and mangled into some unholy abomination.

It can be very upsetting. I still dwell on a big project, get angry, tense, it is very unhealthy, and also difficult to let go.

Doesn't this apply to everyone?

You can in SMEs. Avoid VC-owned or public companies. Of course, there are no guarantees.

Social resilience and social welfare have been vilified enough that I see just enough blanket downvotes in some social fora, as if its an icky subject or an allergy. Those who are at the top benefit from it, as long as as they have enough lackeys to do their bidding.

I also see advice that states you should change jobs every few years to ensure you continue to grow as a person, ensure salary growth (a real thing in my experience) and to ensure you’re staying relevant. So it seems that we want the option to move on our terms but we don’t think companies should view it the same. Management is also painfully aware that key employees can be ‘one bad meeting away’ from leaving. It seems like if we want stability then we probably need to offer some as well; many in this thread describe the relationship as either transactional or a negotiation and if we really believe it then we should view it from both sides.

Finally, there are large industries where there is significant stability: government, defense, etc. They don’t have FAANG comp, but can pay reasonably well.

See a recent HN thread: "Signs that it's time to leave a company" _ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38943040

When you see that management people can't be direct, plain-spoken, and authentic with employees, you should realise that there is a cronyarchy... and you are not in the special club.

This just corporate culture though. where are you working where that isnt the case?

And there are lots of benefits to being independent legally. Tax benefits aside, the pay is usually much higher, and you can/should take on multiple clients simultaneously. This leaves you less exposed to the whims of a single C-suite, and lets you stack up silly amounts of money when times are good.

That will lead you back to the same place when the fund runs out.

Invest in yourself instead of Google. Especially as a SWE. It's never been easier to start your own company.

> This essay examines the arguments that many self-proclaimed libertarians make against unionization. It examines whether unions could be expected to arise in a libertarian utopia; whether we could expect them to arise in both the private and the public sector; what limits, if any, we could expect to be imposed on union organizing and behavior; and specifically, whether rules that make the workplace a union shop – that is, a place where all non-management employees are required to be members of the union and contribute to the cost of collective bargaining, or whether rules similar to those embodied in what are typically called “right-to-work” laws are more likely to prevail and be thought consistent with the demands of libertarianism. Finally, I close by examining the relationship between libertarianism and some popular conceptions of liberty a little more closely and argue that, while many people who think of themselves as libertarians believe that maximizing individual negative liberty is fundamental, this is actually a mistake. Libertarianism actually rejects that concept of liberty in favor, I will argue, of a more republican conception, under which liberty is defined as an absence of domination, and a high degree of unionization and this form of liberty are totally compatible.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/in-the-name-of-libe...

[1] I personally reject "elegance" as the driving first principle when weighing ethical and normative theories. There are higher standards to seek: most importantly, a rejection of dogmatism and the embrace of continual learning. Any calcified definition of "elegance" cannot stand the test of time; what is elegant to one generation may be deeply immoral to the next. To be clear, I don't mean to say that notions of ethics must be left ambiguous. I certainly do not defend ethical "systems" which amount to little more than evergreen debates over weighing contradictory principles. Rather, I mean ethical systems must improve as our intelligence and awareness improve.

You achieve the goals that are aligned with the business - business pays you.

I've been a contractor for 10 years and never took a dollar unless the goal is achieved. Ended up getting full-time position as a head of engineering hefty compensation by one of my clients.

I read once somewhere that the phrase “my job”/“your job” is one of the biggest oxymorons ever termed in America. You do not possess the job. You do not own it. You never did. There never was a time where anyone did. The “job” is owned by the employer. You may be assigned it. It may be unassigned by the employer. Or reassigned by the employer. Or redefined by the employer. “Your job” never was.

On the flip. It’s your life. Own that. We came up with the ideas of continuous integration, apply that to the relationship. Constantly renegotiate how your life overlaps with your employers job.

- goal of your company / values - need to grow - need to perform and be seen as such - need to belong

so often we can read warnings about not falling for this, but it's so common .. it's wired in us it seems

https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-fuqua-insights/kay-passion-e...

> The researchers found that people consider it more legitimate to make passionate employees leave family to work on a weekend, work unpaid, and handle unrelated tasks that were not in the job description.

> The team found passion exploitation consistently across eight studies with more than 2,400 total participants. The studies varied in design, in the participants (students, managers, random online samples) and in the kinds of jobs they considered.

> In one study, participants who read that an artist was strongly passionate about his job said it was more legitimate for the boss to exploit the artist than those who read the artist wasn’t as passionate. This finding extended to asking for work far beyond the job description, including leaving a day at the park with family and cleaning the office bathroom.

Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30998042/

I'm just glad that I'm being able to completely disconnect from work, when I check out. My tittle means nothing. Where I work means nothing. I do enjoy my co-workers, that's about it.

And yet, like in love, the trick is to love again.

Sure, be wise and have high standards about money. But there are some good entrepreneurs here. I was employee #250, it went IPO, became a millionaire. And now that I’ve created a startup, I try to pay it forward.

Large corporations, of course no.

As you gain experience, you get really good at parsing and identifying axes of flexibility in statements from the power structure. In general, professional managers in a power structure will always distort or mislead with any statements they make to turn any announcement into a steering opportunity. This is just how it is and it's really not about "trust", it's about manipulation.

Manipulation is _everywhere_ in the tech companies. Nothing is more amazing to me than an experience I had early on that woke me up: the day after I attended a meeting about how the company was working on a project that was incredibly unethical (think google's china search engine-level unethical or worse, like Nokia's building anti-dissident features into their 3g networking for Iran), I attended a company all hands where the entire message from every exec, including those that were involved, was about how we were a force for free speech, freedom, etc. I already knew but it was stark.

They also engage in constant attempts to blur things. Google, in particular, spends a lot of money to help muddy the job-vs-personal waters because it gives them power. For their first decade and a half, at least, they ran the whole company like college - extracurricular activities, etc. This wasn't just because the founders had no professional experience prior, it was strategic to make it very hard for people to leave (and when they started leaving for FB, that was to another place that was similar).

So forget about "trust" - start thinking in terms of "what is this person not saying, what is this person trying to imply without putting it in words, what flexibility are they reserving for themselves with their statements" etc.

Maybe your job(s).

But there are certainly companies out there that actually care about the welfare of their employees. Usually family owned and such.

That's where I choose to work and they have always taken care of my needs and listened to me.

I never really understood why people have such a desire to work for these big companies that don't care about you. I guess it's just different strokes...

Is it really a contract if it can end unexpectedly? I know it is, but really the original purpose of a contract is to set the terms and conditions, so nothing was surprise when it happened.

We really need a better term for these one sided work agreements.

The cost of the contract being one cost, so when you think about cost of managing the contract and contracts etc. severing it via a payout can be cheaper, and is often sudden to the contractors unfortunately.

They share in the profits with the employees and such.

I mean sure, it's not 100% a save job. If something truly terrible happened and the company went bankrupt etc, then of course you can still lose your job.

But no time have I ever seen or felt like they would ever lay off people unless the company literally couldn't go on to survive some other way.

You learned that 1 company isn't a family company and puts your needs above the company...

When covid hit and work dried up where I work, the company told employees to go out and find charity work and the company paid our full salary to do the charity work.

Just one example of the way they think and act. I've been there 15 years and never seen a single instance or case that would make me believe they would act any other way.

They pay plenty fair and I make more than I know what to do with for myself.

I was a manager there. I was demoted while my newborn was in the NICU (neonatal ICU) at the beginning of my paternity leave. And my position was eliminated a few weeks after I came back to work. As a condition of getting severance, I can't officially talk about it.

That is the culture of tech companies today.

"no longer" -> this might be the time to seriously talk about unionization. Programmers used to have a huge advantage at the bargaining table, going in as an individual. If parent is correct (I tend to agree) these days are over and they're not coming back. In that case, collective bargaining promises better results.

I see a lot more unionization efforts in software lately. Maybe it's just my own confirmation bias but maybe it's just that others are coming to the same conclusions.

My company made some bad decisions and had two rounds of layoffs as a result. I was cut in the first round. My boss is also a friend and confirmed over beer that the highest paid of us were the first to go.

I had negotiated higher pay based on past experience when I joined. So it goes.

See also the other hiring post on todays HN front page that’s a Bay Area startup but only hiring for South America for engineering

"Maybe a recession is forthcoming?" Better 'can a bunch of people just in case it happens to be so.

"Maybe LLMs will reduce programming needs?" Better 'can a bunch of people just in case it happens to be so.

I can adapt to an increased level of cynicism, even to the point it informs my concrete career decisions.

But this level of bad faith itself must do some damage to the economy, mustn't it? There must be some concrete value that would be generated by increasing good faith between employers and employees, musn't there be?

This seems like a really negative and self-damaging perspective. I'm the direct manager for 14 people with whom I have hard-won relationships, built on trust and caring over long periods of time. We're not friends or family, but I honestly care about them. I share as much as I can, and try to include my confidence and assessment of what I share. If they follow your advice and unequivocally discount it all, I think they're actually in an even WORSE situation. Regardless, what a sad, scary way to live.