Why Layoffs Don't Work

Re:Why Layoffs Don't Work by VWWHFSfQ on Sunday March 09, 2025 @08:22AM (#43308486)

So much of the software industry is just an outrageous combination of inexperience and "YOLO". Every problem can be solved by just giving AWS another $100,000 this month because we don't have time (and don't know how) to make even basically optimized software. So just burn the gas and electricity and give more money to the YAML merchants at Amazon.

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Re:Why Layoffs Don't Work by georgemcbay on Sunday March 09, 2025 @08:39AM (#43308604)

I still have PTSD from around 2012 when a company I worked for and loved very much (chumby) imploded financially and almost all of the employees including myself got vacuumed up in an acquihire-type deal into a streaming media company that was building a would-be netflix competitor.

Us former chumby developers were working primarily on the front-end across a variety of embedded-system-like devices (writing code for early versions of 'Smart' TVs from the likes of Vizio, etc) while another team was creating the backend and whenever they would show us the infrastructure diagrams of what they were working on they would just place a "HADOOP Server" wherever they had no idea how they were going to solve some large difficult problem, it was effectively a stand-in for "magic happens here".

Got to the point where there were a hilarious number of layers upon layers of little cylinder icons in the system design titled "HADOOP Server" all interlinked in non-decipherable directed graphs.

I'm pretty sure every single one of us left the new company within 6 months, I lasted about a month and a half.

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