Every major layoff currently is because of the reason as - "hired too many people" and "not seeing the same impact" as the number of people they have. Both of these are related to empire building by Middle Managers. It is a universal metric in all big tech that for a manager promotion - they need more people under them. This will justify hiring more managers and creating additional layers. On the flip side, the scope and impact get diluted; the RoI per engineer in these places suffer. To keep engineers busy, the leaders will create BS features and you will end up with a bloatware product that does not necessarily add to the core business. The Manager recruiting is heavily broken in these places. The first question recruiter asks is how many people you are managing - 20-25+ will be pushed to Sr. EM role, 100+ will be pushed to Director loop. Sadly "number of people relating to business growth" is a classical "body shop" thing. These criteria attracts more empire builders; a good amount of them started their career in WITCH companies. The worst example of companies filled with empire builders are - Amazon, Meta, Google, Oracle. Amazon has 250K people in the corporate (non-warehouse, non-logistic, non-data center employees) which is way higher than Microsoft or Apple. Tens of thousands of people working in Alexa which loses 10 Billion $ every year and now dropped to third place in the voice assistant market. Meta has 3X employees in last 4 years without adding anything meaningful in the product line. There are chain of 3 M1 and 2 M2 and 2 Directors before reaching to a VP. The problem is so drastic that the CEO has to call out this week publicly about Empire building managers. Google / Oracle - lets hire thousands of people in cloud because that's how many minions AWS and Azure services have. TC - 500K
There are no kings without kingdom and this applies to all places However your hatred towards witch was uncalled for and adds nothing to this discussion. salty much?
Because they laid off in bulk. Number matters in layoffs (employees perspective) than percentages. Compared to small/medium or even some large enterprises, these companies hired like crazy. Don't you agree on that?
Yup. They're basically flooding the market with supply this lowering the value of labor in a time when stocks are already way down
You know shit-all about Empire Building
Because I am a Sr EM. And I have seen this shit very closely and staying away from Empire building all the time at the expense of not growing.
Hats off to you for making M2 without empire building. Care to share tips on how? I think very similar, but feel very stuck and increasingly drawn towards the only solution - build an empire
👏
Third time I've seen this comment in different posts.. Is this an ad for ebay? Lol
Welcome to eBay
Exactly match what I observed in my company.
I wouldn’t discount WITCH employees who are in tech. Some of them have been the hardest and most meticulous in their work. Anecdotally the worst people I’ve have the misfortune to work with are people that think because they’ve completed a 2 yr degree that they can look down on everyone else. Big time entitled with a massive ego and casts judgement on everyone else.
I would discount WITCH all day every day. Almost uniformly low caliber. You get what you pay for and the cost is low.
Generalisations like that only show what a salty loser you are rather than them.
What does Google teach you? So many Googlers graduate from the G university with ego. Do they have any training sessions on how to make a meaningful conversation instead of personal attack (I know what you mentioned in your first draft about IQ before editing it). OP has a lot of truth in his opinion (and that's my obvervation as well). I don't buy COVID as a valid reason becuase a significant number of enterprise companies slowed down hiring until last fall because of the same reason.
I fail to see any truth in OPs post. The only people that I’ve seen not contributing anything are diversity hires - white women (the worst. Whichever field they enter, they suppress salaries because they start asking for pay without extra work - law is one fine example) followed by the other two ethnicities - we all know who they are, followed by HR and Recruiters.
100% truth. Recruiters ask the number of reports to decide the level. It's a broken model and the side affects are clear.
Ask the number of reports to decide the level for mangers. And for ICs, guess what? Ask the number/type of successful LC completed in X mins. See a pattern here? Goodhart's law at its finest.
Recruiters are stupid. Most hiring managers are stupid. They should be fired first.
Bezos should be fired out of his retirement.
Well said. almost everyone knows about this in certain way, but absolutely no solution for it.
Yeah, work at Amazon and there are 24 people on my team. My manager never responds to my 1-1 requests ever since I started.
There's definitely solutions, the issue is that those that are capable of deploying such solutions are also those enjoying the current status quo.