Well you see, at home everyone has their own fridge, but in the office there's a single fridge for 50 people. And it's got free drinks in it to make up for the extra (say) hour a day spent travelling to get there.
Right? Funny how C-level employees never think they’ll get outsourced. Ten or twenty years from now there will be great CTO level talent founding companies in Latam if they aren’t already. Then the whole company can operate in a cheaper country with lower taxes and benefits. Good luck competing with that in the US.
> Right? Funny how C-level employees never think they’ll get outsourced.
Plenty C level people know this is the eventual outcome. They just also know that the runway is likely to extend beyond their working career because they control most business decisions for the foreseeable future.
They still operate on a relationship basis with ownership/capital while managing the company on a Netflix performance model for everyone else. Those relationships are likely to stay in place until both sides age out of the industry.
I've worked with a number of C level folks hired into companies from low cost regions and they have all been utterly stellar. This is coming, just not for the current generation of senior execs.
This is correct. Work like a dog and like you have a target on your back, because you do, and you’ll be safe for as long as possible, maybe even until retirement.
They won't because they don't have anywhere near the same access to capital. There is no country even close to the US in this regard, and US salaries in software engineering are the exception, not the norm.
I think the macroeconomic trend is that the work is moving slowly to poorer countries. Makes perfect sense, as in US there is a lot of money, it should mean less desire to work and more to enjoy life, meanwhile in poorer countries people have high appetite for money/work.
For example in India it used to be only outsourcing, but now they are launching their own startups as well, some quite succesful. Slowly the capital will start accumulating there as well. And that is a good thing, for global inequality.
Lower taxes? Which countries are you thinking of? (Genuinely interested not a rhetorical question; IME many poorer countries have higher taxes, in percentage terms.)
I graduated college with significant, real-world programming skills. I immediately went to work writing software. The only thing my first manager contributed was showing me where to find documentation, and even then, books that I found on my own were far more valuable overall.
It was no different the first year from the tenth: here's what we want made, go make it. No mentorship, no training, just self-learning and resourcefulness.
I can't even imagine what mentorship software people could need, besides general career or investment advice.
I don’t mean this as a slight against you because there’s a place in the world for every type of developer, but your description of work and collaboration is very cynical. You could be the most unlucky person in the world and thus you’ve never met anyone worth collaborating with, or, more likely, you’ve not attracted those people in your workplaces.
I’ve worked at great companies and awful companies, and no matter what, I have always met talented people in these companies who I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with. Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with — across all disciplines.
The most valuable work you can do when in software engineering is to help non-swengs in businesses achieve their goals: code is just a means to an end, collaboration is how we discover what to build.
your description of work and collaboration is very cynical.
One man's cynic is another man's realist.
In my opinion, OP's description of office life is idealistic, like a teacher describing the theme of Dead Poets Society or Mr. Holland's Opus.
I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with.
I don't know what you mean when you say meaningful professional relationships, but despite having made many work friends, as stated previously none of them have led to career development (OP's mention of networking).
Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with
One thing I got out of mentorship is that it’s one thing being correct, and and entirely other thing having people actually want to listen to you. It happens often enough that you have one and not the other. Until you have both, you won’t have impact and will grovel about others.
Not every person works in a company organized this way, even IT people. In all my working years and all companies, I always had managers that were technically inferior to me (not bragging, most were not technical people at all, some had some basic tech skills). My only mentoring was for management skills, not guidance in any technical matter.
I’ve not had mentorship or real guidance offered in my career. I would say I’ve made connections, but my experience was very much just “you’re in charge of this team now because someone left. Why are you sucking at being a lead? Geez, we even sent you on a single day management course! I don’t get it!”. And the same for being a manager. People are very complimentary about me when I’m just doing programming because I don’t need any help, but as soon as I get into a situation I’m not very good at, it’s criticism all the way. I would bet this is pretty normal since many managers don’t seem happy being managers, and that only a minority get significant career development value from managers/leads.
Yes, especially from clients/customers. Most manager feedback, though, is of the form “you need to/should do X.” If you press them on HOW to do X, they often don’t really know, especially when it comes to soft skills issues or personality clashes. They see their role as providing the feedback, and it’s your job to figure out how to fix it. It feels like criticism because you’re left with the critical part and no clear path forwards. Of course knowing the problem exists provides SOME value, but I wouldn’t call it mentorship, guidance, or even constructive.
Sorry but this sounds really bad (and frankly, a bit entitled). Not everyone can afford to live 15 minutes walk to work w/ Bay Area, Seattle, etc housing prices. Not everyone wants to spend 30 minutes or more each way in a car just to get to an office that has a demonstrably worse setup than what they have at home. I have a healthy separation between work and home, it’s called closing the laptop lid and walking away.
Oh, they take full responsibility, it always says so in the mails they send out. It's just that taking responsibility doesn't appear to actually result in anything happening.
A cyncical take might be that they are saying that they take responsibility (credit) for reducing the monthly payroll expenses. They may also have overhired in the past, but what's in the past was already paid for. The savings next month is how they justify a large paycheck.
>See: not a single CEO stepping down for over hiring.
Wait, what? You think a CEO should step down because their management over-hired a relatively small proportion of employees and had to do some layoffs?
Not really sure why you're getting downvoted, other than to assume an emotional reaction from the community to layoffs impacting tech.
Frankly - People seem to be forgetting that until 2013, MS was still doing stack ranking and routinely letting go of the bottom 10% of their workforce (and they were hardly the only ones doing it...)
I don't see it as unusual AT ALL that these companies are doing a wave of cuts to headcounts after the large hiring sprees during covid. Especially as interest rates rise, so they're looking to lower debt burdens in the short term and pay off loans made at low interest rates instead of rolling into a higher interest loan in the new environment.
If anything... I'd expect the exact opposite - a CEO that fails to address cost centers as debt becomes more expensive is a liability, and someone the board might be looking to replace (ask to step down).
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Does that mean I'm not sympathetic to those who've lost jobs? Of course not.
But tech had to rev the engine pretty hard to handle the extra load during covid when everyone was indoors and doing things online, and now that demand has dropped. So they're letting off the gas pedal.
If folks don't like it - blame the game. Work to unionize. Work to incentivize co-ops and shared ownership. Work to increase taxation on these companies and their highest earners (which... if you're in the tech industry almost certainly includes YOU). Don't go work for giant tech conglomerates and then act surprised when they act like giant tech conglomerates...
"Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror"
If you make some idiotic financial decision near the bottom of the management tree, such as... over hiring, you'll likely lose your job or get demoted.
But it’s absurd. Companies are not supposed to only ever hire.
Some things are cyclical and you need more people for some amount of time, and then you find you need less. It’s not always predictable/seasonal like farming or holiday rush.
Is it wrong for a company to respond to market effects? That there was a layoff isn’t necessarily a sign a company did anything wrong… I think how they actually do the layoff certainly can be done well or poorly.
Why is it offensive? Over-hiring has been a thing since at least the first dot-com boom. One's managerial power is directly proportional to how many "reports" they have under them. I worked at one company that raised a decent A round. We immediately rented another office down the street, spent close to 2 million on renovations, then filled it with anyone who could spell HTML. The B round was even larger, so the cycle continued (until late 2001 or so.)
It's a response to extreme demand during covid. When - you know - online service usage was at all time highs because everyone was stuck inside and doing things online.
It was likely the right call to hire then, just like it might be the right call to reduce headcount now.
It's not relatively small. All the companies are experiencing similar chaos to the NYSE because people in the middle of important operational work suddenly vanished.
The people laid off weren't idle like H&R Block tax preparers in May or Target clerks in January.
The people laid off and the people not needed were a different set of people, at the time of the layoff.
This is because the CEO's core job is to raise stock price. Nothing else.
They hired in covid and profits & share price spiked due to the economic state at the time. Now the economic state has changed so they fire employees and the stock goes up. By that metric, the CEO will get a bonus at the end of the year. CEO does not get a bonus for not laying people off. Employees are not humans once you get to the csuite. An employee can be a person but multiple employees are just numbers on a ledger. They just send out "I'm sorry" emails to placate the masses and to get good media, no one really cares if the lower level people are upset. You only count once you get to a certain level.
No, they only take responsibility for short-term market cap. Margins and profit don't matter. That's why they chase whatever fad hits the investor class.
They are taking responsibility. They are just delegating the consequences to their staff. I suspect this will change soon. Activist investors are already surrounding companies like Salesforce and I can see CEOs being promoted sideways (board member only).
The CEO of Toyoda is becoming the chairman of their board, that doesn't feel like a CEO being replaced as punishment for poor performance in the way that people are talking about in this thread. But even when CEOs are fully ousted over issues, the golden parachute makes it barely feel like a punishment anyway. I'm having trouble thinking of a case where a CEO actually seemed to be significantly financially impacted by such an event, though maybe FTX will provide an example shortly.
Do you think that honestly matters in the 10s of millions of dollars range? I certainly don't. The problematic parachutes in question are beyond enough for an excessively wealthy standard of living for the rest of their natural lives, even if it's proportionally smaller. Whether or not CEO comp should be as high as it currently is is another question entirely.
Wages for SWEs are lower than other comparable countries in Europe, Canada, and APAC (SG, AU, NZ) and Japanese fluency (not a PR requirement but still needed to live in Japan) is hard to acquire. Why deal with the headache of learning a hard to learn language not spoken outside of a handful of islands in the Northern Pacific with a very insular culture when you can become a German or Canadian national for much less effort.
The things you complain about do not equate to a "hostile immigration policy that is against permanency".
SWE wages are lower than the US, yes, but not Europe in my experience. Japanese fluency is not needed for PR or even citizenship (you do need a little ability for naturalization). You don't need to be fluent to live in Japan; most of the expats I know are not fluent at all.
German is also a very difficult language to learn, and you won't go far in Germany without it. It's much easier to be English-only in Japan than in Germany, in my experience.
I'll copy an earlier comment I made on a separate thread specifically with South Asia in mind, but I've seen similar dynamics in ASEAN as well. Also, I think you are an L1 Japanese speaker. If you're L1 is Indo-European, other Indo-European languages tend to be easier to learn.
Why go to Japan (in reality only Tokyo) where median software TC is around $60k [0] when you can go to Canada where median software TC is around $90k [1] and English speaking, let alone other English speaking and relatively easy to immigrate Western countries with large South Asian communities like the UK (95k) [2], Netherlands (87k) [3], Germany (77k) [4], Australia (100k) [5], Norway ($74k) [6], or Singapore (73k) [7].
I don't see a huge difference between $60k and $77k for instance, and it all depends on your actual job offers.
Regardless, while I don't disagree with your facts, the original claim (not by you) was that Japan had a "hostile immigration policy that is against permanency". This is false, and sounds like a lie in fact, unless the OP just woke up from cryo-sleep after being frozen in 1985. Sure, there are real challenges to working and living in Japan if you're a native English speaker (which I am), but my whole point here is that legally, immigration here is actually very easy, contrary to the anti-Japan posts like the OP's that I frequently see on forums like this one. Immigration policy here is far, far more inviting than the US which claims to be open to immigration, yet has severe limits on visas and green cards and is legally extremely difficult and expensive to emigrate to.
Agreed that GP's comment is innacurate on that point, but...
Are you White? That's the differentiatng factor. If you're of South Asian or Chinese or SE Asian origin (not even nationality, origin), you face much less microagressions in other countries than you do in Japan. In general, factoring in CoL and the insular culture, Europe and other Asian countries tend to make sense. Heck, when I was backpacking out in Isan, while a number of people did go work in assembly lines or pick mushrooms in Japan on the JET visa, they preferred South Korea and Taiwan due to a (relatively) less insular culture than Japan, though Germany, the US, and Australia was the more popular option. This is reflected in diaspora demographics as well.
"Microaggressions"? Asian people in the US are getting physically attacked, brutally, in the streets. That doesn't happen in Japan.
Anyway, I don't know why you keep talking about this kind of thing. I'm addressing ease of immigration, not how welcoming people are in particular countries. The whole thread was started because someone outright lied about immigration laws, and you keep talking about culture, which has nothing to do with the discussion.
