Obviously there's bias involved, but I really don't see a reality where this isn't the case. I've literally never worked at a company where half the team could be laid off and the product would still function at its current level of functionality for 12 months; let alone adding functionality. If you've worked at a company like this; I imagine there are some; then sure; the lights could be kept on. Hey there Oracle & IBM 2.0.
Then again, you (the company) just laid off hundreds of extremely talented engineers with few other marketable skills except "the industry you trained them in", you've been paying them insane salaries, they're just going to turn around and compete with you, except now they've got a clean slate and have learned from all the mistakes that caused them to be necessary in the first place.
The well paying, large companies are literally 7 of the 10 largest companies on the S&P. Oh, and by the way, one of those other 3, UHG, they have... 850 job openings with the word "software engineer" in the title; about 15% of all their openings. Johnson & Johnson, they're on there, 300 software engineering openings, out of 3000 total. Berkshire is also on the list, harder to get their count, but you get the point; software is EVERYWHERE.
I just... don't get it. I don't get how someone can believe what the grandparent believes. I mean, you can argue a more measured stance, that the outlier 99.9th percentile salaries we've seen in the past four years are probably going to stagnate. Maybe; I'm not convinced of this, but its a reasonable stance. You can argue it'll be harder to get into the industry, as companies want experience and not coding bootcamps; I'd bet on it. But to argue that tech companies don't need 50% of their employees, when they're the plurality of the wealth of the United States' public markets; its comical. Where else did that wealth come from, if not their (tech) employees? If the argument is they're overvalued, maybe, but that's speculation; buy Puts if you believe it, but I'd buy Calls on "you won't".
Then again, maybe the grandparent is talking about non-tech roles in tech companies? I can't tell; and moreover, I don't think even they know what they're arguing for.
> But to argue that tech companies don't need 50% of their employees, when they're the plurality of the wealth of the United States' public markets; its comical.
If they were claiming this was something unique about tech I'd be sceptical. But if they're claiming it's just regular corporate dysfunction I'm not so sure. I've watched whole teams of extremely talented engineers put multiple years into building something that never saw the light of day, not because of any technical flaw but because of shifting organisational politics. The idea that less than 50% of employees contribute to the bottom line doesn't seem so implausible.
I think I agree with you, but I'd take it a step further. The plan from management may in fact be various projects in development, few of which will see the light of day. Those few pay for all of the spent effort on the others.
This is no different from VC behavior. It's unfair to label the shuttered projects as not contributing to the bottom line, if they were part of a pool of investments.
I don’t know if I’d agree with the claim that 50% can be cut… but there is certainly bloat and it could be time to trim the fat. This would be very good news for the industry since all those engineers will start new things and build new companies.
That said, I think the salaries might stagnate. End of 2021 had everyone starting a new job and competing offers. It may not last so the negotiations won’t be as lucrative. Beyond that, tech salaries are high because the profit per person is high and that won’t change much, especially if companies trim excess employees.
I read somewhere a while ago (can’t find it) that Uber once discovered they had multiple teams all making an internal map gui, just siloed into different orgs so there was no visibility. While it’s a crazy example and probably fake, it’s not hard to imagine an org like google or Amazon where there are 100k employees having some level of duplicated efforts.
With office politics, some architectural decisions get made because everyone wants their team to touch important things. I was part of a team that owned a critical request flow and when they were adding new features it was decided that this API should be the entry point for those new features (10% increase in traffic estimated). So it went from a crud app (stateless app with database) to an API ingress with a (custom written) event queue linked to a queue processor (by AWS sqs) linked to a service that was responsible for handing the request off to one of several crud apps (except no new ones were written). Now 4 teams had a portion of the flow under their control. Was there a reason for this architecture? Yes. Would it have happened if the org didnt balloon from 7 engineers to 50? Probably not. Would customers have noticed? Yes, the API would have been faster and more reliable.
Beyond that, it’s well documented that tech people like shiny new toys. I interviewed at DoorDash for a pretty visible product team. They said they were hiring to do a complete rewrite of their product switching to <buzzword> and that it was their main deliverable for 2022. The team I was leaving during said interview was allocating 50% of headcount to rewrite the tech stack from binary on VMs to “AWS native” technology. No new features. If the team was told to cut some headcount or was denied headcount to grow, that’s be the first project axed because it doesn’t save money or help the customer. Meanwhile, my new team has 1/3 the people for a literal 10-100x traffic product with way more customer visibly. If you spent the last few years on this team, you’d think software engineering was lean and efficient. On my last one you’d say it’s bloated and full of busywork.
Then again, you (the company) just laid off hundreds of extremely talented engineers with few other marketable skills except "the industry you trained them in", you've been paying them insane salaries, they're just going to turn around and compete with you, except now they've got a clean slate and have learned from all the mistakes that caused them to be necessary in the first place.
The well paying, large companies are literally 7 of the 10 largest companies on the S&P. Oh, and by the way, one of those other 3, UHG, they have... 850 job openings with the word "software engineer" in the title; about 15% of all their openings. Johnson & Johnson, they're on there, 300 software engineering openings, out of 3000 total. Berkshire is also on the list, harder to get their count, but you get the point; software is EVERYWHERE.
I just... don't get it. I don't get how someone can believe what the grandparent believes. I mean, you can argue a more measured stance, that the outlier 99.9th percentile salaries we've seen in the past four years are probably going to stagnate. Maybe; I'm not convinced of this, but its a reasonable stance. You can argue it'll be harder to get into the industry, as companies want experience and not coding bootcamps; I'd bet on it. But to argue that tech companies don't need 50% of their employees, when they're the plurality of the wealth of the United States' public markets; its comical. Where else did that wealth come from, if not their (tech) employees? If the argument is they're overvalued, maybe, but that's speculation; buy Puts if you believe it, but I'd buy Calls on "you won't".
Then again, maybe the grandparent is talking about non-tech roles in tech companies? I can't tell; and moreover, I don't think even they know what they're arguing for.