I think the execs are either using it as an excuse to reduce opex to boost share prices or they're actually buying into this delusion that the productivity improvements are right around the corner. Though I don't really buy into that second option since any reasonably intelligent person would wait to see concrete evidence of said improvements before crippling your company based on some hope.
I also think some of the companies that operate in the AI space are using the layoffs as a form of marketing to prove the capabilities of their tech (while also using it as an excuse to cut costs).
Anyways, I work at one of the major players in the space and the amount of AI code slop I see on a daily basis is absurd. My prediction is that within two years most younger SWEs will only have a high-level understanding of their code. I already see it happening.
This is most definitely an overgeneralization, but in my experience, engineers that constantly talk shit about management are either shitty engineers themselves or they're incredibly difficult to work with and blame everyone else for their shortcomings.
Middle management is playing a completely different game. I don't envy them one bit.
Sure, there are toxic cultures created by bad management, but that can be said about any leadership role. There is a reason for the hierarchy, if you think you have a better approach to structuring a company, have at it.
Having ended up in management by accident and then just sticking around with it for a while just because.... I am now back in an IC role and I mostly feel sorry for my manager honestly.
Agreed I think shitty people are just shitty people. You can tell when someone is trying to make the lives of their coworkers easier, from those who are on a power trip.
Why make such a definitive claim with zero evidence to back it up?
The justifications in that section are nonsense and seem to boil down to a skill issue on your part.
Sure, around the city a scooter makes sense for a lot of people, though I believe they provide a false sense of security. The lower barrier to entry also lowers the "perceived" risk.
Feeling safer !== safer
Personally, I feel much safer on one of my motorcycles than a scooter. But that's because I am extremely comfortable on a motorcycle and can make it do exactly what I want, when I want.
It's most likely an attempt to give low performers (if you received a bad rating for last year) a chance to leave on your own terms before they lay you off.
If I was in that bucket I would definitely take this offer.
Looks like all the large tech companies are doing aggressive stack ranking right now.
The job market is terrible right now. More likely the high performers will take the offer because they believe they have better chances of being rehired somewhere else. Good luck to them though.
Assuming the events are independent, P(you get laid off) x P(you don't find a new job) will always be less than 1.0 x P(you don't find a new job)
If I already had a solid offer somewhere else, I'd take the severance. If I didn't, I wouldn't leave it up to chance, and I can't imagine many other people would.
With only three weeks to make decision, my guess is high performers aren't going to start looking for new jobs now unless they were already looking to begin with. From the wording of the message, it sounds like Google is okay with losing the group that was already looking.
Do people actually do that? Finding bugs in virtually any piece of software isn’t difficult if you have access to the source. Merging in a bug only to fix it later honestly seems like more work. Most bugs are pretty easy to fix…
A much more common story would be people knowingly cutting corners because of management pressure/demotivation/etc, then fixing the resulting bugs. It's easy for somebody doing that to look like a hard-working hero compared to the programmer who just avoided the problems in the first place.
No, if A's PRs always bounce because the testers find bugs then A is going to look like an idiot. Then again you need to work at a place that actually employs testers.
If B always submits PRs and they always go straight to merged in prod, then B knows what he's doing
I've seen a lot of fairly explicit discussions around "this timeline will require cutting these corners and cost this much time to fix later or else it will cause these problems", and also some relatively internal discussions around "how strongly can we rely on promises that the project won't get dropped before all the cleanup is done, and how does that impact what options we can present".
> Finding bugs in virtually any piece of software isn’t difficult if you have access to the source.
What????
Yeah, trivial bugs maybe.
Even because most "hairy" bugs (and those are the one that count by the end of the day) manifest themselves not in obvious ways, but only under some hard to predict set of pre-conditions and input data. And let's not even get started on threaded/asynchronous code.
Millions might as well be zero to Apple. There is overhead when it comes to dealing with another company, combined with the potential of damaging your brand. If the number is not in the billions I doubt they would bother. The only companies capable of paying the amounts that would make it worthwhile would be excluded from this option.
- A new deal with another company is actually in the millions. There are a lot of numbers between zero > 20B that's currently being paid for that default setting.
- Said deal remains small and doesn't grow over time, even as a new competitor to GOOG starts eating away at their market share and spreads around search ad revenue.
I also think some of the companies that operate in the AI space are using the layoffs as a form of marketing to prove the capabilities of their tech (while also using it as an excuse to cut costs).
Anyways, I work at one of the major players in the space and the amount of AI code slop I see on a daily basis is absurd. My prediction is that within two years most younger SWEs will only have a high-level understanding of their code. I already see it happening.
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