Business Big Tech Layoffs Megathread - Techbros... we got too cocky...

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Since my previous thread kinda-sorta turned into a soft megathread, and the tech layoffs will continue until morale improves, I think it's better to group them all together.

For those who want a QRD:


Just this week we've had these going on:

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But it's not just Big Tech, the vidya industry is also cleaning house bigly:

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All in all, rough seas ahead for the techbros.
 
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sadrefrigerator said:
You aren't the own dev in the team. As. Asenior developer you are expected to be able to break a big project down into chunks. Having a board full of unit sized stories allows management to have a overview on how development is going so they don't have to micromanage you. Because the alternative is that they just hope I'm 2 weeks that everything's done and the feature is ready to ship. I've have to clean stuff up when the above happened and the dev shipped a broken piece of shit that took down a core feature of our app. I blame management for allowing things to get to that point.

Having projects broken down is also the very basic necessity for allowing a team to work on the same thing as once. It lets knowledge sharing happen naturally, and naturally leads to small reviewable PRs. I would be pissed as hell if you gave me a huge or with 4digit lines of changes and I had to review it.

Maybe your processes are fucked up and team leads/managers are incompetent. The solution is not to get rid of processes altogether. Letting cowboy devs work in a silo without any insight is a telltale size of weak incompetent management.
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There has to be a balance to ticket/commit/PR size and also code quality expectations. We aren't talking about 4k line commits, nowhere near it, most of the files don't exceed 100-200 lines. It's the other side of the balance we are talking like 15 tickets for 2 weeks of work, and half the work feels like ticketing... and we aren't talking bugs, it's white paper basically. Lots of fine tooth comb/hand holding on top of that, some of which I'm figuring out is kind of a necessary with all the legacy/version compatibility pitfalls... but some of which is subjective/over-polish.

At the end of the day I know exactly what's going on, the process is being tuned, it's being run highly granular for a benchmark, the boss wants quality over speed and I'm still onboarding in a sense. For once (well maybe twice) the people above me aren't dumb, I know that... but I'm a hound when it comes to coding, I just want off leash so I can disappear into the brush and bring back a solution, the whole sit, stay, come by collaborative border collie thing is exhausting.

Also in some sense the whole industry is being slowly normy-fied in every which way, more and more process driven, more and more restrictive, doctrinal, trend obsessed... There is an open agenda to make everything social in order to attract some mythical female programmer who may or may not exist and according to some stories may have a single horn and/or the tail of a fish. You get into hair dressing or teaching or law or something if you want to interact with people. They said "Who wants to sit in the basement alone with a computer and rarely have to deal with anyone?" and I said "Me!" and now no matter where I turn it feels like everyone is trying to take that away from me. I miss the wild west.
 
CircuSphere said:
There has to be a balance to ticket/commit/PR size and also code quality expectations. We aren't talking about 4k line commits, nowhere near it, most of the files don't exceed 100-200 lines. It's the other side of the balance we are talking like 15 tickets for 2 weeks of work, and half the work feels like ticketing... and we aren't talking bugs, it's white paper basically. Lots of fine tooth comb/hand holding on top of that, some of which I'm figuring out is kind of a necessary with all the legacy/version compatibility pitfalls... but some of which is subjective/over-polish.
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Yes, there should be a balance. Having 200 line PRs is fine, so is having 15 tickets for a 2 week sprint. You should be glad that the team is erring towards safety. You said you are still new in the role. Its easy to judge processes and checks from afar, but as you are finding out, theres reasons things are done the way they are.
CircuSphere said:
At the end of the day I know exactly what's going on, the process is being tuned, it's being run highly granular for a benchmark, the boss wants quality over speed and I'm still onboarding in a sense. For once (well maybe twice) the people above me aren't dumb, I know that... but I'm a hound when it comes to coding, I just want off leash so I can disappear into the brush and bring back a solution, the whole sit, stay, come by collaborative border collie thing is exhausting.
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It sounds like you are nitpicking over small stuff. You understand everything that is happening is for the better. Metrics such as velocity are extremely important if you want a scalable team structure. Managers, Team Leads and Product use these metrics to estimate how much work can get done so they can make accurate schedules and roadmaps. Having small unit sized stories is the very basic necessity for all of this.

Of course there is going to be more scrutiny on you while you are ramping up. This is the period where you will have the least amount of autonomy. It sounds like you are new to a bigger company that has their shit together.

CircuSphere said:
Also in some sense the whole industry is being slowly normy-fied in every which way, more and more process driven, more and more restrictive, doctrinal, trend obsessed... There is an open agenda to make everything social in order to attract some mythical female programmer who may or may not exist and according to some stories may have a single horn and/or the tail of a fish. You get into hair dressing or teaching or law or something if you want to interact with people. They said "Who wants to sit in the basement alone with a computer and rarely have to deal with anyone?" and I said "Me!" and now no matter where I turn it feels like everyone is trying to take that away from me. I miss the wild west.
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Process isn't for attracting roasties. Its to prevent the worst from happening. In the past when you trusted nerds to code for 2 weeks and not talk to anyone was also when you had 'rockstar devs'. What happens when a 'rockstar dev' get sick? The project is delayed until he gets back. What happens when a 'rockstar dev' quits? You have vast parts of the codebase noone understands because he never collaborated with anyone else on the team and management thought he would be there forever. Then you have to spend months of manhours to figure out what is going on. What happens when the 'rockstar dev' doesn't deliver on time and the 2 week project turns into a 2 month monster that is in the middle of the third refactor with no insight on progress and no estimations on when it will be done? This happened a lot, and companies soon learned the rockstar dev wasn't that great of a dev after all.
You are not a programmer. You are software engineer. You aren't hired to code. You are hired to work with a team and deliver a product. Interacting with a team is a core component of your job. If you are senior, part of the job is to create stories and groom tickets with product.
 
Kuritan Deplorable said:
I don't really care if Cletus gets the money for doing fuck and all most of the year as long as he's on the snow shoveling crew when the winter storm hits. Its the moral of the action, not the quantity.
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To add to this, there is a sense of pride and investment in society that comes with feeling like you have a purpose. Cletus may not be profitable, but as long as he feels like he is earning his pay and not getting a handout he is a lot more likely to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment.

Individualism Incarnate said:
Isn't this exactly the same argument that Chris-Chan made for why its ok for him to live off welfare?
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I'm not sure, the only point i'm making is that gibs at least circulates around this country vs. with immigrants sending back home to circulate somewhere else. I'm not endorsing welfare.
 
We're in a bust cycle but it'll be back to boom soon, because unprecedented opportunities have opened up. It always, always takes a couple of years for people to figure these things out, but someone will, and they will become endlessly rich.

Google has absolutely dominated the search engine market for 20+ years, with no meaningful competition.

10 years ago, if you said "Google search sucks so bad, we need a replacement right away," you were probably talking about privacy and tracking.

Fundamentally, privacy concerns motivated only a small number of people. Privacy was not close enough to the core value proposition of Google for normies to care. The core value was being able to find what you wanted to find on the internet, and Google would do that for you very competently (for the low, low price of all your data).

Today, if you say "Google search sucks so bad, we need a replacement right away," you're talking about the fact that the search results you came for are terrible, irrelevant, and low-quality. The core value of the product has been hollowed out.

One of the core pieces of knowledge they impart to startup founders is this:

Fall in love with the problem you are solving, not the solution you are designing.

Google fell in love with its own way of doing things, because so much was invested in it that they couldn't see another way to do search. Now, they find their search results simply cannot stop being filled with garbage, because they stopped caring about the actual problem search solves (finding what you want on the internet) and became married to their solution (spidering every possible web result and listing as much as possible).

This presents untold opportunity to anyone who wants to take on the challenge of providing valuable search results.

What AI really means (and Google hasn't figured it out, and probably won't until the first next-gen competitor gets big enough by 2027 or 2028 ) is that the era of searching "the whole internet" is coming to an end. When most of the internet is garbage AI content, and AI can't be reliably scanned for by other AI tools (many researchers claim accurate AI-scanning-for-AI is mathematically impossible), this is an inevitability.

The Library of Alexandria notoriously was on a mission to collect every text in the world. If you were on a ship that docked in Alexandria and had texts onboard that they did not already have, you were required to relinquish them so they could be hand-copied and returned to you. They could persist in a mission this broad because the number of texts being created in the world was so low.

Trying to have a library with every text in the world would have become near-impossible within a century or so of the movable type printing press. By the time self-publishing houses existed that could put any old crap into the world with a near-zero barrier to entry, such a mission would have been not only difficult, but foolish: you'd probably be adding 10 terrible texts for every one that had value.

We've hit the same point in search, but so far, Google remains ignorant, trying to be the Library of Alexandria in an era where that mission simply means they are a garbage dump with occasional valuable content sprinkled in amidst the trash.

Generation is no longer valuable in an era of generative AI. The only thing that matters is curation, just like with the libraries.

Soon enough, a competitor will show up who curates search results with an actual human process for approving/rejecting search results, including forcing anyone submitting potential pages for curation to sign an agreement not to directly use generative AI for content creation or change the content significantly without resubmission.

The internet will become a village of walled gardens, each used for specialized searches about a specific area of knowledge, with people venturing into the untamed Google swamp only when they're willing to wade through hundreds of dull AI retreads in hopes of finding buried treasure. The first person to make a really good walled garden village will become one of the first tech billionaires of the new web era.
 
Diana Moon Glampers said:
Soon enough, a competitor will show up who curates search results with an actual human process for approving/rejecting search results, including forcing anyone submitting potential pages for curation to sign an agreement not to directly use generative AI for content creation or change the content significantly without resubmission.
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I doubt it'll work out cause a lot of content is posted on social media that cannot vouch that no users have generated their content using AI. I think it's more likely that a competitor that uses AI for search will emerge. It'll probably be able to better filter out garbage, but also better at censoring wrongthink.
 
Diana Moon Glampers said:
Soon enough, a competitor will show up who curates search results with an actual human process for approving/rejecting search results, including forcing anyone submitting potential pages for curation to sign an agreement not to directly use generative AI for content creation or change the content significantly without resubmission.
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Unlikely - The vast majority of consumers don't actually give a shit if content is AI or not, as long as its good/what they wanted. The sites serving such content are likely to be popular, and if your search engine filters out popular content for ethical reasons that are irrelevant or against what the customer wants, they're just not going to use your search tools.

Hardline Traditionalist said:
I think it's more likely that a competitor that uses AI for search will emerge. It'll probably be able to better filter out garbage, but also better at censoring wrongthink.
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This is indeed more likely - Not the censorship part specifically, but search agents using natural language recognition and the associative powers of LLM's can probably classify and group content far more effectively than current trawlers that depend on metadata and gameable SEO tags and terms. Combine it with hopefully more matured AI content identification tech, and the engine can display a notice/comment below a result "May contain AI generated content or imagery", a much more useful tidbit than just never seeing the result at all.

Of course, this would require a significant upfront expense and massively increase the cost overhead of search engines for a given query. I doubt anyone who tries will be financially successful long term, especially with advertising rates continuing to crash.
 
Kuritan Deplorable said:
Unlikely - The vast majority of consumers don't actually give a shit if content is AI or not, as long as its good/what they wanted. The sites serving such content are likely to be popular, and if your search engine filters out popular content for ethical reasons that are irrelevant or against what the customer wants, they're just not going to use your search tools.


This is indeed more likely - Not the censorship part specifically, but search agents using natural language recognition and the associative powers of LLM's can probably classify and group content far more effectively than current trawlers that depend on metadata and gameable SEO tags and terms. Combine it with hopefully more matured AI content identification tech, and the engine can display a notice/comment below a result "May contain AI generated content or imagery", a much more useful tidbit than just never seeing the result at all.

Of course, this would require a significant upfront expense and massively increase the cost overhead of search engines for a given query. I doubt anyone who tries will be financially successful long term, especially with advertising rates continuing to crash.
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What I've seen shows that detection of AI content by AI can never really get much beyond coinflip even theoretically with existing AI ideas.
 
Diana Moon Glampers said:
What I've seen shows that detection of AI content by AI can never really get much beyond coinflip even theoretically with existing AI ideas.
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I think there is some merit to an 'AI exclusionary' search engine but I also think he is right that the consumer does not care if the info comes from the AIs neural net or a traditional algorithm. To the consumer they are both impenetrable black boxes.

However what it is useful for is, ironically, is training and testing AI. You don't want your AI to be inbred and you always leave some of your training set on the table to test the thing.
 
PyroJohn said:
View attachment 5688080
Zoom peaked during Covid.
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of course it did, because everyone was shilling for that chink piece of shit software hard as soon as the lockdowns started to take effect and work from home became the norm. Absolutely nobody wanted it, including the IT departments, but all the retarded suits and CEO's were all over that like flies to shit.
 
only tangentially related, but came across someone in a discord server who was complaining about being laid off recently. their profile describes them as a "BIPOC writer". its only one example, but hopefully this is a trend that continues
 
Kuritan Deplorable said:
Unlikely - The vast majority of consumers don't actually give a shit if content is AI or not, as long as its good/what they wanted. The sites serving such content are likely to be popular, and if your search engine filters out popular content for ethical reasons that are irrelevant or against what the customer wants, they're just not going to use your search tools.
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This xckd comic is over 13 years old.
 
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This week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other execs gathered in an auditorium at the company’s Mountain View headquarters. The occasion was Google’s all-hands meeting called TGIF, where leadership answers questions submitted by the rank and file.

As Google has grown into a leaky behemoth, employees tell me these meetings have come to feel so scripted and benign that they no longer bother attending.

But with Google thrown into a morale crisis by rolling layoffs and Pichai’s recent warning that more cuts are coming, the most upvoted questions heading into this week’s TGIF were unusually spicy:

“We get that execs are excited about Google’s future. Why should we be excited, when we might get laid off and not be around to share in that future? If we lose our jobs and equity grants, it’s cold comfort that Google is succeeding off our hard work, and we don’t get rewarded for it, but you do.”

“Why has there been such an extraordinary effort to limit the internal visibility of layoffs announcements? I’ve learned more about layoffs in my own PA from The Verge than from my own employer.”

At this week’s TGIF, a recording of which I obtained, execs defended the company’s approach to the recent layoffs while also acknowledging that they could have been handled better in some cases.

Pichai also tried to frame the outcome of the cuts — “removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity” — as being welcomed by some, and at one point said that “most people won’t be affected by all of this.”

He also suggested that having to make the cuts is punishment itself. “Part of leadership is also making the tough decisions that are needed.”

At moments, Pichai tried to rally the troops. He said he spends a “few meetings a week doing AI product reviews.”

At the same time, he was clear that there will be choppy waters ahead. “We are going through a moment with some uncertainty in it,” he said. “This is how it is in most companies around the world at all times. At Google, we haven’t had a phase like that. And we are going through a moment like that. We will work through that moment.”
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Ahriman said:
German boomers be like: "nein nein nein! you NEED to return to ze office! vork from home iz verboten!"
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meanwhile one loud cough and everybody gets send home...

Netizennameless said:
To add to this, there is a sense of pride and investment in society that comes with feeling like you have a purpose. Cletus may not be profitable, but as long as he feels like he is earning his pay and not getting a handout he is a lot more likely to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment.
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this. I knew people on welfare which were still working even a few hours for pennies just to have a job, welfare was merely used to bridge the gap.
 
Ahriman said:
“We get that execs are excited about Google’s future. Why should we be excited, when we might get laid off and not be around to share in that future? If we lose our jobs and equity grants, it’s cold comfort that Google is succeeding off our hard work, and we don’t get rewarded for it, but you do.”
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Awww, look, the naivety of youth. Which, I guess, is what Google is counting on.

My employer and I have an agreement: I do work, they pay me for work. If either one of us decides not to do that then oh well, we'll go our separate ways.
 
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