Original Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1t31dic/big_tech_cut_80000_jobs_and_blamed_ai_experts_say/
The inefficiencies come from the top.
Management comes up with unrealistic ideas, people run in circles trying to keep up, and then management decides the reason that their revenue goals or whatever aren’t being met is because of over staffing, not their harebrained ideas.
It’s not like 25-75% of employees are just playing video games all day (though there’s people who do that). They’re dealing with the corporate machine - the real “culture”, not the one that’s so carefully “cultivated” by management dictating office hours. Getting in meetings that should be emails, answering “just a quick question” that destroys their thought process, and dealing with AI being crammed down their throat.
Are they overstaffed due to overhiring, or are they overstaffed due to the changing macro-economic picture which has derailed growth?
They make far too much money to be ‘over staffed’. They are overcommitted to billionaire shareholders. They always blame a blameless entity for shitty actions. See ‘the economy’ etc. Might as well blame the weather.
I have only worked a handful of “traditional” jobs in which ai could do anything major, and even then it can’t replace any job I had (in my opinion). But regardless, in none of my jobs have I had “too many” coworkers. The only time I’d say as much was when a company was hiring to preemptively fill roles they knew were going to be vacant. Although I did notice bigger companies had the perception they were overstaffed, because they also had no communication with lower rungs at all.
I worked for a company which “prepared for a growth spurt” by hiring +10% of the total workforce in sales specialized for an upcoming anticipated opportunity. Then the opportunity was delayed and the extra 10% literally were twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do. Then the opportunity went sour, very difficult sales compared to what was anticipated, but instead of backing down, they did a 10% RIF across the board. I left voluntarily after that, along with about 10% of the survivors of the RIF. Big talk of “back to work, business as usual, if you’re still here we love you and will never let you go.” Less than another year later, another 10% RIF.
Instead of always worrying about having a job, maybe we should be pissed that not having a job means homelessness and starvation.
Not having proper safety nets in a society that demonizes homelessness as a moral failing is the real problem.
This.
It can get even worse
If I lose my job, I won’t be able to stay here, I’ll get deported, I might lose my marriage as well, I’ll lose everything in life
And the company owner knows this and oh boy is he having fun with that knowledge. So they scream their lungs out at me, insulting me to my face. What am I going to do about it? Quit? Complain and get fired?
Fuck all this
I can’t speak for other fields, but I’ve worked in IT as a sysadmin for about a decade at a bunch of different companies, big and small.
I’ve never worked at a place that was close to “overstaffed” nearly every place I’ve worked we’ve needed at least 2-4 additional people.
Everybody was overworked, overwhelmed with tickets and projects, working 50+ hours a week constantly.
But upper management and executives love claiming that staffing is maxed out and needs to get more lean. Like, dude, our IT team is handling dozens of tickets a day, running 5-10 different infrastructure projects simultaneously, and keeping near-decade old equipment alive because we were denied our third budget request in a row.
My whole career was like this until I moved to the public sector. Now, I wouldn’t say we are over staffed, but my team of 3 has about 2.5 people worth of work, such that if one person is out we can still handle everything, if two people are out it gets stressful.
By comparison it feels like I am exhaling for the first time in 25 years.
Add onto that, the fact that upper management is 4 or 5 people deep as well. Basically more management than workers.
It’s a pyramid - almost always is. If you average 5 direct reports, 5 deep, that’s 1 at the top, 5 on level 2, 25 on level 3, 125 on level 4, and 625 worker bees. The bees still outnumber the managers, which is how the managers justify 20% raises while the bees have to suck it up with 2% (in an economy that inflated prices 4%) - too many bees to give all of them a real raise, much cheaper to “reward and retain our good people” at the top. /s
In 30 years of employment, I’ve never had a job where any department at any company I’ve been with seemed properly staffed to say nothing of overstaffed.
I imagine, this is more about software devs than sysadmins. Sure, you’ll hire a couple more sysadmins to help with the massive user growth during the pandemic. But especially combined with loans basically being made free in the same time, it’s suddenly worth hiring a bunch of devs to build the Next Big Thing™.
Once those loans start costing again and the user numbers fall off, you quickly have lots of devs that you can’t find tasks for, that are worth doing.
Management loves them some rank & yank - not only are you culling the low performers, you’re retaining the doormats who you know will put up with all kinds of BS going forward.
I think most of those people are gone. The pandemic was 6 years ago. We’ve had significant layoffs in tech 2022-2026.
Those experts are whackadoo insane and/or on the payroll.
In this case it’s Marc Andreessen. He’s not on the payroll. He is the payroll.
The man with the most egg shaped head who doesn’t understand introspection or thinking about… things?
The man is actually a moron. Straight up someone who I don’t think I could have a pleasant conversation with without making fun of the money man.
I can name a ton of bullshit jobs at my company. Heck, I know whole departments that shouldn’t exist. But they do because some management consultant said we needed it to improve our attractiveness to investors or if we IPO or something like that. But they will cut the people that actually do the work.
Everyone always thinks it’s their job that isn’t the bullshit one.
Naa, I actually worked some of these same jobs myself and it was how I became convinced that they were bullshit jobs.
Such as?
We have a partner team that ostensibly manages the partners, but the sales team already does this as all sales go through partners, so the partner team just makes up reports and busy work for the sales people to extract data from them.
We have a sales engineering management team, but the sales engineering team just used to report into the regional sales leads, which gave them about double the time to do actual work because now this unneeded management layer has to create work, initiatives, and reports to justify their existence, but all it accomplishes is sapping about half of their teams time away on tasks that usually actually make their effectiveness worse. I have held both of these jobs.
The worst thing is that all of these silos are fighting over the same KPI’s so if one wins the other loses. The sales account managers are stuck in the middle because they decide how to make the reports work so that one or the other side wins.
Unless their employees can take vacations whenever they want with no pushback about coverage and they’re not forcing them to work late nights and weekends, they’re not overstaffed. I don’t think there’s a tech company in this country that hasn’t squeezed every bit of their employees’ schedules that they can without major pushback. We should be working fewer hours, not overtime and until that happens, we’re absolutely not overstaffed.
Yeah, it usually means overstaffed with too expensive workers.
Definitely from the company’s perspective, but I have a hard time believing that the workers are expensive from a perspective of what they should be making if wages kept pace with inflation and skills for the last six decades or so.
The place I work at I wouldn’t say is “over staffed” but it is maybe “wrong-staffed”.
They have a full time “scrum master” and from what I can tell all she does it share her screen so people can awkwardly tell her which tickets to click on, and she calls on people in order during the morning meeting. That’s a whole-ass job. Meanwhile, devops is like crying blood because there’s like 2 of them managing decades of systems, and no senior engineering roles have been backfilled after people left for years.
Do you work for the same company I do. We just laid off our senior dev ops manager and moved the team to our India office.
That’s it? She’s not involved in planning or anything? Even when I was a dev scrum leader, we’d plan out every sprint as well longer term planning. It was surprisingly time consuming and we had to budget less dev time for me so I could handle the scrum duties.
Glad I didn’t have to do that shit anymore.
Not in any way I can discern! She’s in the planning meetings but her entire role seems to be sharing her screen so people can tell her what to click on. (This is excruciating to witness. It is so slow.)
Sometimes she’ll say “remember to check your capacity!”, but two other people on the team say that too.
She seems to be entirely non-technical, too, so she doesn’t have much input on any of the discussion. The inter-team stuff is handled by two other people. (A lady of importance whose title I don’t know, and some sort of business analyst)
Very similar issue here… Scrum masters that invite themselves to every meeting to run them, but are not able to contribute meaningfully in any way. I guess it’s not just my company that does agile wrong
Typical Scrumbags
I’m fortunate to have an effective scrum master. She knows the products will enough to properly interface with our different stage holders. The amount of shit that doesn’t make it to us because she’s essentially our firewall to the customers, is astounding.
That said, there are plenty of other business decisions being made that are rapidly leading to a team wide brain drain. The top brass is so out of touch with reality, and they make major decisions on that ignorance without consulting anyone that knows anything. It’s also turned into a boys club at the top, so there’s no individual accountability, just yes men.
I mean, without knowing the details what your scrum master does, that feels more like a ‘product owner’ role to me.
But to be fair, I’m also not sure, what the ‘scrum master’ role is actually supposed to do. Some say, scrum masters really need to be deeply involved in the whole project to be able to question/assist the way of working.
And then there’s the reality at my company, which is that scrum masters often have 10+ projects, where they just hop between meetings to host them, while hardly being able to contribute anything…
Lol that’s not what a scrum masters job is at your company
Yeah, a lack of revenue can also be stated as “overstaffed”, I suppose. “We have too many people for the business we no longer have.”
And it’s not even a lack of revenue. Profits are still coming in the billions, it’s just that they have to keep it going up every quarter to keep the shareholders happy.
Constant growth till death, like cancer.
They’ve been saying they over hired during the pandemic for years, now. There’s no way they hadn’t already shed those “extra” employees by now.
The goal is zero employees and 100% profit.
And without customers, 100% of 0 is still 0
Oracle terminated 30k employees.
I manage a web team for a pretty big company. It’s just me and a Jr dev. Even with AI, we still can’t keep up.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
Theres a couple people I saw recently that went though the process of getting another job.
One was network engineer, he was snatched up really quick (less than a week looking). Another was a software developer and had a harder time (something around a month from what they told me in the meetup).
Both were remote.
I know it kinda sucks…but there are still jobs out there. They are just not in the MAANGA world ATM. I personally think those companies are trying to get beyond having staff as much as possible (which is silly).
From my time in the industry, I can say most are probably 25-75% overstaffed for their current requirements, but not for their current dreams. They invent projects they think will do something and hire for that, but it doesn’t align with the work they should or need to be doing. Their dreams aren’t always valid or rooted in reality within their experience and market niche.
So you get the wrong staff for the job you need to do because you staffed for what you wanted to do and end up with more people needing to do jobs they don’t have the knowledge or experience for trying to use AI to fill that gap.
You get an inefficient work force and end up having to cut the wrong things to make the line keep going up in unsustainable ways. The pressure to make line go up often gets in the way of making the line more consistent. And it often gets in the way of that dream that maybe could have worked if you gave it the time it needed to bake before giving up to make the board happy.
