>Rattner writes that he thinks virtual commuters have “gone soft” and quotes JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon as stating that the remote option appeals to individuals who don’t want to “hustle” as much as they should.
Honestly, Americans are getting hard. They were soft when they allowed themselves to be pushed around, jobs outsourced, sign 4 year non-competes and non-disparage agreements, and put up with crappy bosses with no cost of living increases, and sexually harassed in the office by their boss.
The marketplace is talking, are you listening? Nope.
Oh and Jamie Dimon, looking for some more bailouts? I guess by hustle you mean begging to CYA.
>Americans’ “work ethic” is lacking, Rattner says, especially in comparison to that of the Chinese, which he describes as “extraordinary.” (Rattner did not respond to a request, passed to him through the Times, to discuss his piece.)
You mean the workers that are practically forced labor? Good one. I'll bet you'd love to go back to the good ole slave days, huh? Maybe corporations shouldn't have given away all their IP to make a buck, we wouldn't be in the situation we are in with the supply chain. Keep up that hustle.
Nope, corporations got worse and worse, paid less and less compared to the cost of living, and people finally had enough. I think that's what's happening. The ones that allow work from home will have a much higher chance of survival than the ones that buy your rhetoric.
I'll bet people will be more willing to go back if they had their own offices instead of the travesty that is "open office." "Better for communication!" Ya right. Do that and maybe you'll get some bites.
> Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations. In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce.
Let's just take a moment to admire this paragraph.
> "our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment"
There's that passive, vague non-word again: "impacted". Such a milquetoast way to say "something happened" but without that pesky specificity.
> "user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations"
So, they are growing, but not growing faster than some [arbitrary] goal?
> "In order to run our business sustainably"
Wait, I thought revenue was growing! How is that not sustainable? If you just leave costs where they are and let revenue grow, you are by definition sustaining/growing the bottom line.
> "we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce"
This is what I don't get about all of these layoff letters. It's always the same thing: We're growing, our revenue is growing, and [usually unsaid] our costs are growing. So why not just arrest the cost growth? Stop the bleeding, don't start amputating limbs. I can understand layoffs when your business is running at a loss, not when it's growing.
Banks have lost all excuses to be making money out of other people's deposits. If those deposits are guaranteed by the government, and backstopped by the government, then there's absolutely no reason banks should be able to invest any of them.
There's absolutely no excuse left for why banks get to invest any of their clients money. They get free leverage from their clients for free. They can send it to zero and the entire risk will be held by the government. That's absurd.
Revoke banks ability to invest deposits. They can't get to have the cake and eat it too. They could offer higher interest rates for non guaranteed accounts which bear risk, or zero risk for the already zero interest rates.
> At the same time, this is yet another example of changing the rules in the middle of the game. Yellen has just broadcast that FDIC insurance is essentially unlimited, as long as you can threaten wider disruption to the economy.
The criteria isn't threatening a "wider disruption to the economy", it's threatening the quality of life of a certain class of people. When unions threaten a wider disruption to the economy for maintaining their quality of life, they'll do their damnedest to not give in. They'll pass laws outlawing strikes. Or send in "law-enforcement". As the saying goes, laws are for the poor.
Every bank account holder was made to pay insurance premium for those with more than $250K in a couple of banks. And this was done AFTER the risky event the insurance covers has already happened. This absolutely is socialization of losses, while privatization of profits goes on as usual. Good reason to be upset, IMHO.
These stats are for the U.S., but one thing that usually get ignored in these retirement discussions is just how massively life expectancy depends on income level and sex: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/health/
Raising the retirement pension age screws over the poor, especially poor men. Perhaps retirement age should be tied to income/wealth somehow ... and maybe even sex (as controversial as I imagine that would be).
As a French citizen, I find it unsurprising that the usual top comments here are all about numbers. Life expectancy going up, do your part, work work work.
That people are angry is not about the damn numbers. It's about the attitude of a political class that had private restaurant dinners behind closed doors during lockdown times where the population was fined for being out walking their dogs, it's about a president that's been deliberately calling left-leaning ideas of the younger generations about ecology and equality "extreme-left" while joyfully siding persistently with the actual parties created by fascists, it's about a reform that comes in with a justification of a deficit that was literally created by giving money to large companies and rich people in the form of tax deductions, it's about some of his ministers who take part in all sorts of horrible things and continue to go unpunished, it's about people asking for compassion towards difficult jobs more than for their own selves, and I could go on...
This is only tangentially related to the article, but I recently quit a 2+ year stint at Amazon where I was permanently designated a remote employee who could not be called back into the office (one of the stipulations I negotiated in writing before starting).
Not only did Amazon try to weasel out of our written agreement, but I found Amazon's management to be toxic, their HR department lazy and ineffective, their base salary is bottom-rung and their stock isn't doing well, their benefits were the most stingy and dismal of any company I've worked for in my 30+ year career, they treat their customers like shit and their employees worse. The only benefit to staying the first two years was the sign-on bonus, which is spread out over your first 24 months. After that, you're better off working at a bootstrapped start-up.
I was fortunate enough to have an excellent manager during my first year, but that is definitely not the norm at Amazon. I'm not sure why anybody works there to start with, let alone if they're forced into multi-hour long commutes everyday, just so they can be marginalized and abused in person.
I feel like we are seeing cartel behavior with tech employment. I wouldn’t know how to prove such a thing, but I think it’s pretty clear that some collusion is going on.
1) Make two lists. Write everything down in the first list. The second list is empty.
2) Something came up! One item on this list cannot be done. It doesn't matter why: you know which one that is. Which one is it? Write that down in the second list and mark it off the first list.
3) Repeat until the first list is done.
Congratulations, your second list is prioritized (albeit likely in reverse order), without extraneous algebraic diversions.
Bonus points for going Warren Buffett on it: only the top 3 priorities matter, sideline everything else; consider repeating the exercise after those three are complete.
- You'll realize that building an organization not built on exploitation is not viable in an exploitative economic system. You'll always be undercut by companies treating their employees shittier, that's what capitalism optimizes for.
Running a business is extremely hard; but no one is forcing these businesses to grow to be so fucking large that they are induced to justify all of their inhumanity on the impossible difficulty of operating at scale. THEIR EXECUTIVES CHOSE THE CHALLENGE. Kotick threatened to have his secretary killed, and we're still touting this MBA bullshit that the greatest challenge he faced in running Activision-Blizzard is how to sell the next Call of Duty?
CEOs manage that just fine. Their greatest challenge is building a culture of empathy; something psychopaths generally would find difficult. Call of Duty, The System, sells itself; a distributed self-healing machine like those found at Microsoft, Salesforce, Nestle, Pfizer, and every other giga-organization, nine-thousand eight-hundred neurons aligned toward the goal of deleting or absorbing competition.
Encouraging more kind-hearted people to start businesses is a magnitude of naivete which begets an unrealistic level of faith in the system which created the companies that rip our economy apart. Sure, you can go start Slack; and eventually be faced with the impossible choice of submitting to one overlord or being annihilated by another. You grew your business beautifully. Your customers and employees love your organization. You made mistakes, though not a tenth the number your competition did. But, they have Unlimited Capital, and were willing to cross the lines you wouldn't because the lines don't even exist in their morally-depraved worldview.
But; you're right; you'd discover that you can balance one and two, if you get lucky and stay small; like hiding from a hungry bear in the woods. This doesn't minify readers' dissatisfaction and frustration with a system that allows bullshit like this to happen, nor does it justify an out-of-touch ultra-Republicanized soundbyte about pulling up your bootstraps and getting to work fixing a system that loads fifty trillion dollars into a cocked gun and points it at anyone who respects the human condition just a bit too much.
I mean, if all mechanics and car designers and the entire auto industry were Thanos-snapped, my car would keep running for probably 6 months. There wouldn't be any new cars, though?
> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here
As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups when it comes to hiring lately. I wonder if it will affect their longterm attraction as employers.
Call me crazy, but I'm a huge fan of these type of editors (I guess IDLE can be included there too), especially Processing, Racket's Editor (DrRacket iirc) and I'm sure I've missed others (LINQPad also comes to mind!) they allow you to start out with zero knowledge, and in some cases some of these editors have some visual cues for beginners.
What I like most is that because they typically start you off with a simple file and a "run" button, there is no "how do I get this going" you just paste in your "Hello World" code sample, and you're off to see it live in seconds.
I would never use it to build a startup or some production tier work, but for prototyping its great and has significantly less distractions, you're in there to edit code and get out.
I wish Go, Rust, and even D had editors in a similar spirit to the ones I've mentioned. I feel like adoption rate for those languages (specifically D and Rust) would probably rise, especially if you bundle it all-in-one for beginners as some of these editors do (definitely Processing does!). This also would force Rust and D to consider the possibility of having a minimal built-in UI library, which I hate that these new languages do not go that route, it is why Electron is the lingua franca of UI these days.
I agree, and I wish we had more power in these things than just forking. Now that I know Bitwarden took VC money, I'm also fucking out of this mess, and here I was about to renew for the 5th year in a row.
Fuck VC's, they ruin everything good. Can I say that here? It's true.
You can definitely say that here. To me the problem isn't exactly VCs, it's the expectation of rapid, open-ended growth that ruins good products and companies. Of course, the driver for that is often VCs, but it can come from other places too.
I really wish we would stop calling it technical debt. Every team/org I’ve worked in with “tech debt” issues has had very tactical problems that could have been communicated, invested in, and solved. But instead the org talked about “tech debt” - an immeasurable boogeyman that anyone outside of the engineering org has no grasp of and, most importantly, management up the chain to the C-Suite have decreasing mental models of investment/pay-off the further up you get.
Teams saying “tech debt” are perpetually under funded and under appreciated.
Instead, speak a language your management chain understands.
* These specific services have outgrown their architecture and back pressure keeps outgrowing their current scale, we need to invest in a more reactive architecture. It’s going to cost 3 teams 1Q and we will prevent N outages based on historical data.
* In 2023, engineers far fingered the deployment of these services N times causing various levels of service outages, one made the news, we need to invest in guardrails in our CI/CD to prevent that. It’ll cost one team 2Q and we will prevent N outages.
* We had 4 employees across our engineering org quit last quarter because holding the pager burned them out, we need to stand up a tiger team that can help kick our metrics into shape.
Speak a language your management understands. Speak in terms of delivering features (feature velocity), reliability (outages), employee retention, hiring through resume driven development, etc.
You’ll find you’re negotiating in a positive sum game if you do this. You give me 1 unit of investment for this problem this quarter and I’ll give you 1.3 units of return next quarter. And maybe there are greater returns elsewhere so you aren’t making a competitive bid and that is okay, or maybe your management will invest in you and you just signed yourself up to deliver 1.3 units. But don’t handwave and ask for budget.
You can think of maintenance as one sub-branch of software development, usually containing tasks that do not create immediate value for the business, but need to be done to be able to add new features. It's also a good way to make it clear to non-programmers that a certain amount of time needs to be spent on tasks that seemingly do not create direct value. Maintenance is a concept that everyone understands and is a good way to explain it.
Regarding the project vs product model, it fully depends on the business. Venture outside of the SaaS/FAANG/etc type businesses that HN seems to focus on and you'll see countless businesses that are very happy to just have a project done for X cost in Y time. After that, the project goes onto a maintenance contract, where the development team is just expected to keep the lights on, fix bugs and keep it secure. From my experience, it's a huge part of software development, considering the amount of systems that exist in this form is only increasing.
Back in 2008, a woman I was dating worked for a subsidiary of
PepsiCo and was laid off by Indra Nooyi's decision to create
"financial breathing room" in response to the economic storm
clouds that were gathering.
The Financial Times described it as "just 1.7% of the group's
global workforce."
Meh. 1.7%
Because of the economic collapse of 2008-2009, she didn't
find another position for well over a year and a half, damn
near lost her home, and had to draw very deep from the well.
Nooyi's characterization has stayed with me ever since as
a metaphor for just how cold the wind blows in those meetings.
Here’s a thought that has been percolating in my mind for a bit since these “market adjustments” began a month or two back.
Somehow at some point, in what perhaps could be blamed on the ever-hated mass produced MBAs - companies got really comfortable with the “it’s not personal, it’s just good business” of letting go of their employees for a slightest reason, or sometimes for no reason at all - just to make it look to their investors like they got their shit together.
We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? What happened to “people are our most important resource”?
And this brings me to my main point - I think years of this has had an unexpected side-effect the companies never signed up for: people started treating companies they way companies treating people and we are starting to see the results - quiet quitting, oft bemoaned lack of loyalty, job hopping, etc. Now I am not saying it’s all new, but at least in my observation it’s peaking now and my thesis is these things are connected.
This is Elon Musk 101. He lies and commits fraud after fraud for more than half a decade now. But tech crowd used to see him as a mix of Jesus and Ironman, and gave him a free pass, because he's cool. Luckily, it seems he ran out of luck with Twitter tho, and tides are turning.
I'm partial to Gepetto for IDA, which includes an especially hilarious trick in which it instructs ChatGPT to phrase its responses in JSON, and then uses this JSON directly to name variables in the decompilation. If the JSON is incorrect, it politely asks ChatGPT to please fix its JSON output, which usually works.
Shameless plug, the organization Louis (and I) work for, FUTO, is hosting a fellowship program sponsoring people to work on open-source software for three months for $20k-$80k and free housing in Austin. Applications are due Jan 1st!
Honestly, Americans are getting hard. They were soft when they allowed themselves to be pushed around, jobs outsourced, sign 4 year non-competes and non-disparage agreements, and put up with crappy bosses with no cost of living increases, and sexually harassed in the office by their boss.
The marketplace is talking, are you listening? Nope.
Oh and Jamie Dimon, looking for some more bailouts? I guess by hustle you mean begging to CYA.
>Americans’ “work ethic” is lacking, Rattner says, especially in comparison to that of the Chinese, which he describes as “extraordinary.” (Rattner did not respond to a request, passed to him through the Times, to discuss his piece.)
You mean the workers that are practically forced labor? Good one. I'll bet you'd love to go back to the good ole slave days, huh? Maybe corporations shouldn't have given away all their IP to make a buck, we wouldn't be in the situation we are in with the supply chain. Keep up that hustle.
Nope, corporations got worse and worse, paid less and less compared to the cost of living, and people finally had enough. I think that's what's happening. The ones that allow work from home will have a much higher chance of survival than the ones that buy your rhetoric.
I'll bet people will be more willing to go back if they had their own offices instead of the travesty that is "open office." "Better for communication!" Ya right. Do that and maybe you'll get some bites.
Anyway, working at home and loving it.