Rod Hilton
I really think all these tech companies are going to be in rough shape when the other shoe drops.
Yes, right now, it's making a lot of sense to their bottom line. Record-breaking profits can surely be even more record-breaking if you slice headcount. Yes, a correction after pandemic hiring is likely in order.
But fostering an industry culture where everyone is afraid of being laid off all the time is not going to work out well long term.
Rod Hilton
One consistent thing about these layoffs seems to be how "random" they are, that it doesn't seem to be performance-based.
That pretty much eliminates any motivation someone has to be a top performer.
If you want to protect your employment, kicking ass at your job isn't the way to do it. The only way to do it is to be the only person who understands x, y, z modules in the codebase. Become unfireable.
If you're a top-level manager and don't see the moral hazard that creates, big oof.
Rod Hilton
Back when companies started tracking LoC output as a measure of engineer quality, it wasn't long before engineers started making their code extremely verbose and needlessly long.
If you make someone's paycheck depend on something game-able, they're going to game it.
And all the goodwill around "collective ownership" is going to disappear in favor of "job security" real soon.
Teach this junior engineer how the code works? Pfft, why? So you can lay me off?
Rod Hilton
"Clean Code"? Why? So someone else can take over this codebase after I get laid off? Hard pass.
We're going to see a major increase in code silos, code that is difficult to read, land-grabs, and people being protective of what they build. Whatever people have to do to become costly to lose, that's what we're going to see.
If you make someone's paycheck depend on their ability to prevent someone else from taking over their code, that's what is going to happen.
Rod Hilton
All of the collective community support engineers offered to each other was a low-layoff-phenomenon.
I've worked in environments where employees are stack-ranked and the bottom x% is removed each cycle. One thing you will notice in those environments is there's no such thing as going into Slack and asking for help. Nobody will help you. The more you struggle, the less likely they are to get canned.
Rod Hilton
For a long time, the best-performing tech companies have had an engineering culture that stressed mentorship, having senior/staff folks doing "glue work", force multipliers, etc.
I remember distinctly hearing the phrase "automate yourself out of a job."
There was a very real sense that the best engineers were striving to train and teach more junior folks and build automations to improve efficiency.
You're going to see that vanish now.
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