How working for Big Tech lost 'dream job' status
How working for Big Tech lost 'dream job' status
Mass layoffs have eroded the shine of the tech industry.
Working for these companies lost any charm, when it stopped being about innovation, and working on cool things, and started being about min-maxing profits, at the cost abusing workers until they are suicidal
Especially considering most fun innovations get scrapped either way.
Most of the "fun innovations" are awesome ideas that would get a small startup a ton of business and make them widely successful. But the problem is that these companies are so large, that even those successful innovations barely make an impact on the company. So many initiatives at these companies have to be pitched as huge and game-changing in order to be funded in the first place. Which means they need to hire huge staffs, to justify their importance.
The managers make extremely optimistic forecasts: they have to, to get the project funded at all. Then, when the project is successful (but not as successful as promised) the bean counters scale it back to the size it should have been in the first place. So the headline is all these layoffs, when the real problem is that these companies are too darn big to operate efficiently.
I, too, am a, very big, fan, of commas
That's what happens, when the two grading choices in your language class are either 0%, or 100%
Wasn't it always like that?
You always needed the money, but imo it seems like the culture has been shifting away from making tech products to gaming profits, in a way that seems more unrelated to the product than ever before.
Like my company has had two rounds of layoffs last year, mass exoduses, but all I see from the Bamboo HR emails is us bringing on enterprise partner managers, growth hackers, etc.
Meanwhile the actual product is maintained by an ever dwindling rosters of devs, many of whom are certainly at least soft looking for other work.
Depends on how you put it. Realistically, to a degree. The issue is that with any new business type, they are forced to prove their worth at first, so it's always ran by passionate people. Later on, it all slowly transitions into the clusterfuck we have today
And it's not from today, in the 90s a friend of mine was hired for IBM, imagine!!! I don't think he made a year there, it was already horrible.
Friend of mine had a heart attack in his early thirties working for AT&T in the nineties. I ended up in the ER with acute chest pains working for UBS.
These days, I'm generally able to weather the daily shit storms, but I'm mostly dead inside just waiting for the sweet, sweet relief of the real mortal deal.
I kinda wonder what the machine is going to have at its disposal to extract more out of me after I've left this mortal coil. Reanimated labor I suppose.
I got a pretty decent raise a couple weeks ago. As I usually do, I expressed my appreciation, but added the commentary that when a hundred percent of my time away from work is spent bedridden from exhaustion, what's the difference between an $X thousand dollar raise and an $X million dollar raise.
This. It used to be the dream because we believed in what technofuturism had to offer. We believed in instant access to knowledge and we thought we could all make it cheap enough that it would be an uplift across humanity.
We came up with so many cool things in the process. Little did we know we were simply building the foundations of our dystopian cyberpunk corpo future.
"We just wanted ice cream cones and fast cars" (South park).
I've always worked for small companies and moved to a big company a year ago, and I feel like I AM living the dream. Hard capped 40 hour weeks, 35 days vacation, plenty of perks like an on-site gym and free car charging. I didn't think that things like this could exist in the IT world. Unions really make a huge difference.
Damn you’re unionized IT? Where are you general located?
That is a lot of words to say "they found out that the big tech executives had been lying to them about being family, changing the world. etc" just as much as their last employer was.
News flash, working in big tech is every bit as soul sucking for the rank and file as it is working in big healthcare, or big law firm, or <insert large industry here>. Nothing special about it, they are large publicly traded companies that have shareholders and investors to answer to as the number 1 priority.
They lost dream job status for me when I realized I was facilitating some evil shit. Like "oh! great job in genomics! I can help cure cancer!" Then realize it's "oh, help China build population scale genomic sequencing, wonder what they're gonna do with that?"
And "oh, edge computing, sounds cool", then realizing "oh, edge computing is mostly useful for facial recognition, wonder what people will use that for?"
I started out my career as a traffic engineer because I hate traffic, but then realized I was just helping build more sprawl...
...now I'm a software engineer who refuses to work for FAANGs on principle.
It is extremely hard to find companies that aren't doing evil shit yet are still profitable enough to be able to hire people.
Did you ever work with or cover parking areas in your job/studies?
I have always wanted to know, when there are carparks (the open style rows of bays such as outside of grocery/big box stores) why do they never use angled bays? I figure it came down to the difference between something like 100 available parking spaces instead of 96 with losses in corners or something.
It baffles me that with how much easier it is for everyone to both pull into and reverse out of an angled bay why they dont just sacrifice a couple bays in return for increased traffic flow and less dings.Also if they are in a herringbone pattern between adjacent rows it means that people cant just 'pull through' one bay into the next row and destroy any landscaping that may be between the two (i see strips of nicely mulched landscaping with small shrubs destroyed everywhere in my city from dickheads that dont give a fuck).
Telle you don't know a damned thing about computing at the edge without....
I think Big Tech is still pretty much a dream job for most people. High pay. Perks. Work/life flexibility. It's certainly not as dreamy as it was 5 years ago perhaps, but realistically I'd take it over pretty much anything else.
Not anymore. Middling pay, constant threat of fire, constant degradation, most perks went away a loooong time ago, zero work/life balance. You can get that same bullshit working for Company X.
Eh. I work in tech. I have friends who work or worked at almost every big tech company you'd recognize. These are still jobs, dealing with layoffs, annoying bosses, etc. has always been a fact of life. But from what I can see the average techie still has it very good compared to most other jobs. My friend who is a nurse would certainly like to earn a tech salary, not have to deal with hospital politics, and not work night shifts all the damn time, and take time off whenever they want to not whenever there's availability...
I would too, but it really depends on the company. If I can do it, I'm WFH for the rest of my career for companies < 1000 people.
FAANG (or whatever it is these days) are awful fucking people to work for. One of the developers I respect most in my career walked out on .5M in bonuses on Amazon because of their ranking system for his employees. I was shocked.
But depending on the employer it's still a very good gig. But if you're at the wrong place, it's like the upper circles of hell.
One of the developers I respect most in my career walked out on .5M in bonuses on Amazon because of their ranking system for his employees. I was shocked.
This also shows what an incredibly privileged position techies have in the job market. I totally understand quitting Amazon. Really, I wouldn't want to work there either. But ask one of their warehouse workers if they'd ever quit and forfeit a 0.5M bonus...
Each year this trend will accelerate. My dream job will not inevitably lay me off in 3 years...
Remember that it was Musky that did the first tech layoff that started this whole thing
Family pushed college as the only possible way for me to lead a happy life and make money.
The kids from my high school who went into the oil fields are making double my salary.
Yep... And they don't have the crippling student debt.
I don't think there's ever going to be a case for "less education is better," but I also don't think more education necessarily leads to higher salaries. It often does, but those are two different conversations in by book.
These companies can't help but shoot themselves in the foot grubbing for ever more money.
And yet they keep making that money. I don't see them "shooting themselves in the foot" (as much as I hate the way they operate, too). The metrics used by the bean counters drive these decisions.
I worked at on place where an HR bean counter realized they weren't firing as many people as they could be. So they told management to increase the firing rate. The BS I saw....incredible senior management folks getting fired over made-up bullshit. Saw entire teams disappear.
The company saw an increase in profit that year.