Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as “cheaper” labour, the report claimed.
Please treat this as an explanation, and not an apology for big tech. If you work in tech, or are thinking about it, understand the rules of the game :
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First, a new skill goes hot - maybe functionally superior, may just be a trend. In tech, it’s always the new shiny.
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Demand for skills outstrips supply
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Salaries go up !
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Big tech flex, offer big money to hoover up the talent. Sometimes it’s for projects, sometimes it’s just to keep them out of the hands of competition, in case the trend becomes a standard
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Time passes
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Chasing big salaries, lots of people acquire the skill.
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Supply outstrips demand, skill becomes a commodity.
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Salaries come down
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Big Tech is still paying huge salaries, for skills that may have stopped trending, but at the very least - are now available at market at a much lower rate. If you include globalisation, it could be 30% of what they are paying.
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The high salary hires get cut, because there’s a new skill trending, or, the same skill is now available at much lower rate .
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Everyone is shocked !
This has been tech workers life cycle for at least 30 years, and I don’t see it changing
You’re missing the whole “growth starts to plateau so management looks for ways to cut costs”
And
“Product comparatively stable so it gets hired out to contractors who inevitably fuck it up because they’re cheap and there was 0 knowledge transfer but it’s too late you laid off the entire original team”
Big Tech is still paying huge salaries, for skills that may have stopped trending
I gotta say, we live in some truly rarified space when fucking Python, possibly the best programming language developed in my lifetime, stops “trending”. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean from a business perspective. Its not like you just get to stop supporting a legacy language. Just ask someone who spent seven years, fresh out of college, supporting archaic old school ASP pages and Perl scripts.
But also you’re not just supporting the language. You’re supporting an entire suite of libraries, applications, and interfaces built for the particular environment.
Elon Musk learned this the hard way when he started trying to tear the wiring out of the walls and sell it for scrape at Twitter.
Also, the story of Boeing’s planes-that-don’t-fly-good. Decades of engineering out the door to save money in a single quarter means accumulating tail risk that you - a manager who will be up or out in another five years - never have to deal with.
This has been tech workers life cycle for at least 30 years, and I don’t see it changing
Longer than 30, to be sure. But its the sort of thing that comes at the expense of end users, rather than business execs. That’s the dirty secret behind these business decisions. Making the product worse only ever seems to benefit the firm’s bottom line when a business is in a secure cartel.
Python is great for what it is, but the best language developed in your lifetime? Its type system is janky and bolted on. A good type system is one of the main things I look for to call a programming language great.
That’s the dirty secret behind these business decisions. Making the product worse only ever seems to benefit the firm’s bottom line when a business is in a secure cartel.
This, as with enshittification in general, is a symptom of our fucked up culture that views money as a virtue. And with the business culture in particular, regardless of cartel or monopoly status, if the bottom line gets better the managers are doing a “good job” and almost nobody cares about inconveniences to customers or tarnishing of the brand.
