Every time I hear news from the tech industry lately

My (soon to be ex) company gets around the rebuild step by doing annual layoffs.

they are so clueless. half of my team got laid off on friday, and we got an email from our manager inviting us to attend a different team's standup in addition to our own so we could feel more "connected".

the only thing another standup is going to make me feel is fucking pissed off

My employer had a slightly better reason to do layoffs, because our financial situation then was pretty bad and still is pretty bad. I don't mean "we got 30% profit instead of 31%!", but "we aren't making money and we have no money". Layoffs were more understandable than usual given the situation and circumstances.

And even in these conditions, I still think it was a terrible decision. Morale was ultra low after the layoffs, and the situation led to quite a few people who did survive to leave of their own volition for better opportunities. We lost talent in the layoffs, and then we lost talent in everyone who felt like they were on a sinking ship. Which, in turn, has led to even more people feeling like it's a sinking ship with the writing on the wall.

My management chain is completely gone. I directly report to an executive now, where previously there was my supervisor, his supervisor, his supervisor, and then the executive. Where there were perhaps 10-15 system engineers both in and outside my team, there are now like 3-4 of us thanks to layoffs and departures. And if one of these guys leave, I'm going to find a new job and put in my two weeks once I land one.

The silver lining is that my job security has never been better, because they've created a situation where they literally can't afford to lose me or my colleagues. We're all on critical projects, and at the point where a new person just wouldn't be helpful, because they don't have the proper time to learn and get caught up before we need these projects finished.

In short? Layoffs are a terrible decision, even when you're in terrible financial straits. You risk a death spiral that makes things even worse and worse.

I always jump ship after a layoff. They invariably ask you to do more work for the same price. Half the time at places I've worked the company goes under soon anyways.

You get a bigger raise with a new job than staying at the old job, and I assume it's even worse after layoffs. When I tell job interviewers "because layoffs", they can easily verify it and confirm I didn't just get fired for being an asshole.

What happened at my work was they did like 2 mini layoffs, then a medium one, then a big one that was split into 3 parts, all this over the course of about two years. Morale here is more or less in free fall, we've alienated our user base, and I don't expect it to recover for many years.

I'm sure that won't have any negative consequence. Please do not question the decisions of our enlightened leaders or you won't have pizza.

Here's a list from just one major company

Good God Almighty. If I worked on a construction job, you'd see a bunch of people trying to pound screws in with the head of a screwdriver. Meanwhile, I'm over here like, "No! What? What the hell are you doing?!Wait, did you just try to solder too boards together with a blow torch? Oh fuck. Now the building is on fire."

And of course, management is like, "Why is the building on fire?? Isn't this like the twelfth time the building has been on fire?"

Yes. Yes it is, because you geniuses fired all the guys who knew anything about construction and hired a bunch of people who were able to identify screwdrivers without asking them if they knew how to use one.

Now, if we were actually in construction, this would be completely ludicrous. But if you work in technology, it's considered a "good business decision" because it has a "positive impact on the bottom line". ..for about 5 minutes anyway.

Also 9x the terrible flaws that scare away customers.

Spent about the same for more people to do less work and lower quality work.

Note that 99% of the time the offshore labor geography does have talent, but they aren't going to work for an offshoring shop, they will work for real companies in that geography. The offshoring companies thrive on essentially fraud, no matter what country they are in.

Exactly. I feel like Andrew Yang gets a bad rep, but it's not like he didn't say stuff that everyone should know. I liked his idea of expanding the "American Scorecard" as he called it. Basically we currently use GDP, and stock prices to determine how well we're doing as a country. That's insane. Sure, the economy is up, but you know what else is up? Homelessness, unemployment, suicide, divorce, drug addiction, and many others. But we don't include those metrics to grade our performance. Just once I'd like the President to do a PowerPoint at the State of the Union Address. With a bunch of slides and graphs and charts.

Some of this is a bit soft. Like, the 50% / 0% employment split says something about business's ability to command labor. If we had an amazing economy with 50% unemployment, this would imply a large population that businesses either didn't want or couldn't access. And the former says something very different than the latter.

In that same vein, the ability to grow the economy is heavily predicated on how individual workers within the economy operate. A bunch of precarious workers with tentative access to capital, poor education, and dismal living conditions don't generate the kind of surplus value found in countries with ready access to new capital, high end education, and comfortable low-stress environments.

From a raw numbers perspective, you can try and transition your economy to an entirely financialized scorecard. But then you just end up with two engineers optimizing the rate at which a dollar can be traded back and forth.

Although, this might already technically describe the London economy.

Either way, you're divorcing the means by which we measure new value in the economy from the actual measures of economic utility through layer after layer of abstraction. Yes, this can fool people while economic utility is increasing (or even while its increasing for a subset of the right kind of people). But eventually - at the 50% unemployment and large migrant caravans of jobless vagrants trawling across the country - you run into some very basic domestic policy problems that outshine the focus on GDP Go Up.

Yup the CEO, shareholders, and middle management goals are diametrically opposed to the workers.

Good thing my entire retirement is dependent of stock price!