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Silicon Valley layoffs aren’t a cost-cutting measure. They’re a culture reset

• skyde 4y ago
  time to start an Union then ?
  • toss1 4y ago
    Yup, this is about reasserting the boss-over-worker structures. The workers were getting to uppity, expecting things like actual work-life balance.
    • dahdum 4y ago
      > The workers were getting to uppity, expecting things like actual work-life balance. Which of these large companies would you say have a poor work-life balance on average? Google, Facebook, Adobe, Microsoft, and others have reputations as rest-and-vest retirement homes. I've heard Netflix can be challenging, along with some parts of Apple, but nothing like startups, investment banking, or big law. Twitter before Elon was more like "rest" since they were vesting garbage, but he's trying to morph them into Tesla, which does have a terrible reputation for balance.
      • alfalfasprout 4y ago
        Amazon and FB have never been "rest and vest". Honestly google in most teams isn't like that either.
        • dahdum 4y ago
          I agree about Amazon, but I've definitely heard FB thrown about as rest-and-vest regularly since IPO, and that's the impression I've gotten from developers I've met working there since. I have heard the AI and other non-FB/IG parts of Meta are pretty grindy-but-worth-it though.
      • skyde 4y ago
        I worked in Investment banking, at Microsoft and Amazon. I can tell you majority of team at Amazon and facebook have 0 work life balance. When you work in Investment banking you are not expected to get 3 call at 3am every night including weekend and have to wake up get a coffee and work for 3+ hours to fix the problem the intern or idiot from another team (not your team) caused. in Investment banking you can take a 2 week vacation without the whole company catching fire.
• hobbitstan 4y ago
  The Silicon Valley culture was aimed at attracting younger talent away from established companies, with childish perks like free food and video games, and a less rigid work structure. But it was never going be sustainable. At the core, the ‘promise’ that these new tech companies alluded to one day had to actually appear. And the slow creep of government regulation was always going to catch up too. I always assumed most of these large companies would adapt and survive but it’s looking increasingly like they will not, or cannot.
  • IOT_Apprentice 4y ago
    No it was to keep them on campus and working. Oracle was doing that to keep butts in seats at work & minimize time going to dry cleaners or even dental appointments. Come early for breakfast and also get fed dinnner along with your long hours—on campus.
  • addisonl 4y ago
    > childish perks like free food Ahh yes, food, such a childish thing.
    • shankr 4y ago
      Big boys go for yacht and stuff /s
    • hobbitstan 4y ago
      Conveniently dropped the ‘free’ I see. Whenever I interviewed with companies and they mentioned free meals or fridges full of sodas as a perk, that was a red flag. Companies like IBM and Microsoft had on-site cafeterias and coffee shops usually with subsidized pricing and it never came up in in interviews.
      • DimitriPetrova 4y ago
        Probably because the food isn't good and they're paying for it?
      • 4y ago
• encoderer 4y ago
  As long as tech companies remain fantastically profitable the culture will not change. I see this as just a sour grapes piece from a journalist who has to cover tech from outside the bubble.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • 2devnull 4y ago
    East coast money vs west coast money; always has been.
    • ben7799 4y ago
      The tech industry greatly predates Silicon Valley so saying this is East Coast vs West coast doesn't make any sense.
  • vineyardmike 4y ago
    > As long as tech companies remain fantastically profitable the culture will not change. I think it’s slowly changing. Maybe not getting “boring” and stodgy but changing. The culture from fb and goog in 2005 of crazy perks like food is probably going away. It’s probably be replaced with new things, like WFH and super funded 401ks and cushy healthcare. It’s a sign of an aging workforce and a changing WFH first culture. Eg Google provided digital (and pricy) reusable Covid test kits to everyone during the pandemic.
    • wobbly_bush 4y ago
      To add to original poster's point - even with changing perks, wouldn't they always look different (better) than traditional industries like journalism? Even your examples would indicate to that.
      • vineyardmike 4y ago
        I personally don’t want to project an assumed emotion to the journalist, but my point would corroborate not undermine that argument. Tech has always held a captive journalistic audience either in boom times as a North Star to the future, a scapegoat, or a villain. I don’t know how real people feel about tech tbh, but I imagine it’s now closer to how they feel about wall street than it’s ever been.
• incanus77 4y ago
  > The last real deflation in tech was all the way back in 2000, 2001. There’s almost no one working in tech now who was around for that. Oh?
  • lovich 4y ago
    Almost no one doesn’t mean no one. There’s been so much growth in the industry in the past 20 years that even if everyone working in 2001 was still working now, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were a small minority compared to the sea of new talent
    • catiopatio 4y ago
      Depends on where you work, obviously. In my organization (at a FAANG), people in their 40s are probably a (very slim) majority.
      • markwaldron 4y ago
        I'm also at a FAANG, and work with a lot of people in their 40's
        • lovich 4y ago
          They obviously exist but from a quick and dirty google search it looks like there was roughly 500k-600k software engineers in 2000 and over 4 million today in the US. Even if zero of the ones from 2000 attritioned out they’d be ~13% of the work force and I highly doubt none of them have retired in a 2 decade span
  • rzazueta 4y ago
    My beard's not even grey yet, c'mon!
  • easterncalculus 4y ago
    Tech companies according to people that don't actually work in them.
• gumby 4y ago
  "Tech is mature and growth is over". I remember that consensus headline from the 1980s.
  • hedora 4y ago
    Yeah. This article is repeating the classic rationale established companies use coming into each downturn: Growth is over forever, so let's burn the seed corn. Fast forward a few years, and a crop of startups (that innovated while the incumbents belt-tightened) blindside previously unassailable monopolies. I find it kind of ironic that they use Facebook and Google as examples in the article. Remember when FB bought the Sun campus, stripped it to concrete walls, and grafitti'ed the hell out of it? Google HQ is the fossilized remains of the SGI campus. The big question now is: Who is going to dethrone the current rudderless big tech companies, and how will they do it?
    • vineyardmike 4y ago
      > The big question now is: Who is going to dethrone the current rudderless big tech companies, and how will they do it? Watch who hires all of the laid off tech workers over the next few years.
  • 2devnull 4y ago
    But back 80s there was a lot of irrational exuberance about AI.
• rajin444 4y ago
  Software is one of the best tools we have for dealing with human communication issues (in a variety of ways). While there might not be many iPhone / fb / twitter size jackpots out there (until the next hardware growth enables new opportunities), there’s still tons of human communication problems to be solved. Software is ultimately about replacing inefficient human communication and we still have a lot of that.
  • Ebree 4y ago
    I am of exactly opposite view. Software is about replacing organic direct human communication. Since computers came under roofs streets are empty & local communities died out. Breaking up through electronic channel, creating fake digital public face being examples.
• bumbledraven 4y ago
  > And as petty a thing as, “We’re going to give you smaller to-go boxes so you can’t take the steak we’re giving you and go feed your family with it.” That's not "petty" – people shouldn't have been doing that in the first place. A take-home box should be for you, not so you can pile up food to "feed your family".
• dahdum 4y ago
  > And as petty a thing as, “We’re going to give you smaller to-go boxes so you can’t take the steak we’re giving you and go feed your family with it.” That's what she thinks is petty? I wonder if she feels the same about replacing snack bars and drink fridges with free vending machines to slow down the workers who fill their backpacks full of Odwalla, Monster, and expensive snacks every night. These benefits were worthwhile when employees appreciated them, but appeasing increasingly hostile and entitled workers is a losing battle.
  • ben7799 4y ago
    I can't remember how long ago it was.. before Google and Facebook started pushing crazy benefits Microsoft was kind of famous for it. MS's level of it back in the day was much lower than today, but still generous for the time. At some point they had to stop as they had caught employees emptying the free drink fridges and taking them off campus and reselling them. So they had to stop offering that stuff. Though I'm sure they had to re-add it later.
    • akamia 4y ago
      There are always going to be people who take advantage of anything "free". I once worked at a boring large company that didn't offer any of these perks. They repeatedly had to tell people that the office supplies were for work use only. One person was caught selling office supplies on eBay. Another person had been using them to supply the office for his side business.
• ben7799 4y ago
  The Facebook/Google crazy level of perks with 3 meals provided very day, dry cleaning, massages, etc.. ? Free alcohol in the office? That stuff can go, and people will have to deal with. Some of the other stuff like untracked/unlimited PTO (It's never really unlimited) and free coffee and snacks is nice to have. I'm in my 40s. I started internships in 1996. All this free food and alcohol, etc.. didn't exist till around 2010. We would have occasional "hey we're working late so we're getting pizza" in the 1990s and 2000s. We would have "hey we're having a BYOB in the cafeteria friday afternoon." Not this constant culture stuff that constantly wasted tons of money. But Coffee has always been free & around. It does seem like younger workers who have only experienced the current environment have gotten entitled to it. We used to have crunch time and working weekends and all that nonsense and we didn't have the perks. Sometimes the companies ran out of money anyway. Tougher times can kind of suck. But it still makes these jobs great. They always paid really well. You were still sitting in front of a computer and not stuck doing physical labor.
  • jcims 4y ago
    >The Facebook/Google crazy level of perks with 3 meals provided very day, dry cleaning, massages, etc I worked for Google at the campus on Crittenden for a short stint in 2015. We had a few folks keep the kegerator stocked with their home brews and a wall of liquor one could sample as needed. I kept the kitchenette stocked with hot sauce on my own accord b/c I wanted to have some handy. I'm also in my (late) 40s and all of these little perks were very new to me. I quickly grew accustomed to them, but to be honest I didn't miss a single one of them after I left. I don't know that they really moved the needle for me at all. Except for the shuttle. I *loved* having the shuttle. It greatly simplified the ability to not have a car for the first time in my adult life and it was awesome.
• unity1001 4y ago
  Some of the criticism doesn't make sense: Providing food, amenities, even accommodation has been a method with which private and state organizations around the world used to cut their costs and better the life standards of their members since the dawn of the modern economy after the industrial revolution. Especially for organizations that have thousands of employees in one location, providing a cafeteria can be much cheaper for both the employees and the organization than thousands of employees going out to eat in private establishments at lunch time. The organization providing housing to employees to work around the bloated real estate sector can also be beneficial to the employeees and the organization. Similarly, Apple mulling its own health services is a good idea - they can reduce their costs and increase quality of life. Its economies of scale after all. If you have tens of thousands of organization members in a location, it becomes an economy of scale that can reduce every member's and organization's costs directly. If you do not provide such services to your members using economies of scale inside your organization and instead leave it to the free market by giving monetary compensation instead, you can bet that the free market will do everything in its power to suck all of that monetary compensation out of the hands of the employees by providing the minimum service in return to maximize profit.
  • ben7799 4y ago
    This used to be handled by having a non-free cafeteria. The cafeteria will still be cheaper for employees than going out to restaurants, and it will be cheaper than the company picking up the tab for everyone. It used to be common to make a lunch and bring it to work too. This recent stuff that tech workers are entitled to a free meal at work or to go spend an hour+ to go to a restaurant for lunch every day is a very new thing.
    • unity1001 4y ago
      > This used to be handled by having a non-free cafeteria. Well, if the food can be provided for cheap enough, it may make more sense to give it away free than to handle all the accounting hassle. > This recent stuff that tech workers are entitled to a free meal at work or to go spend an hour+ to go to a restaurant for lunch every day is a very new thing. Its not. It was a practice very widespread in most of the world's social democracies, especially in government organizations, in order to lift up the life standards of the members. Its still used in a lot of countries. The US has 'rediscovered' it through the tech companies. Just like its 'rediscovering' company-provided housing and all the other tangible benefits that the rest of the world still practices instead of leaving their employees to the mercy of the market.
• 1letterunixname 4y ago
  Somewhat. They're an excuse for corporations to cut people they don't really want and to shift their spending posture to austerity.
• P_I_Staker 4y ago
  More of a scare crow. The government should investigate whether there's collusion.