How working for Big Tech lost 'dream job' status
2 years ago by alb_004 to c/technology
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 believe it also is for creating hype among investors. “Look at this new amazing product lineup we got! Self driving cars! Invest in us before those huge things turn into reality!”
And to get on the more conspiratorial side, it might also be to dry up the market of talent. It’s hard for competitors to make a product if all talent is already doing cool stuff elsewhere.
I, too, am a, very big, fan, of commas
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.
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.
devs are such babies. I went to school and got licensed as an a&p (9 part proctored exam with written, practical, and oral components) and was working in the weather for $16 an hour, working my way up and dodging layoffs (which dont make it in the news because blue collar) to 25 an hour after years and years.
This is working as an aircraft mechanic, at various levels. This is a high hazard environment filled with carcinogens (solvents like methyl ethyl ketone), fall hazards, operating heavy equipment.
I got qualifications like engine run and taxi qualifications that result in $0.25 raises.
Mandatory overtime, busting knuckles, freezing in the cold, boiling in the heat, standing on concrete all day.
Oh and if I fuck up, planes crash, people die, and I go to jail.
I got a job as a software developer in the same area working for a medium sized company no one has heard of (300 person engineering department) and I work 8 hours a week, with no deadlines, at home, and make 3 times the salary. The worst I have to do with is identity politics and stupid meetings, 🤷.
These jobs are absolutely dream jobs for people who have perspective on what bad jobs actually are.
“I’ve had worse jobs, and my current job is unrealistically laid back for the field being talked about. Everyone else is a baby.”
This is what you sound like.
Here’s a thought: Different people have different experiences in similar jobs.
Here’s another: Different people experience things differently, because they are different people.
As someone who has worked in fast food, warehouses, and woodworking: I know how privileged I am to be a software developer.
Ive seen kids right out of college get hired and make more than I did, despite my having 20+ more years of experience … just because I’m self taught with no college. And then they bitch about how bad the job is.
Insane.
I am so much NOT a dev, that it took me a minute to even register what you were trying to say. I thought of a college classmate whose name is Dev.
I too have had my time in hard physical labor.
But you do you. Enjoy your Internet sanctimony.
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 . 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).
That is a good question. I feel like I probably asked that during my site design class in college, but I don't remember getting a clear/satisfactory answer. I think it might just come down to which design happens to work better on the particular site, or the preferences of the client (for example, it seems like Publix prefers their parking lots to have angled parking, while Kroger's parking more often tends to be straight).
Just an observation: The “square/right-angle” parking spaces are harder to park in, but do make it easier to pull-out/exit in either direction. The angled spots are easier to enter/exit, but it’s harder to exit in one direction than the other.
This might be desirable in order to influence cars to enter/exit in one direction.
In the common US box store layout, the end of the parking lot nearest the store is often highest in pedestrians. I find it easier/faster/safer to avoid that end of the parking lot. So I try to enter/exit using the side of the parking lot opposite the store. Angled parking slots make this strategy harder.
Undoubtably there are more factors than this involved in parking-lot design.
Source: Not a pro. Just a parking-space user.
Thanks for your response anyway!
I cynically feel like it may come down to the red-pen signatories who say "why 47 bays when we can squeeze in 50?! make it 50"
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.
I work these same companies. It's not about bad bosses, it's the C-Level people in your news feed degrading their entire workforce via the press. It's hearing your job is going to be "phased out" if you don't start reporting to an office hours away after being hired for remote work. It's having your pay slashed and being told to "deal with it, or find a new job" via email on Monday, then hearing about it all over the news on Tuesday to really hammer it home that you have to fear for your job, and they'll absolutely replace your ass if you say anything about it.
This was all done by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the past year at various different times as if it work from a guidebook on demoralizing your workforce.
The biggest obstacle to unionizing in tech, none of the unions know how to represent technology work. I have been in a couple unions as a tech worker, but those unions were historically representing different classes of workers.
That’ll happen.
I think that Hollywood provides an example: cast, crew, writers, and directors are all unionized, and there are so many different types of jobs at such different rates of pay within those unions.
Middling pay? At FAANG-tier companies?
These are some extraordinary claims in need of some extraordinary proof.
Not a claim, just a fact. Everyone walking around thinking we're making an easy $300k, and taking vacations all the time, and have the best of everything. Absolutely nothing resembling that type of compensation exists anymore. Easy to Google, but just read this headline from today:
I work in medium tech. Since they have to compete for talent. We get the high pay and work life flexibility. It’s much better than large tech. I would never go work for a Microsoft , Amazon or Google. Not worth it.
Lots of opportunity in SMB, especially the M.
Agreed. M is definitely the sweet spot for tech right now.
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.
Companies like Amazon can pull this off because of stock grants. (And I don't think they give out stock grants to warehouse workers, but I could be wrong.)
When they hire a developer, especially one who already has the relevant experience they for, they will say "On top of the salary and bonus, we will also give you $200k worth of stock". But that stock can't be sold right away; it goes into an account where it vests over some number of years, every 6 months. Your only condition for vesting the stock is being employed. If you leave for any reason, or even get laid off, you give up the rest.
Sometimes you also get smaller awards with your yearly review, subject to the same terms. They do this so that if you are a key developer, leaving would mean you forfeit this large account you have accumulated on paper. But in the back of your mind, you know that if your project gets canceled and you don't find a new one in the company, that money goes poof also. So it's play money until it vests, anyway. And there is always another vesting event coming sometime in the next few months.
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.
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.
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.
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