In 2022 we learned
You don't keep your job by:
- Working late nights
- Leading a team
- Staying loyal to a company
- Going above and beyond
- Finishing all your projects
- Working for big companies
It seems like the most important factor Is working on a critical business need
Metaverse for Facebook (Meta)
AWS for Amazon
Blue check marks for Twitter
It's depressing to remember that companies will always put business first.
That also means
You should never put the company first!
Also appears that working with existing business, especially in SaaS, is pretty secure. While landing new business is difficult in these times, a company must hang on to the business they already have. Working in Customer Success specifically seems to be a good place to hold a job. Just my 2 cents.
Yes, the business need is king. There's nothing that feels more bittersweet-tragic than doing my best engineering work on a project I don't think the company should have commissioned. And I've noticed that sadly those two properties are correlated.
Examples:
1) PM wants to be a hero, gets his team on fascinating optimization problems allowing customer orders to be split and automatically farmed out to the best combination of suppliers. In principle it's exactly the way to build a scalably profitable tech business. In practice, it's predicated on simplifications the PM so wants to believe are true but are not. The company's best coders spend months creating the most beautiful engineering it has seen thus far.
I tell my friend working on this team that I'm both a little envious he's on such interesting work and pitying because I don't think it makes sense and is going to create an operational disaster. In the end, higher management catches up and cancels 5 months of work before it's deployed.
2) One with a lot of technical details: Same company makes extensive use of Salesforce. Decides it will be quite easy to make a generalized syncing engine that allows any backend service to treat Salesforce like it's a locally accessible database, rather than crafting API calls. In practice this means a multi-master non-blocking consensus engine. It's practically impossible to do without data corruption given its non-locking architecture and I spend the next 2 fascinating months learning to think multi-process and squashing data corruption bugs in this elegant but flawed codebase I've been handed and was just deployed a week before its author left. All the while I'm arguing that they should scrap this project because we're a startup that has for some reason decided to take on one of the hard CS problems that many of the world's best databases feel is too complex to go near.
Meanwhile, other inherited bugs on a different service mean a significant portion of callers to our sales line are not getting through and all of their SMS messages are going unread. I cannot convince the right people that this is more important. I try to improve those problems in secret.
I left shortly after but I heard that they told themselves the syncing system wasn't a failure by grafting on a lot of detailed hacks to make each particular data corruption problem get just enough better and then tried not to use it for further development.
No, it means that in tough times you need to be able to pay the bills.
The realism approach
Wth you just took this post from Alex Nguyen on LinkedIn. Are you like farming for likes or something?
It’s not like this is groundbreaking anyway C2 lol
This has always been the case but we all forget in boom times. Look out for yourself first. Stay close to revenue. Document your shit. Have a Plan B, C, D, E.
Staying close to revenue is 💯
✌️ Two THINGS…
1) FLOW of money. 💰
If businesses don’t make money, then they can’t pay for worker’s role.
I never understood why people thought that businesses owed them anything. They don’t.
2) Permanent Damage
I BLAME it on HR for brainwashing everyone into thinking it’s more than a business & start to create a culture & try to form these weird “families”.
They are doing more harm than good.
From a psychological perspective, Their are forming an attachment with their employees and then when they lay them off…. It’s a traumatic experience for the employees causing them to feel a sense of loss.
This sense of loss is equivalent to someone passing away.
The more times a worker gets laid off or moves around from one company to another, they begin to get de-sensitized over time and subconsciously start to form surface level attachments instead of deeper relationships.
This could affect them for their lifetime.
Companies want people to represent their brand, whether they’re working or not, and to do things outside the office that reflect positively on the company, whether it has anything to do with them or not. To some extent, they’re also expecting a certain lifestyle from employees these days. The idea that people expect something in return for that isn’t outrageous. Loyalty used to mean something.
That’s one thing I learned from being new to the workforce. Try your best to be hired into a need. If your hired under the premise that your work is needed you therefore are an asset to the companies bottom line.
Pro
I dunno, I mean I agree with the overall point that you could get laid off regardless if your performance and all that. Having said that, I worked at GE for several years and survived layoff after layoff (were talking I was on a team of 20 that got whittled down to 3) and doing a lot of the things on your list were absolutely why I was kept and others let go.
If you get laid off you get laid off but I’m more of a “leave it all out on the field” guy. I’d be disappointed in myself if we’re chosen over others due to slacking off or underperforming. No shame in being let go if you were good at your job obviously but if that happens, I’d want to know I did what I could to be kept.
Also, these situations revel a lot about someone’s character. Not checking out and continuing to be professional in these situations opened some doors for me later on.
I've had to perform layoffs and always fought hardest for those who were giving their best; whether to retain them or use my personal network to ensure they landed well elsewhere.
Many roles, particularly at higher levels, are secured through back-channel conversations or recommendations. Developing a strong reputation and relationship, with your leadership and peers, will often serve you well.
Layoffs are not a new thing, why is everyone ‘preaching’ about not making your life about work?
With social media, we are able to see more transparency for who is being laid off. Value adds and loyalty points no longer matter, as the process has been reduced to a random names selection process.
Think Margaritaville episode of South Park, where the execs make decisions using a kazoo, a roulette board, and a beheaded chicken. 🌀
Pro
Metaverse drowned them and they still want to invest - that’s an odd man out in that list
And they still laid off employees working on metaverse so this post is wrong
Preach! 😎
Companies exist to turn a profit. If they don't, they die. That's not depressing, but it is very important to remember! Prioritize you and your family.
Yep.
Honestly it happens. We’ve always known companies put companies first.
Especially if the company is publicly traded, they will do lay offs when they are not making the $$ they said they would.
Adding to the list: Becoming a new hire.
I've seen a few posts from ex-Meta who had just started a few days prior to being layed off.
Always be greedy.
Also, please save atleast 6 months of salary, give yourself the cushion till you find a new job
Any company that claims to care about you as a person is lying
Except AWS employees have been affected, so I would mind your facts.
Whomst?
Lol how long will Metaverse be continue to be "business critical"? Doesnt feel long given how much money is wasted with little value
Sad reality of our times