Business Big Tech Layoffs Megathread - Techbros... we got too cocky...

Since my previous thread kinda-sorta turned into a soft megathread, and the tech layoffs will continue until morale improves, I think it's better to group them all together.

For those who want a QRD:

Just this week we've had these going on:

https://www.theverge.com/24048636/ebay-layoffs-1000-employees-january-2024

https://arstechnica.com/google/2024/01/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-promises-another-year-of-google-layoffs/

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/24/tech/sap-restructuring-ai-jobs-intl-hnk/index.html

But it's not just Big Tech, the vidya industry is also cleaning house bigly:

https://www.brokentoys.org/ludum-mortuus-est/

All in all, rough seas ahead for the techbros.

 

[Tanner Glass]

"Studio that hasn't released a good game in 10 years might be struggling" - the article.

 

[moocow]

https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2024-06-04-microsoft-announces-up-to-1500-layoffs-leaked-memo-blames-ai-wave

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/04/microsoft_plans_to_cut_about

Sure hope you're not building anything important on Azure. If they're laying people off from the "Azure for Operations" team, that means they're getting rid of their most experienced (i.e. most expensive) operations engineers. That is, they're getting rid of the knowledgeable and skilled staffers who keep the lights on, fix operational problems, put out fires, and generally keep the "cloud" alive.

The people left in place are undoubtedly pajeets, junior-level, and/or diversity hires. This is one of those classic "brain drain" events that companies always think they can weather without a hitch but end up biting them hard in the ass. Like what's happened over at Google in recent years, the people who built the infrastructure are gone (or leaving), and the people remaining in place to keep the lights on couldn't pour water from their boots with instructions on the heel.

Then again, if you are using Azure for anything important, you deserve what you get.

 

[Netizennameless]

The people left in place are undoubtedly pajeets, junior-level, and/or diversity hires. This is one of those classic "brain drain" events that companies always think they can weather without a hitch but end up biting them hard in the ass.

In my experience you have this backwards. Most of the people getting laid off right now are the diversity hires. Those DEI checkboxes are expensive, they had to be overcompensated to make the pay gap look smaller and they don't produce anything but headaches. This was fine when interest rates were near 0% and hiring them meant 1000x returns in Blackrock investments, but the free money era is over and now profit matters. It's also been long enough to measure the impact these hires have had on the bottom line and it turns out diversity is not our strength.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

Then again, if you are using Azure for anything important, you deserve what you get.

Remember, Azure-AD has something like one fifth of the entire Single Sign-On and Authentication market under its belt, an Azure wide outage would be paramount to a Tech Sector wide outage, and there's not much anyone who cares can do about it, those contracts are five levels over their heads, with yearly costs equal to a decade of their salary.

 

[moocow]

In my experience you have this backwards. Most of the people getting laid off right now are the diversity hires. Those DEI checkboxes are expensive, they had to be overcompensated to make the pay gap look smaller and they don't produce anything but headaches. This was fine when interest rates were near 0% and hiring them meant 1000x returns in Blackrock investments, but the free money era is over and now profit matters. It's also been long enough to measure the impact these hires have had on the bottom line and it turns out diversity is not our strength.

I disagree. I've watched it happen first-hand. Yes, some dead weight is being shed as well, but they are absolutely getting rid of their highest-paid most experienced operations engineers.

Remember, Azure-AD has something like one fifth of the entire Single Sign-On and Authentication market under its belt, an Azure wide outage would be paramount to a Tech Sector wide outage, and there's not much anyone who cares can do about it, those contracts are five levels over their heads, with yearly costs equal to a decade of their salary.

I can't fucking wait for that ugly hack to tip over and take that whole market with it for a day. People have got to learn to stop hitching their wagons to Microsoft products and services. Repeated painful beatings are the only way to make any progress on that front.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

I disagree. I've watched it happen first-hand. Yes, some dead weight is being shed as well, but they are absolutely getting rid of their highest-paid most experienced operations engineers.

What often happens is that the engineers do the work, the diversity hires fuck shit up, and the performance metrics reflect it. So, they start adjusting performance measurements to make the diversity hires look better, often to the significant detriment of the engineers as they stack non-deliverables in value. Yea, you delivered three major projects, but you didn't donate at least ten hours to our volunteering program because of that project crunch, soooo we're gonna have to put you on a performance improvement plan. Meanwhile, Dilator Dave over here remediated three incidents this quarter, and only broke the API once in the process, but volunteered 30 hours, so we're looking to fast track him to the next stratum for representing our ideals in this org.

Then, once cuts come, they just take the performance metrics of course, anything else would be risking lawsuits. Not their fault if the performance metrics say your bad at your job, they're just being applied fairly.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

Sure hope you're not building anything important on Azure. If they're laying people off from the "Azure for Operations" team, that means they're getting rid of their most experienced (i.e. most expensive) operations engineers. That is, they're getting rid of the knowledgeable and skilled staffers who keep the lights on, fix operational problems, put out fires, and generally keep the "cloud" alive.

Consider this your daily reminder that there is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer.

 

[Tealeaf]

Unrelated but, to the surprise of no one:

Having clear cut requirements is a luxury, uncertainty and unknowns are a reality.

If you have great requirements and turns out half of them were wrong or missing as you go and test the product in the real world, fixing them means you did an agile.

 

[Dragged Into Sunlight]

View attachment 6059603

https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2024-06-04-microsoft-announces-up-to-1500-layoffs-leaked-memo-blames-ai-wave

More on this:

View attachment 6059608

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/04/microsoft_plans_to_cut_about

Unrelated but, to the surprise of no one:

View attachment 6059610

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/agile_failure_rates/

As soon as the manager that forced Agile on us left, we dropped Agile fucking immediately and were better for it.

 

[TheRedChair]

I disagree. I've watched it happen first-hand. Yes, some dead weight is being shed as well, but they are absolutely getting rid of their highest-paid most experienced operations engineers.

Well I'm going to disagree with you somewhat. Since I also seen some of this shit go down.

You are right about getting rid of higher paying employees. You are also wrong on your comment on DEI. IMHO Corporations are getting rid of undesirables under the disguise of an economic down turn. This includes many of their new DEI hirings since they are newer hirings. Another legal excuse of course.

By the way these DEI hirings are getting more and more into Lawsuit Happyland... AND YES there is already laws in the books against this bullshit. Corporations are now understanding this problem.

Another reason why the woke mindset is getting a reset is... the age of free money is over as well as the average person is getting sick and tired of that sort of mindset. HUNDREDS of billions of dollars have been lost in for the past 3 years is because people are voting with their wallet.

So under the disguise of a "Weak Economy" many of the larger corporations are cutting the useless cunts making stupid ass big money.

80% of Twitter Employees are gone. Where's the crash? Not going to happen because like Twitter X and so many corporations in Silicon Valley land are fucking top overhead heavy.

Fucking corporate baby sitting factories for the fucking weak willed pussies are getting a second look. Not much but certain things are being evaluated.

So you fucking assholes who REEE so damned hard in Tech land...

Learn to weld mother fuckers.

 

[moocow]

80% of Twitter Employees are gone. Where's the crash? Not going to happen because like Twitter X and so many corporations in Silicon Valley land are fucking top overhead heavy.

Twitter is an edge case. It's a very simple product and infrastructure. The first implementation was literally just a MySQL database and a frontend server. Obviously now it's more complex, but it still doesn't take a lot of people to keep it running. It was mostly a day care center for useless libtards before Musk took over.

Azure, AWS, GCE and friends aren't nearly as simple. Slicing out 80% of the engineering staff at any of them would be fatal.

 

[Netizennameless]

Azure, AWS, GCE and friends aren't nearly as simple. Slicing out 80% of the engineering staff at any of them would be fatal.

No, not really. Azure, AWS and GCE are basically data centers full of VMs with a front end slapped on them for ease of use. It takes almost nobody to run the giant datacenters themselves and the technology behind "cloud" is a lot of smoke and mirrors. The hard work is in writing the drivers for the custom hardware being run in the datacenters, and those people aren't being laid off. There is nothing special about the azure team writing web applications that just call a bunch of APIs and display the data. That's why they are being laid off, the work is done for the most part and redesigning the UI every year is an unnecessary luxury.

 

[moocow]

No, not really.

Yes, really. Google's already dealing with it.

Remember Google Reader? Remember how they killed it, despite it being their most popular product after Gmail, claiming it "took too much disk space" to run it? The real reason they killed it was that there was literally nobody left in the company who knew how it functioned or how to fix it because a couple of its engineers had left on their own and they'd laid off the others. So it coasted on fumes until something important broke down and they knew they couldn't actually fix it (the pajeets they had on hand couldn't figure it out).

The same thing happens with cloud computing. I know "cloud" is just rented space on someone else's computers, but there's more to it than hardware drivers and an API. It takes engineering talent to build it and to keep it running. You can only cut so deep before stuff starts falling apart.

 

[Netizennameless]

Yes, really. Google's already dealing with it.

Remember Google Reader? Remember how they killed it, despite it being their most popular product after Gmail, claiming it "took too much disk space" to run it? The real reason they killed it was that there was literally nobody left in the company who knew how it functioned or how to fix it because a couple of its engineers had left on their own and they'd laid off the others.

https://www.androidcentral.com/heres-why-google-kills-so-many-its-projects

It got merged into google news and other existing products and was killed off as a standalone because it wasn't profitable. Nothing to do with "nobody in the company knew how it functioned". It can be the most popular app ever, but that's worthless to google if it doesn't make money.

Also, google has a culture of killing off popular apps. They do it time and time again and it's not because Google can't find people who can understand the code. That is and always has been their culture.

So it coasted on fumes until something important broke down and they knew they couldn't actually fix it (the pajeets they had on hand couldn't figure it out).

The same thing happens with cloud computing. I know "cloud" is just rented space on someone else's computers, but there's more to it than hardware drivers and an API.

There really isn't. The servers are not provisioned using anything unique to any of the cloud providers. Docker, Kubernetes, etc. are all existing products and are separate companies or separate from the cloud divisions anyway. That's where most of the "APIs" being called are actually from. The technologies that "the cloud" interact with are already supported independently because there is no meaningful difference between "cloud" and "on-prem" except where the servers are stored. The networking components used by the cloud are calls to existing APIs from existing infrastructure and require no special skills to interact with. Networking hasn't meaningfully changed in over 30 years.

It takes engineering talent to build it and to keep it running. You can only cut so deep before stuff starts falling apart.

People vastly over-estimate the amount of engineering talent it takes to build and run things. Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc. are well known for hiring talent simply to deny said talent to their competitors.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-over-hired-talent-fake-114331193.html

https://archive.ph/U2plG

Those days are over and the useless diversity hires + the overpaid lifers making $350k per year to code are not worth the output they produce. The developers that were worth $350k per year all left and either started their own companies or went to a start-up and got equity. Or they're not getting laid off.

With all of that said, I'll stop shitting up the thread now. I think part of this divide in our experiences is regional.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

With all of that said, I'll stop shitting up the thread now. I think part of this divide in our experiences is regional.

Its not shitting up the thread to talk through disagreeing with things, long as it doesn't devolve into folks acting like lolcows. I might disagree with you vehemently on the cloud stuff on the basis of my own experience and hands on awareness with the nightmare of Azures guts, but that doesn't mean I don't wanna hear what you have to say about the state of the industry and what you thinks driving it.

 

[moocow]

Its not shitting up the thread to talk through disagreeing with things, long as it doesn't devolve into folks acting like lolcows.

Nah mate FUCK YOU BOTH I'M RIGHT YOU'RE WRONG

j/k I love discussions like this, and it's good to have differing viewpoints on display. Maybe my view of cloud computing is tainted by my burning desire to watch Google and Microsoft burn to the ground in my lifetime, or by 30 years in the IT industry watching dumb people making dumb decisions that destroy good ideas and kill good companies leaving the dregs in charge of all the decent hardware.

Still glad to hear other perspectives though.

 

[Seething Troon Collector]

Maybe my view of cloud computing is tainted by my burning desire to watch Google and Microsoft burn to the ground in my lifetime

Looking at it objectively, utilizing cloud services makes sense when the adjusted cost basis for operating the infrastructure yourself exceeds what it would take to operate a similar service on infrastructure that you essentially rent.

Let’s use a complicated website, figure in the cost of the server over 5 years (add in maintenance agreements). Add networking, power, cooling, licensing and accessories required to operate the site. I’m not figuring labor costs since operating cloud infrastructure requires smart people who know how things work.

If annualized cost of serverless resource in pick your cloud provider of choice < doing it all yourself, it might make sense. That’s not to say every use case will work out this way and realistically a lot of use cases for on-prem still exist.

My frustration comes in with those dumb people you mentioned thinking that the cloud is the answer to everyone’s problems, they don’t do ROI or basis calculations, then get mad when they do the math and realize they overpaid by a factor of 10, then get mad at me for…some reason.

 

[DavidS877]

Looking at it objectively, utilizing cloud services makes sense when the adjusted cost basis for operating the infrastructure yourself exceeds what it would take to operate a similar service on infrastructure that you essentially rent.

One good reason for "Teh Cloud" is if you have bursty requirements. Say you're a retailer named after a river and you have a baseline for most of the year and then in the holidays you have big traffic spikes. Buy the baseline and rent the extra capacity instead of having it idle 300 days/year. Or rent your spare capacity out to others.
Online gaming would be similar. Launch month you need a ton, then it tapers off significantly for most of the crap released today.

But math is hard(tm).

 

[74164978231]

Looking at it objectively, utilizing cloud services makes sense when the adjusted cost basis for operating the infrastructure yourself exceeds what it would take to operate a similar service on infrastructure that you essentially rent.

Cloud rarely makes sense when you have a clear defined need thats going to be ongoing and need to support more than a minuscule service or handful of users. Its only benefit is the first few months to maybe a year are cheaper than building out/replacing/upgrading onprem infrastructure so short sighted managers think theyre saving money by going cloud.

Cloud shines though when you have unknown requirements. Dont know whats going to happen after your contract runs out? Dont know how many users are gonna be using your app/service? Dont know how fast youre business is gonna grow? Thats when it makes a lot of sense.

 

[Netizennameless]

Cloud rarely makes sense when you have a clear defined need thats going to be ongoing and need to support more than a minuscule service or handful of users. Its only benefit is the first few months to maybe a year are cheaper than building out/replacing/upgrading onprem infrastructure so short sighted managers think theyre saving money by going cloud.

Cloud is also valuable for disaster recovery/georeplicating servers. It saves the cost of a second off-site datacenter. It comes with the drawback of having your critical infrastructure be at the mercy of large corporations.