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.

 

[The Hardest R]

Is there a reason that all of these places lay-off 10% of their workforce? Is it legal reasons, or is my autism super-power recognising patterns where there are none?

A lot of corporate cost cutting starts off at 10%. They feel that it’s enough to make a difference but not so much that essential and critical functions cease to operate.

This is not based on anything scientific, it’s just pure gut feel, which is almost always wrong. It can never be equal across the board because some fiefdoms are protected, which means non-protected areas take the hit. Executive benefits like private jets obviously don’t count either. It’s why in practice these 10% cuts can be brutal and kick off a death spiral that many companies can never undo, even if those cuts are reversed.

 

[FedPostalService]

Fellow soulless corpo bros, have you noticed all the corporate discount schemes have been getting pretty rubbish?

Booking a holiday looking for deal through them and it doesn’t seem as good as it used to be.

Also, I used to get access to corporate discounts through the alumni scheme of former employers but they are just glorified recruitment sites now and have no other features?

Looks like everything is getting cut way back.

 

[The Bovinian Derivative]

Looks like everything is getting cut way back.

I work for a Souless500 and we had a bunch of small online self-learning courses on basic IT security shit like "don't click on suspicious links" and "really don't click on them." These courses were dolled out over the course of 2-3ish years, maybe around 20 in total. The first ones that came out had live action actors, 3d animations, narration, all that jazz. The last videos that came out earlier this year were PPT slides narrated by TTS.

 

[Ahriman]

 

[Seething Troon Collector]

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The wrong people are being laid off. Everyone in this retarded tiktok slop should get blacklisted.

 

[feral cat #6385]

If you don’t like it start your own management

No thanks. I'd rather do actual work, solve problems, get stuff done. And not be some worthless scum sucking parasite middle manager that schedules 5,000 worthless meetings, send out pointless DEI emails and not have a fucking clue about basic aspects of the business.

 

[The Hardest R]

Looks like everything is getting cut way back.

My globohomocorp business silently clawed back in 2022 all the additional perks they gave out in 2020-2021.

Of course we booked record profits each year over year but the last couple years has been about taking revenge for the few months employees had just a sliver of leverage.

 

[Snekposter]

What would you guess Dyson's salary was?

Considering that dude probably had a federal security clearance that went up to Top Secret as a result of being a chip designer for the US military? Around 400k. Master engineers like him are worth their weight in gold. Dude was one of the few capable of even trying to decipher some of Skynet's hardware.

 

[Ahriman]

Considering that dude probably had a federal security clearance that went up to Top Secret as a result of being a chip designer for the US military? Around 400k. Master engineers like him are worth their weight in gold. Dude was one of the few capable of even trying to decipher some of Skynet's hardware.

$400k in 1990 would translate to...

Adjusted for inflation! Holy balls.

His gig at Cyberdyne paid really fucking well, but like you said, he was reverse-engineering the T-800 CPU, that's no small feat.

EDIT: on the other end of the spectrum, we got Nedry, who got shafted by Hammond.

Dennis Nedry’s fate is even more tragic if you read the book. Hammond contracted Nedry and his team to build Jurassic Park’s system network, but kept making changes to the original design without compensation for the additional work. The plan was to shutdown the surveillance system, get the embryos, deliver them to the man on the dock and be back before anyone noticed he was gone. Nedry never meant for any of this to happen, he was always going to come back. All he wanted was fair compensation for both him and his team.

Funny how Hammond always said "spared no expenses", but he sure did with Nedry. A small mistake that unleashed a tragedy.

https://www.cyberark.com/resources/blog/prehistoric-security-controls-deconstructing-the-jurassic-park-insider-threat-incident

Moral of the story: NEVER underpay the Sysadmin grunt.

Jurassic OS in your browser:

https://www.jurassicsystems.com/

(https://www.jurassicsystems.com/about)

Some commands you can try:

access main security systems please
access main computer system please
access local security grid please
display zebraGirl.jpg
system raptor

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20140304-jurassic-systems/

 

[Snekposter]

His gig at Cyberdyne paid really fucking well, but like you said, he was reverse-engineering the T-800 CPU, that's no small feat.

T-800 CPU, and definitely had some very high security clearances considering it was for the military. That dude probably had a hell of a network connection to the Cyberdyne servers, or at least as much as the Feds would allow. The dude did take his work home, and that meant he needed remote access to run simulations and calculations on the mainframe. Tech guys like that pretty much wrote their own checks back in the day before corporations really started cutting corners and strangling their golden geese.

As to the books, I've heard things were even worse for Nedry because Hammond wanted the system to do one thing but asked for it to do something completely differently, and was shocked when it didn't do what he wanted.

 

[Ahriman]

Then there's also the gang in "Hackers". That movie has "Fast & Furious" levels of corniness, but I give it a pass because I grew up with it, at the time when I didn't know any better.

This scene hits different now - they have basically doxxed a glowie and are messing with his bank account, and sharing his phone numbers in all kinds of seedy faggot places, just to fuck with him. Pretty ballsy if you ask me.

 

[Begemot]

SF being so expensive to make it painful for the worker drones to live there via keeping them forever on the brink of financial ruin is a feature not a bug to Big Tech. This ensures that your work force is fully enslaved and never unionized or have a 100% neutered union since if they lose their job, they are irrevocably fucked and will be homeless or forced to crawl back to where they came from since they can't afford to live in the area while the company having hundreds of thousands of people clamoring for said person's job as far as them being replaceable.

The microsecond unions are brought up tech companies sound like Pinkerton-hiring robber barons instead of 'woke' workplaces.

 

[FedPostalService]

The microsecond unions are brought up tech companies sound like Pinkerton-hiring robber barons instead of 'woke' workplaces.

Weird that union members on here will unironically call others neighbour cattle without ever looking at their own behaviour

 

[moocow]

It looks like Redbox is going under (archive) along with its parent company Chicken Soup for the Soul (lol wtf?):

With the move to liquidate its assets, all of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment’s employees are now unemployed and will not receive severance or extended benefits. As of late June, the company said it had 1,033 employees.
...
Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment had failed to pay employees and vendors for at least four weeks prior to its Chapter 11 filing.

Bunch of rotten cunts. This is why loyalty to an employer is never worth it.

 

[Ahriman]

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-layoffs-dei-leader-email-2024-7

NO
LONGER
BUSINESS
CRITICAL

 

[Some Badger]

I’m seeing these layoffs bleed into animation as well, if only anecdotally . Paramount and also Nickelodeon’s office in Manhattan made cuts last month and killed off a bunch of UX and motion design jobs some alums from my SO’s school had been employed by. A few of them have even already moved out of the city and back to their parents in the suburbs. The situation must be really bad if there’s no incentive to stay and continue job hunting, but to be fair, I wouldn’t want to live in New York City either.

What I understand from this uptick in corporate design and animation layoffs is that a lot of these positions were created as the result of the last decade’s tech bubble. Rather than solely animation, a lot of money was being put into hiring designers to make interfaces for streaming apps and daily upkeep, so when these streaming services don’t make the projected returns that out of touch boomer executives were expecting, the fat and even the meat gets cut.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

What I understand from this uptick in corporate design and animation layoffs is that a lot of these positions were created as the result of the last decade’s tech bubble. Rather than solely animation, a lot of money was being put into hiring designers to make interfaces for streaming apps and daily upkeep, so when these streaming services don’t make the projected returns that out of touch boomer executives were expecting, the fat and even the meat gets cut.

Sort of lines up with what I see - In my experience, the constant hiring and use of design and animation people in digital product spaces is because execs are smoothbrained about a lot of tech. If you do a big major technical update or change or improvement to the service, but it looks the same? To them, its like you did nothing at all. So the User Experience has to be consistently and repeatedly reworked so you can show that off as part of the overhaul, to get signoff. Now that belts are being tightened, project managers can admit that the programmers can do code work that streamlines stuff to save/make money, without needing to pay for all the UI redesign people to churn the waters to make it look like you did something. Its meager savings, but everyones grasping for straws.

And to lurkers, yes, this is why your favorite things keep getting worse and worse UI changes forced on them that make little sense and often just annoying everyone for no good reason - Its a self serving smoke screen to try and give the engineers cover to do the actual work thats needed.

 

[TooManyKittens]

Indeed. As I've said before, a 4/10 schedule or hybrid 2-3 in office is getting essentially normal now. If you can't handle that, enjoy being outsourced to India or some other low wage place

So sure boss, here's the wagie deal...

You want good work done quick. Can do.
You want me to commute and be in office? Ok. But, I expect the return of coffee in break rooms. Fridge. Microwave. All that shit you removed during covid.

You want 9 to 5 solid? You got it boss.

But hey, that doesn't overlap with eu hours? Sorry man, rush hour traffic precludes that for my long commute, and its not like you wanna pay relocation or wage that covers living *in* the city.

Eu hour overlap doesn't get me answering west coast and far east questions? Well fuck man sorry. Work stays at the office. Can't have any of your super duper productive secrets on my unacceptable home office now can we.

Nope can't stay late to help west coast. Gotta schedule my life down to the minute now. You get 9 to 5. Besides can't the h1b west coast pajeets figure it out? You pay them more than me. It'll be fine.

Maybe the far east contractors can solve it. You do get 3 of them for every 1 of me. Pay wise. They look good on esg/dei shit. It's not my fault if they can't do the work.

I'm a good little wagie and you will get *exactly* what you're demanding. Butt in seat, normal hours, normal commute.

Why no I can't work tons at home, you've already said remote work isn't. So its not. Thems the breaks. If I can do it remotely we wouldn't be having this conversation about RTO would we?

 

[Terrifik]

2/4 -hopium but make sure to download all humble bundles you have
It is the same building but has different departments.

https://x.com/shinobi602/status/1815820657008975985

https://x.com/ethangach/status/1815810100465918269

 

[Jimjamflimflam]

2/4 -hopium but make sure to download all humble bundles you have
It is the same building but has different departments.

https://x.com/shinobi602/status/1815820657008975985

https://x.com/ethangach/status/1815810100465918269

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But where will I get 30+ shovelware indie pixel games designed by queer trans women of color to support queer trans women of color who code charities now?!