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

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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:

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

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All in all, rough seas ahead for the techbros.
 
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Flatline said:
Those trackers are helpful, but watching videos of people seething is always better. It's always fascinating to see the kind of person who thought recording and posting their meltdown online was a great idea.
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Trackers don't tell you which divisions/branches are being cut either. Firing people in HR is very different from firing people in programming.
 
Kuritan Deplorable said:
Its cyclical, devs use one until it 'does something bad' then move on to a new favorite, and repeat as new models are released and the community cycles back into the earliest failed model with a new version and go "this is my new favorite". They're all in the OpenAI position at one point, just trading the bag.

However, Anthropic has kept their focus and therefor spend much more narrow, trying to maximize specific potential use cases and not just make an everything machine, and Google has a vastly higher ability to soak AI operational losses. When they hold the losers bag, it only hurts, rather than kills. OpenAI is going full blown retard with their spending, haven't excelled anywhere and put way too much of that revenue into use cases that haven't panned out all over the place, and generally just mismanaged their finances. When they get handed the losers bag its an existential threat because those optics are the only thing keeping them afloat with investors.

The fact that OpenAI now wants to advertise to paying users is probably going to be the fatal shot for them though. Nobody in the history of advertising has "handled it well", and when their subscriptions are still in the same ballpark price as their competitors who aren't doing that, they're basically betting against god and google that everyone else will see their ads as the chance to join in, rather than the chance to murder a competitor by staying out. The only player in the field that'd probably do so is Microsoft, in their infinite blindsight, and nobody likes copilot for a reason.
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Microsoft owns OpenAI. Their spend is Microsoft's spend, but with a different line item. Anthropic just lost their government contracts for trying to put restrictions on the military, and OpenAI is the only viable replacement. Literally nobody uses Gemini.
 
TJT said:
Well I think I have a new one for everyone here. I have worked as a SWE for going on 20 years. I recently accepted a new position for a huge pay increase among other things.

One of my offboarding tasks is to create an AI Agent of myself and give it a bunch of docs of the institutional knowledge I have acquired in my time at this company. Nobody has any idea how to do this, but the order to make this part of offboarding came down from C-Suite. Nothing prevents me from making it an AI Agent for the intricacies of 40k lore or just giving it technically sound but totally incorrect information to ruin the next devs forced to use it. Both would be lol.

I suspect y'all may need to get used to this.
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Tell them to fuck off after getting your last paycheque
 
FedPostalService said:
Serious question, why are these guys employees and not contractors? They're all on short time projects and there will be points they're barely needed at all? You hire them as contractors and you pay them a few grand extra in wages, but you save that on the backend, plus it avoids all the union nonsense. I know a couple of contractors who worked in gaming so it's not like it's unheard of.
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Microsoft did that, then the contractors sued Microsoft because they didn't have the same benefits as Microsoft employees despite working for many years. Because of that, Microsoft switched to contractors on a 18 month cycle. It's (one reason) why Halo Infinite took a lot longer to come out as they had to continuously train new contractors on the engine and tools. It's also why everyone is switching to Unreal Engine. If you use that as a common base, then you don't have to train new contractors on your unique game engine.


blargenheimer said:
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Your Jira ticket has been... Closed.

Ahriman said:
View attachment 8714336

...Because they can.
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Better question is why are they firing people and still applying for H-1Bs.
Why are they allowed to use H-1B and OPT labor when computer science relayed degrees have the highest unemployment rate.
 
indomitable snowman said:
Why are they allowed to use H-1B and OPT labor when computer science relayed degrees have the highest unemployment rate.
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Because sweaty they should have just read their crystal ball 15 years ago and decided to go get an MBA and Psych degree instead, not our fault Ranjeesh has fifteen degrees and is willing to work weekends + holidays.
 
indomitable snowman said:
Better question is why are they firing people and still applying for H-1Bs.
Why are they allowed to use H-1B and OPT labor when computer science relayed degrees have the highest unemployment rate.
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...Because they can. For the average American, and probably even politicians, it will come as a surprise that a near zero part of H-1B (and OPT) requires that they employ Americans first. The vast majority of employers can apply for as many H1-Bs as they want, including fees, and will get as many as the cap and lottery allows, unrestricted. Only "dependent" employers with 15% or more of their workforce being comprised of H-1B have additional regulations. Others like Amazon have such a large amount of American warehouse workers that they will never reach that percentage with just H-1B corporate workers. The "dependent" employers are thus basically only the infamous small and large Indian staffing firms that bear most of the legal burden and which American workers rightfully will not touch, and a select few others like Facebook, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Visa, Paypal, eBay, and Tiktok. Of the additional regulations, those specific companies can't lay someone off and within 90 days replace them with an H-1B worker, and they must "take good faith steps" to recruit an American, which there is no hard requirement on how exactly they do so, and so there is next to zero enforcement because their lawyers aren't usually retarded. The new $100,000 fee, though they could easily afford it over a six-year employment period, has mainly just led to these companies, aside from the overall downsizing that pleases the shareholders, are scrambling for the remainder of H-1Bs and F-1/OPTs still within the country, as well as switching to abuse L-1, O-1, and possibly EB visas, all of whom which will be even more desperate to please their corporate green card overlords, another program which is, while stronger, also negligently enforced.
 
Kier Starmer said:
I still don't know how the fuck Dell is still afloat.
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I bought a laptop from Dell once and both the monitor and battery stopped working in about 3 years and I had to remove the battery to get it to even turn on. Meanwhile I have laptops over a decade old without these kind of issues and the batteries that are somehow in better condition.
 
Kier Starmer said:
I still don't know how the fuck Dell is still afloat.
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Corporate contracts. The consumer side business is just the second hand parts of the corporate side, where they're still an absolutely huge supplier of "good enough for cheap enough" hardware. For the supermajority of business users who just need windows, office and outlook, and maybe some browser based SaaS tools on the side, their device+support contracts are certainly affordable, in so far as their competitors go. Past a certain org size, hardware acquisition and refresh becomes a big deal with a big price tag and that's when they come in to play. Corporate doesn't really care about a laptop maybe lasting ten years, they care about having a reliably known fixed cost and duration for the whole fleet of hundreds to last, and to have a good idea well in advance exactly how much it'll cost to refresh the fleet. I've got data on every laptop in our fleet of thousands, down to the exact day that the base dell service warranty expires, and how much it'd cost to extend it to a further date and what that date would be for stubborn higher echelon users who refuse hardware refreshes. I know what we're getting from Dell down to the individual serial numbers months before they even arrive so I can preload our system, and they've never fucked it up.

Dell keeps afloat by doing a good job at servicing the business needs that involve a computer, rather than just excelling at the computer itself, and it pays off.

Its also why you can reliably find masses of second hand dells in just about any city on a reliable schedule. Once you start a refresh, its easier to sell them off for cheap just to avoid paying to properly recycle them or dealing with fishing out the ones that still have legs. If you also just need a browser with a keyboard, a corporate surplus dell for a couple hundred bucks is honestly not too bad, and while its harder to find towers in the corporate world, second hand towers make for a decent starting point for baby's first home media server.
 
Kuritan Deplorable said:
Dell keeps afloat by doing a good job at servicing the business needs that involve a computer, rather than just excelling at the computer itself, and it pays off.

Its also why you can reliably find masses of second hand dells in just about any city on a reliable schedule. Once you start a refresh, its easier to sell them off for cheap just to avoid paying to properly recycle them or dealing with fishing out the ones that still have legs. If you also just need a browser with a keyboard, a corporate surplus dell for a couple hundred bucks is honestly not too bad, and while its harder to find towers in the corporate world, second hand towers make for a decent starting point for baby's first home media server.
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And all of that despite their weird proprietary PSUs.
 
Kuritan Deplorable said:
"good enough for cheap enough" hardware.
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It's not just that. A lot of gaming studios use Dells for the dev machines. Seeing high end GPUs and CPUs shoved inside of horribly designed cases with terrible airflow and tiny 60mm (or smaller) fans trying to cool it just makes you feel bad for the hardware. Plus it just ends up making it sound like an aircraft taking off whenever the fans ramp. They're definitely doing it for the service contract so they can outsource that part to dell rather than worrying about the hardware entirely in house. Though it seems like internal IT still has to handle a lot of it. So, I really don't understand why they do it.
 
When I did IT contracting the boss put every client he could on Dell and planned replacement of all PCs/servers every 3 years. Had them all pay for Dell pro support. Think it was all just $$$. Getting a big replacement contract was more desireable than meagre 'maintain our shit' and Dell is a recognizable name. Budget-approval friendly
 
Drunken Fox said:
Though it seems like internal IT still has to handle a lot of it. So, I really don't understand why they do it.
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Salesmanship, and the fact that it is generally a good deal for business. Dell's contract and negotiation teams earn their keep, I can tell you that much, they know exactly how to present the variable costs and risks of self inventory against the fixed costs of "we'll handle all that and just give you machines and take back bad ones". Having your local IT be reduced to handling machine assignment, RMA's, and software issues that can be fixed on site means fixed, predictable costs for the business. Computers are an overhead, not a goal, they just want them to work. Having a guy who can run weird frankenlaptops is great until that guy gets a better offer, and then your entire fleet is fucked. Same with the relative manpower spent on individual deal hunts and small batch acquisitions. The stuff internal IT deals with becomes more the inventory and asset management side of things, making sure you know who has a given laptop, that you get it back when they're gone, that you have spares in your various manned locations in case of failures, that the appropriate bios updates are applied to inventoried machines that aren't deployed, etc. All stuff that isn't realistic for Dell to manage for you anyway.

The contract 'bloat' is also often not even seen as bloat, but as better than the alternative. If the dell contract introduces a $10,000 overhead, but corporate accounting considers manpower to be 'worth' $100/hr for internal accounting, then anything that takes more than a couple weeks for one dude to deal with is worth less than spending that time somewhere else. Its also why there's basically no point to in house repairs, the laptops are a few hundred dollars a unit, and anything more complicated than trivial maintenance is quickly not worth the cost. Some places might have a value closer to $50/hr for the deskside team, but those ballpark "I fucking wish I got paid that much" numbers are the lifeblood of higher echelon decision making.

Drunken Fox said:
A lot of gaming studios use Dells for the dev machines.
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Gaming studios, specifically the people who actually need better than a dell like the Artists and some (not all) of the programming team makes up a fraction of a fraction of the addressable market. And even inside EA and the other players out there, a significant number of their machines are still just running basic software. Managers and project leads, leadership and HR, Finance and Marketing, None of them need much more than a mid grade Latitude. The actual 'high spec' users are the exceptions, and it once again works 'well enough' for their needs. Who cares if the things gonna scream to death and cook itself in two years, put on some headphones when baking the lightmap, and swap it for a ready unit that we'll just reimage your shit onto from the cloud backups and get back to work, we will RMA the fried one.

thyme said:
Think it was all just $$$. Getting a big replacement contract was more desireable than meagre 'maintain our shit' and Dell is a recognizable name. Budget-approval friendly
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Budget approval is a big element, when you're asking big bucks instead of trickling out a few machine buys here and there, you end up with director and VP levels involved, not the 'normal' finance penny pinchers that'd flag IT for weird and irregular spending, which they fucking hate. And sales people know how to convince executives on the merits of fixed costs, even if they're higher. Its easier to budget for "We'll definitely spend $80,000" than "Well we might spend $80,000, but we might also only spend $40,000, but its possibly we go up to $100,000 if we lose the silicon lottery this year". Asking for money and not spending it is a great way to get fucked in corporate finance, because if you do get approved for $80k and then only end up spending $40k through a combination of luck and good hardware maintenance, then great - next year your hardware budget is $40,000, because you proved you can operate at that level. Good luck, fucko, your miracle performance is now the expectation, because you are an overhead and not a revenue generator, and so taking that $40k and giving it to the guys who actually make the money was always the goal.
 
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