Do you have any people in your company who could build what you need if given the time? Sometimes there are people who are pretty handy with coding who aren't called "programmers". They may be analysts or engineers or something like that. And is there anyone who understands the domain, has solid leadership skills, and at least a bit of tech skill, enabling them to serve as a project lead?
If you have both of these, you could conceivably use your existing staff to build at least a limited-functionality version 1, and backfill the jobs they used to do with new people. If not, you have the harder problem of needing to hire people to do something you don't know how to do at all.
It makes sense that Google would want to push jobs from high-cost centers to low-cost ones. The only question is why they haven't done so more aggressively.
That's funny because internally at Google this is what happened:
Step 1) Forced RTO for folks who weren't officially remote back to their HCOL offices. (Also, in some orgs, fully remote people were being told they're not going to get promoted).
Note that remote folk were getting paid less. They removed the ability to apply to go fully remote too effectively.
Step 2) Moving people to be closer in their "main offices" for their team. Again, inflating how much they need to pay.
Step 3) Suddenly, its fine to hire in lower cost of living areas, even though the team is now going to be split again.
The reason they gave for RTO was better inperson team work, but then are splitting teams again.
The pandemic proved that organizations can continue to function even if the workforce is distributed globally, plus visa processing in the US has basically ground to a halt due to systemic issues internally at USCIS.
This is the pandora's box that was opened by WFH and systemic incompetence in USCIS.
>The pandemic proved that organizations can continue to function even if the workforce is distributed globally, plus visa processing in the US has basically ground to a halt due to systemic issues internally at USCIS.
They realized this with the big offshoring boom in the late 1990s.
>This is the pandora's box that was opened by WFH and systemic incompetence in USCIS.
It is not. Companies have been offshoring as much labor as they feasibly can, and often more, for at least 3 decades.
> They realized this with the big offshoring boom in the late 1990s.
The productivity tooling we take for granted (Github, Zoom, Slack, Salesforce, high speed internet penetration) didn't truly exist in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
> It is not. Companies have been offshoring as much labor as they feasibly can, and often more, for at least 3 decades.
Absolutely, and we've done it as well, but the pandemic was a major forcing function in the tech industry to show that you can still retain your employees whose visas renewals got stuck in the system or rejected, but still want to work for you.
A mix of coincidences (rise of Productivity SaaS, a global pandemic, Twitter mass layoffs yet semi-functional operations, extremely slow visa processing by USCIS) has caused a systemic shift in the tech industry.
A lot of old timers think it'll eventually get better - but it won't for new grads. New grad hiring has functionally stopped, because that capital can (and has) been better deployed abroad now.
This is not to say the industry is dead - if anything it's growing - but the barrier to entry is going to be much higher now. You can't just be a dropout from Spokane and finagle your way into a 6 figure entry level dev role anymore.
>A lot of old timers think it'll eventually get better - but it won't for new grads.
It will, just have to wait for the next hype train. Long live the hype train. Toot toot!
I'm an old timer, so take that for what it's worth.
New grads have to do their part. They can't just coast through college and think some company is going to hire and train them up just because they have a degree and no drive.
We've been hiring for a year now and there's a whole lot of people with no drive, no ambition, don't feel the need for self improvement via side projects, etc. I always had a side project going on to learn new stuff. It's table stakes.
If there's one piece of advice I could give to new graduates is that. Give a shit about your career. Always be improving on your own time. Otherwise you'll be one of millions of people who got into tech for the money and got pushed out during a culling like we're currently going through. If you can't hack the hacking, get into QA, it pays pretty ok too.
> New grads have to do their part. They can't just coast through college and think some company is going to hire and train them up just because they have a degree and no drive.
I fully agree with you! No one should be complacent.
> Always be improving on your own time. Otherwise you'll be one of millions of people who got into tech for the money
EXACTLY
> If you can hack the hacking, get into QA, it pays pretty ok too
This is the issue - relatively meritocratic entry level roles like Support Engineering, QA, SRE, ITOps, etc have been offshored (eg. at my last employer, we completely offshored TAM and L1 Support Eng), because of a mix of cost savings and a lot of us old timers don't mentor as much.
What if you’re a new grad that does have drive? You might still end up in a situation where all the experienced people want to work from home, and half of them are offshore anyway.
Yeah, it's not hard to find knowledgeable commentary to the effect that the duty of directors to act in the interests of the shareholders does not mean a simple-minded duty to maximize profits. The interests of shareholders are complicated, and boards can make nuanced decisions about short-term vs long-term profits, risks, reputation, and such things that are difficult to capture using financial reports.
"There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and 'shareholder value' — even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: 'Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.'"
"Serving shareholders’ 'best interests' is not the same thing as either maximizing profits, or maximizing shareholder value. 'Shareholder value,' for one thing, is a vague objective: No single 'shareholder value' can exist, because different shareholders have different values. Some are long-term investors planning to hold stock for years or decades; others are short-term speculators."
"More to the point, corporate directors are protected from most interference when it comes to running their business by a doctrine known as the business judgment rule. It says, in brief, that so long as a board of directors is not tainted by personal conflicts of interest and makes a reasonable effort to stay informed, courts will not second-guess the board’s decisions about what is best for the company — even when those decisions predictably reduce profits or share price."
> He is considered one of the most savvy and aggressive tech ceos out there
By whom? I used to work at Snowflake, and from what I remember people on the inside were far more excited about the founders than they were about the CEO.
I got the impression that he was meeting expectations for the CEO job, but no more. Though that's a pretty high bar, given position of the company and the industry.
I don't know about that. Companies generally do regular performance reviews, so there should be a lot of information about who the underperforming or merely adequate workers in each group are.
Performance reviews degenerating into assessment of "politics and networking" skills, as GP put it, is more common than people care to admit.
Objectively evaluating performance of somebody who is smarter than you is incredibly hard, and sliding into using "s/he is a nice person" metric instead, is an easy way to avoid that hard work.
This is really difficult to do. Ratings tend to be done mentally by managers by comparing peers. Meaning every group has top and bottom performers. It ignores the fact that the absolute level of performance of each team is likely very different. The bottom performer of a top performing team could be way better than average. Will that be caught, who knows? The inverse is also true. That someone shitty is on a great team and it's hard to observe that.
There are likely a lot of downsides to their PSC system, but Meta is way more rigorous than this. They take performance reviews written by the employee themselves, reports, peers, managers, and calibrate them in meetings involving peer managers and several levels of managers above.
It's probably one of the more rigorous systems in the tech industry that at least avoids this kind of bias, though there are certainly ways it can be gamed.
Why don't they already do something about the low performers without needing such an initiative? What I've read about layoffs also implies that its not necessarily only the low performers who are let go, that it can be quite random which I don't understand -- why would a company randomly let people go if it has information about who are its lower rung performers?
Facebook has only hinted that they have to trim headcount. Literally everything else in this article is pure speculation - no one knows what the actual process will be.
More than likely Facebook (sorry, Meta) will probably do it by team and trim underperforming departments. A low performer in an important department is probably more likely to stick around than a high performer in a money pit.
I doubt the really top companies -- top 10, say -- have any trouble finding staff, at least for low-level positions. These companies are mobbed by applicants, and can afford to pay top rates. But I can believe things are rather different farther down the totem-pole of prestige. How far down do you have to go before hiring becomes really difficult, and you can't just pick the top of the crop, but rather have to make do with questionable workers?
Netflix is the #6 internet company by market cap. Probably no problems there.
> I doubt the really top companies -- top 10, say -- have any trouble finding staff
Amazon’s recruiters have been particularly aggressively lately. Especially since their culture causes them to churn through people so quickly, they must have trouble finding staff at this point.
I don't for a minute believe this number is actually true. But on the other hand, it seems like a very strange lie to tell, because it's so unbelievable. It would be far easier to believe a claim that COVID deaths are simply very rare but not actually non-existent. That would be the sensible lie, the canny lie.
It's tempting to believe that the Chinese government just doesn't give a damn what people think, and are therefore willing to say anything at all. But if they really don't care, why lie in the first place?
The only interpretation that I can come up with that makes sense is that a) the government of China is reluctant to admit to any fault at all, b) the actual number of deaths is low but not impressively low, and c) the Chinese press (including social media) is very tightly controlled, and d) by b and c the government can get away with saying there are no deaths without looking like idiots.
A lie you want me to believe is an admission of weakness. You're effectively saying you're ashamed of telling me the truth. Claiming zero deaths is a lie you don't want me to believe. You want me to know you're lying. It's half "none of your fucking business", half "what are you going to do about it?"
It doesn't start this way... but it becomes this way once the reality of a dysfunctional chain of reporting begins to send you progressively less less believable reports. Past a certain point... you have no choice, your left with "play it as a power move" and "admit failure". Thats the most likely chain of events.
I don't think it's an actual lie, maybe more incompentence.
Western governments don't try to lie about it (I hope) and they still underestimate the real numbers by ~50%. China shockingly doesn't publish (perhaps they don't even have that data) excess deaths for the whole country and they never did.
So it's impossible to try and figure it out from there. They are doing some serious mental gymnastics (
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/01/china/china-birthrate-202...
) about changes in birth rate to explain change in total population though. So, perhaps there are more excess deaths there as well
Considering that URSS named whole space missions only when they succeded, and they failed quite often, it's quite believable that China could lie on this number, a task that requires only to "hide" people and Chinese Communist Party is quite good at that.
I think it's the Russian tactic of trying to coarsen debate with the aim of people not knowing what to believe so they tune out of politics ("all politicians lie").
Somehow this hasn't really sunk in in the West, but China basically ended its pandemic by April 2020.
There has been no sustained local transmission within China since then. There are small clusters of cases that occur when the virus somehow breaches the border protections (e.g., 3-week quarantine for all incoming passengers). There's a very quick reaction whenever this happens, and the outbreak is ended within days to weeks.
The Xi'an outbreak, with 2,000 cases in total, is the most serious outbreak China has had since April 2020. There are small cities in the US with more cases than that every day. Exponential growth is brutal, so China can remain at ultra-low numbers, as long as it detects and contains outbreaks early.
That's why there have been only a handful of deaths (contrary to the title of this thread, there have been a few reported deaths) since April 2020.
There are plenty of people here on Hacker News who either live in China or have friends/family there. It just seems to be the people who don't have any contact with the country who have a hard time believing what's going on in China. I sort of understand: China's pandemic experience has been so different from that of the West that it can be difficult to accept as reality.
the way Chinese government works is that thousands of local municipal level governments implements and then reports into the central government (politburo).
this basically becomes a huge prisoner's dilemma, no body in charge wants to look bad.
Let's say I get a math text book published in China. In the first page it prints 1+1=2.
I don't for a minute believe this equation is actually true. But on the other hand, it seems like a very strange lie to tell, because it's so unbelievable. There are too many digits to select, why do they choose 2? It would be far easier to believe a claim that 1+1=11.
It's tempting to believe that the Chinese government just doesn't give a damn what people think, and are therefore willing to say anything at all.
The only interpretation that I can come up with that makes sense is that they just choosed the mose closed digit after 1 without looking like idiots.
Guess what? If you find a state which is too unbelievalbe to be a lie, it has a very big chance that it is not a lie, unless you really get a evidence to against it.
I am sorry be emotinal if you are really seriously to anaylis. However just because you are probably seriouse, I really want to points out you are in the wrong way. When you are driving in highway and find a sign sys 'WRONG WAY GO BACK'. You should go back, but not turn left, breaking roadbed and drive to the wild field.
Around Feb 2020 at the peak of then Wuhan, there was an accidental reporting on one of the news channel there showing 200K death. Even subsequent body bags order urgently from Taiwan seems to account for that huge numbers. And many reported for days the sky has strong ash smell, with all crematorium working non-stop for months. It is possible the numbers are in millions as there is also reported telco subscribers lost a lot of subscribers there in the range of millions. Considering health care in China sucks if you're in rural and about 40% still in rural, plus babies died because refused admission to hospitals for hours, many believes death number are way higher than those in USA and EU. Even today, China own education system don't mention much death of "great leap forward" which actually put Mao way ahead of Hitler in death counts.
The problem I see with various flavors of Agile is that they don't fit in particularly well with how things actually get done at companies.
For example, teams running Agile are very reluctant to give both a delivery date and a fixed set of features. They're willing to promise one or the other, but not both. And that's a problem, because the whole rest of the organization really wants to know when they can announce the release to customers. Planning for releases tends to be a really big deal, the pressure to make promises of both functionality and delivery dates is very strong.
Also, Agile methodologies tend to assume you are in close contact with the customer, who can tell you what they actually want and decide how things should work. But this is rarely the case; typically you have a PM or something like that who is in touch with the customers, and is supposed to understand what they want. But this person is rarely senior enough to actually make decisions; important decisions are made by a dev manager or a project lead or someone like that, with the PM just providing input and perspective.
Finally, Agile has this notion that everything is supposed to be handled informally, verbally, person to person. And that's fine for small tweaks to the product. But as soon as you start building something big enough that it takes months and crosses team boundaries, it gets really useful to have an actual document explaining how something is supposed to work. Such a document is an invaluable record on what has actually been decided, and anyone joining the project or wanting to contribute to it absolutely should read it. But Agile tends to discourage creating such documents in the first place.
Given that Agile clashes so hard with how actual organizations get things done, it rarely gets adopted in anything approaching a pure form. The practices that tend to get picked up might be called Agile-light: sprints, daily meetings, and task estimation in points.
The fundamental insight behind what became agile is that it isn't actually possible to have both a guaranteed delivery date and a guaranteed set of delivered features. The reality of software development just doesn't allow it.
Businesses don't "get things done" by operating as if they can have both. That's why projects fail, businesses cut corners, and then inevitably ship broken products or don't ship at all.
Most of the "agile methodologies" are nonsense dreamt up by borderline con artists attempting to sell their services. The fact that it's an either / or choice - and that nothing can get around that choice - is inherent in the nature of the work.
I agree with you that it is not possible to both fix the feature set and fix the delivery date and expect to consistently succeed. But it is also not possibly to tell upper management, who are dealing with a whole other set of difficulties, that they have to pick a feature set or a delivery date and that's all there is to it. If you do that, they'll reject your advice, and find someone else who'll give them a more palatable message.
The best I can come up with is the notion of a double contingency plan. Engineering agrees to a set of functionality to be delivered and a delivery date. This is inevitably going to be a bit optimistic, because people consistently overestimate themselves.
To deal with that, the first contingency plan addresses the question of what should be done if things are not converging to the ship date. The plan here is to keep the ship date, but ask hard questions about what bits of functionality actually need to be kept. What are the actual P0 - MUST HAVE features?
The second contingency plan addresses what is to be done if the first one fails. At this point engineering has already done all they can. They have pushed as hard as they can, and they have deferred every feature that is deferrable. They are down to the actual MUST HAVEs. Now the rest of the organization has to figure out what to do with a product that is inevitably going to be late. What is the alternate ship date? What customers are going to be really unhappy. And so on.
It seems to me any large engineering project should think out these contingency plans in advance. What will they do if making the deadline starts to look daunting? And what will they do if making the deadline turns out to be impossible?
> Also, Agile methodologies tend to assume you are in close contact with the customer, who can tell you what they actually want and decide how things should work.
Yes. Kinda :) But the issue isn't want. The friction is actual make-an-impact business needs.
It's easy to sit around a conference table and spitball wants. But trying to bin that person or group down to specifics as well as resolve disconnect and inconsistencies between the ideas and faces go blank.
Customers want the luxury to spit out wants without having to take the time to knuckle down and do the hard work of defining needs. They have a "you figure it out" attitude. That leads to assumptions. And assumptions lead to dysfunctional product / features, for which the engineers get blamed. Again.
Agile is a worthy solution to this problem, but when IT is treated as a service provider and not an equal partner the tool (i.e., agile) gets mutated to a point it's not truly agile anymore.
Here are the current number of deaths per million from COVID for the G7 nations:
Japan - 119
Canada - 696
Germany - 1,093
France - 1,704
US - 1,876
UK - 1,886
Italy - 2,118
Judged by this metric, Canada came second among the major first-world democracies. We did well. To be sure, there were missteps. We should have done better. But we could also have done a whole lot worse.
If you have both of these, you could conceivably use your existing staff to build at least a limited-functionality version 1, and backfill the jobs they used to do with new people. If not, you have the harder problem of needing to hire people to do something you don't know how to do at all.