"Engineers have been spoiled rotten for the last two decades[...] employers offered unlimited PTO"<p>In what world does unlimited PTO spoil engineers? It removes the companies liability for vacation days and shames employees into taking less time off.
The further I go into my career, the more see the it the opposite way. I think business people are overvalued compared with most software engineers. If software engineers take the time to learn the "business", they can build their own companies that eclipse those started by the typical MBAs who view engineers as "pampered and coddled" cost centers. I think after the bubble pops, we'll see new companies that led by engineers and creatives conducting orchestras of AI that will allow them end the need for the typical corporate business people.
IMO, these layoffs are not caused by AI or because Google suddenly doesn't need engineers. Instead, we're seeing at least four effects collide:<p>1. Growth can't last forever. Big tech is moving from an exponential phase to a sigmoidal one. Expect to see less spending and more focus on efficiency. It takes fewer people to keep the profit engine going than it does to build something totally new from the beginning.<p>2. What goes up must come down. Paradoxically, even though half of the world shut down, COVID led to a giant market boom. Head counts went up dramatically from 2020 to 2022. Tons of cash was thrown at the market.<p>3. 0% Fed rate is over (for now). It costs money to borrow money, and investors can get actual non-zero returns in a "risk-free" investment. Now companies need to justify their spending, reduce debt, and show returns that are commensurate with their risk in the new environment. Raising interest rates cools the economy precisely by forcing layoffs and cutbacks.<p>4. "R&D" (which includes a substantial amount of software engineering work) now must be capitalized and amortized over five years (at least in the US). This is a much less tax-advantageous position than existed before 2021, and new guidance in late 2023 made it clear that this applied to much of our industry.
Software engineering (and many other parts of IT) is at its core a creative process, and the “coddling” is what creates an environment where creativity becomes possible. You can’t get into the zone/flow if you’re constantly worried about who’s trying to screw you over, or when you feel you have a gun to your head about some metric you need to hit.<p>Of course those things are going to happen, this is <i>work</i> after all, but the idea is to try to reduce those things as much as possible. Many of those benefits are made with that goal in mind, and employee retention just follows from having a good environment. IT people are happiest when they can get into flow and work on something really cool, and will move to other companies who provide that environment.
This article is a roller coaster of the authors very mixed emotions and thoughts. It hits all the b-school tropes from "workers should be grateful for their employers not the other way around" to "retention is waste" while also saying how valuable engineering is and how the best companies they worked for had leaders that came with the exact mindset being attacked here. Add in a little "see how good of a writer I am" thrown in for flavor. The structured abuse makes the short blips of "I'm trying to help you" feel hollow and tacked on in response to someone's feedback on an early draft.<p>The funny bit is the article completely understands the problems, it just makes all the wrong conclusions. Aside from a "workers should be property" vibe, the author very clearly identified that modern business leaders think of engineering as magic, aren't taught anything about it in business school, and can't be bothered to learn about it. It is an absolutely bonkers idea that anyone running a software company doesn't need to know even the basic ideas underpinning their software.<p>Maybe, as an engineer, I have a very different view of what "leadership" is but this gives me the same feeling as an entitled kid inheriting dads business and being angry about the salary of the senior folks that make it work without even stopping to consider why they might make what they make or if it is a good deal.<p>Unfortunately there are lots of people who think and act this way. The author is right in some ways because of it - there will always be people who see someone getting paid well but don't understand the value of it and their response will be to try to knock them down a peg instead of trying to understand the why.
This is a re-run of the end of the first dot-com boom where the rest of the organisation got some payback against the pampered and coddled engineers who built the web sites in between foosball games. Except this time around when your engineers are able to create agents, what do you need the rest of the organisation for. Software is eating the world, and it's only just getting started.
And here I am thinking the rest of the workforce needs to be treated better, rather than using how poorly the rest of the workforce is treated as the ideal example to go by.
It is crazy the genuine anger that some senior leadership has over the tiniest most inconsequential perks like beer, ping pong tables, work flexibility, and not getting micromanaged to death. They worked their ass off getting up at 4am something something grind corporate ladder to get to play golf and go to sports games as work expenses and these entitled 20-somethings show up expecting to <i>not</i> get treated like shit and not have to kiss ass so hard it qualifies as a rimjob to get ahead? <i>The audacity!</i> It's unreal the amount of I suffered so you should have to as well.<p>It's so depressing how much leverage the SW engineering field needed to get treatment like how everyone should have always had it. The default is so skewed to employers being able to grind their employees to dust and getting thanked for it. Companies should be constantly worried about retention across all their positions and have to treat their employees well because of it.
This became a much more engaged conversation than I expected! I interpreted the writer as saying that<p>1. Communicating your value to other departments is a skill that you can learn<p>2. Learning how to do this lets you own the narrative within an organization<p>3. Owning your department's narrative is how "normal" work relationships work<p>4. That engineering hasn't needed to do this before is an anomaly<p>5. Now's a good time to learn
> They coddle rather than manage<p>At one of the gigs I had, the VP of Engineering was running the engineering department like your good uncle rather than actually managing it so it becomes a well oiled high performing department. And it showed. And not in a good way. It set the company back badly.
"The promise of AI put the nail in the coffin"<p>Statements that are so vague and so casually made as if they were fact simply sends my alarms ringing and makes me question both the intent and the arguments of the writing.<p>It is and different market, markets change over time. I think that's a non controversial statement.
This is one of the main reasons why incidents, outages, dev environment breakages need to be surfaces up to the C-Suite. Put a $ sign on all of them. Show that these are increasing over time - which it is always.<p>The CEO then asks, how can we make this better? The savvy CTO and VP says, we need more engineers and more headcount and retention to merely flatline the increase. Get the headcount and raises.<p>Do this every year because the nature of software is that it is not a spend == returns. It is a spend to even keep the lights on - it is a bespoke utility that builds your business and gets customers to pay you - thus requiring constant maintenance.
> In other words, a culture where engineers don’t need to do anything that they don’t want to do.<p>Wish I'd received the memo our "great engineering culture" was based on getting things done.
Developers as people are happiest when productive. A company <i>can</i> say you need to sit in the useless meetings, write the TPS reports, use the shitty desktop, and wait 12 weeks for IT approval to update packages like everyone else because this is the grown up world and you’re not special. This might be a social status regulation play, but crucially it’s not an efficiency or cost saving play. Developers like forward progress and the things they complain about are generally the time wasters.
<i>> Are engineers a bunch of spoiled, overpaid geeks who were long overdue for a reckoning?</i><p>will no one rid me of these meddlesome engineers?<p>ever since tech took off in business the C-suite has resented developers: we are overpaid relative to the other peons, we talk back and, above all else, we are physically ugly<p>first it was outsourcing, now it's AI<p>and yet, despite it all, the codemonkey abides
This article sort of gets it, but misses it in the end. Engineering essentially "works for" product management because the product is the value they provide, and the product people ultimately are the ones who defend the resources required to realize their plans. If you are an engineer, the person who goes to leadership with plans that require you to work is your number one internal advocate.<p>...and for what it's worth, presenting refactoring as a part of delivering on new development goals is the absolute truth.
> They’re strolling into conversations with their CFOs on ‘productivity’ with developer sentiment surveys in hand.<p>> Their teams are sitting ducks. It’s painful to watch.