Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)?
If so, perhaps the layoffs are a good thing—in my experience, the worst tech companies to work for are those dominated by non-technical employees. Perhaps layoffs are being used as a blunt instrument to shift the balance away from that.
I guess working on your empathy skills and trying to understand emotions of others (instead of solely focusing on your own) might make your life easier.
I have met many engineers who thought along the same lines of “technology is the end and sales and product managers are the means to have me do whatever I want to code" and agree that these people struggled in environment focusing on "the customer".
I doubt, that "customer and product centric" companies will become less "customer and product centric".
A reason for the changes we are observing is less access to cheap capital which - as far as I can tell - will shift attention more towards "money, customers and products" and away from "engineering pet projects".
The most shocking thing to me I’ve observed during my career is how many good technologists lack empathy. I hazard it’s because the same neurological structure that optimizes for what makes a good dev/technologist is also what makes empathy and social skills lacking, very broadly speaking. You can learn/fake it with enough time and practice (I’ve met those who do), it just doesn’t seem to be that common of a hack.
A lot of people discover that they can get respect despite being an asshole if they're skilled enough.
You see this pattern of behaviour in all disciplines, but in tech it seems that social skills are less important than elsewhere so those types are attracted to the field, and we've also cultivated a culture that glorifies people who are assholes but are also visionaries - Jobs/Musk/Zuckerberg etc.
Being a visionary is mostly tied to having a budget line item for paying a PR firm that specializes in that kind of work. If you would like to be a visionary there's a whole fleet of companies over on Post St who would be happy to take your money and get your name in blog posts on Fortune and Bloomberg's website.
I am not a psychological professional, and I should keep my mouth shut, but I don’t believe this is terribly unique to the tech sector. I think this is more closely linked to institutionalized people. That is, people who spent long amounts of time in schools, the military, prison, and so on. These large organizations themselves lack empathy. A person formed by such a machine will begin to find that treatment normal and replicate that treatment. As many technologists are university graduates, they’d fall into this category of institutionalized people. It doesn’t help that many then get hired by megacorps which are also institutions.
Empathy doesn't seem particularly valuable in a work context. Wether I empathize with a non technical manager who creates more problems than they solve or not doesn't change the impact that person has on the people around them. Is it empathy that keeps someone like this employed? We tolerate their meddling and chaos because we feel bad for them?
Off the cuff, I observe people who have social skills also find social commercing and social power pleasurable in itself and desire the activity for that end as well, far more pleasurable than sitting around solving logic puzzles and factoring the solutions; maybe on the side, like someone who plays Sudoku, but not as something occupying their day.
Unless your mob or pair programming all day most of the week, the actual work involved is rather isolating.
I don't have programmer friends, my friend group has consisted of social people owing to a series of incidental factors that began late in high school. I was consistently the person first to be exhausted going into late night where they seemed to have a replenishing reservoir of energy.
One of the programmers I used to work with took an online personality test, and told us that it reported him having "less empathy than Stalin". He was a good programmer, though!
many years ago i signed up for an online dating site where i had to take a very long (maybe 200 questions) personality test. I reach the end and it says "due to your personality our services cannot help you" or something like that. That was a blow to the old ego heh.
/happily married for 13 years now with two kids so i guess my personality isn't that toxic heh
> Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)?
A lot of them were in "tech-adjacent" positions. PM, tech recruiters or evangelists, community managers, sales, DEI folks... At one point one layoff announcement had "returning to a healthy ratio of engineers to non-engineers" as a goal.
There is a wide mix of roles across most "tech" layoffs I'm aware of. HN only really surfaces the big figures and engineering/dev cuts, but there are a lot of business support folk being laid off _outside_ the tech industry as well, so I'd expect an even mix given a large enough sample.
From the original post, the next biggest category after “tech” is “Business & Professional Services“ at 24.2% of total (or 171 companies). This category includes - quoting the top few industries - financial services, business consulting, advertising services and recruitment.
With the exception of some financial services, these do not sound like industries whose companies have large internal IT presence.
The next largest categories are manufacturing/engineering, health, government, and energy. I agree that all of these fit your bill (government, perhaps less so).
I work for a construction company and there’s like 15,000 employees but only like 500 of us are software engineers (we’re outnumbered a lot by other engineers, obviously) It’s still enough people to fill up a nice sized building.
I've spent most of my career at places that most people here would classify as "non-tech" companies and have spent my time there working with programming, statistics and data analysis and data science research.
Hey, never said otherwise! Just wondering if non-devs are being laid off disproportionately.
For the record, I think layoffs of tech employees can also be a good thing (if done right, i.e. solely with respect to performance). Layoffs can be a great opportunity to purge underperforming dead weight employees en masse who have only managed to stick around because the process to PIP them is too onerous.
Sadly, performance did not seem to be the primary criterion for laying people off at many companies.
>Sadly, performance did not seem to be the primary criterion for laying people off at many companies.
That's because layoffs are meant to adjust headcount due to changing business conditions (budget, etc). If you're using performance as a criterion, the word you're looking for is "terminated for cause" or "terminated for performance".
That’s not necessarily the case, especially at smaller companies.
A friend of mine leads a department of ~20 people at a midsize company (~1000 employees). They were told late one afternoon that the company was announcing a 10% layoff the following day, that they needed to reduce their departmental payroll accordingly, and to submit a list of employees to lay off by next morning, using performance as the primary criterion for whom to cut. This was feasible and fair, since a manager of 20 people can know exactly how well each of them is performing. (In fact, the employees my friend ended up dismissing were ones they’d wanted to get rid of for a while, but didn’t quite meet the stringent criteria for PIPing, so it was actually a relief to be able to let them go.)
At bigger companies, layoffs cannot get decided with such granularity (decisions come from several levels above managers familiar with each and every employee being laid off), so individual performance is a much smaller factor.
Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)?
If so, perhaps the layoffs are a good thing—in my experience, the worst tech companies to work for are those dominated by non-technical employees. Perhaps layoffs are being used as a blunt instrument to shift the balance away from that.