Meta and Google Are Cutting Staff. Just Don't Mention Layoffs. – tech.slashdot.org

Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!
Nickname:
Password:
Nickname:
Password:
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Time to upcycle old nugets, such as:
o Right-Sizing
o Reduction In Force (Riffing)
o Optimizing Headcount
o Personnel Realignment
o Reorganize (Re-org)
o Restructure
Those are some I remember reading in the news when I was little, back in the Dark Ages of the 70’s – 80’s.
Anyone here remember more? Or perhaps lived through them? Or had parents that did?
^ The real answer.
Software product management has gone as bonkers as the rest of the country is in politics. It’s all about fads now. It’s like the Kardashians. Things are popular because they are popular. The micromanagement shit show that Agile has become. Jira, which does everything – poorly., git which now makes you focus on the plumbing of code updates instead of actually writing the code. Software development is now about closing tickets and getting across an imaginary goal line.
Newsflash: Most software developers got into it because they were introverts who liked puzzles. Many, most in fact, were not into team sports (i.e. collaboration). Software development is not a fucking football game.

Newsflash: Most software developers got into it because they were introverts who liked puzzles. Many, most in fact, were not into team sports (i.e. collaboration). Software development is not a fucking football game.
Damn well said! The growth of project managers was the beginning of the end. They starting hiring corporate douche-bags from business schools to manage development projects. Starting having to meet arbitrary goals that have nothing to do with successful software development. Don’t worry, we’ll fix that massive error in the first patch after release!!!

^ The real answer.
Software product management has gone as bonkers as the rest of the country is in politics. It’s all about fads now. It’s like the Kardashians. Things are popular because they are popular. The micromanagement shit show that Agile has become. Jira, which does everything – poorly., git which now makes you focus on the plumbing of code updates instead of actually writing the code. Software development is now about closing tickets and getting across an imaginary goal line.
Newsflash: Most software developers got into it because they were introverts who liked puzzles. Many, most in fact, were not into team sports (i.e. collaboration). Software development is not a fucking football game.
Since you brought up tooling, the first part can be blamed on the other thing. When you really like puzzles, it’s acceptable for everything to lean towards becoming a puzzle. Not exactly pulling the ladder up behind ourselves, but more like climbing the tallest, ricketiest ladders, and feeling just great about our accomplishment, so don’t dare attack my ladder! Because I identify with my git mastery, or Jira… terraform… agileness… k8s… dumbass cloud API or my OS and I’m personally attacked when
This is the most insightful thing I’ve read in a long, long time. I’m going to keep it in my “nuggets” file, properly attributed.
Redudnancies.
“Please don’t make me redundant.” –David Brent (The Office, UK)
Yah, that one I heard lots of when I got to the UK (’89-’91)
Along with very graphic descriptions of what people would do their PM of that era (I got there right before Thatcher quit). Ruin, Redundancies and Poll Tax were the hot topics of the day.
Made Redundant. Still has the same unpleasant hollow ring that ours does, too.
Euphemisms are for the weak of heart, or weak of mind. Why not call it what it is? Why sugarcoat it?
We let sales and marketing take over every aspect of our lives. They even market being fired with friendly sounding words at first glance that are, as you say, hollow.
My favorite (that I actually saw): “Involuntary separation from the payroll”. You’re not being laid off, we’re simply removing a row in a table.
[Cue obvious Milton jokes.]Here’s one:
“prioritized movement”
Employees in departments that are facing cuts are presented the option to move to other departments. Supposedly voluntary, but not.
Like the old bar closing time refrain: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
Time to upcycle old nugets, such as:
o Right-Sizing
o Reduction In Force (Riffing)
o Optimizing Headcount
o Personnel Realignment
o Reorganize (Re-org)
o Restructure
Those are some I remember reading in the news when I was little, back in the Dark Ages of the 70’s – 80’s. Anyone here remember more? Or perhaps lived through them? Or had parents that did?
I remember during the recession of the 1970’s, when many parents were losing their jobs, Sesame Street explained to kids that their parents were being “fucked up th
I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it.
Both Federal and State government have what are known as WARN ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… [wikipedia.org])
rules covering layoffs. This is the reason companies want to avoid saying the work “layoff”

Both Federal and State government have what are known as WARN ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… [wikipedia.org]) rules covering layoffs. This is the reason companies want to avoid saying the work “layoff”
It doesn’t matter what the company calls it, if it matches the legally defined definition [ecfr.gov], it’s a mass layoff.
Rsilvergun:

Everyone’s cutting staff
Also rsilvergun:

It’s not working because there’s still a ****ton of money to be made and you need staff to make it
Make up your mind, man!
And to counter your statement that Democrats make for more jobs, I can offer this:
1. Every time I’ve lost a job it’s been in a Democrat-president era (Dot-Com crash, and later an M&A during Obama’s reign)
2. Every time I’ve gotten a job, it’s been in a Republican-president era. This one I currently have, I got 2018.
Also rsilvergun:

“Plus the gov’t’s about to do a half trillion in long delayed infrastructure spending and that means jobs jobs jobs! “
This administration is driving the country squarely into ruin, and you expect some kind of WPA from them? With two years
Make up your mind, man!
But he’s right and there’s no contradiction. He’s saying people are being laid off and it’s not working for the companies doing it because there’s more need for employees than ever.
And to counter your statement that Democrats make for more jobs, I can offer this:
1. Every time I’ve lost a job it’s been in a Democrat-president era (Dot-Com crash, and later an M&A during Obama’s reign)
2. Every time I’ve gotten a job, it’s been in a Republican-president era. This one I currently have, I got 2018.
He’s right on that too, and your anecdote is about as useless as can be. You’ve been made redundant twice in your life, once at the end of the Clinton administration, and once at some unspecified time but likely the end of the Obama administration. You say you got your jobs during the next Republican president’s regime (which is why I think you likely got made redundant at the end of the Obama administration’s term) but unless you’re going to tell us you spent years looking for a job, that’d be while the effects of the prior, Democratic, administration were still being felt. You got your second job one whole year into Trump’s term? You think it had anything to do with anything he did? IIIRC, one whole year into Trump’s term he was still trying to punish legal asylum seekers and focusing on shit like that, not job creation.
So, uh two redundancies possibly affected by the Democratic administration’s policies (but companies do, even in the best economies, occasionally make people redundant) and you were rehired due to the prior Democratic admin’s policies.
But in any case, not only do your anecdotes bolster rsilvergun’s point, but you also don’t contradict them. So you were part of the handful of jobs created under Republican administrations. So what? Someone has to be!
What did Carter do for us? Double-digit interest rates. Energy crisis. Sound familiar?
Carter didn’t take any actions that lead to that, as any student of history is aware. He was unfortunate enough to be President just as we had an economic crisis caused by Nixon’s economics and 30 years of realpolitik resulting in some pretty pissed Arabs.
What he did do were concrete actions to deal with all of these. He couldn’t peg the dollar to anything stable any more, that ship had sailed (and was never done particularly well anyway, hence the crisis being even worse than it needed to be), so he focused on putting the right people in charge of the Fed, which used monetarist economics to deal with stagflation. He deregulated transportation, and set in motion serious attempts to deal with America’s dependence on oil, things his successor immediately overturned (gosh, how far sighted of Reagan, as our dependence on oil never caused anything else to go horrifically wrong ever again…)
Carter was one of the best Presidents the US has had, and his unpopularity is mostly the result of the fact he had to make difficult decisions during a major crisis, not because he did anything wrong. 90% of the positive stuff Reagan worshippers take credit for, like deregulation, were things Carter did and Reagan merely didn’t stop.
And what Clinton did was the setup for the 2008 disaster — all the sub-prime lending came crashing down. The short-term gains of his presidency ended up in a calamity.
Clinton had nothing to do with the 2008 disaster. Plus, guess who actually proposed and managed all that financial deregulation that you’re referring to. Who’s got at least one thumb and skips out on visiting his dying wife during her cancer treatment so he can be with his mistress? This guy, that’s who [insider.com].
In any case, Bush had the best part of seven years to act on sub-prime lending and didn’t. Why didn’t he? Unlike Clinton, he actually could see in real time what th

1. Every time I’ve lost a job it’s been in a Democrat-president era (Dot-Com crash, and later an M&A during Obama’s reign)
2. Every time I’ve gotten a job, it’s been in a Republican-president era. This one I currently have, I got 2018.
Repeat after me: Correlation is not causation.
Actually, repeat after me: Extremely small sample sizes don’t yield believable correlation coefficients.

Things like the ability to drag you back into the office and make you work unpaid overtime (or “quiet quitting” as they call it).
That’s not quiet quitting. Quiet quitting [gallup.com] describes what happens when an employee is disaffected to the point where they’re just trading their time for a paycheck without putting any real effort into doing the job, but not so dissatisfied that they leave for employment elsewhere.
What you’re referring to — making the job so unpleasant that the employee eventually gives up and quits, is called “quiet firing” and is an increasingly common strategy to avoid laying people off and having your unemployment insur
But they have power.
Why spend millions in layoffs when you can just persuade people (fear/panic) to quit on their own? Layoffs costs money and Meta is afterall a social media company and thus know a thing or 2 about social engineering. Google, then-some… That’s where “ruthless prioritization” comes in play. Old corporations used to call it “pigeon holing” (putting a employee in a dead end job hoping he’d leave on his own), and I’m sure Meta has put a faster, scalable, socially and more modern spin to it.
…don’t mention the layoffs!
It’s not a lay off. It’s a re-org.
Heard it first at my first job out of college (this company was a competitor to DoubleClick) when they started to lay people off in early mid 2001. Then after 9/11 everything went down hill. I myself was let go on Dec 7, 2001. The night before we had an unhappy hour and afterwards a bunch of us just came back to the office to pack up our things because a lot of thought we were going to go.
That date shall also live in infamy.
As a Google shareholder, I freaked when I saw the headline “Meta and Google are cutting staff”. But then there was no mention of Google.
The WSJ link is wsj.com/articles/meta-and-google-are-cutting-staff-just-dont-mention-layoffs-11663778729 but the article itself has the headline “Meta Quietly Reduces Staff in Cost-Cutting Push”. Sounds like the WSJ changed their mind.
However, the article does say “Google has required some employees to apply for new jobs”.
There may be more comments in this discussion. Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to turn on Classic Discussion System in your preferences instead.
Cutting Reliance on China, Apple To Move 25% iPhone Production To India By 2025 – JPM
Google Partners With Framework To Launch Upgradable and Customizable Chromebook
We will have solar energy as soon as the utility companies solve one technical problem — how to run a sunbeam through a meter.

source