I did used to work for a consulting firm about a decade ago, and I was leading a staff augmentation project with another company and I was once chastised for saying "hey guys" in a chat because there were women in the group. I was encouraged to use "y'all" but not wanting to sound like I was from the south, I just used "peeps" which was somehow okay.

I'm all for inclusive language but I thought that was a bridge too far.

In the last few years, I ended up at a bigtech co through an acquisition, and had been someone who was a go-between for solving issues across teams by having a good understanding of everyone else's codebases, tests, build processes, deployment, infrastructure etc. This papered over the culture of siloed development, refusals to think beyond single services etc. I would submit tests and patches, along with tickets describing the bug, impact statement, fix, test coverage, risk, and make myself on-call or directly supervise deployment, etc.

Attempting to continue that in an org x25 larger was met with people firing off angry emails to executives saying their authority was being undermined and made to look bad, when long standing issues were made trivial and fixed by "someone they had never met before", and wherever they came from can they please go back to. I have no idea what a lot of these people were spending so long doing, their commit history was often full of changes that would make you go think "???". I guess it's lucrative to run out the clock year after year on a 180k package, attending meetings where you argue that things are difficult and lets meet again in 3 months? After becoming highly visible for bringing things to attention, I was offered a package to leave, I assume so they could go back to a culture of top down authority and silence.

IBM, GE... how many former American giants failed to evolve.

I go back to this article on the failure of US steel: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno...

Perhaps what you perceived as someone being emotional was actually someone who spent a long time barely functioning due to things that have been happening in their life, and that small event just so happened to be a straw that broke the camel's back.

People around you are going through stuff. Everyone is. Someone's stuff is easy to carry, someone else's stuff isn't. "Back in the day" people also carried their burden with them. This is nothing new. Perhaps you never noticed because so far everyone you dealt with was great at masking, and desperately want to avoid having to see coworkers like you worsen their burden by doing what feels like kicking them while they are down.

Like how "the boys" in engineering would made jokes about having sex with the female office manager in the middle of meetings. It was only a great time for certain people.

It may be a bit controversial, but I believe the male tectonic shifts going in right now under our feet are also driving much of the shift regarding “immigration” because billionaires don’t need immigrants as much anymore and they’re also causing systemic problems in things like the housing market. In fact from what I’m hearing, there is concern that immigration is now becoming a potential cost due to the major changes in society rather than a profit center by scaling up marginal returns from every immigrant you can import by hook or crook, i.e., the more people you import, the more you can undermine salaries and increase revenues and thus, profits.

Companies used to have elaborate processes for quality, reliability and all that and it flew out the window on day 2 of LLMs. So of course you'll find people who no longer are productive because the context is now being created for machines, not for humans.

Not sure I can say the same for UK.

Was it about displaying the user's birthday?

I think now LLMs might play a part of those dismissals but also I think those companies are embracing for thin cows season.

The record profits and etc are the last few for a while I am guessing. My guess they might have up to a year of positive numbers as consequence of deals and layoffs up to this moment.

I think at some point it will be clearer what are the real productivity gains of LLMs. My opinion is that there is a gain but we are already on the phase where there is a deceleration on the improvements and the costs have not yet caught up. The reason for this is the frequent change in the reporting of results. Now they hide the models, they hide the harnesses, they hide the results. They would not be doing that if they were 100% confident it was working perfectly. Also they have been putting too much effort on blocking other initiatives by hiring important researchers with no clear proposition on what they will be doing. One might argue that when you hire Karpathy you never know what he will might be doing anyway, but I digress. We also see some of the huge investment funds starting to switch strategies.

Unless there is no breakthrough, we might see LLMs results in a couple of years. The company I work for and others from friends I know have all started restrictions on costs. Some even started hiring people back.

My prediction is that the low AI cost per token era will end very soon when investors realise that the market is broken and they want their money back for leverage themselves or other businesses.

I even think this is why Elon Musk is merging all his companies. He might making himself artificially richer, but I think he is focusing his efforts to smart weapons and robots.

I think there will no way back to the inflation of people as in 2020/2021 but probably we are going back to early 2010s number.

This is part of it, but it's also true that in a lot of massive enterprises there is an absurd amount of inefficiency that leads to people effectively having nothing to do.

I had one such role at Splunk, pre-acquisition, which had a mere ~2k or so employees at the time. My entire office was effectively doing nothing; we were the result of another acquisition and management had no idea what to do with us. More hours were logged at the foosball and ping-pong tables than in front of an IDE. I'm not even exaggerating. I left after 9 months because I was bored; I did not write a single line of code that got used in any real application, internal or external.

When I went to AWS, it was closer to what you're describing; it took a lot of work to do seemingly very small changes for the reasons you mention. But I would never say that my team there had too many employees doing not enough work; everyone was busy all the time, it just took a lot of work to do very small changes.

At what point is a company established? I recall that the early years of Google, it produced not only Search but also Gmail, Maps, Translate, Android, and Chrome. That was all between 1998-2008. At what point did most of Google's work become refinements?

My point being, it is a culture issue. Google could have become "established" and focus on "refinements" after Search. Or Gmail. Or Maps. Or Translate. But each of those times, it did not.

Recently we've hired a few startups for PoCs regarding to data analytics and they all get deeply frustrated at the pace it takes us to even agree basic details.

OP might have been stuck in a dept that is winding down to prep for a layoff or something. I probably would have stuck around unless I found a different role. Who knows, you might just get some severance.

I'm ISO27001'ing my company and I wonder if some day, we'll find a better way than written policies, procedures, forms, evidence and audits. To me, it seems like our current world's biggest flaw: We're losing 2/3rd of our workforce to maintaining procedures, they make the work boring and unbearable, and they're not even efficient, even if they do provide upside in systematically organizing things. Standards (when pushed to procedures, forms and audite) are the regression-to-the-mean of collective organizations.

  I resigned a year ago, L65. The service I worked on was 5 engineers, within a few months’ time it was just me. Was always rated a 140 come connect season.

There are high talent density orgs at MSFT too. I do not want to give the impression that everyone at MSFT is low calibre. I was at the beginning of the Security org being formed (back then it was a tiny part of E+D). I was a minion who witnessed Security transforming into a 10B+ USD business so there are very qualified people at MSFT. We went from a few hundred devs and PMs to ~10K devs, PMs, Support etc to work on a mature business. There are a host of talented people still at MSFT, also MS continues to publish impactful research in AI, Systems etc. The great Leslie Lamport is still at MSFT. I am not comparing myself to these titans, I am nowhere near that level but just saying that there are oodles of talent at MSFT.

On the other hand, here is an example that is illustrative of the sort of people I encountered towards the end of my tenure. My last manager who was one big reason behind me resigning once told me in my 1-on-1 that I should count myself lucky to be employed at MSFT and that other developers would kill to join MSFT. This was someone who had started his career in TCS, Wipro etc and then worked at a bunch of networking companies who presumably didn't pay that well. Everyone at MSFT is decently paid because the stock is doing well and long may that continue . My last team/org was a 30M$+ business with only one customer, we had maybe ~300 people altogether in the US, UK and India. It felt like we were always support engineers for this one big whale of a customer and we were trying to "pivot" to get more customers but that always seemed fanciful as the product was expressly designed for one customer. MSFT acqui-hired from this customer multiple execs and developers to sell said product to the same customer. I am missing a lot of key details as I wasn't at the inception of this product but the whole org seemed dysfunctional, inefficient and certainly I had low-morale. There just wasn't as much work for that many people.

When I submitted my resignation, they actually tried to retain me! I was befuddled to say the least, I hadn't been that productive at all but I guess they just needed warm bodies to work on some other misguided initiative. Personally, I had enough. I forewent my last tranche of sign-on stocks (a non-trivial amount) but was glad to see the back of this org. It was deleterious to my career, I was so pissed that I didn't even send a farewell email. I don;t blame anyone but myself, I hold myself accountable for my career but this was what I perceived.

Apologies, this felt like a rant and it is partly one. But I never had a frank conversation about this with anyone after I left. My fiance is a Doctor so she can't understand all this but my fellow colleagues in tech will.

What I'm seeing on my teams is everyone being more overworked than ever because the coding part happens SO quickly now that there's no friction to slow down all the nonstop "team alignment and box drawing" work that someone else in this thread alluded to.

I've been at places where I went years hardly doing work on a average week. But I'm also good [at some things] so when it mattered I showed up, then didn't do anything for months.

Also, if you build a foundation of being very good, you can coast on that even longer (years) in the right situation. There are 1000s of stories of people doing nothing for years making six figures, easy.

And once you're big enough, you can just offload your inefficiencies onto the consumer (the "enshittification" stage). As long as you're not _terribly_ bad, competitors won't be able to overcome your network effects.

What _really_ held companies from taking over the world was the inherent overheads of distributed corporate structures. Before computers, you couldn't really manage a horizontal company with offices in hundreds of different cities. Network effects were also less pronounced.

Internet-enabled companies like Google (or Yandex, Baidu, etc.) are a really great example. The early Internet was about as close to a perfect free market as possible. And in every case (Google in the US, Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China) the same thing happened: one large company ended up dominating and then gobbling up all the competitors.

I am merely 30-years old, hopefully I have a long career or at-least as long as possible but playing politics to play the short game is very short sighted to say the least.

If I want politics, I would rather just re-watch Game of Thrones.

Maybe they were L3s? Maybe it's EU?

I think it is possible, but I am not sure there is any actual will for it on either side. Management doesn't want to know unless someone is breathing down their neck or they are the of micromanager variety. I certainly stopped just volunteering information. But I absolutely do think it is possible.

Post mid-2025, there were mandates to use it wherever we could.

Capitalism made sense with small companies where each individual had more or less direct exposure to the markets. One bad employee would drag down the company. You couldn't hide or manipulate your way to the top if you weren't good at creating value and skilled people could actually start their own companies and compete. Now with huge corporations which own the economy, the markets don't work to begin with, and also, people within the big corporations are rewarded randomly at best or worse; in a counter-productive manner.

This inefficiency is highly destructive because of how the system compounds wealth. You end up with random people with zero value-creation skills and zero vision having millions or billions of dollars and deciding everyone else's lives.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/browseall.html

So when you dig in you can easily see what all those people work on.

Whereas, Uber is basically two services (ride sharing and food delivery). So there it's a bit harder to understand. Of course they're in lots of markets and have a huge human support surface area because of all the drivers and riders. Probably most of those employees aren't working on the products.

Because it's a legit question, like if a companye can lay off thousands of people and still run their service, what were they all doing?