Ex-MSFT here. I resigned in June, I was an L63. I spent 8 years at MSFT across two stints.
My last 18 months at MSFT were deeply unproductive. Constant reorgs, the work not being aligned to my capabilities and unfortunately just the general feeling that I was under worked and had very little opportunity for career advancement.
I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial ? Or how did this person get promoted for doing that work ? I am sure envy played a part in the second question but it was legitimate. Remember, all this was before LLM tools were prevalent.
In the end, I left off my own volition. In my last 6 months, I did very little work, if at all any. I thought why am I being paid so handsomely for such little and trivial work. I did try interviewing in a few different teams but didn’t make it (Azure Files and Hyperscale DB). If I had stayed, I would have been swiftly laid off or if I was lucky enough last long till this buyout.
I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
The big tech companies are getting old. I think it's a fundamental rule that the competence and effectiveness of an org must fall, over time, driven by the fact that a person will more readily hire someone they can understand than someone that is more intelligent/competent/effective. This causes a slow degradation.
I also think there's been a drastic shift in the working culture of tech/engineering spaces, in general, over the last 15 years. From my experience, it's definitely drifted away from a bunch of nerds solving problems to something more towards emotional/personal/politics. I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy. "Back in my day" people would just state facts, point out flaws, and argue a bit, and have fun doing it, for better or worse.
The last 12 years were largely the same, the last 3 were completely new.
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.
Maybe I'm just lucky but I have a few gen Z coworkers and they are probably more often than not the voice of reason in our org (start up with 8 engineers). I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.
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.
A coworker was asked in a meeting how he was holding up after pulling an epic two day sprint to deliver a project that saved our butts. He replied “I felt like jumping out of a window.”
Someone reported him for not warning the room about suicidal ideation before saying it and not considering that it might be triggering. He was actually reprimanded.
Unfortunately typical of the place. I left soon after.
That's wild! I wonder how far I could get at a place like that by saying random things trigger me, like "don't call it a sprint because I once tripped and broke a tooth while sprinting" or something like that. Make an entire organization change their jargon and use fun words like "this is our two week adventure!"
I once told someone that they shouldn't use 'flesh out an idea' because it's offensive to skeletons.
That may be the game that others are playing. I always wonder how much of this is other countries paying agents to spoil the productivity of the West, as a retaliation for unmerited wars we do to them.
If that was how they treated top performers, I'd hope you had quite a bit of company on the way out.
I think this is... well, hilarious is the wrong word. How does that protect anyone that's suicidal? It's teaching everyone that you will be punished for expressing it.
> How does that protect anyone that's suicidal?
It doesn't, this kind of language policing is all about control and power.
A friend of mine worked as consultant with a big bank in London. They would get weekly emails about what kind of "newspeak" is allowed or not.
They seriously banned terms such as an "all hands meeting".
Woke 1 was absolutely crazy.
And the reason there is so much more visible (and still invisible) pushback, stuff went into ridiculous in offices and schools, biggest screamers and complainers basically got the biggest voice. It seems pendulum must swing to the extremes, some stable balanced rational position ain't possible now.
Reminds me of that one time my partner mentioned "Latino" in a meeting, referring to people from Central and South America in broad terms (this was a marketing meeting, where customers are naturally grouped together along various dimensions).
She was told to not use "Latino"; but to use "LatinX" instead. What hurt more was the implication that she was being insensitive.
When I learned of it, I asked my Mexican friends which one they preferred. None of them had heard of "LatinX" and were as confused as I was.
“Latinx” is weird because it seems to have arisen from a set of privileged English speakers deciding that poor downtrodden Latinas were being hurt by a word they never complained about and pushing this as the “appropriate” word. It’s so clearly not born of the Latino community because that’s not the construction they would use.
I remember reading about some similar thing with French and the French president’s wife responding that the language was beautiful the way it was and they don’t need outsiders telling them how to gender (or not) their words.
Gives vibes of saying “unhoused” instead of homeless.
I feel like the affluent just love to invent new words to show the “others” that aren’t using it how backwards they are, and how the affluent are truly enlightened.
I also thought unhoused was just a pointless euphemism, but I recently learned it does have a technical meaning. A "homeless" person might live with friends, in a shelter, or on the street. An unhoused person is one strictly living on the street/car/public space.
This is interesting. Two things can be true though. There may be a technical distinction between the two terms but I think many people (like me, until now!) don't know it, which means that many people do use it as a euphemism and not as its technical intention.
If I had a friend who was staying with us because he had no other place to be, he wouldn't be homeless. That's like saying my 13 yr old is homeless because his name's not on the mortgage. The only point of the euphemisms is for people to feel self-righteous for policing language. Which they often do because it's lazier than any sort of real reform.
The sillyness of LatinX is that there isn't even an "Ecks" sound in Spanish.
I assume you pronounce that X as the X in Mexico.
that is even worse
I'm South African so wouldn't really know culturally how African Americans would see it, but wondered at the time if the changing of the Git default branch name to "main" was an initiative by European Americans worried about offending rather than actual offense taken by African Americans.
It is interesting how different locations find different things offensive. Only when I was living in Europe for a while (doing Blizzard Customer Service) did I became aware of how big a deal the usage of N word was, as over here the K-word (look up "South Africa k-word" if you don't know it) is the word of choice for the, unevolved, die hard racists.
Was similarly unaware, (but not really surprised in hindsight) how World War II references were much better left avoided and Nazi references an enormous no-no. Over here references to Nazism are very rare and while South Africans did fight and die for the Allies in Europe, the impact of WW2 over here was no where near what it was like for most of the rest of the world.
I think the Latino community who cares about such things prefers "latine".
LatinX is awful. An AIM screen name from 1998.
Here in Spain both the 'x' and '@' versions are really common in written language. The 'e' version I've not seen. But they're not really spoken because the X and @ versions are weird to pronounce. Replacing the o and a with an e makes more sense but it hasn't really seemed to have reached here.
And no it's not just privileged white people. My Spanish teacher was a Colombiana and she always pointed out the innate patriarchal traits of the Spanish language while rolling her eyes.
My native language has no gender. Every time I see these conversations I wonder “why not do away with the gender?”
It often leaks information the speaker didn’t intend to share. e.g., “I met a friend. She was late.”
Did the speaker mean or care to share to gender of this friend? Is it relevant? I don’t think so.
And I find it especially interesting when people argue for gender-neutral plurals, but then happily use gendered noun. It sort of feels like “everyone must stay in their lane” type of expectation.
Even the patriarchy argument is weird. The patriarchy - along with religion - wanted this gender line and specification in every context. Wanna stick it to patriarchy? Nix the gender from all languages!
> My native language has no gender. Every time I see these conversations I wonder “why not do away with the gender?”
Yes, many languages have no gender or have a generic option besides genders.
I always find this very annoying in Roman languages, where every object has an arbitrary gender, and to make matters worse it's not always the same. A word that is female in Spanish could be male in Italian or Portuguese. It trips me up a lot and it's annoying because the gender is just some arbitrary thing there, it has no meaning because objects have no gender. If we're talking about people I can understand but things?
But languages are not very logical. They are something that melted together over centuries out of habit.
I wonder how you would feel about, for example, Slavic languages. There, you leak information about the gender even about speaking about yourself in first person (at least in the ones I have some idea about). Example in Polish:
"Spotkałem kolegę" - "I [male] met a [male] friend."
"Spotkałam kolegę" - "I [female] met a [male] friend."
"Spotkałem koleżankę" - "I [male] met a [female] friend."
"Spotkałam koleżankę" - "I [female] met a [female] friend."
Notice the different ending (em/am) depending on whether a male or female is speaking.
> The patriarchy - along with religion - wanted this gender line and specification in every context
Did they? English used to be gendered but lost it ~1000 years ago.
Languages evolve in odd ways and don’t think the patriarchy or religion have much to do with it.
English is still strongly gendered: the animate and inanimate genders are everywhere. The masculine/feminine subgenders are still present in pronouns of the animate gender.
If English were to truly evolve to be non-gendered, there would be no "he/him/them" or "she/her/them", only "it/that/those".
I’m curious on people’s opinions here cause I have seen this both ways. I have seen people say gender in the language at all is bad. And have said Spanish is sexist.
I’ve also seen people argue that we should learn to not see vocabulary gender as gender at all, just start associating some words as “la” and some as “el” with no boy/girl idea behind it.
Old English for “wife” was masculine. “Maiden” in German is neutral. In Italian, the formal “you” is the same as “she” (written capitalized).
Grammatical gender is not intrinsically sexist and doesn’t really make a lot of sense if you try to analyze it to tease out what patriarchs were thinking when they added these forms, because largely they never thought about it at all. The forms evolved over hundreds of years.
There are also languages where the gender changes from singular to plural! What do we think of this?
I can't say I follow these things too closely, and I do find them silly, but I think that, at least for languages that have "genders", this mostly comes from words describing professions that "seem gendered". I don't think many people care if a bag is feminine or masculine.
For example, in French, a doctor is "masculine", but a secretary is feminine. The point was that young girls would see these words and figure, "I can't be a doctor because I'm not a man. Guess I'll just be a nurse (which is feminine, but also has a masculine form)".
Now, I think there may be some kind of truth to the fact that many such professions were traditionally held by people of the "same gender". And, now that these traditions don't hold as much anymore, especially for "prestigious" professions, people want to make a point that there's a difference, especially in things like politics and medicine.
Of course, I don't remember much noise being made about how to call a woman who picks up garbage (though there are quite a few) or does construction work (haven't seen that many).
“Maiden” in German is neutral.
Nachweise erbeten (citations, please). :)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Mädchen
dpark is using a slightly archaic translation, Mädchen would normally be rendered as "girl" in modern English.
> I’ve also seen people argue that we should learn to not see vocabulary gender as gender at all, just start associating some words as “la” and some as “el” with no boy/girl idea behind it.
If you look up the list of exceptions to the whole "-a = feminine, -o = masculine" in Spanish, it's incredibly long (and covers many of the most common words). Similarly there are a whole bunch where the gender is correct, but the article is swapped because it sounds better. The gender of specific words is also arbitrary, and doesn't agree between the various Romance languages.
This whole thing is just the leftover pieces of Latin's 3x linguistic genders hanging around in our languages, and ceased to be related to actual gender centuries ago.
> Similarly there are a whole bunch where the gender is correct, but the article is swapped because it sounds better.
Yes, like "el agua" but agua is a female word. Soo confusing when you are learning it.
Interesting. Google trends shows that Latine is more common in Spain (and everywhere that isn’t the US).
Nonetheless I appreciate a perspective from someone who has an affiliation with the culture term refers to.
Ah I have to say I'm not reading much official media in Spanish, perhaps the media is taking up these terms faster. But I see x and @ in official event posters too.
But my friends and in the LGBT+ communities chat groups I only see people using the x and @.
>My Spanish teacher was a Colombiana and she always pointed out the innate patriarchal traits of the Spanish language while rolling her eyes.
Was the eye roll part of the sarcasm or...? Colombian and other related Spanish speaking cultures do the same things, so what's her point, to feel like she's sticking it to the invisible spanish dude?
No, she genuinely hated that even though it is part of Colombian culture too. But being part of a culture doesn't mean you 100% agree with everything.
I'm Dutch myself and I hate many things in Dutch culture. Especially those stemming from the calvinist influences. It's one of the reasons I don't live there anymore.
Which is funny because the entire Spanish-speaking world has always been deeply matriarchal.
No not really. In the Spanish language the masculine form always takes precedence.
And they are also catching up on feminism. Until recently here in Spain a woman would have to prove there had been violence when claiming rape. There was a big headline-making case where some rapists went free (well until supreme court appeal): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Manada_rape_case It led to the "only yes is yes" law which was already prevalent in other countries.
> it seems to have arisen from a set of privileged English speakers
I'd recommend getting out a bit more or reading a bit more:
> According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004,[7][21][22] and first appeared in academic literature around 2013 "in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language."[20][23] Contrarily, it has been claimed that usage of the term "started in online chat rooms and listservs in the 1990s" and that its first appearance in academic literature was in the Fall 2004 volume of the journal Feministas Unidas.[24][25] In the rest of the United States, it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@.[21] A similar use of 'x' in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.[10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
From the same wiki:
> Despite the increase in awareness, use of the term to describe oneself has not greatly increased over time.[4] As of 2018, use of the term Latinx was limited nearly exclusively to the United States.[29] Manuel Vargas writes that people from Latin America ordinarily would not think of themselves using the term unless they reside in the United States.[29]
Maybe it didn't technically originate in privileged English speakers but it certainly seems to have arisen in popularity among them.
As someone who lives in a 99% hispanic region in the US, I've never heard anyone use this term to identify themselves. We're right on the border and that sort of thing seems to mainly happen in larger cities north of here.
I’m not saying no one who identifies as Latino/Latina/Latinx has ever used the word, or even advocated for it. But the only people I’ve ever heard use this term are, bluntly, very white.
To the extent that the term has become widespread, it seems to have piggybacked on other diversity and inclusion efforts. People who identify as Latino/Latina seem overwhelmingly to dislike the term.
> Among Hispanic and Latino Americans, knowledge of the term is not widespread, and reception to the term as a potential classifier for the entire Hispanic/Latino population has been overwhelmingly negative. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly half of U.S. Hispanics were not aware of the term Latinx; of those aware of it, 75% said it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population, preferring instead the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" by large margins.
Ironically, the also relatively uncommon “Latine” is in decline but still more popular than Latinx for all of recorded Google trends history. Except in the US. Of course.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=latinx,L...
Latinx appears to be on the way out now as well, to be replaced by Latine, for exactly the situation you described. "Latinx" didn't come out of the broader community of native speakers, and was seemingly rejected due to that fact.
… I wish they picked a better word, because I actually misread that as Latrine… definitely not going to be referring to anybody with _that_ at least.
"It used to be Shithouse"
"It's a good change!"
Both were presumably invented by insufferable white people.
9/10 Latinos would roll their eyes and get back to doing actual work, they don't have time to be offended.
Latine comes from South Americans (primarily chileans and argentinians). Whether the people from those countries that came up with it are insufferable white people is up to you.
Their World Cup teams are insufferable.
I was born in Peru and I absolutely abhor the word "LatinX". I assume people meant well, but ironically, it exhibits the "we Americans known better than you" attitude that liberals usually avoid.
No one has been saying LatinX for years. Why the anti-lib propaganda from 2022? Are y'all really that desperate to connect with folks?
It it still a thing in many California based tech companies.
Was I wrong in assuming that "Latinx" was only intended for written language? Because it's not pronounceable in any way that makes sense.
I pronounce it "la-tinks" if forced to read it aloud. Always gets some side-eye from coworkers you probably already find obnoxious.
It's all a performance to them anyway, and I'm not playing the game.
I think you're "supposed" to say "Latin-Ecks" (as in pronounce the X) but yeah it's fun to say Latinx because it sorta signals what you think about it while still technically complying.
That's exactly how my Mexican friend says it, and he's about as liberal as they come
> I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.
and then
> I was encouraged to use "y'all" [..] I thought that was a bridge too far.
I wonder if there might be a small bias on your part. The criticism you deem constructive everyone shall endure, but the other criticism you deem a bridge too far you yourself shall not endure.
The original story about not handling criticism well was someone crying after a kind question, not merely saying something was a bridge too far. (FWIW if I saw someone cry once, I would consider it might be a one-off due to stress at home etc, not necessarily a constant personality trait I'll have to deal with regularly.)
There’s a difference between feedback regarding your work and language policing something like “you guys” which some people have just suddenly decided is offensive as of 2016 or so because I guess we’ve already solved the rest of sexism.
This is/was absolutely a thing and I saw it happen to others and switched to y’all, I got called out for using “dude” and come on dude, dude is extremely gender neutral in this sense.
I have not been able to bring myself to use y’all, it just seems so fake and performative. I am not a southerner, why am I y’alling people?
Pennsylvania uses 'yins' for the second person plural, if you'd like a confusing alternative!
No one decided it was offensive. Show me anyone saying they're offended by the use of "guys" as a gender neutral term.
People get lumped into "guys" and feel excluded. That's such a different bar than feeling offended.
It's ok for you to say, "I'm sorry my language makes you feel excluded, but I'm not going to change" and it's ok for someone to think less of you as a result.
Why does everyone jump to the idea that people who want more inclusive language are offended? Or that the critique being offered here is that the language is offensive?
(Granted, sometimes that is the critique. Plenty of casual racism or ableism is offensive. But that's not the case with "guys".)
This really feels like splitting hairs.
As a woman in this industry, being told that using “guys” to address mixed groups is non-inclusive/insufficiently considerate/worth thinking less of me for (just wow) is much worse than being addressed by “guys” when I’m in a mixed group.
Like… we have real problems with equality in tech, right?
Yes we have real problems, and this one isn't and it takes 1 minute to solve. "Okay thank you, will change it for next time".
Why spend even one minute "solving" a non-problem? What would even qualify as a solution to a non-problem? Or maybe it's a problem, just not a real problem, although if a problem is imaginary, surely the solution can be too.
It can be a problem. If someone doesn't like people taking calls at their desk because it interrupts them, they might ask their peers not to do that. If someone has a dislike for a food, they might ask their friends to not go to a type of restaurant. If someone has particular nickname preferences (Will vs Bill) they might share those.
People deliberately choosing not to try to honor those preferences are making a choice with a small impact. No one is claiming it's a big deal. But honoring preferences can make people feel unhappy.
As can honoring a preference that you find silly.
It turns out, this is pretty simple human negotiation stuff -- we can all express a preference and we can all choose to not honor it. And we have to be comfortable with the idea someone might think less of someone else a little bit as a result.
I'm all for reasonably accommodating reasonable preferences. A nickname preference for example is common and fairly easy to accommodate. The more bizarre and unreasonable your preferences are though the less likely people are going to be to accommodate them, especially if those people aren't very close to you. Even people who do go through the trouble to accommodate someone's strange or burdensome preference might think less of them a little bit.
"I interpret a commonly used word or phrase as meaning something other than what the dictionary says that it means, and differently from what pretty much everyone, for hundreds of years, has intended it to mean when they say it, and so every time I hear it used by anyone that makes me unhappy so please stop using that word or phrase around me" is a pretty strange request that some people might find a bit unreasonable. At least it might not be too hard for some to constantly remember to alter their vocabulary around specific people.
In terms of human negotiation, part of working in a professional environment, or any large group of mixed company, involves understanding that you may not have your every preference catered to and that for some preferences it can even be impolite to impose on the group by asking them to take your weird hang up into account. The strength/impact of the preference, the size of the group and how well you all know each other will have to factor into that though.
I suspect that "I'll just try to remember and understand that people who say 'you guys' use it to mean what the dictionary says that it means" is a more reasonable position than "Every one of the 200,000+ people who work for the same company that I work for should alter their vocabulary to accommodate my personal preference because I want to cling to a non-standard definition of that particular phrase and I'll judge anyone who refuses to comply"
You seem to not be listening, or perhaps not understanding.
You are free to consider my request unreasonable. The consequence is a minor one -- I'll know I asked and you declined, and you'll lose some fractional amount of social capital with me.
Where in that does it say I expect my preferences to be catered to?
The whole interaction goes like this: "I feel excluded by 'guys', any chance we could settle on something else?" "No" "Ok" (-1 reputation with me)
Why do you make this out like it's some major thing to have someone ask, and then decline? You have agency, you are allowed to say no. I genuinely don't understand the intensity with which you and others respond with.
Is your request made one-on-one or in front of the whole "guys" group? If it is not one-on-one, then you have set the other person up in front of the entire group.
> "I feel excluded by 'guys', any chance we could settle on something else?"
In agreeing to your preference this person can no longer use the word 'guys' at all, ever? Or they can, but before doing so must first scan the faces of everyone in the group and if they see you then use an alternate?
This is the problem with personal preferences. They are personal to you, not to anyone else.
If your company orders pizza for lunch and your personal preference is for no pepperoni, then expect that the person placing the order asks for a cheese pizza and several pepperoni pizzas. Don't expect that everyone gets cheese pizza.
> I genuinely don't understand the intensity with which you and others respond with.
I'll try to explain. I think it's a very strange request to make, especially to people you aren't close to like random co-workers. Imposing on others can put them in an uncomfortable position. It would be easier for them to say "No, if you choose to feel excluded by an explicitly and objectively inclusive phrase with full knowledge that it isn't being used with any intention to exclude you, that's 100% a 'you' problem. Please handle your shit and don't make your problem into everyone else's problem.", but most people probably won't want to be rude, so many will just agree. Depending on the power dynamic in play, some people may feel that they have little choice at all, or that the consequences of non-compliance could be career limiting.
For you the whole interaction is the request, followed by their response, followed by your judgement, but for the polite others it involves making an active effort to be conscious of every moment where you're within earshot, remembering the common and innocuous phrase that upsets you for some strange reason, and then actively changing the way they'd normally express themselves to others in order to accommodate you. In addition to having to constantly remember to self-censor, it also means risking feeling like shit if they happen to slip up, or worse, worrying about the impacts their mistake might have on their career or the work.
It's absolutely not the most demanding demand you could place on another person, but it isn't nothing either, and when the reasons for that demand don't make a lot of sense, having to actively make and continuously maintain that effort can feel like a larger imposition than it might otherwise, especially in a busy environment where there's work to be done and people's heads are already filled with other concerns.
A request like that could easily be seen as rude, self-centered, or off-putting in a professional environment even when the same request made to your friends and family would likely be better received. Being able to clearly explain why you have the issue you do in a relatable way might help avoid some of those negative feelings. If it isn't a deliberate choice on your part to twist other people's innocently spoken words by willfully ignoring the very definition of them and turning them into something that makes you feel bad inside, and you find that even if you try you can't help but feel that way about it, in all sincerity, I'd recommend finding and speaking with a therapist about it.
> It's absolutely not the most demanding demand you could place on another person, but it isn't nothing either
Another way to think about this is as a parallel to microaggressions. Little things that may seem innocuous or not that big a deal on their own, but that add a little bit of emotional or cognitive load to someone's day.
> Why do you make this out like it's some major thing to have someone ask, and then decline
Notice how in China, which has its shit together and is gradually outpacing the West, no one is asking others if they could avoid using a common term that makes them, individually, uncomfortable. That is one reason your behaviour seems a "major thing": it shows from your part a disrespect of social harmony, which is an important thing for a productive society.
The China which has its shit together? Which China is that? :-D
China is outpacing the West but it's not all on the good metrics.
This is not about personal accommodations, though? Usually its coming from people who are supposedly trying to enforce this stuff to “protect” broader groups of people who they perceive need saving or just engaging in general virtue signaling.
It takes less than that.
“I’m not going to do that. Moving on.”
People are down voting you for this, but like, I'd rather have that honesty. I know where I stand with you when you do that.
Everyone is out here thinking I'm policing, correcting, eradicating, or some other verbing. When really I'm asking you to inconvenience yourself to stop inconveniencing me.
You are well within your rights to be like, "no". I don't understand this compulsion to make either party into some villain.
> I don't understand this compulsion to make either party into some villain.
If someone replies as the GP suggested, they will be villainized by some subset of the people who hear that reply. In a professional setting, that could involve a visit from HR and/or be a career-limiting move, depending on the company culture.
It doesn't matter if you understand it or not. It happens, and that's what matters.
> Yes we have real problems, and this one isn't
Yes.
> solve
No that's not solving anything.
I'm glad for you it doesn't feel exclusive. Your experience is totally valid and also you are correct, there are structural issues at play that also need addressing.
Other folks, myself included, do feel excluded by "guys" as a gender neutral term. I'm not offended, but I do appreciate when people offer something else.
But to your later point, I don't think it's either/or. We can do both.
I think pursuing things like the eradication of an expression that is genuinely considered gender neutral by large swaths of people is the sort of thing that loses you goodwill for the big stuff.
I’m sorry that you find it exclusionary. What I find exclusionary is people telling me that it’s justifiable to think less of me for using that term, or comparing continuing to use the term to their grandmother who still uses the N word.
For what it’s worth I have stopped using “you guys” at work except for in “safe spaces” because I don’t want to deal with this sort of judgement. But I find the “it costs you nothing!” defense of word policing to be completely unconvincing.
You and others keep putting words in my mouth. Where did I sell the eradication of language?
The scenario here is, "I feel excluded by 'guys', would you all feel ok using something else?"
You are a grown up, you can just say "No".
The consequences will be me having a slightly lower opinion of you as a person.
There's no eradication. I'm not asking you to stop using the word guys.
> The consequences will be me having a slightly lower opinion of you as a person.
That's an incredibly naive take. In many places, especially professional ones progressive/liberal/woke places, the consequences are much more than you having a slightly lower opinion of someone.
> I think pursuing things like the eradication of an expression that is genuinely considered gender neutral by large swaths of people is the sort of thing that loses you goodwill for the big stuff.
On the flip side, someone unwilling to do even the “small stuff” pretty much already lost the goodwill that they would be willing to do the “big stuff.”
Put another way, if you ask someone to take a small step for you, and they refuse, would you feel like they are more or less likely to take a big step?
Not at all, it’s just that those (i.e. sensible) people just think that this small step is in a direction that’s entirely orthogonal. Unless of course the goal is virtue signaling rather than solving actual problems.
I would be concerned that if I ask them to take a bunch of small steps they will marvel at my chutzpah for asking them to take a big one.
If a person won’t even return your text messages, you don’t ask them to help you move.
I think if you want people to give you the grace to form your own opinions of others, you need to be comfortable with us forming an opinion of you. I'm allowed to have people I think about as allies, I'm allowed to think of others as assholes. To suggest otherwise is a much stronger control over someone than to say, "I would find it less uncomfortable if you spoke differently."
You are, in essence, saying, "I want you to think differently."
I made no claim that it costs nothing. Changing language use is non trivial. Which is why I never demand it. I make a preference known, you can act on it or not.
I made the claim that: a) it does not offend me and b) I prefer others not use it and c) if I've expressed my preference and you choose not to honor that preference, it will diminish my opinions towards you.
This is how preferences work. We communicate them. Others find the request reasonable or not and act accordingly. If my preference was no music playing in desk areas, and you played music in the desk area, I'd think less of you as a result. If you gave me a nickname and I asked you not to use it, and you still used it, I'd think less of you.
Maybe you shouldn’t sort people into allies and assholes based on whether they are willing to change decades of language use to accommodate something that doesn’t even offend you (or as you say anyone else).
I try my best not to offend anyone at work, but policing my language to match the preferences of everyone around me would be exhausting. I grew up speaking a non-prestige dialect. I have a lifetime of experience policing my words. It can be exhausting. It’s easy to underestimate the mental cost if you speak a prestige dialect.
I spent a few decades being made fun of for saying y’all. I now find it a bit weird people who would have made fun of me for using it 20 years ago now use it themselves. I’m not offended by it, but my preference would be that non-southerners don’t use it.
However, I realize that it would be a bit much to ask that of everyone I interact with. And if I did it would be insane to label people who didn’t comply assholes.
I prefer that people that people don’t use learnings instead of lessons. I prefer not to be referred to as a USian. But I don’t expect people to follow my preferences.
I don't expect either. Why is it unreasonable to say, "I'd prefer something other than USian"?
> Why is it unreasonable to say, "I'd prefer something other than USian"?
Not the person you're replying to, but my take on it: because in the grand scheme of things it's small potatoes, and putting even a minor burden onto someone else to change their language seems unreasonable and unnecessary.
> I think if you want people to give you the grace to form your own opinions of others, you need to be comfortable with us forming an opinion of you.
This is both trivially true (I recognize that everyone has the right to form their own opinions of everything) and still counter to things I assume you believe (such as: people shouldn’t make assumptions about others based on their gender or skin color).
I do want you to think differently. I want you to think that people who continue to use a phrase widely considered to be gender neutral are not in fact your enemies. Some of them probably are your allies.
For what it’s worth, if I knew you in real life and you made that preference known to me, I would try to respect it, but that respect would depend on the closeness of our relationship. It’s hard to remember every preference of someone you meet once every two months, but I don’t like to be an asshole and try to respect the preferences of people I interact with.
The problem though is that somewhere along the line, continuing to use “you guys” became a sort of reverse shibboleth among a certain set of people who try to use things like whether someone uses “you guys” or whether they have their pronouns set on their profile to determine whether they are allies or, presumably, enemies. And yeah, I do object to that sort of mindset.
First, I definitely don't judge people for a preference I haven't expressed. If something genuinely hurts me, I need to advocate for myself. And I'd only do that if it was really something that genuinely hurt.
From there, if I only see you once every few months I don't expect you to remember flawlessly. The only time I judge someone is if they say no.
As for pronouns, they are a useful signal, but not the entire signal. Like, their presence indicates "this person might be safer", their absence indicates nothing.
You are missing the point. You're allowed to think highly or lowly of whomever, for whatever reason. That's your business (freedom of thought). It's more problematic when you express, overtly or not, such low opinion, as you will cause resentment. And there is the risk that the mere request is seen as a "correction". In our society, it's not generally polite for adults to correct other adults' speech.
I would also take issue with reasonableness of the request. You concede it does not offend you, and that it's merely a preference. I also have a myriad of preferences about speech: the intonation, accent, the grammatical constructions, the words, etc. To ask of other people, whom I don't even know intimately, to match my preferences is something else altogether. It's to impose my preferences over that person's dialect or ideolect, which is also rightly frowned upon.
Why would I express that opinion though? There's zero benefit to me to indicating you've slightly damaged your reputation. We both move on.
And it's never couched as a correction. It's always an expression of the impact on me, "Hey all, I know this is a bit of a hang up, but the use of 'guys' feels exclusionary to me, any chance folks would try alternatives? Folks, peeps, y'all, etc?"
In a work context this still creates tension and constraints. Work is not a context where we are free to express ourselves, so even such an "expression" creates a situation where I either piss off someone else or self-police. Given that you might have a particular role in the organization, might be trusted by people in a certain role or might simply represent a potential case where HR gets involved, self-policing becomes the safest, obvious choice. This means I don't really have a free choice to make, because the impact of such choice can go beyond our respective opinions on each other.
My personal experience in a UK/US company as a non-native English speaker includes this specific case. I still remember this very example (I.e., the use of "guys") being used as an example of noninclusive language from day-2 in the company (it was in some policy), 5 years later. It requires a nontrivial amount of energy and attention for me to self-police in a language that is already not my own, and I personally stress about it (including the few times I had slip-ups where I automatically said "hi guys" to a mixed group and corrected myself in a clumsy way). There are countless ways I could express my preference (speak slower, less accent when speaking, don't use idiomatic expressions or metaphors that are very language specific, maybe learn to pronounce my name how I pronounce it rather than english-ize it). I personally never expressed any of these because I wouldn't want to cause stress to anybody for something so minor, and I believe people will feel less free to talk with me.
This is just my opinion, but being someone who cares about not making others uncomfortable, I think we should all be realistic about what it really means to express such preferences at work, because it's not just a personal matter.
> Other folks, myself included, do feel excluded by "guys" as a gender neutral term.
You are reading into the words a message that was never intended, and that is on you, not the speaker.
I don't think that's true at all. I think language carries history, and that we all come from different upbringings and life experiences that give language context.
There are words we use because they are familiar that are nevertheless hard to hear for some groups.
When that happens, one absolutely can share the impact of the words AND acknowledge no malicious intent. When I was a kid, "gay" meant bad. Tell you what, didn't feel good to hear it. "Hey, I'm gay" was met with, "Oh I didn't mean it like that". Like, sure, but also can we find another word for bad?
Idk, some queer people are ironically using it in that way, which kinda blurs the line. The word gay itself started out as an insult, but later became the preferred term people identify with, as opposed to the clinical "homosexual" which I'd identify as more uncomfortable today.
I feel this is pedantry. It's been used in good faith as a neutral term to address all, basically no different to using words others don't like such as moist.
If this level of pedantry can be considered acceptable, how on earth do these folks justify/cope with terminology used in "empowerment" initiatives who often use very non-inclusive wording more so than "guys".
Pedantry would be pointing out the extensive history of "you guys" as being non-gendered and that even dictionaries say that is what it means. Anyone misinterpreting a word or phrase by using their own made up non-standard definition of it is, at best, assuming the absolute worst about someone's intention without any cause. If people feel excluded by the phrase it's an entirely self-inflicted wound.
And yet despite centuries of use of singular they/them pronouns, people respond the same way when they encounter them. Presumably you are comfortable with singular they, given its long and frequent use?
I'm mostly ambivalent about it excepting those situations where it makes things confusing. For example, I really enjoyed A Psalm for the Wild-Built which featured a non-binary protagonist referred to using they/them pronouns, but there were some sentences which became ambiguous as a result. That's something the editor could have caught and had corrected though and I wouldn't have had anything to complain about.
I don't know about others, but yes I'm entirely fine with people using singular they on me. My native language doesn't have an animate gender-neutral pronoun and I like how English gives me the option to actually be more gender-inclusive without an unnatural "he/she" construct.
If another cis man was suddenly uncomfortable with "they", I'd attribute that to some fragile sense of masculinity or a weird anti-woke crusade, as was the case with most such cases in my life, and find it personally annoying.
I don't want to deliberately make other people uncomfortable with my language, but it does feel exhausting to second-guess yourself, having to double-check if any innocuous phrase might be misinterpreted as an underhanded aggression, preempting a correction we know will be awkward for both sides.
I think we'd do better to consider context more than the specific language...
I've watched a woman walk into a space to meet her group -- all of whom were women -- and address the group with "Hey you guys!"
I've also worked with a woman who was extremely displeased to be greeted with "you guys". I found her absolutely insufferable.
The reason it feels bad to people who use "you guys" in a gender neutral way is what it says about the offended person. The offended person has a pet peeve, and if you don't accommodate it, it will be a problem. That's pretty much the definition of an insufferable person.
A person who is well-regulated wouldn't make a stink over something so trivial. Which then tells you that the person is going to make a similar stink over other trivial things. Ad infinitum.
No one is offended by the use. Some folks feel excluded by it. Those are wildly different experiences.
Eh, happened to me. Decades ago, before all this wave of preformativeness. To be fair, I _was_ addressing a small group of girls my age; at the time the gender of the people involved was simply not relevant to the topic and I didn't consider it at all.
There's probably bias on my part. But I didn't cry about the criticism as the person I was replying to mentioned. Technically I abided by the criticism. I didn't agree, but I liked having the social capital with my employer more than I cared about how I felt about the policing. It's all just words in the end, I just thought it was nitpicky.
Because he was saying “hey guys “ naturally without thinking twice.
Now you make him think twice about what he’s saying, of course he’s going to nitpick everything.
The start of the "electric company" started with I think Rita Moreno shouting "Hey you guys..."
anyway I have always considered Hey guys as gender neutral.
Merriam Webster seems to agree by listing this as a secondary meaning.
used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex saw her and the rest of the guys.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/guy
You appear to be German so I will assume you lack the cultural context to understand why these two things are not comparable. Asking someone born outside of the deep south to refer to a group of people as “y’all” is so absurd my immediate assumption would be that my coworker was playing a joke on me.
I'm very much not from anywhere resembling the American south, and "you all" is very much a part of my lexicon.
The difference being that telling someone they are not allowed to use "guys" is not a valid criticism. It's just someone being a bully and trying to language-police others.
Somehow you missed: Not all critiques are equally valid or valid at all.
and then
Somehow you missed: They did deal with it. The one they criticized did not.
Both of these issues come because our ancestors messed up changing the language.
Centuries ago, "thou" was singular second person and "you" was plural second person.
"Thou" got abandoned and "you" lost its original meaning to replace "thou" as the new singular second person.
"You guys" or "y'all" are simply attempts to re-introduce a needed pronoun.
IIRC "you" was also the formal second person pronoun (like usted in Spanish or vous in French).
I think it's all just normal evolution of language. I actually think it's kinda neat how different English-speaking subcultures found different ways to reintroduce the pronoun.
So we get to fight sexism AND bring back cool anachronistic language? I'm in.
Australia has 'yous' for plural you. Yous is used exactly how you might think it'd be used.
Beware! Y’all doesn’t necessarily include everyone:
> All y'all is used in the Southern United States when a speaker wishes to include everyone being addressed. Y'all may refer to an indefinite set of members of a group, but all y'all definitively includes everyone in the group.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_y%27all
I dunno, as someone who’s lived their entire life in the southern US this sounds really pedantic. At best.
Also, is it just me or does that Wikipedia entry have zero citations? I thought Wikipedia was allergic to citation-free claims..
I just asked my SO and she confirmed that "all y'all" means everyone within earshot and "y'all" usually means a specific group of people. She also said "y'all" is similar to "on" in French and "youse guys" in the NE.
I'm guessing it's regional and/or group specific.
I go for “yinz” then, and tell them not to discriminate against my Pittsburgh area heritage
Yinz goin dahn tahn for the Stillers game? I need a ride, car needs fixed.
Odd, the dictionary definition (here: webster's) is literally:
> guy: (...) person —used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex
Yeah, tell that to my manager at the time!
If we want to trace back the etymology of the term "guy" we would unearth some interesting facts. The most infamous "Guy" of the 17th century is Guy Fawkes, would-be Catholic terrorist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes
Guy Fawkes is most notorious in the UK today as the progenitor of Guy Fawkes Night, where children solicit "a penny for the Guy?" and the funds raised ostensibly go to construct and burn a large straw effigy of Guy, in order to celebrate his defeat and the survival of the Parliament. He was executed, not by burning but by hanging, but nevertheless Guy Fawkes is the original Burning Man.
Guy Fawkes Night was imported to the United States during our independence, and it became Pope Night, a night of mayhem and anti-Catholic vandalism and hooliganism. George Washington once told his military troops to knock it off with the Pope Night shenanigans, because it was alienating Canadians.
So the term "guy" became genericized, beginning in Australia it seems, to refer to a grubby lower-class Catholic boy. After a few centuries of circulating in this way, it lost most of its derogatory connotation and became a generic way to refer to men or boys, and by extension, girls and women.
I don't take offense at being called "guy", nor would I if I were female, and especially because today in the USA, it is so generic and inoffensive. Nobody recalls its sordid roots, even if Pope Night is making a resurgence around here.
> So the term "guy" became genericized, beginning in Australia it seems, to refer to a grubby lower-class Catholic boy.
I'm sceptical of this alleged Australian connection. As far as I'm aware, the term started in England, spread to the US, and it is in the US that its usage really took off. In Australia, "guy"/"guys" as a term for a male or gender-neutral person was imported from the US in the second half of the 20th century.
Just holler
Can you use "hey everyone" or does that offend schizophrenics?
> I'm all for inclusive language but I thought that was a bridge too far.
Presumably you haven’t been living on “the other side” for a whole life. Try living decades in environments where you’re constantly devalued in little ways, and you too may grow to become resentful.
Now, maybe you were chastised, or maybe you were just asked politely and interpreted it as a reprimand. I wasn’t there, I can’t say, all I have is your side. But let’s say the person did chastise you. They could probably have been more polite about it, but how many times have they been polite before with no results? That’s maybe not your fault, but you did unwillingly contribute to that person’s exasperation that day.
All I’m saying is let’s have a little empathy towards others, even when they don’t have it towards us, because we all have days when we’re our best and days when we aren’t, and we don’t know what the other person is going through.
Edit: I want to thank the downvoters for not letting me forget HN has turned into a cesspool and spending long here isn’t healthy. This is the website where calling other people subhuman and cheering for their extermination is upvoted (I’m not referring to the parent comment, but something I’ve seen more than once) and calling for empathy and union is downvoted. With such a backwards inhumane cheering squad, it’s no wonder tech companies are what they are.
The Gen Z and Alphas will save us. As a late Gen X, most of our cohorts were bogged down eating for boomers to die and are lost causes in big companies.
> From my experience, it's definitely drifted away from a bunch of nerds solving problems to something more towards emotional/personal/politics. I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy. "Back in my day" people would just state facts, point out flaws, and argue a bit, and have fun doing it, for better or worse.
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.
> 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.
If we asked your coworkers to tell us what happened, would they say "he was easy to work with and so generous with their time by fixing issues all over the org"?
Or would they say something completely different?
Being “easy to work with” is unfortunately often confused with supporting other people agendas. Rising what’s necessary even if it makes people uncomfortable doesn’t automatically make you an ass, but odds are it will make you one that doesn’t play ball.
> Being “easy to work with” is unfortunately often confused with supporting other people agendas.
I don't think this is hard or complex. It's an easy question with a simple answer: do you like working with user foo? Whether you answer yes or no, why?
If virtually all your coworkers answer no, and the org feels it's in their interest to kick you out, then what lesson do you take from that?
And let's not forget that someone going around inventing fires to put out that he alone can put out is also something that fits the description of an agenda.
So no, sometimes the world is not our to get you. Sometimes you cause grief to everyone around you, to the point that it's a net benefit to get rid of you.
People need to stop confusing geeks and nerds with being socially awkward and outright sociopaths. Enjoying tinkering with things doesn't require you to be abhorrent or lack any social skills. You're not smart or intelligent if you believe it's a good idea to go around telling others to fix problems they don't have and being obnoxious about it. Being able to fix a bug does not change that.
They would say something completely different and be wrong, most likely.
If you've seen it you've seen it. If you haven't, it'll be tempting to interpret this as some kind of garbled or one sided story.
I actually have seen good coworkers get chopped down because they cared more about the system than others egos. It saddens me when management supports egos more than the product. It shows up years later to the customers.
I had plenty of backing under the original org to operate that way, but acquisition restructuring often means managers at multiple levels exiting. When I was put on garden leave pending payout, several of my colleagues reached out distressed asking if they should be threatening to quit to force a reversal of the decision, or start looking for other work out of dissatisfaction, and others offered to provide references. I of course thanked them, but said they should look after their own interests as nothing was likely to change.
Getting big is the same as getting old. Getting big means that they lucked into getting a cash cow and a bureaucracy springs up to manage that cash cow, kind of a necessary evil, and also attracts opportunists who think they can make the cash cow bigger (and enrich themselves in the process). So the business starts bloating up with employees.
Professional executives.
I think you are on to something maybe. I also think there is a key part where Microsoft and others would hire people so nobody would. I know cases where people were hired and stayed on irrelevant or useless projects for years. Because of non compete agreements this means a good professional would stay few years out of the hands of the competition.
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.
Actually, I think there are areas of interest that come up in large companies. Microsoft started the equivalent of an FDE organization about 12 years ago. It was interesting to have the freedom to build and grow an organization from about 20 to 800 people. Working with customers and product teams to help get direct customer feedback to help evolve products was interesting. Now, 12 years later, FDEs are sort of the current buzzy role.
FDE allows execs to covertly circumvent their internal bureaucracy to ship faster. It will be interesting to see what execs make of that data.
I think it's a role that makes sense. Solution architects and pre-sales engineers are a role that has been sorta defined in the past. Working directly with customers gives much more market insight than PMs that don't actually ever talk to a customer.
I suspect there is still a good amount of shedding the defensive-hiring going on from the pre-AI, low interest, high growth inflation front-loading era. Now all that is crumbling, interest is rising, growth is contracting due to several factors, and AI is clearly crushing manpower demands. What do you do under these new circumstances with an excess of staff you largely hired as capacity and defensively?
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.
> they’re also causing systemic problems in things like the housing market
The rest of your post sounded rational. This part doesn’t.
Failure to build more units (NIMBY) and properties being held as investments (non-US nationals are significant in some markets) are the two causes I would point to. Of course every additional family that needs housing drives up the cost a little, but I really don’t think that can be responsible for the massive increases in housing valuation.
Depends on the market, Australia has a massive issues due to migration for a few reasons; the big one is that the rate of growth attempted means that the rate of public infrastructure build is also high. This is expensive, and since the migrants are not earning more than the naturals, the GDPpc is not growing to balance the increased cost of infrastructure.
The other big issue is density is expensive; it costs much more to build an apartment at the 10th floor than a detached house. Combine that with density being inherently a bit shit, you get less quality and less housing for the money spent.
Part of what scares me about hold these companies are is how they've like the Titan Cronus been allowed to keep eating their children. There's so so much missing new blood that should be here, so many interesting medium sized companies that should be adapting, figuring out this new age, but so much of our talent and brainpool is locked up deep inside one of a handful of these massive techno-feudal empires.
The only thing I’m looking for from antitrust is a moratorium of a few companies from buying their competition.
My ass, latest gen is actually more open to criticism. Old gen people used to be bullies and dogmatic. I call your story bullshit.
I've worked with a number of people who were like this at MSFT. They've all been laid off.
> I think it's a fundamental rule that the competence and effectiveness of an org must fall, over time
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...
Most giants in highly technological areas don’t evolve, almost by definition. They get to a point where they’re mature companies just operating an existing business, and that’s diametrically opposed to developing new businesses.
Sure, they can spend money on R&D, but then they’re competing with every other new venture in the world - the only benefit they have is money, but collectively, everyone else has more money than they do.
This is why when private equity takes over a mature business, they almost always shut down any R&D the company is doing. Silly mature business, that’s not the reason for your existence!
>IBM, GE... how many former American giants failed to evolve.
"How many failed to evolve", on its own, is a bad metric for success, because it misses the how many new giants the US economy managed to create, which IMHO is the more important metric of a healthy economy.
Companies are like people, the old ones die out and are replaced by new young ones, as it should be. Worst you can do is be like Europe where all you do is try to keep ancient dying companies on life support for the sake of "stability", instead of creating new ones to replace them, which is also a fitting metaphor for EU demographics where a third of the state's budget goes to keeping boomers pensions higher than the salary of average worker(in France).
> I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy.
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.
I can’t tell if you’re trolling.
Of course we should be compassionate, but anyone needs to be able to function enough so that they can internalise criticism and evolve.
It feels like tech overcorrected from allowing assholes to be assholes. To now having words and tone policed constantly.
Reminds me of when Douglas Crockford got removed as a keynote speaker because he made other people uncomfortable because he used the term "gonads" and also did a muscle flex when talking about WeakMap vs StrongMap.
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/50u77r/douglas_...
Those weren't the reasons. For example, you make it sound like he just used the word "gonads" once, but actually, he had an entire 39-minute presentation with multiple references to testicles.
They may not be the real reasons but they're the reasons that were referred to by the organizers.
Personally I was not aware of that and I feel like something like that should have come up during the entire time he was being deplatformed.
But, was he referencing actual testicles or did he just use the term "balls" in a tongue in cheek manner (to mean like, chutzpah or something?)
The assholes are still there. Complaining about language does nothing to get rid of the assholes. They're completely orthogonal activities.
If you wanted to get rid of the assholes - incredibly difficult, because they take many forms - you'd have to reinvent corporate culture in the US to make it less extractive and performative and more substance-based and cooperative.
I guess I would change what I said to specify a certain sub type then
Politically correct language has a definite purpose. If nothing else, it can be used as a gauge of compliance and obedience. If you publish a list of politically-correct terminology, company-wide, and you make suggestions on how people can amend their language to be socially-acceptable, then you will find varying levels of compliance.
The people who are loyal to the company, and believe in the mission, and obedient to the leadership, they are the ones most likely to amend their language and adopt the new terms. They will apologize for their mistakes and correct themselves. This will be looked upon with widespread favor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair
Others will not comply. Perhaps they are too old and set in their ways, or they just don't care about other people's feelings, or they are disobedient to the leadership already, and disloyal to the company. For whatever reason, they are the ones who will begin to distinguish themselves with language. When the rest of the company has adopted the acceptable terms, the Missing Stair people will be left behind. Then, they can simply be treated as Missing Stairs.
The bad apples don't necessarily need to be fired or exiled. Simply having a way to distinguish them in a crowd is very helpful in any organization.
One person's over-correction is another person's "finally". Norms change; it's as reasonable for that to happen as it is to complain about it.
For some cases, but the industry has already swung back on some language like master branch.
> saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy
Was it about displaying the user's birthday?
not being able to find true love is pretty emotional tbf
> and have fun doing it, for better or worse
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.
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.
On call 24/7/365.
My mental health took such a beating that I resigned without giving two weeks.
Multiple reorgs (7 in last three years).
HR moving requirements for what it takes to get rated a 100.
Service security review was just me. Guy asked where the rest of the team was. I shared it was just me and said he’s seeing same thing across all the services he reviews, wondered where everyone was going.
Place ended up being stage four cancer and haven’t regretted my decision at all.
How do they work after the last person leaves?
> I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
A lot of people has this feeling because the work at a big corporation is different than in starting technologies.
When you start a new technology everything is new, and a lot of stuff is added at the edge.
When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements, following new rules or regulations, incorporating products from merges, maintaining technology up to date with new releases... nothing feels important and nothing feels challenging. At the same time, your company fails if it is not done. Quality is also incredible important, to break a tiny component may send thousands of companies around the world spinning.
Maybe you should work for a startup instead of a stablished company. You can move fast and break things when you have no customers, or just very few of them.
> When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements, following new rules or regulations, incorporating products from merges, maintaining technology up to date with new releases... nothing feels important and nothing feels challenging. At the same time, your company fails if it is not done. Quality is also incredible important, to break a tiny component may send thousands of companies around the world spinning.
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.
No thank you. I worked in multiple startups and they inherited the worst cancers of big tech: moving slowly, decisions by committees, leveling (in one startup, the founder decided to have six engineering levels in a company with less than 10 engineers). Compound with low pay and erratic behavior of founders, I had seen more than enough.
> When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements
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.
In the years since, Google has spun up GCP from nothing, built the foundations of the current AI boom, designed its own chips (TPU), rolled out self-driving cars, etc.
It's possible for both things to be true at once: a huge company can contain pockets of innovation, pockets of people doing nothing, and a lot that's somewhere in between.
Android and Google Maps were both acquisitions, and Chrome was initially based on WebKit. I don't know when exactly Google started focusing on refinements, but I think it was before 2008.
That is not to say that nothing since then has been impressive, but I do think it's fair to call just about all of it incremental.
In August 2006, Google's then CEO Eric Schmidt joined Apple's board.
Andy Rubin, the founder of Android had already made a name for himself in mobile technology. In 1999, he co-founded Danger Inc. Microsoft bought Danger in 2008.
Google acquired Android in 2005, before the iPhone was unveiled in January 2007.
The rumor here is Eric was shown an early iPhone product, and saw how much better it was than the then-current beta builds of Android. https://betawiki.net/wiki/Android_1.0_April_2007_build
Chrome was based on WebKit, which was based on KHTML, the browser engine from KDE. The only reason we have WebKit as an open source engine is because Apple had to open source it. https://blogs.kde.org/2007/10/26/web-diplomacy/
They released "just" enough of it that WebKit could be replaced in Safari. That's it. Their patch would not compile or run on Linux. It would be _years_ before KDE had a WebKit browser. KDE took months to implement many changed from WebKit into KHTML.
Sequoia Capital introduced the Where2 team to Google. https://www.smartcompany.com.au/technology/neural-notes-how-...
Sequoia were freaking out. They had signed a term sheet with the Where2 team, and backed out because Yahoo! just released a map product. Yahoo was involved in both Google's early history and the events that led to Google Maps. Yahoo had an early opportunity to license Google's search technology, rather than acquire Google outright. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were introduced to Sequoia investor Michael Moritz through Yahoo co-founder David Filo.
Yahoo CEO Terry Semel reportedly offered around US$3 billion to buy Google, but Page and Brin declined.
Sequoia withdrew its proposed investment in Where 2 in 2008. Thinking Yahoo would dominate the market, and it was not a safe investment.
Sequoia then introduced Where 2 to Google. CIA, Keyhole, it's all a fun little rabbit hole :)
When you start hiring former management consultants into leadership positions
I work in oil and gas manufacturing and we are slow dinosaurs when it comes to adapting or using new technology.
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.
What sucks about these situations is that middle managers want arbitrary things. Their imagination is tainted by existing inefficient processes and systems; they cannot see past these flawed abstractions. So when you ask them what they want, they say stuff like "faster horses" and then spend months debating the color and genders of the horses and what shape the carriage should be... The person who wants to sell them a "car" has no hope.
Yeah, at least in the pre-AI times I was writing way less code than in my startup days. but like 10 to 1000x people actually interacted with them.
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.
> following new rules or regulations
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.
There is a massive amount of overhead in any big company. Each person can manage only so many people, and so that really puts limits on how much you can flatten the middle management layer.
Combine that with each company having effectively invented “Not Invented Here” before anyone else in the world had heard of that term, and you have massive amounts of bloat.
Two jobs ago, I was working at AWS on the EC2-Chronos team that was responsible for managing all NTP time sync across all Amazon and AWS regions, availability zones, and data centers. Including the classified and isolated regions. The people I worked with were some of the best I’ve ever known, and I thought we had really good managers. I even liked my skip-level manager. And I knew some of the others as well, and had even spent a fair amount of time listening to Peter DeSantis and other internationally known luminaries on the weekly ops calls.
From Peter on down, I never saw anything or anyone that I would call bloat. If anything, I felt that his organization was too lean.
Problem was, while I had extensive experience with the NTP protocol going back to 2003, it turned out that > 99.999% of the daily job involved dealing with ancient proprietary build and deployment tools that were created twenty years ago, and had done nothing but accumulate cruft since then. And I think that was true for just about everyone who worked at AWS. There are much more modern tools and methods that have been created in the decades since, but people in AWS weren’t allowed to use them, because they weren’t the blessed proprietary tools.
And RTO had to come from somewhere. And after that, it was mandatory co-location with your boss.
And then some person thought it would be a good idea to start measuring performance by lines of code committed per developer per week, and everyone had to commit code. Didn’t we kill that idea like nearly twenty years ago, too?
Anyway, I got out of there as fast as I could.
There are things that are deeply, deeply wrong at Amazon. And AWS. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the low-level technical people.
Senior ICs spend all their time either in meetings or on their way to meetings because there are so many teams to "align". It might be okay in the normal days: organizations grow, and we need people specialized in navigating company dynamics. But as we are facing the tsunami of AI, it is increasingly risky to stay a professional meeting goer and box drawer as an IC. The only way to derisk the situation is to go to a company that moves fast, and learn how to build next generation of software with AI, or building the AI infra.
Disagree. The only part an AI can't do is the people aligning and box drawing. The implementation part is trivial. That's who will get replaced.
I assume that the demand will change. Say, a new generation of companies to replace the old. Besides, those who do have practical experience on building AI-native applications or building AI infra may be in higher demand as well. That is, maybe our experience will become not as valuable as before, therefore we'd need to refresh our experience with a different pace.
arguably the meeting overhead is actually just people trading domain knowledge. an ai agent can go read their whole code base instead of having that meeting. its not clear how all this shakes out
I would say in addition to domain knowledge, it's also about intent. Code does not capture intent, it usually doesn't include the "why" just the "how".
I argue you still need communication for the "why" to get to the "how", otherwise you will just get the wrong thing.
Thanks for sharing your experience. What you have written resonated deeply with my experience across a range of large companies.
Ironically, every large company I have worked for has chosen Microsoft partially because of their size and a perception that they have an enormous amount of top talent developing best-in-class products.
My reaction to that has been that, if a company is so large, then they can't all be in the top percentiles of talent. And when you look at how many products they have, relative to the number of software engineers they have, their can't be that many software engineers dedicated to any given product.
So I'm curious: how many people would work on a typical Microsoft product, and what sort of calibre are they?
> how many people would work on a typical Microsoft product, and what sort of calibre are they?
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.
I still don't get why companies like Uber have 34000 employees, Canva 12000, LinkedIn 10000, Dropbox 2000, and so on, not even talking about Oracle with their 140000 or Salesforce with 80000
Are they all publicly traded? I have this theory that publicly traded companies hire people to inflate their stock value.
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?
In 2025 Microsoft reported $101.8 billion net income for $281.7 billion in revenue[1]. If Microsoft has a profit margin of 36.2% with "too many employees doing not enough or quality work", then it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect profits of 50% without said employees, right? Right?
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar25/index.html
You got it all wrong my friend. In a big dysfunctional org like that the key thing is to focus on the role play and politics.
I didn't get it wrong. I am okay to play politics if there's a prize worth taking, working on impactful products or learning new skills but if all there is to grab is titles or better pay then playing politics is playing the short game.
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.
Good luck to you but I don't think playing politics is necessarily a "short game" especially now that AI is used to displace ICs en masse.
I always joked that when a company grows past 20 people it goes from being a table top game or crpg and it morphs into an MMO, but with DoTA/LoL mentality internally.
This is why companies (in a free market) do not grow big enough to take over the world. "The Innovators Dilemma" is a good book on the topic.
That's a good book, but I'd argue that in a pure free market without intervention, monopolies would be disappointingly common (and why some level of regulation should exist).
Absolute free market, like any other idea taken extreme, is cancerous.
History shows us that the more free market an economy is, the more prosperous it is.
For example, the software industry. It's pretty much completely unregulated. Prices for software have gone to zero. Software engineers routinely become millionaires, and some billionaires.
Safe to say that money and prosperity can be linked, but are not equal.
Lack of regulation in tech causes real harm, like addiction, social issues and misinformation,not to mention issues with cyber bullying and suicide in teens.
Do some people make out like bandits with billions or millions of dollars, sure but I don't think that's a good barometer for progress or prosperity.
To paraphrase Doctor Who "Human progress isn't measured by industry, it's measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege"
And by that measure we are still cavemen.
> Lack of regulation in tech causes real harm, like addiction, social issues and misinformation,not to mention issues with cyber bullying and suicide in teens.
None of those had effective regulation.
Regulation against fraud does work, but the job of government is to prevent crime, enforce contracts, and stop fraud, in a free market.
> And by that measure we are still cavemen.
Government is not going to fix that.
> Do some people make out like bandits with billions or millions of dollars, sure but I don't think that's a good barometer for progress or prosperity.
In the 1800s the US lifted scores of millions of people out of poverty into the middle class.
> History shows us that the more free market an economy is, the more prosperous it is.
Ad infinitum? No it doesn’t.
> Prices for software have gone to zero.
On earth?
> Software engineers routinely become millionaires, and some billionaires.
They don’t but if they did, this could mean the opposite of what you think it means.
Nobody has discovered a limit to prosperity under a free market.
I didn't pay a cent for any of the software on my Linux machine. Free Open Source software is everywhere.
In the 1990s, the Seattle Times wrote that there were 10,000 Microsoft millionaires in the Seattle area, excluding the value of their homes.
Charles Simonyi became a billionaire as a Microsoft employee.
How do you know that it would all evolve to a handful of companies? I hear your sentiment all the time, people just assume it is true.
We obviously cannot know.
However, what we do know is that a free market requires management people today aren't accustomed to. Suddenly you are fully responsible to negotiate protection, transit, etc. That is a burden many would find off-putting and, in many cases, something beyond their capabilities.
If we were magically dropped into a free market tomorrow it is likely we would quickly attach ourselves to whomever is willing to give us those things without needing extra thought, just like the monopoly does today, and – tada – we're right back to the way things are right now.
If we were born into a free market and didn't know anything else then monopolies might be harder to pull off. That said, while the initial conditions were a bit different, we've been in a similar situation before and the monopoly won in the end.
I believe the exact opposite: you need collusion with the state to establish a monopoly. And you don’t have a pure free market as long as there is a state that puts its heavy hand on the scale to favour one group over another.
The free market has its flaws, but many blame it for the ills caused by corruption and lobbying of politicians.
There has never been a truly free market anywhere in the world, let alone ‘pure’, so I don’t see why you use this adjective at all.
Every corporation requires collusion with the state to simply exist, so of course it’s a requirement for a monopoly.
> I'd argue that in a pure free market without intervention, monopolies would be disappointingly common
How? If a monopoly were to emerge in what was a pure free market, it would become the government, and its rules would become regulation on the market. And thus the pure free market could no longer exist. Monopolies and free markets cannot coexist.
That's not what we're seeing. Companies grow big enough to take over entire sectors of the economy, the economy of scale works against smaller competitors.
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.
So what happened to Sears, IBM, RCA, GE, Kodak, etc.?
Why are the biggest companies of recent origin?
> So what happened to Sears, IBM, RCA, GE, Kodak, etc.?
They never had a chance to expand in the post-computer era. GE was really close, but they switched to the "do everything" model a bit too early. Before computers, your only option was to have a financial stake in other companies, and this doesn't provide enough control.
As for IBM, I think it just lacks the ambition to do anything drastic. You don't get _automatic_ world takeover, you need to work for it. But others are giving a good run for it, just look at the recent acquisitions by Oracle.
People in the 1980s thought it was inevitable that IBM was going to take over the world. They offered the same arguments you have.
They were too early. Collaboration tools and business practices built around them matured only in the 2000-s, with video conferencing becoming widely available only in the 2010-s.
If you want to study the history of bureaucracy and business (an exciting topic!), it took about 20 years for companies to adapt their business processes to be typewriter-friendly. The key invention: short memos rather than long-form letters.
So yeah, my answer is that prior to the modern computer era, companies had a natural maximum limit on their complexity*size metric. This naturally limited the scope of world takeovers and made monopolies self-limiting in the long run.
These limits have now increased, and we're seeing companies taking advantage of that.
Some numbers: the largest unregulated (i.e. not AT&T) company in the pre-computer era was GM, peaking around 600k employees in the 80-s. Amazon has 1.5 million employees now. Walmart is about 2.1 million, Alphabet is at ~250k.
And these companies are not showing any signs of slowing their growth down.
I strongly agree, I work in big tech right now and I feel almost like a charity case. Before Opus 5.5 my work would involve maybe a few hours of coding per week and pointless meetings. Now it’s few minutes of Opus 5.5 prompting and more pointless meetings. And im being paid very well for this, not gonna complain but this can’t last.
I dont know which Big Tech you work at but at “my” Big Tech we are working crazy hours. And thats with very heavy use of AI.
But it was like this pre-AI, as well. I don't think I spent a significant amount of the work week coding since I was an L3 15 years ago. And even then it was clear that impact (and thus promos and raises) was inversely correlated to the amount of the week spent coding.
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.
The only counter-point here is, I think a lot of larger orgs operated like this before AI. Pointless meetings, a lot of people only really working a few hours a week. It's the classic Office Space portrayal. Or Big Head at Hooli just hanging out on the roof in Silicon Valley. It's real. So I understand the temptation to say "this can't last", but yet...
>Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
I've worked at Australia largest bank and airline companies, it's insane the amount of people who are either:
* Being paid to do nothing. Manager at the bank would spend whole day going from meeting to coffee then ask you if things are done already to be delivered as "his/her team"
* Are in position without qualification. They couldn't understand the basics of common sense.
The thing is, if you know somebody who knows somebody, that is it.
Now working at one of the telcos here, bro, it's pure circus.
This is why I think communism would make sense in our current reality. If everyone got paid the same, then it would be fairer than what we have now where everyone gets paid a random amount with no correlation with skill or effort.
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.
Honestly the same impression I get. I met with some old coworkers I hadn't seen in a few years two weeks ago and we caught up. I went to a very small company that almost got killed by false rumors that killed a few of our biggest contracts and got us blackballed for a few years that we've only recently come out from under.
Two of them, in contrast, went to Google, and the differences in experience were so drastic. I'm out there almost every single week directly meeting with customers. Our CEO knows me personally. CEOs of other companies know me personally. Whether or not what I'm doing actually matters, I can at least feel the impact. I can give a concrete dollar amount for deals from the past year that would not have closed without my contribution to tackling issues the buyers had.
The guys who went to Google talked of how nice it was to have stock grants appreciate, but they did basically no work at all. It seemed Google was just experimenting with expanding into remote work but had no idea what to actually do with all these people. The strategy seemed to just be hire anyone smart enough whether or not there was work for them. They'd describe periods of weeks doing nothing at all, with no contact from any team members or superiors, no direction being given to them. Then contraction comes and, sure enough, they're the first to get laid off. Not because they did anything wrong, but just because companies that big are constantly experimenting with entire divisions and product lines that existed for no real reason other than they had more money than God and may as well do something with it, but when it turns out a product line with no purpose never actually sells or even gets completed half the time, the entire division gets axed and anyone in it goes, regardless of the quality of their work or their persons or intellect.
I know these guys very well. One of them is pretty good and I'd take him in a heartbeat for anything not super challenging, but the other is a straight up honest to God superstar in the making. He was solving other team's challenges without even being asked within a week of being on the job. I'd put him on any project ever. The fact that a company would even consider losing him is an indictment on their ability to judge ability.
This isn't even really saying anything specifically bad about Google or Microsoft. I just frankly don't think it's possible for any organization that large to have any idea what 90% of their employees are even doing on any given day. Google and Microsoft should each be about 30 different companies, not one, and even those 30 would still be too big to really stand out if you're not Raymond Chen or Jeff Dean.
I work at google and our team has too much work and is expanding constantly. Anyone I meet in GCP is working 45 hours a week minimum. It's not a death march but I've yet to meet the people who just don't do anything.
Maybe they were L3s? Maybe it's EU?
As with any large company, I think it's going to vary, even within the same jurisdictions.
Something a lot of people are bad at is the gradations of "no" that might be allowed in a situation, and learning how to communicate that can ripple up and down.
If upper management tells you "I want 1 million ponies by tomorrow", but what they really mean is "I want to see how far you can get at delivering those ponies by tomorrow", that can be the difference between making a plan for coordinating that transport and going home on time or being up at 2 am calling around to find someone who won't call you expletives for waking them to ask about ponies at 2 am.
> If upper management tells you "I want 1 million ponies by tomorrow", but what they really mean is "I want to see how far you can get at delivering those ponies by tomorrow"
People who communicate like this are overrepresented in upper management and they are the exact people who shouldn't be allowed to be in any kind of management role. :/
Not a Googler, but from what I've heard from colleagues at GCP, it's is a very different organization than much of the rest of Google.
This makes it sound as if LLM tools weren't prevalent inside MS yet by June. Is this really true? I'd be shocked if so.
I am speaking of the time from 2024 to mid-2025. While upper management was pushing developers to use Copilot, it was still not prevalent.
Post mid-2025, there were mandates to use it wherever we could.
> I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial
And yet nobody has time to do anything except to tell everyone they don't have time to do anything.
Alot of people with legacy knowledge that pitch in sometimes, but are mostly blocking others work/playing politics all day
Or they wont stop talking in meetings, but produce no real work
So glad we can finally notice this! :)
These big tech companies aren't meritocratic at any level from hiring to promotion. It's all nepotism and funny business going on behind the scenes.
One time I interviewed for a job at a big tech company during COVID/woke era and I had selected a dropdown option under 'Ethnicity' in the application form saying that I was from a "Caribbean ethnic group" which is technically true and I flew through all the interview stages and technical tests until the final interview where I had to meet with the CTO which they said was just a formality... They had dangled the biggest salary package of my life; it was like 2 times what I normally get... But then the CTO didn't show up; I spoke to some senior dev instead; conversation was not technical and I think I was quite pleasant so I don't think I did anything wrong there but I didn't get a job offer.
Unfortunately, the drop-down did not allow me to specify 'White Caribbean ethnic group" - Technically I'm a descendant of white settlers who settled the Caribbeans 500 years ago. My guess is they were not a big fan of the white variety of ethnic Carribbeans.
Middle Management Machivallianism
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I was here before this comment was flagged
what good is that comment if you won't explain what was said?
looooooool, they were asking how many H1Bs were involved.
I was joking, but this just became an even bigger joke.
I witness you