Spot on, and not just young, liberal. Old-ish and privacy minded. Mid-aged and right.
Two crowds are critical though:
- this is the talent pool: college campuses. FB's changing tone (sponsoring scholarships, sponsoring scholarships for non tech -> tech transfers, etc) is evident.
- this is the management pool: mid-30's to 40's, married, coastal EMs or PMs, that have to explain at dinner parties where they work and why they do it. See: the whistleblower.
That management pool isn’t going anywhere. Have a bunch of friends who work at FB, mostly immigrants. They don’t care about the reputation, or don’t have the luxury to. No one confronts them about why they work there at dinner parties. It pays the bills very well and allows them to buy nice houses and send their kids to private school.
It’s the lack of work/life balance that gets to them, not the reputation of the employer.
Exactly. Giving a lot of shits about the reputation of your employer is something people who take high pay and the lifestyle that comes with it for granted do.
HN delusion about their own self-importance is strong on this one.
There are millions of talented Engineers who'd die to work for Facebook, Google, Netflix.
Top 0.1%ile of 8,000,000,000 is 8 Million.
Most woke, liberal graduates were protected from competition from other countries due to their location advantage. Ironically these woke employees are demanding remote work, displaying their usual cluelessness about unintended consequences.
Like Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, its time for CEOs of tech companies to voluntarily kick out these entitled SJWs and hire true Capitalists, Libertarians, Indians, & Chinese. There are millions of them in this world and they are extremely talented and hard-working.
Very much missed the point with a motivated reading of the intent behind what I'm saying. Nicely done!
My comment wasn't directed at 0.1% pile. It's directed at mid-tier, good-not-great CS programs that FB is both targeting in ways that other FAANGs don't, and also have put on heavy marketing programs at. Signal or noise, hard to say, but they wouldn't be doing it if the need didn't exist .
What matters more is the self-fulfilling prophecy of if the PMs/EMs with the cultural sway decide to check out. It's incorrect to think these types don't matter due to the externalities tied to them, not just their management talent (there are a lot of good managers). An example is will the future Sheryl Sandbergs work, or not work at FB. These dinner table conversations are what starts to decide that, and their decision has a material impact on the company's future.
No, they can't work at Facebook because they aren't as talented as they think they are. Part of the libertarian / conservative delusion is that the "system" is working against them because of what they believe, and that it can't possibly be because they aren't making the cut due to talent. Profit-oriented, billion dollar companies are not discriminating against talent unless they have serious personality issues.
Sure, but developers who can get into FB can easily get into Google, Netflix, etc. Compare apples to apples.
As a FAANG engineer from the enterprise world, plenty of enterprise developers would excel here. But they're not willing or able to sufficiently practice the leetcode grind.
> to voluntarily kick out these entitled SJWs
Another way to think of these people are the most talented, highly educated pool and casting them as somehow less capable or more entitled is just pure political spin. (There's people from this pool that are right leaning, but just a lower proportion of them.)
Please define what "woke" and "SJW" means. Whenever I see it being used on HN especially in contexts like this, it's a strawman for "anybody with a political opinion different from mine"
There are fewer than 30 million software engineers in the world [1], so at 0.1% we're talking about 30,000 people worldwide. That's... not a lot of people. At all. There are waaaaaay more than 30K "we'll pay anything for the best" SWE positions in the world.
> Most woke, liberal graduates were protected from competition from other countries due to their location advantage.
On the contrary, I think those "liberal graduates" understand the US SWE labor market better than you do.
Tech is one of the least protected occupations in the United States. Driving up the supply of tech talent has been an explicit goal of the United States' immigration policy for 30+ years. Unlike medicine or engineering, there's no licensing barriers. And outsourcing has been an option for decades.
A lot of the labor market disruption you're predicting already happened. Stuff that could be effectively outsourced to IIT grads was outsourced over a decade ago. At this point, I'd bet good money that over the last 10 years or so automation (aka cloud and devops) was responsible for more IT layoffs than outsourcing.
> Ironically these woke employees are demanding remote work, displaying their usual cluelessness about unintended consequences.
I thought this would happen as well, but data seems to suggest exactly the opposite.
Also, while we're on the topic, outsourcing and skimping on engineering compensation obviously works -- just look at how IBM has taken over the tech industry while domestic firms like the FAANGs have languished ;-)
The IITs are truly world-class computer science programs. Better than most US colleges/universities. To say nothing of the fantastic engineers in Canada and Europe that can be had for fractions of American labor prices. MOOCs are noise.
> slack/remote-infrastructure
Slack-like technologies existed during the outsourcing wave in the 90s, and high-quality video conferencing existed during the wave in the early 2010s.
We've been through this rodeo before.
In college I was warned to major in Accounting instead of CS because all the programming jobs would be outsourced. Today, I make north of $600K and all of the entry level positions at the Big 4 ask for some programming knowledge, or at the very least strong SQL/Excel skills.
Again, I've lived through some of these waves. IBM et al. tried this twice and lost both times.
> An Analytical mind can be productive from 12 to 75; All of humanity is a pretty decent proxy for the talent pool.
I'm... not even going to engage with this.
> Fortunately, there are many who are seeing the cancer of woke culture and are creating alternative pipelines and being very successful at it
I don't really know where this moral panic about woke culture in tech is coming from. It's not something I've experienced in the workplace. I don't doubt that there are microclimates within FAANGS where this is a problem, but I've never seen it and at this point have to assume it's not as pervasive as the panicked folks seem to think.
In meatspace, I've had a number of friends who've complained about cancel culture/wokeness. Mostly in our small group at church. TBH, if I had to guess based on my interactions with those folks at church, all of them are struggling in their careers because they are abrasive, argumentative, and have a tendency to steamroll conversations. That lack of social graces is the sort of thing people put up with in church/friend groups but have less patience for at work (particularly in non-executive roles).
I don't doubt that cancelling is a thing, but my general anecdotal experience has been that most people complaining about it are wrong about the motivation for their firing/non-promotion. For prideful people, it's often easier to believe the world hates Christians or Conservatives than to own up to the fact that people just don't like working with or especially under abrasive personalities.
Spot on, and not just young, liberal. Old-ish and privacy minded. Mid-aged and right.
Two crowds are critical though:
- this is the talent pool: college campuses. FB's changing tone (sponsoring scholarships, sponsoring scholarships for non tech -> tech transfers, etc) is evident.
- this is the management pool: mid-30's to 40's, married, coastal EMs or PMs, that have to explain at dinner parties where they work and why they do it. See: the whistleblower.