Companies absolutely take perf and years of service into account for layoffs. It’s not always the same process or formula but those are popular terms in such a formula, along with pay, location, role.
I agree the processes are almost random. There’s really very little correlation between a rating and value produced.
I’m increasingly convinced the best systems are those that spend the least amount of everyone’s time. If they’re going to be dysfunctional, they might as well not waste precious time or prolong the agony.
It's often worse than random because it favors the political in-group mafia focused on climbing the ladder through any means necessary, instead of rewarding people doing good work or with actual leadership skills.
Reading this article brought back all the things I disliked about being manager. My anxiety shot up as I was reading it. I’m glad I prematurely ran out of text at the subscribe to keep reading button at the bottom.
Everyone's not the same. They don't have the same motivations. For the first decade of my job, I worked a steady, stable job that paid decently. It wasn't bad, but I was bored. Bored as in counting down the hours until the end of the work day each day, booking out all my vacation months in advance to the day.
I switched over to startups and have not looked back. Yeah, I work more, but I enjoy it a lot more. I can't do it forever, but the financial rewards have been better too, so I probably won't need to work to 65 like when I had the more stable, boring job.
Netflix's competition changed. They were one of the few players in streaming. Now, there are infinite streaming platforms, all angling for their cut of the pie. For Netflix to continue to be profitable, it decided it needed to spend more on original content. Then I suppose the cost cutting came for other expenses. Hiring a bunch of very experienced engineers does not come cheap. Netflix was known for having the highest cash comp in the valley. They've started hiring new grads again, because it's cheaper to hire one senior engineer to lead a bunch of junior engineers instead of a few seniors to do everything themselves.
I’ve no clue about Netflix specifically, but at some point as an industry we have to hire some junior people in order to have new seniors a few years down the line…
I agree the conspiracy theories don't add up. The potential benefits of WFH for employers are substantial. Lower real estate costs is direct money saved. Ability to recruit from a much larger candidate pool means they can hire faster and for lower salaries than otherwise.
There have to be meaningful downsides that CEOs and the like believe is outweighing all that.
The conditions aren't the same. When COVID caused many workplaces to go full WFH, most employees had nothing to do except work and hang out with those in their household. A lot of the increased productivity came from working instead of doing other things. Once things opened up, in aggregate they stopped working as many hours. Ultimately, it was never sustainable.
This reminds me of a job I had 15+ years ago where we did code reviews by emailing files to one another with our changes. It worked like this with the first part of the file being a script and the end of the file being a base64 encoded zip of the changed files. We had tooling that would pack them, but unpacking was done by execution.
What could possibly go wrong with emailing executable scripts?
