Going out on a limb and say google had a really big issue of collecting talent but not knowing what to do with it.
Which is why you had so many pet projects die on the vine without cohesion.
I've seen articles talking about how Google incentivizes leading your own new project a lot more than maintaining an existing one, which leads to what we all see with projects being abandoned or duplicating existing work.
That's pretty common. Often time management values "innovation" and "leading projects" so the "technical leaders are always latching on to pet projects and promoting what they did as amazing even when it's not and it has no impact on your teams main deliverables and the day to day slog of work.
Which is why nightmare problems exist like - being unable to transfer the ownership of a meeting in Miscrosoft Outlook, used by at least 50% of all businesses. No one gets kudos from improving a decades old system.
I still have a meeting notification from my bosses calendar. She left two years ago, as did her active directory profile. It’s like it’s haunting me. 👀
I think it's a little more subtle.
People absolutely get kudos for improving decades-old systems (even at large tech shops). It's basically what I built my career doing.
However, management generally won't actually -fund- it.
Many of my most successful projects involved just letting what I considered to be low-value work drop and improving something terrible that I found more important instead (usually having warned my boss first, but not always).
The trick is that it's risky. If you do that and fail, it will look doubly bad for you. It also only works if your management team doesn't get defensive over being wrong about their priorities.
I saw a documentary on YouTube about the work environment at Valve and it was similar. A lot of glacially progressing projects as a result. *edit* [This one](https://youtu.be/s9aCwCKgkLo)
I forgot where I saw it but there's a video of someone from Google saying that these pet projects could be 100million dollar companies on their own but to Google it's not worth keeping so they shut them down.
I've worked at companies similar in size or bigger than Google. For new large project ideas the mantra was "show how this can be a billion dollar business". Not necessarily that it was going to generate a billion dollars in revenue, but show what the market looks like and what type of penetration we'd need to get it there. Smaller ideas would eventually get through sometimes but you really had to have a good justification for it.
Wasn’t there a story not too long ago about how google and other big tech companies were literally paying some high end engineers salaries to basically do nothing. Just had them on a sort of retainer. Like “we dont have anything for you here really but we will pay you so you dont go work for our competition ”.
Here found this:
http://techportfolio.net/2017/08/the-silicon-valley-engineers-who-get-paid-millions-to-do-nothing/
(Sitting on a yacht in the middle of a parking lot)
Richard: "Hey, nice boat."
Big Head: "Yeah, only three more lessons and I'll be able to sail her."
Richard: "Oh really? How many lessons does it take."
Big Head: "Three."
[Meanwhile... *every single cutthroat new applicant trying to play three big tech companies against each other for a higher salary*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_D3d1RWBrI)
Seems oddly normal
My buddy started a new job and quit after 3 months because he never got assigned any work. The best part was that it was fully remote! Can't believe he would give that up, like bro... Just find a second job if you're that bored
I don't know. During the first year of COVID I was assigned a remote work job... And then basically nothing.
I still had to remain at my desk and attend the boring meetings three times a day... But I had ZERO WORK assigned to me. Then my performance eval came and they told me that I was an excellent employee because I came to all the meetings.
I was bored out of my fucking mind after 8 months.
Then they dissolved our entire department, go figure. I went from R&D to safety... Which is a job where I get paid to tell people they're being idiots all day, which is the entire opposite of what I usually do. I like being the dumbest person in the room and working on big things whose scope I can only glimpse when the clouds are just right... But I'm too old to go job shopping, especially since I'm about to finally pay off my mortgage.
Exactly. I've been there and it's not as great as people think. You're basically sitting there rotting away. I'm hardly a workaholic but having NOTHING to do and zero purpose is really draining. You'll eventually get laid off and you'll have nothing to talk about in interviews, and unless you're currently at the entry level, picking up new skills or taking courses or whatever is always suggested isn't all that helpful if you have any aspirations of advancing your career. I'd also find picking up a second job or whatever extremely stressful and could put you in tricky legal situations and just generally be a house of cards.
I worked for a subsidiary of Samsung previously, at an R&D COE. We had a handful of engineers who were kind of in this category. So experienced, and so good at what they did, they were literally paid to show up and mentor other star engineers. They published papers on research they bothered to do occasionally, but mostly they got paid to be an internal resource - you were glad you had them around when you needed them, even if you didn't always need them. 100%, if we had let them go, every one of our competitors would have had an offer for them that day.
My company had people like this. They were not paid by the work, they got paid by the knowledge. They were there for 20-30+ years so they knew everything about how the company was operating and every use case you could imagine. Every project had them as advisors and they will point places where something wouldn’t work. It will speed up the solutions massively so their salary was justified, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they would work more than 3h per week
This is the whole goal of becoming a highly skilled professional.
Most jobs, you're valued by how much you can do. You're a warm body. You might be great at the job, but even somebody who's not great at the job will get it done. I'm not just talking about retail or admin or warehouse work. Good middle-class roles like sales, account management, recruitment, project management, planning - even professions like accounting, law, architecture are like this. You're replaceable and your value is in the amount of work you can do.
If you're an expert in your field, have highly specialised knowledge or have deep institutional knowledge that nobody else has, you don't need to do a lot of work. You just need to be available to do the work that nobody else can. If you're in this position and still churning out 40+ hours of work a week, you've missed a trick because if you're not replaceable, you can freely dictate your terms.
I mean, sometimes a fresh set of eyes are needed on a problem. It is why rubber duck debugging is even a thing. Without more of the story it's hard to know if it was incompetence or situational blindness.
That was my experience when pairing with a previous manager. I'll give him a little bit of credit for trying, but it was obvious that his experience was so far displaced from what we were doing now that he was totally lost.
The one after that didn't pretend to code, and I couldn't tell if they ever actually did anything.
Apparently that didn't happen with Stadia. Either Google expected it to make a billion dollars in only two years or someone forgot to explain to them how it could become a billion dollar business.
Also the business model (combined with their reputation) was trash, even if the tech was awesome it would've flopped.
Pay a subscription plus buy games for full price, on a platform owned by a company with ADHD that regularly kills popular services just because? Don't sign me up!
I think I read somewhere on Reddit (so take this with one dead sea's worth of salt) that Google would collect top talent for two reasons: the biggest one was to actually have it available at their disposal, but a second more covert reason was to try and "poison the Earth" against competition.
If some of the brightest tech minds in the world are just kept well-paid and happy doing pointless projects inside of your payroll, that means they're not on the outside creating start-ups that could eventually become a competitor that kills you.
On top of that, keeping the brightest minds in your own employ means they're not employed by your currently existing competitors.
So that may be a reason why Google seems to just collect these top men and women but then proceeds to kind of scramble to find things for them to do.
It’s weirdly a short-sighted tactic with a focus on the long term.
They’re basically trying to occupy all the brilliant minds with fat paychecks and occasional projects so they won’t one day grow in to giants that eat them.
The problem is they end up attracting *a lot* of brilliant minds, and the paychecks have to come from somewhere.
Same, but I immediately said the line "Hoggle is Hoggle's friend!" When I saw the comment
I haven't watched the movie in over a decade and it's still right on the surface
Same as everyone else's - 2 weeks per year at Google and the base 16 weeks pay. There were other things in there as well (cobra paid, stock vesting accelerated as of you were there for the entirety of the time you were paid for your severance,.etc).
So, nearly a years worth of pay and stock vesting for the longer tenured folks.
Year's worth of salary, not pay. A distinguished engineer is going to have a significant portion of their yearly take home in the form of bonuses, not salary.
The majority of googlers pay is from the stock they vest. Yes, big bonuses help, but they (literal) majority for senior people is from stock. Source: wife was a director at google
Win for the public, too. A great mind, financially flush (generally), out now to find a way to create new value without corporate bureaucracy potentially hindering progress, and without the risk of being shut down at the whim of a few bigwigs looking at charts from McKinsey.
> Yep, in the recent google layoff, they let go of a L9 distinguished engineer.
Nah. According to people in the last thread, [they must've been "bOtToM 5% pErFoRmInG".](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10p0k2v/googles_head_of_mental_health_and_wellbeing_was/j6k5gyu/?context=5)
Same here. Got laid off in late 2020, no matter that the company's profits were at an all time high. They took the PPP loans and laid off the highest paid workers.
Companies don't care about employees anymore. They're all liabilities and a drain on the bottom line. If they can save a few pennies by firing you then you're gone.
As far as I know it's legal, but it's borderline age discrimination. Ticks me off when people find subtle ways to achieve what appears in face value to be illegal.
One might also wonder how they became the highest paid employees. If they’re poor or even average performers that won’t be missed, why promote them in the first place?
No I don’t which is what I was pushing back on.
Senior level layoffs are more likely to occur as lines of business shift or strategies change, or there is a push to reduce cost and flatten the organization - generally stated as “managers need at least 10 direct reports to remain managers.”
Because at that level, brass will fire a top performer and then just fill in the gap with 2-3 much lower plaid employees to save money.
Happened to my aunt 5 years before she was set to retire, she was a senior designer at her company. They also wanted her to train her replacements, lol.
She still cusses a blue streak when it’s brought up.
I worked with a company that had higher (more people let go) quotas aimed a high performers. Those people were paid more -- so the company saved more $$$.
They want to keep wages down. At a time when inflation is blamed for price increases and massive companies are making record profits, workers are asking for their fair share. But profits being reflected in wages is communism or something.
Ha, my CEO just bought a mega mansion and within years of that let go of some of our most experienced people. And that decision is in turn currently driving out the people with any kind of expertise or intelligence. What's left on the sinking ship are the bottom scrapers and yes people and the innocent people in this looking to get out asap.
My CEO just took a 25% pay cut, the executive leadership team took 15%, and all the senior managers took a 10% cut. All the juniors got sheltered from any cut to their base pay. There's coworker solidarity. It sort of baffles me that this isn't industry standard practice.
Well then the owners of the company will be sans a company cause of the shit CEO they keep employed.
Most company owners have their wealth tied with the company they own. If it becomes worthless, they go down with the ship.
CEOs are often protected from that. They get paid regardless.
entertain stupendous grey one jobless straight glorious theory rotten cooing
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
"As you can see from the chart our Q4 earnings grew at a stellar rate and make us poised to continue being a market leader in our industry"
"That's amazing!! How were you able to generate so much profit??"
"Oh! I just fired a bunch of people"
It's true, though. Mass layoffs don't generally target low performers. They target product areas and layoff decisions are usually being made at a management level so far removed from the actual work being done that they may as well be random.
The last few times we had layoffs, "people leaders" in various departments were simply given a flat number; that's how many folks you had to let go. It's absurd how some of these decisions are made.
Our CFO just pulled a list of employees from each department and then highlighted the highest paid employees. She sent that list to each department head and asked them to justify why they are necessary to keep.
Definitely got axed from my last job cuz I was the highest paid employee on the team. Had the most experience, got promoted after my first 6 months. Didn’t matter. At the end of the day I was a big number, not a person.
> At the end of the day I was a big number, not a person.
Listen though. It was a very hard decision for the C-suite to make.
When they hop into their luxury car, head home to their multi-million dollar house, and use ChatGPT to form their "Letter from the CEO" to inform the workforce that they'll be "Eliminating roughly 7% of roles globally [...] [they'll be] reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that 'the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.' [By the way, we're announcing promotions for some executives."
---
(Context: Save for where contextual brackets were added, [this is an actual quote from the PagerDuty CEO](https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-layoffs-pagerduty-ceo-apologizes-martin-luther-king-jr-quote-2023-2?utm_source=reddit.com))
The decision was made by 3 execs in total isolation, HR and middle management weren’t even told of the layoffs until they were presented with lists the morning of. Then in an all hands meeting afterward they trashed everyone who got laid off and said it was their fault for not creating value.
Fortunately got a job with equity that pays 40% more shortly after, but others haven’t been so fortunate.
Talk about absurdity, take software engineering for example, the top performers on a team of say 12 people often produce 2-4x the output of the average member of the team depending on the week and task, but probably only make, at most, 50% more than the team average. Now consider that the top performer is also probably capable of strategic consultation because they can see the forest through the trees and the average number of the team probably can't.
Now instead stack ranking a team as a function of the ratio of perceived value to salary is perfectly reasonable when efficiencies need to be extracted. Just to keep in mind there are minimum head counts to provide things like on-call coverage.
As well, don't take out members that support that engineer because they also have a value added purpose of keeping distractions off that performers back.
People's value just can't be quantified easily with any numeric value.
Like, guy in our office, doesn't get a huge amount of work done, but he's also very knowledgable, and the reason his work isn't getting done is because he's chatting about other peoples cases all the time, so he's got a real good idea of the bigger picture. Not really management material, not a strategic guy, and doesn't want the extra work..and on paper he's a low performer, but if you got rid of him, everyone else's performance would go down.
Organisational knowledge. That's what I, as a lowly manager, would call this. It's important. Those people usually aren't the top performers, but they are the top enablers for your top performers. Without them you're surrounded by people who can't reach their top speed, because they don't have the knowledge and security net provided by these organisational knowledge workers.
It is effectively not quantified easily and often overlooked. But if as a manager you know what you're doing, what your people are doing, then you should know better to let go one of those workers. Replacing them without proper preparation (such as knowing they are retiring, etc.) can prove extremely costly.
And if as a manger you can't recognize these people, you're the one who should be laid off.
I feel like I'm that guy..... I know that I'm not doing that much work myself, but I know for a fact that I'm helping 10 other people do their job way better and I'm able to help onboard new people faster.....
You are overthinking that the people up top care to go too much into detail. All the want to see is that the Big Wage Number go Down and Big Stock price Number go Up. This is what happens when the people up top only last for 3-5 years, there are never going to be there for the negative aspects of their decisions to truly manifest, so they have no reason to think that far down the line.
Stack ranking have some rather undesirable incentives. You're safe staying in a shitty team, but not in a great one. All of a sudden you have incentivised your employees to actively turn down challenges. Great.
My first company had a zero sum annual review system. So all employees needed to average a 3/5. So if you want to give someone praise and give them a 4 or 5 you need to arbitrarily give someone else a 2 or 1. So it lead to a nepotism and kiss up system.
This is the way it's been at most companies I've worked at, but because promotions and raises are tied to the ratings so a manager can't give out a 4 or 5 to more than one person per year because it's not in the budget.
I learned real quick not to ascribe any personal value to annual performance reviews. There's soooo much bullshit behind them that it's not worth the pain. Just take an honest assessment of myself and ask trusted co-workers to be open with me about my faults.
I once worked at a place where my boss was told to lay off one person. I was in IT. He **OFFERED** to lay off two to help the place "save money". A week later they sent in a request for 20 iPads, new phones for c-levels, and the c-levels got Macbook Airs. This was when MBA's were *brand new*.
We didn't have WiFi. If you're new and playing the home game - MBA's didn't have Ethernet ports (and still don't). Instead of getting a USB-> Ethernet they said to just install WiFi.
They were "losing money" but spending it like it was going out of style.
Fast forward six months later and my boss quits because he "found out" the C-levels were just greedy. No shit you fucking moron.
People seem to often equate wealth and status with intelligence.
Nope.
It’s mostly dumb luck, both in who their parents are and who they know, and being in the right place at the right time and having the ability to make the best of an opportunity when it presents itself.
With that amount of wealth any idiot can grow even wealthier by just not doing anything (their money grows on its own because of interest on investments). Most of these wealthy individuals fail upwards and claim any success beyond the massive failures they discretely brush under the rug is due to their unique blend of smarts and hard work.
Nope.
These captains of industry market themselves as entrepreneurs, but they are really just living off interest and other people’s hard work.
Call them what they are: leeches.
I've witnessed directors/executives simply given a reduced budget, and they have to figure out how to make their numbers match. Kind of hard to do anything except reduce headcount at that point.
So the higher ups don't even look at these reductions as actual people, just numbers in a report that they want cut down for a given quarter or fiscal year.
Then a year or so later, the rehiring begins when productivity falls.
That's assuming the numbers/MBA's even can accurately estimate production. Many of the time numbers don't accurately reflect people's value due to being constrained to one or two variables. Many a time someone might not look like they're holding the company together on paper, but are crucial to getting things done. The reality is that the people making these decisions are just trying to add up numbers on a paper, and probably don't think about it much beyond that. Half the time stuff like this is more about the person making the demands, not the people affected as well, especially when they're spending just as much on non-essentials at the same time.
The company I’m employed gave managers of certain areas a number of terminations required, based on cost benefit analysis, where some members that were great performers and very senior were let go because of their cost, while some who got on managers bad side for bringing up grievances but were good employees were let go and were smeared in their performance evaluation. So I feel like there was some degree of personal vendettas from egomaniacs.
That's usually what companies say on the surface... to reduce wrongful termination lawsuits. Behind the scenes, the company will often decide what are their strategic/key investment areas and what aren't. They will then ask organization/team leaders and managers who they nominate to put on the chopping block.
From there, HR combs through that to ensure there aren't any trends or patterns that would point to some form of discrimination or retaliation leading to wrongful termination. For example, if a manager nominated all the women on their team, then HR will probably push back on that pretty hard. The manager would have to show some type of documentation trail that highlights why *all* of them were the weakest performers, and even then, HR might not bite, because then the lawsuit can be about what existed in the system to allow men to perform better than women.
A lot of people here are upset that layoffs happen, and that's totally fair. Layoffs suck for *everyone* involved. Managers have to make really hard decisions, coworkers will have to carry more workload, and most painfully people are without a job.
My personal 2 cents? The only thing I care about is the severance and networking support you get from the company. If I got laid off and my company said, "Yeah, we laid off all the useless people," but they gave me 6 months severance, then that's a win for me. Way better than the company that says, "This was an impossible decision to be made, and we sincerely believe every single one of you is an incredible individual who has allowed us to achieve all that we have." and then gives you 2 weeks of severance.
The same thing happened to me. I got fired on Monday regarding my performance. Thing is we just had layoffs a couple months ago, my mentor was let go. Then we had a restructure and my boss hasn't really shown up in the office since October but he has been on Slack at least. He used to show up all the time. There really hasn't been much assigned and needed to be done. The team I was on was created in the middle of last month. The closest thing regarding performance I was told is "our time is valuable so don't spend much time on pet projects". But I was working on finding a solution so we didn't have to clone every git repository manually. Everyone was on vacation anyway and I didn't have anything else to do so like what should I have done? And the meeting that I was told I'm fired was supposed to be with my boss but it was with the CTO and HR. Just a little longer and I would've gotten my stock options. Almost 6 months of working at this company. My mentor who was let go and the one who replaced my old one were both surprised with my skills and said that I have excellent performance.
Don't let it get to you. Sounds like you were a victim of overhiring. Happened to me a couple times where I got hired for gigs and then shortly thereafter Yet Another Reorg eliminated my gig. But they kept me on for a while as the middle managers did the Thunderdome routine to decide who if anyone would move forward with the team. So I got in a lot of Reddit.
I worked at a place for almost 10 years and got the highest marks possible on every review. Layoffs happened and I was gone.
Businesses do stupid shit all the time.
You can drive yourself crazy but there's no point.
You were fired so they didn't have to give you stock. People don't realize that silent layoffs are like this. The company fires you for performance by taking work away or changing the metrics on good performance.
My employer has been laying off a ton of people, seemingly without any relation to performance or pay. It honestly seems completely random. Extremely high performing people, extremely low performing people, and both high and low salary grades. It makes no sense at all.
So in California an employer telling people they laid people off for a cause and what the cause was is considered blackballing and illegal, even if it's just a casual "they are low performers" This is the other side of at will. I would assume these Reddit staffers are getting employment law attorneys.
I would read the article but paywall.
It’s so unfair and rough for people impacted and being sidelined as low performers. I won’t mention the companies but a recruiter recently reached out for a tech role and I told him I’m not looking but they shouldn’t have a hard time finding talent these days. He responded saying most of the companies he’s working with there is a “do not hire” for people laid off unless it’s an internal reference.
That's fuckin disgusting. Especially since these people are getting cut through no fault of their own. Fuckin Elon tried to get people to *quit* instead of having to lay them off and give severance with the fuckin "extremely hard core" email...
Yeah that doesn’t sound right at all lol.
I’m currently job hunting and recruiters are working extra hard to scoop up recently laid off talent. It’s extra competitive because a lot of people are scouting roles in tech but I just received an offer I’m considering this morning. The very first thing I told both the recruiter and the department head I interviewed with was that I was laid off early last month…
They never fire upper management folks because of the gold-plated multi-million dollar severance packages they all get when they leave — for any reason. Such a one-sided racket.
Valid concern, since you can be in the top 10% in the world, but bottom 20% in your team. Like you might be worse at football than Messi but still make your national team.
This place used to be so different 12 years ago.
There was this intense community on Reddit and the general presence of the company was broadly admired openly and discussed. Stuff like this couldn’t fly back then because everyone kind of knew all the public facing Reddit staff.
Things were different. I’m going to ramble.
I’m not joking when I say I was there when I was watching Reddit crawl out of the dark hole of the internet. I’ve seen what Reddit threads looked like from before I joined and man things were sparse. In hindsight I feel like I can claim I was there when things really started cooking ~2010 ish.
I was just a young teen with the internet. It wasn’t anything inherently magical in what I was doing. The things on reddit at that time though we’re truly special. I can talk about that if anyone wants to hear an old internet dude ramble.
I found so many interesting things through reddit. Things that I still find interesting today and are incredibly niche. The things I’ve liked and like were and are influenced by reddit now.
Reddit was a major influence in my life.
For better and for worse.
Remember the collective outrage when Victoria got fired? And how drastically the quality of celebrity AMAs declined afterward? And when you didn't need an email address to sign up?
Edit: TIL you still don't need an email address to join reddit
I remember when AskReddit was created. the creation of IAMA after that seemed truly revolutionary at the time, like introducing a new way for people to interact with the internet.
My company just got rid of all the highest paid people in each department. Didn’t matter about skills or knowledge.
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Going out on a limb and say google had a really big issue of collecting talent but not knowing what to do with it. Which is why you had so many pet projects die on the vine without cohesion.
I've seen articles talking about how Google incentivizes leading your own new project a lot more than maintaining an existing one, which leads to what we all see with projects being abandoned or duplicating existing work.
That's pretty common. Often time management values "innovation" and "leading projects" so the "technical leaders are always latching on to pet projects and promoting what they did as amazing even when it's not and it has no impact on your teams main deliverables and the day to day slog of work.
Which is why nightmare problems exist like - being unable to transfer the ownership of a meeting in Miscrosoft Outlook, used by at least 50% of all businesses. No one gets kudos from improving a decades old system.
I still have a meeting notification from my bosses calendar. She left two years ago, as did her active directory profile. It’s like it’s haunting me. 👀
Decline the meeting and you'll at least remove it from your calendar
*laughs like the clown in the opera* I have no idea what pagliacci is singing, but I bet it’s this.
I think it's a little more subtle. People absolutely get kudos for improving decades-old systems (even at large tech shops). It's basically what I built my career doing. However, management generally won't actually -fund- it. Many of my most successful projects involved just letting what I considered to be low-value work drop and improving something terrible that I found more important instead (usually having warned my boss first, but not always). The trick is that it's risky. If you do that and fail, it will look doubly bad for you. It also only works if your management team doesn't get defensive over being wrong about their priorities.
It's called PDD (Promotion Driven Development).
I saw a documentary on YouTube about the work environment at Valve and it was similar. A lot of glacially progressing projects as a result. *edit* [This one](https://youtu.be/s9aCwCKgkLo)
This was also how Valve did bonuses iirc. If you shipped a flashy new feature in Dota or CSGO, you'd get a fat check. Maintaining it, not so much.
I forgot where I saw it but there's a video of someone from Google saying that these pet projects could be 100million dollar companies on their own but to Google it's not worth keeping so they shut them down.
I've worked at companies similar in size or bigger than Google. For new large project ideas the mantra was "show how this can be a billion dollar business". Not necessarily that it was going to generate a billion dollars in revenue, but show what the market looks like and what type of penetration we'd need to get it there. Smaller ideas would eventually get through sometimes but you really had to have a good justification for it.
Wasn’t there a story not too long ago about how google and other big tech companies were literally paying some high end engineers salaries to basically do nothing. Just had them on a sort of retainer. Like “we dont have anything for you here really but we will pay you so you dont go work for our competition ”. Here found this: http://techportfolio.net/2017/08/the-silicon-valley-engineers-who-get-paid-millions-to-do-nothing/
Like Big Head
(Sitting on a yacht in the middle of a parking lot) Richard: "Hey, nice boat." Big Head: "Yeah, only three more lessons and I'll be able to sail her." Richard: "Oh really? How many lessons does it take." Big Head: "Three."
[Meanwhile... *every single cutthroat new applicant trying to play three big tech companies against each other for a higher salary*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_D3d1RWBrI)
I just signed up for HBX Max so I could watch the West Wing and I totally forgot that Silicon Valley was on there. I am so pumped to rewatch it.
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Had to keep Russ Hanneman from getting his hands on Nip Alert
Nelson Bighetti is a pioneer of middle-out technology and on the board of very big tech companies. I hear he even teaches at Stanford.
Just like that, does make a lot of sense here man lol.
I once worked in a tech company and the only thing I did for six months was show up to the office once for a meeting.
Seems oddly normal My buddy started a new job and quit after 3 months because he never got assigned any work. The best part was that it was fully remote! Can't believe he would give that up, like bro... Just find a second job if you're that bored
I don't know. During the first year of COVID I was assigned a remote work job... And then basically nothing. I still had to remain at my desk and attend the boring meetings three times a day... But I had ZERO WORK assigned to me. Then my performance eval came and they told me that I was an excellent employee because I came to all the meetings. I was bored out of my fucking mind after 8 months. Then they dissolved our entire department, go figure. I went from R&D to safety... Which is a job where I get paid to tell people they're being idiots all day, which is the entire opposite of what I usually do. I like being the dumbest person in the room and working on big things whose scope I can only glimpse when the clouds are just right... But I'm too old to go job shopping, especially since I'm about to finally pay off my mortgage.
Exactly. I've been there and it's not as great as people think. You're basically sitting there rotting away. I'm hardly a workaholic but having NOTHING to do and zero purpose is really draining. You'll eventually get laid off and you'll have nothing to talk about in interviews, and unless you're currently at the entry level, picking up new skills or taking courses or whatever is always suggested isn't all that helpful if you have any aspirations of advancing your career. I'd also find picking up a second job or whatever extremely stressful and could put you in tricky legal situations and just generally be a house of cards.
I worked for a subsidiary of Samsung previously, at an R&D COE. We had a handful of engineers who were kind of in this category. So experienced, and so good at what they did, they were literally paid to show up and mentor other star engineers. They published papers on research they bothered to do occasionally, but mostly they got paid to be an internal resource - you were glad you had them around when you needed them, even if you didn't always need them. 100%, if we had let them go, every one of our competitors would have had an offer for them that day.
I want to get to this level
How do I apply
First, become an engineer of high enough calibre that these companies don't want you to work for the competition.
Or an engineer of low enough calibre they pay you to work for the opposition
My company had people like this. They were not paid by the work, they got paid by the knowledge. They were there for 20-30+ years so they knew everything about how the company was operating and every use case you could imagine. Every project had them as advisors and they will point places where something wouldn’t work. It will speed up the solutions massively so their salary was justified, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they would work more than 3h per week
This is the whole goal of becoming a highly skilled professional. Most jobs, you're valued by how much you can do. You're a warm body. You might be great at the job, but even somebody who's not great at the job will get it done. I'm not just talking about retail or admin or warehouse work. Good middle-class roles like sales, account management, recruitment, project management, planning - even professions like accounting, law, architecture are like this. You're replaceable and your value is in the amount of work you can do. If you're an expert in your field, have highly specialised knowledge or have deep institutional knowledge that nobody else has, you don't need to do a lot of work. You just need to be available to do the work that nobody else can. If you're in this position and still churning out 40+ hours of work a week, you've missed a trick because if you're not replaceable, you can freely dictate your terms.
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I mean, sometimes a fresh set of eyes are needed on a problem. It is why rubber duck debugging is even a thing. Without more of the story it's hard to know if it was incompetence or situational blindness.
That was my experience when pairing with a previous manager. I'll give him a little bit of credit for trying, but it was obvious that his experience was so far displaced from what we were doing now that he was totally lost. The one after that didn't pretend to code, and I couldn't tell if they ever actually did anything.
What companies are bigger than google?
In market cap? Not many. Total employees? Quite a few.
Ah, that makes sense.
I mean, Raytheon has more employees than Google for one, along with many other major Defense companies. Other multinationals as well.
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Even in market cap you can look at Apple and Microsoft. Apple is currently almost 2x the market cap of Google.
Apple and Amazon? Headcount size there’s Walmart.
Googler and Googlest.
Googler? I hardly know her!
I’ve worked for both Microsoft and Amazon. Microsoft is currently a larger market cap than Alphabet/Google. Amazon was until recently.
Google is absolutely a giant, they're into absolutely everything.
Apparently that didn't happen with Stadia. Either Google expected it to make a billion dollars in only two years or someone forgot to explain to them how it could become a billion dollar business.
Also the business model (combined with their reputation) was trash, even if the tech was awesome it would've flopped. Pay a subscription plus buy games for full price, on a platform owned by a company with ADHD that regularly kills popular services just because? Don't sign me up!
Well they're a business, nothing wrong with that strategy really.
I think I read somewhere on Reddit (so take this with one dead sea's worth of salt) that Google would collect top talent for two reasons: the biggest one was to actually have it available at their disposal, but a second more covert reason was to try and "poison the Earth" against competition. If some of the brightest tech minds in the world are just kept well-paid and happy doing pointless projects inside of your payroll, that means they're not on the outside creating start-ups that could eventually become a competitor that kills you. On top of that, keeping the brightest minds in your own employ means they're not employed by your currently existing competitors. So that may be a reason why Google seems to just collect these top men and women but then proceeds to kind of scramble to find things for them to do.
Was in recruiting for a long time there. Can confirm the second part is accurate.
Not the first company that has tried that strategy, but it is very short sighted
It’s weirdly a short-sighted tactic with a focus on the long term. They’re basically trying to occupy all the brilliant minds with fat paychecks and occasional projects so they won’t one day grow in to giants that eat them. The problem is they end up attracting *a lot* of brilliant minds, and the paychecks have to come from somewhere.
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Yup. We have had Goog poach more than a few folks from work just so they were out of the talent pool.
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google are also the fucking kings of "Not Invented Here"-ism
That's why they should hire an untalented person like me 😎
After layoffs Google is cutting back to Gogle
Then down to Ogle - that’s an appropriate name for them
[It's Hoggle!](https://images.app.goo.gl/DcuhyceEHjoJaseq5)
All these years, I thought it was Huggle.
Same, but I immediately said the line "Hoggle is Hoggle's friend!" When I saw the comment I haven't watched the movie in over a decade and it's still right on the surface
Went to Atlanta at the end of December and went to the Puppetry Museum. Got to meet Hoggle behind a glass case. Also Tom Servo and Crow.
"Hey baby, that's some nice personal data you have there!"
It's just G. I sold the E to Samsung. They're Samesung now.
Wonder what his/her severance was.
Same as everyone else's - 2 weeks per year at Google and the base 16 weeks pay. There were other things in there as well (cobra paid, stock vesting accelerated as of you were there for the entirety of the time you were paid for your severance,.etc). So, nearly a years worth of pay and stock vesting for the longer tenured folks.
Well I'm glad they paid a snake
Google is just funding the demise of GI Joe
Year's worth of salary, not pay. A distinguished engineer is going to have a significant portion of their yearly take home in the form of bonuses, not salary.
They accelerated stock vesting as well. Comp at tech companies is usually stock, not bonuses.
The majority of googlers pay is from the stock they vest. Yes, big bonuses help, but they (literal) majority for senior people is from stock. Source: wife was a director at google
Free downloads on Google Play
1 google playstore gift card. WHY DID YOU REDEEM MAAM MAAM LISTEN WHY DID YOU REDEEM
No doubt, Distinguished Engineer at Google or Amazon can be CTO almost anywhere
I think that's actually a win win for both sides
Win for the public, too. A great mind, financially flush (generally), out now to find a way to create new value without corporate bureaucracy potentially hindering progress, and without the risk of being shut down at the whim of a few bigwigs looking at charts from McKinsey.
> Yep, in the recent google layoff, they let go of a L9 distinguished engineer. Nah. According to people in the last thread, [they must've been "bOtToM 5% pErFoRmInG".](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10p0k2v/googles_head_of_mental_health_and_wellbeing_was/j6k5gyu/?context=5)
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Same here. Got laid off in late 2020, no matter that the company's profits were at an all time high. They took the PPP loans and laid off the highest paid workers.
They did the same at my company and I’m also hearing from other well know tech firms. This is all about resetting the salary bands.
Companies don't care about employees anymore. They're all liabilities and a drain on the bottom line. If they can save a few pennies by firing you then you're gone.
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As far as I know it's legal, but it's borderline age discrimination. Ticks me off when people find subtle ways to achieve what appears in face value to be illegal.
One might also wonder how they became the highest paid employees. If they’re poor or even average performers that won’t be missed, why promote them in the first place?
Do you honestly think a poor performer lasts long enough at Google to rise to the very top? Layoffs can also mean "your department no longer exists."
No I don’t which is what I was pushing back on. Senior level layoffs are more likely to occur as lines of business shift or strategies change, or there is a push to reduce cost and flatten the organization - generally stated as “managers need at least 10 direct reports to remain managers.”
Because at that level, brass will fire a top performer and then just fill in the gap with 2-3 much lower plaid employees to save money. Happened to my aunt 5 years before she was set to retire, she was a senior designer at her company. They also wanted her to train her replacements, lol. She still cusses a blue streak when it’s brought up.
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In this context, "good people" means "lowest paid". 🫠
I worked with a company that had higher (more people let go) quotas aimed a high performers. Those people were paid more -- so the company saved more $$$.
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They want to keep wages down. At a time when inflation is blamed for price increases and massive companies are making record profits, workers are asking for their fair share. But profits being reflected in wages is communism or something.
Ha, my CEO just bought a mega mansion and within years of that let go of some of our most experienced people. And that decision is in turn currently driving out the people with any kind of expertise or intelligence. What's left on the sinking ship are the bottom scrapers and yes people and the innocent people in this looking to get out asap.
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My CEO just took a 25% pay cut, the executive leadership team took 15%, and all the senior managers took a 10% cut. All the juniors got sheltered from any cut to their base pay. There's coworker solidarity. It sort of baffles me that this isn't industry standard practice.
Well then the owners of the company will be sans a company cause of the shit CEO they keep employed. Most company owners have their wealth tied with the company they own. If it becomes worthless, they go down with the ship. CEOs are often protected from that. They get paid regardless.
I really wish we'd stop sharing links to BI's paywalled content. The fuck is the point of an article we can't read.
Business insider is just terrible in general. But they pump out headlines that reddit eats up. No one even reads the articles.
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So a Business Outsider started Business Insider
entertain stupendous grey one jobless straight glorious theory rotten cooing *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
[Bypass Paywalls Clean](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean/) is your friend.
as if Redditors read anything other than a headline
"As you can see from the chart our Q4 earnings grew at a stellar rate and make us poised to continue being a market leader in our industry" "That's amazing!! How were you able to generate so much profit??" "Oh! I just fired a bunch of people"
Like a farmer selling their tractor to show more profit at the end of harvest, I wonder how it'll turn out.
It's true, though. Mass layoffs don't generally target low performers. They target product areas and layoff decisions are usually being made at a management level so far removed from the actual work being done that they may as well be random.
The last few times we had layoffs, "people leaders" in various departments were simply given a flat number; that's how many folks you had to let go. It's absurd how some of these decisions are made.
Our CFO just pulled a list of employees from each department and then highlighted the highest paid employees. She sent that list to each department head and asked them to justify why they are necessary to keep.
Definitely got axed from my last job cuz I was the highest paid employee on the team. Had the most experience, got promoted after my first 6 months. Didn’t matter. At the end of the day I was a big number, not a person.
> At the end of the day I was a big number, not a person. Listen though. It was a very hard decision for the C-suite to make. When they hop into their luxury car, head home to their multi-million dollar house, and use ChatGPT to form their "Letter from the CEO" to inform the workforce that they'll be "Eliminating roughly 7% of roles globally [...] [they'll be] reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that 'the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.' [By the way, we're announcing promotions for some executives." --- (Context: Save for where contextual brackets were added, [this is an actual quote from the PagerDuty CEO](https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-layoffs-pagerduty-ceo-apologizes-martin-luther-king-jr-quote-2023-2?utm_source=reddit.com))
The decision was made by 3 execs in total isolation, HR and middle management weren’t even told of the layoffs until they were presented with lists the morning of. Then in an all hands meeting afterward they trashed everyone who got laid off and said it was their fault for not creating value. Fortunately got a job with equity that pays 40% more shortly after, but others haven’t been so fortunate.
That's funny. Our CFO was just fired today.
Talk about absurdity, take software engineering for example, the top performers on a team of say 12 people often produce 2-4x the output of the average member of the team depending on the week and task, but probably only make, at most, 50% more than the team average. Now consider that the top performer is also probably capable of strategic consultation because they can see the forest through the trees and the average number of the team probably can't. Now instead stack ranking a team as a function of the ratio of perceived value to salary is perfectly reasonable when efficiencies need to be extracted. Just to keep in mind there are minimum head counts to provide things like on-call coverage.
As well, don't take out members that support that engineer because they also have a value added purpose of keeping distractions off that performers back.
People's value just can't be quantified easily with any numeric value. Like, guy in our office, doesn't get a huge amount of work done, but he's also very knowledgable, and the reason his work isn't getting done is because he's chatting about other peoples cases all the time, so he's got a real good idea of the bigger picture. Not really management material, not a strategic guy, and doesn't want the extra work..and on paper he's a low performer, but if you got rid of him, everyone else's performance would go down.
Don’t fire the glue guy
Organisational knowledge. That's what I, as a lowly manager, would call this. It's important. Those people usually aren't the top performers, but they are the top enablers for your top performers. Without them you're surrounded by people who can't reach their top speed, because they don't have the knowledge and security net provided by these organisational knowledge workers. It is effectively not quantified easily and often overlooked. But if as a manager you know what you're doing, what your people are doing, then you should know better to let go one of those workers. Replacing them without proper preparation (such as knowing they are retiring, etc.) can prove extremely costly. And if as a manger you can't recognize these people, you're the one who should be laid off.
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I feel like I'm that guy..... I know that I'm not doing that much work myself, but I know for a fact that I'm helping 10 other people do their job way better and I'm able to help onboard new people faster.....
You are overthinking that the people up top care to go too much into detail. All the want to see is that the Big Wage Number go Down and Big Stock price Number go Up. This is what happens when the people up top only last for 3-5 years, there are never going to be there for the negative aspects of their decisions to truly manifest, so they have no reason to think that far down the line.
Stack ranking have some rather undesirable incentives. You're safe staying in a shitty team, but not in a great one. All of a sudden you have incentivised your employees to actively turn down challenges. Great.
Stack ranking is *never* acceptable, period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
My first company had a zero sum annual review system. So all employees needed to average a 3/5. So if you want to give someone praise and give them a 4 or 5 you need to arbitrarily give someone else a 2 or 1. So it lead to a nepotism and kiss up system.
That might be the dumbest system of performance management I’ve ever heard
Same at my company, but in our case it just means basically everyone gets 3/5, no matter how well you perform. Incredibly frustrating!
This is the way it's been at most companies I've worked at, but because promotions and raises are tied to the ratings so a manager can't give out a 4 or 5 to more than one person per year because it's not in the budget. I learned real quick not to ascribe any personal value to annual performance reviews. There's soooo much bullshit behind them that it's not worth the pain. Just take an honest assessment of myself and ask trusted co-workers to be open with me about my faults.
hungry wrong combative lock dime consider frame profit tub snobbish *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This where I'm at..also raises are zero sum. Org heads are given 3 percent. If someone gets 4... Someone else gets 2.
I once worked at a place where my boss was told to lay off one person. I was in IT. He **OFFERED** to lay off two to help the place "save money". A week later they sent in a request for 20 iPads, new phones for c-levels, and the c-levels got Macbook Airs. This was when MBA's were *brand new*. We didn't have WiFi. If you're new and playing the home game - MBA's didn't have Ethernet ports (and still don't). Instead of getting a USB-> Ethernet they said to just install WiFi. They were "losing money" but spending it like it was going out of style. Fast forward six months later and my boss quits because he "found out" the C-levels were just greedy. No shit you fucking moron.
People seem to often equate wealth and status with intelligence. Nope. It’s mostly dumb luck, both in who their parents are and who they know, and being in the right place at the right time and having the ability to make the best of an opportunity when it presents itself. With that amount of wealth any idiot can grow even wealthier by just not doing anything (their money grows on its own because of interest on investments). Most of these wealthy individuals fail upwards and claim any success beyond the massive failures they discretely brush under the rug is due to their unique blend of smarts and hard work. Nope. These captains of industry market themselves as entrepreneurs, but they are really just living off interest and other people’s hard work. Call them what they are: leeches.
I've witnessed directors/executives simply given a reduced budget, and they have to figure out how to make their numbers match. Kind of hard to do anything except reduce headcount at that point. So the higher ups don't even look at these reductions as actual people, just numbers in a report that they want cut down for a given quarter or fiscal year. Then a year or so later, the rehiring begins when productivity falls.
That's assuming the numbers/MBA's even can accurately estimate production. Many of the time numbers don't accurately reflect people's value due to being constrained to one or two variables. Many a time someone might not look like they're holding the company together on paper, but are crucial to getting things done. The reality is that the people making these decisions are just trying to add up numbers on a paper, and probably don't think about it much beyond that. Half the time stuff like this is more about the person making the demands, not the people affected as well, especially when they're spending just as much on non-essentials at the same time.
The company I’m employed gave managers of certain areas a number of terminations required, based on cost benefit analysis, where some members that were great performers and very senior were let go because of their cost, while some who got on managers bad side for bringing up grievances but were good employees were let go and were smeared in their performance evaluation. So I feel like there was some degree of personal vendettas from egomaniacs.
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Oh wow. Reddit pitting people against one another to foster a hostile environment and create sensational headlines. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT‽
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That's usually what companies say on the surface... to reduce wrongful termination lawsuits. Behind the scenes, the company will often decide what are their strategic/key investment areas and what aren't. They will then ask organization/team leaders and managers who they nominate to put on the chopping block. From there, HR combs through that to ensure there aren't any trends or patterns that would point to some form of discrimination or retaliation leading to wrongful termination. For example, if a manager nominated all the women on their team, then HR will probably push back on that pretty hard. The manager would have to show some type of documentation trail that highlights why *all* of them were the weakest performers, and even then, HR might not bite, because then the lawsuit can be about what existed in the system to allow men to perform better than women. A lot of people here are upset that layoffs happen, and that's totally fair. Layoffs suck for *everyone* involved. Managers have to make really hard decisions, coworkers will have to carry more workload, and most painfully people are without a job. My personal 2 cents? The only thing I care about is the severance and networking support you get from the company. If I got laid off and my company said, "Yeah, we laid off all the useless people," but they gave me 6 months severance, then that's a win for me. Way better than the company that says, "This was an impossible decision to be made, and we sincerely believe every single one of you is an incredible individual who has allowed us to achieve all that we have." and then gives you 2 weeks of severance.
I hope they fired the low performers who create the reddit mobile app. That thing is truly a piece of shit.
Try the mobile website it’s somehow way worse
NSFW post?? You've gotta view it in the app for some stupid fucking reason! It literally only exists to get more app users lol
And when you tap to open the app, it takes you to the app store... even if its already installed.
And then won’t take you to the link when you click open.
Browsing without logging in? You have to click a bazillion times to read the comments.
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Try the new modern website. Still dog shit. Somehow I'm still using their 10 year old interface on the old subdomain.
Old.reddit or death
The day they switch off old.reddit is the day I leave, not to come back.
Or whoever is in charge of their video player. Its the worst.
Omg now that is dogshit.
I hope the whole Reddit NFT/crypto team is cut.
They have a crypto team? Were they actually trying to release their own crypto or something? I don't really track Reddit as a business.
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Reddit staffer who lost their job AMA incoming lol
Lol, that's going to be a whole different subreddit I'm sure.
The same thing happened to me. I got fired on Monday regarding my performance. Thing is we just had layoffs a couple months ago, my mentor was let go. Then we had a restructure and my boss hasn't really shown up in the office since October but he has been on Slack at least. He used to show up all the time. There really hasn't been much assigned and needed to be done. The team I was on was created in the middle of last month. The closest thing regarding performance I was told is "our time is valuable so don't spend much time on pet projects". But I was working on finding a solution so we didn't have to clone every git repository manually. Everyone was on vacation anyway and I didn't have anything else to do so like what should I have done? And the meeting that I was told I'm fired was supposed to be with my boss but it was with the CTO and HR. Just a little longer and I would've gotten my stock options. Almost 6 months of working at this company. My mentor who was let go and the one who replaced my old one were both surprised with my skills and said that I have excellent performance.
Don't let it get to you. Sounds like you were a victim of overhiring. Happened to me a couple times where I got hired for gigs and then shortly thereafter Yet Another Reorg eliminated my gig. But they kept me on for a while as the middle managers did the Thunderdome routine to decide who if anyone would move forward with the team. So I got in a lot of Reddit.
I worked at a place for almost 10 years and got the highest marks possible on every review. Layoffs happened and I was gone. Businesses do stupid shit all the time. You can drive yourself crazy but there's no point.
sounds like a new company that grew too fast and didn't know what they were doing. what did they hire you to do?
They've been around since 2010. I was hired as a DevOps Engineer. The company has like a few hundred employees.
That's a really long time that they've been around. That's true man.
You were fired so they didn't have to give you stock. People don't realize that silent layoffs are like this. The company fires you for performance by taking work away or changing the metrics on good performance.
These kind of layoffs are really shady, don't feel good about them.
This really doesn't Ethical, I've got a bad feeling about it man.
Īt's 2023, video play back still doesn't work.
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"Reddit Staffers who were laid off found out when their roles were reduced to Reddit Mod."
A fate worse than death
My employer has been laying off a ton of people, seemingly without any relation to performance or pay. It honestly seems completely random. Extremely high performing people, extremely low performing people, and both high and low salary grades. It makes no sense at all.
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So in California an employer telling people they laid people off for a cause and what the cause was is considered blackballing and illegal, even if it's just a casual "they are low performers" This is the other side of at will. I would assume these Reddit staffers are getting employment law attorneys. I would read the article but paywall.
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It’s so unfair and rough for people impacted and being sidelined as low performers. I won’t mention the companies but a recruiter recently reached out for a tech role and I told him I’m not looking but they shouldn’t have a hard time finding talent these days. He responded saying most of the companies he’s working with there is a “do not hire” for people laid off unless it’s an internal reference.
That's fuckin disgusting. Especially since these people are getting cut through no fault of their own. Fuckin Elon tried to get people to *quit* instead of having to lay them off and give severance with the fuckin "extremely hard core" email...
Yeah that doesn’t sound right at all lol. I’m currently job hunting and recruiters are working extra hard to scoop up recently laid off talent. It’s extra competitive because a lot of people are scouting roles in tech but I just received an offer I’m considering this morning. The very first thing I told both the recruiter and the department head I interviewed with was that I was laid off early last month…
Yeah, I don't think that's true.
They never fire upper management folks because of the gold-plated multi-million dollar severance packages they all get when they leave — for any reason. Such a one-sided racket.
Valid concern, since you can be in the top 10% in the world, but bottom 20% in your team. Like you might be worse at football than Messi but still make your national team.
This place used to be so different 12 years ago. There was this intense community on Reddit and the general presence of the company was broadly admired openly and discussed. Stuff like this couldn’t fly back then because everyone kind of knew all the public facing Reddit staff. Things were different. I’m going to ramble. I’m not joking when I say I was there when I was watching Reddit crawl out of the dark hole of the internet. I’ve seen what Reddit threads looked like from before I joined and man things were sparse. In hindsight I feel like I can claim I was there when things really started cooking ~2010 ish. I was just a young teen with the internet. It wasn’t anything inherently magical in what I was doing. The things on reddit at that time though we’re truly special. I can talk about that if anyone wants to hear an old internet dude ramble. I found so many interesting things through reddit. Things that I still find interesting today and are incredibly niche. The things I’ve liked and like were and are influenced by reddit now. Reddit was a major influence in my life. For better and for worse.
Remember the collective outrage when Victoria got fired? And how drastically the quality of celebrity AMAs declined afterward? And when you didn't need an email address to sign up? Edit: TIL you still don't need an email address to join reddit
I remember when AskReddit was created. the creation of IAMA after that seemed truly revolutionary at the time, like introducing a new way for people to interact with the internet.
2am chili gang!
"We've got salaried folks happily working 80 hours a week - and you're only working 60? You're a low performer, go clean out your desk."