Here is the link.
Recent layoffs first had me amazed that tech leaders could so misread the market that they grossly over hired despite economic warnings. Now I believe this was entirely intentional. The tech giant operating models have resulted in tech employees becoming short term resources.
The CEO of Google admitted this. “…if the trend had continued and we had not hired to keep pace, we would fall behind in many areas as a company.” So if Google thought they were correct to massively hire and massive fire within one year, then new hires are a resource with one year value to the company.
Ironically the rise of the term People Ops should have been the first warning. Just like a Dev Ops team scaling up and down the number of servers to fine tune costs, giant tech companies are treating people like a resource that is easily throttled up and down to hit annual targets.
Honestly this makes sense. In a SaaS business economic conditions can greatly impact annual recurring revenue as customers have a chance to downsize their contracts each year. In the past I might expect a company to have a slower moving average, don’t over hire in good times so you don’t have to lay off in bad times, then when good times come around again you’re ahead of the curve because you don’t have to hire as many. But if instead a company can afford to be hyper reactionary with staffing they can optimize revenue on shorter intervals and rake in billions. It’s like day trading, but with people’s lives.
So if the the tech giant model of thinking of tech employees has changed, how should the tech employees respond? Should we only agree to higher pay to even out our inevitable time without work? Should we demand guarantees up front, get paid in cash a year in advance? Will tech unions become a thing? The next boom could be the opportunity for tech employees to redefine this model.
No comments:
Post a Comment