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Matt Hagy's avatar

> I’m not exactly sure why this happened, but roughly a year ago there was a substantial vibe shift in Silicon Valley which holds that most large technology companies are massively overstaffed.

Many, if not most, tech companies are extremely reluctant to fire engineers for performance reasons until they run into a cash flow issue and have to do layoffs. You’ll find this general consensus across tech forums (e.g., Hackers News). I believe this is the case for a multitude of reasons.

First, engineers are among the most expensive employees to hire and onboard. A lot of resources go into recruiting, including numerous interviews with existing engineers and managers. And many candidates get rejected or reject the company. This adds up to a lot of time and money (guessing high 5 figures) just to hire one engineer.

Further, it can take months for an engineer to get up to speed at an established company due to all of the proprietary tech and knowledge. And engineers grow in value for years as they pick up more tribal knowledge of the firm’s codebase and systems.

Second, engineers on the same team become non-fungible due to working on different projects. We certainly try to minimize this by rotating people on to different projects so that they can gain more tribal knowledge. Yet every team member becomes the canonical expert on different systems since they simply have worked on different projects.

Third, there rarely is any short term value to firing a low performing engineer. Yes, some of us are an actual net negative by worsening the codebase quality or breaking things that require other people’s help to fix. Yet that is rare. More likely is a “quiet quitter” that makes some minimal, yet positive contribution. You’ll find numerous self-reporting on Hacker News of engineers only working 10 hours a week at FAANG firms.

Fourth, engineers have short tenures, commonly jumping to another firm in two years. It’s an open secret that an internal promotion at almost all tech companies is harder than simply getting hired at that higher level at a comparable firm. There’s a lot of debate among engineers about whether that is due to a failure of internal promotion processes or a failure of the hiring processes. And of course the most ambitious and highest performers are jumping firms more frequently.

So in summary, engineers are expensive to hire, possess valuable differential tribal knowledge, are almost always a positive contribution to the team, and constantly leaving anyways. So there’s just no reason to manage out low performers unless the firm runs into cash flow issues.

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Richard Gadsden's avatar

I think there is a fundamental difference between left-wing and right-wing speech norms.

Left-wing norms are about the sentiment; what a ban on "misgendering" amounts to is a ban on expressing the position that trans women are men; it doesn't matter what language that you use to express that sentiment, you are not allowed to say it.

Right-wing norms are about specific words. The question right-wing people ask, often, is "what words can I use?". Their mental model is that you can say that a trans woman is a man, but you can't use (list of slurs) to say so.

To pick an issue where the badness of the sentiment is less controversial:

Right-wing norms on race are that you can say that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than white people (they mostly think that this is incorrect as to fact, but it's acceptable to say it), but you can't call them by a slur.

Left-wing norms are that the sentiment that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than white people is, in itself, outside of the norms.

I should add that this is consistent: if an atheist says "there is no God", then right-wingers do not take offence (they disagree, often vehemently, but they don't take offence); if they use what is intended as disparaging language, like talking about "invisible sky fairies", then right-wingers do take offence at that.

You'll often hear right-wing people asking what words they can use to say what they want to say - and they rarely hear the truthful answer, which is that there are no words through which it is acceptable to the left to express that sentiment.

You can hear this culture clash all the time: right-wingers objecting to people using George Carlin's seven words; left-wingers happily using all of them and objecting to The Bell Curve, which never once uses a racial slur, but expresses a view of black people that is utterly abhorrent to the left-wing mindset.

The only word I can think of where left-wing people object to the word itself rather than the sentiment is the N-word. I'm aware that there is some discussion about two versions of this word, but as a speaker of a non-rhotic dialect, I can't actually hear the difference. Other slurs you can usually quote directly or talk about (the use/mention distinction).

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