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by gtop3 1177 days ago
All but the most naive (or small) companies will do market analysis on the market rate of labor and have internal churn targets. I'm sure the accountants did the math and upper management decided the expected bump in churn is worth the savings. They probably noticed a recent decrease in churn at the company, and a recent stagnation of tech wage growth and thought this was a fantastic opportunity to manage labor costs. Not giving labor a 5% wage increase now will have an impact on their labor costs for years, as wage growth compounds.

The prevailing engineer perspective is that this behavior causes the smartest engineers with options and ambitions will move on. Other top engineers will leave simply because they prefer working with other great engineers. Three years of small plays like this from management is enough to cause complete brain drain, as even those waiting for more vesting will lose optimism. It's one thing to have 6% churn from engineering/product in a year. It's another if you lose the most qualified and respected 6%.
2 comments
Aeolun 1177 days ago
> It's another if you lose the most qualified and respected 6%.

I doubt that’s the case. The people deciding to lay off are just getting rid of 6% of their ‘resources’, they don’t consider that those 6% might be doing 50% of the work.

So 3 years on they’re just wondering why their engineering team is so useless, and thinking back to the good old times.

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gtop3 1177 days ago
1. My comment was on managing churn rate, not layoffs.

2. My comment described a process in which talented engineers self select to leave companies, and management only had indirect input on which engineers leave.

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nr2x 1176 days ago
I think you’re spot on. Elves and whatnot.
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no_wizard 1177 days ago
To kick inflation though, it'd need to be more than 5%. In this year, we're probably looking at 8-10% to keep up with inflation.
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gtop3 1177 days ago
1. Inflation numbers are hyper local to both individuals and region.

2. If we wanted to use a number with authority we would probably use 6.5%, which is the US Buerau of Labor Static's number for 2022 CPI.

3. My level of precision (one digit) should have been an informal indicator that I was using a rough estimate.

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