[metabro]

This doesn’t mesh with my experience. I work at big tech co that went through massive rounds of layoffs. The criteria was a mixed bag. A lot of it was just entire products and associated teams being dismantled.

Also, one can make the argument the other way as well. Tools and infra have gotten good enough that the work doesn’t require the “dedicated nerds”. So let’s get rid of the highest paid engineers as that’s the most impactful to our bottom line. They coincidentally happen to be the nerds. We can always hire them back for less because what else are these nerds going to do in this market.

Not saying that’s the case but demonstrating that it’s pretty easy to string together silly notions we might have to explain reality.

[eps]

These are two sides of the same medal.

What the GP said was how the bloat accumulated and why the professional quality went down. What you are saying is how they are trimming the bloat. It's not possible to trim by skill alone, because it would leave all teams and products understuffed. But the bloat is there and it is insane.

[foofie]

> These are two sides of the same medal.

I don't think it is at all. OP put up a strawman on how the tech world is packed with incompetent new arrivals, but corporations are firing people indiscrimately by blindly cutting branches out of their org tree. Corporate's criteria to fire people is deciding which product they can either slow development, freeze, or even completely eliminate. This has absolutely nothing to do with the skills of whatever employees are covered by the firing rounds. These are pure business decisions which bear no connection with the tech aspect of their services. This is not bloat. In fact, I know for a fact that one FANG was still hiring midway through a round of layoffs and their HR was adamant in not even considering internal transfers for those positions. Are we expected to believe that employees who not only passed last year's hiring bar and received positive performance reviews are bloat, but today's new recruits are competent?

[gnz11]

This assumes "professional quality" was somehow higher in the past when it's really just looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. There was plenty of crap and even bloated software written in the past.

[austin-cheney]

> Also, one can make the argument the other way as well. Tools and infra have gotten good enough that the work doesn’t require the “dedicated nerds”

Has it though? In my career I have seen people die on that hill, but only because their entire careers were utterly reliant upon those tools. If you cannot execute without a given set of tools you are in no position of objectivity when it comes to those tools, which results in a lot of catastrophically bad business decisions.