[candiodari]

Yeah, but the glut was used for something. And that something was management mandated projects. All successful Google projects were bottom-up ideas or acquisitions, with management usually fighting it as much as they can, because that's what management does.

Management isn't involved in actual functioning of the company, just in how it's organized. And of course, their main skill always turns out to be "organizing" it to their own advantage. Actual good ideas WILL lead to reorganizing work, and rearranging the management deck chairs. So management always turns out to be radically against those.

The engineers at the bottom are not just a necessity, they're THE source of revenue.

But guess what happens when you "trim the fat". Management is really good at keeping themselves in a job, and don't care about sacrificing the bottom. Meaning the worst possible outcome, according to these investors, and I'm 100% sure this happened at Google: the proportion of managers goes up when the layoffs happen. MORE organizing, less work.

[add-sub-mul-div]

> Management is really good at keeping themselves in a job, and don't care about sacrificing the bottom.

Engineers are also good at explaining why their system or feature needs to be three times more complex than it really needs to be. Or why last year's tool or framework needs to be replaced with a new one. As an engineer I've seen this bullshit my whole career.

[hot_gril]

With no incoming work, we SWEs will make ourselves "100% utilized" just rearranging things. We might be sincerely trying to clean up the software, but still, it'll never end until you give us a real task.

[candiodari]

And the alternative is to have managers who do nothing but rearrange the chairs in the company. Which doesn't even achieve good uptime or code cleanup, plus, in the case that your company does find something to do, those engineers CAN do it. The managers can't.

[hot_gril]

I've heard they're laying off managers too.

[ta1243]

Maybe there are no more tasks to be done. But layoffs aren't liked by either those being laid off, or by managers with shrinking headcounts.