[vb-saan]

Originally Posted by mohansrides

Granted that good and robust HR policies are always helpful. But in today’s environment, it is almost impossible to take an org for a ride. Deliberate attempts to undermine an org (for selfish gain) are typically crushed with cold brutality, as they should be.

Totally agree with this. But later you mentioned an employee that you had to endure even though she could sabotage the program/client relationship (quoted below).

Originally Posted by mohansrides

To be clear, if a male employee had created the problems she had created, my PM would have personally chucked him out of our doors by the collar and dusted his hands afterwards.

This is interesting. I would think a troublesome (or underperforming employee) would be dealt with the same set of policies and procedures, irrespective of gender. The inability to do so was due to your organization’s HR policies, or this is the way it is in general?

[vedirah]

Originally Posted by mohansrides

To be specific, she was constantly critical of everything.

Originally Posted by mohansrides

Instead she focused on the minutiae of what the team didn’t do - like that piece of documentation that you didn’t keep or that email that you didn’t send to so and so, etc.

This is seen as an asset in my industry. Employees are encouraged to be critical of everything. If we don't do that, people die in airplane crashes.

How interesting. What's viewed as an asset in one industry is viewed as problematic behaviour in another!

[tsk1979]

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

Now that Musk has shown a way, everyone has started questioning the number of employees needed to run a tech company.

LOL its absurdity. Companies which host user generated content will require much larger number of employees as they have to comply with locals laws and regulations everywhere they operate. Content moderation teams outnumber engineers in most public platforms. Sure, twitter can be run with 1/10th the number of employees. But how long can it run before it starts breaking laws everywhere.

As for other companies, product companies already run a tight ship. Service companies need to have enough buffer employees to meet client and business needs at short notice. Hence the need for buffer.

And last but not the least, do not forget that Elon Musk himself ran a loss making company for years. Years of R&D expenditure with no profits were required to take spaceX and Tesla to where they are today. Its very easy to look at a now profitable company, and claim how he is a genius. but everybody forgets that his companies were burning money till not very long back.

Same thing with other software companies. Products they work on may generate revenue many many years down the line.

[Samurai]

Twitter could be broken into two SBUs, one that deals with tech stack, and the other that deals with content moderation and compliance. Musk should focus on the former and let someone else run the latter.

If Musk is managing content moderation, it is not going to work at all.

[mohansrides]

Originally Posted by vb-san

..even though she could sabotage the program/client relationship (quoted below)….I would think a troublesome (or underperforming employee) would be dealt with the same set of policies and procedures, irrespective of gender.

Originally Posted by vedirah

This is seen as an asset in my industry. Employees are encouraged to be critical of everything.:

@vb-san Where did I say she underperformed? If she had, that would have given us cause for sure. I was sweating the external manifestations; but ‘could sabotage’ isn’t the same thing as ‘did sabotage’. She didn’t. By the grace or God.

The issue was her attitude and general conduct. Criticism is perfectly fine as long you come to the table with sincerity; and you follow the processes and procedure for improving things for everyone.

In this case, she walked around running her mouth to everyone she met at the office; talking trash about the team and about the management and also about how some people on the client side aren’t good enough to run our team. This last statement in particular was dangerous. All this sowed discontent in the team and sunk morale. It is only when my PM questioned her did she start throwing out the minutiae to come up with material. He then pulled in his boss and HR, and the issue started getting bigger. Most of her criticisms were rubbish as neither the client nor our internal quality teams had a problem with anything. And by the way, our internal quality teams are a proverbial thorn in every team’s flesh. So if they themselves had nothing to be unhappy about, there really wasn’t much there to address.

I mentioned that the treatment would have been different if it had been a guy, because it certainly would have. In that case we wouldn’t have to worry about a attitude conversation snowballing into a tangent about sexism and such. That would have been the death knell. We could have legitimately cited attitude as the cause and it would have been acceptable. He would have gone somewhere else and we would have given him a good reference to boot. This is not possible with a lady employee.

By the way, male or female employee, we could easily manufacture cause if we wanted to. But most teams never do that because that would be a.) be unethical and b.) be a disproportionate response to the issue at hand (in this case). Performance related setbacks in work history have a way of following you for a long time and no one wants to destroy someone else’s career.

We tried asking other teams to take her as she had no major work problems; not a single one of our teams accepted. No one wanted the headache.

She was young and I chalked her behaviour up to her inexperience. No one who is older ever thinks that they know it all. When you think that you are smarter than everyone else and that everyone else is stupid, that is the start of the end for you.

An example. We had a very smart HR guy. One fine day I hear that he got sacked because he along with some ex-colleagues had started their own staffing firm with which they were feeding our recruitment requirements without going to the open market for those resources and while charging our org hefty fees. This was blatant malfeasance and conflict of interest.

When I heard about it, I was very surprised because I had always come away impressed by this dude. The issue was that he had slowly started to lose respect for our executive management; and over time resented the fact that he had to report to them. This seed of discontent led him astray to the point where he was unceremoniously fired.

At the end of the day, you have to accept your position in the org hierarchy and then move forward while operating within it. No point harbouring resentment that others are getting things easy while you have to toil for those very same things. No one said life is fair. But you aren’t without opportunity. Make the most of what you have and your circumstances.

[Malyaj]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Twitter could be broken into two SBUs, one that deals with tech stack, and the other that deals with content moderation and compliance. Musk should focus on the former and let someone else run the latter.

If Musk is managing content moderation, it is not going to work at all.

I suspect Musk is not interested in the tech part of it, except to the extent that his tech interventions help solve moderation issues.

I am no techie, but how complex is Twitter really from a technology perspective? I mean it's not as if it has hordes of paying customers who are demanding new features all the time or that there are transactions being processed which require better handling.

I have seem some older interviews of Musk and to me he seems to be a person who always wanted to build a large application, and not just build it, but be hands on in terms of coding it. It seemed somewhat like a newbie syndrome where a developer thinks that code is the most important thing in the world, and if you don't understand every single line of it then you are to be looked down upon. He has shown glimpses of this when he asked his employees for a code review where he would sit and personally check the code. By most accounts he is not a great developer (not that he cannot be one), and perhaps he is allowing some of that imposter syndrome to affect him. Which is strange because he has achieved so much in other highly technology heavy fields, yet feels the need for acknowledgement as a code guru.

[DigitalOne]

Originally Posted by tsk1979

Content moderation teams outnumber engineers in most public platforms. Sure, twitter can be run with 1/10th the number of employees. But how long can it run before it starts breaking laws everywhere.

Originally Posted by Samurai

If Musk is managing content moderation, it is not going to work at all.

Content Moderation also, as long as the scope is narrow, is an engineering problem. For e.g. C**** p***. I have read a Twitter thread where an authentic activist had posted on how earlier Twitter was unintentionally allowing certain keywords/hashtags used by that disgusting industry in Twitter search; and how now it has been curbed in the last few weeks. He publicly thanked Musk for that. (I cannot search for the Twitter thread, as I am at work).

If engineers from Google, FB/Insta/WA, Twitter etc join hands against such despicable content, this can be solved algorithmically. The key is to narrow down the remit of content moderation. If the scope is to moderate everybody who questions Covid origin, election process, woke practices etc then yes, any size of content-moderation team is not going to be enough.

Originally Posted by tsk1979

As for other companies, product companies already run a tight ship.

Not true . I work in a mature product company, and we also hired a lot in the last two years. Mass delusions happen more in product companies than service companies. Service companies have to show utilization every quarter. Also we do have middle management, including me, who base their self-worth on the number of people we manage .

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by Malyaj

I am no techie, but how complex is Twitter really from a technology perspective? I mean it's not as if it has hordes of paying customers who are demanding new features all the time or that there are transactions being processed which require better handling.

I don't really consider Twitter as a tech company. However, they do own nearly 2000 patents just to protect themselves from patent trolls. This is one of the sad parts about Software industry. You don't have to do something really clever to patent it. It is like patenting a dance choreography, after that no one can dance like that without paying royalty to the first person who patented it. Mind you, it is not necessarily the person who choreographed it first, but the person who patented it first. And it need not be anything very complex or amazing. Even an average dance can be patented in software.

The Twitter software can be built and maintained by a team less than 100. But the operations team could be bigger, which has to interface with the content moderation team and sales organization that sells ADs. It is hard to comment on the size of the operations team without knowing more details.

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

Content Moderation also, as long as the scope is narrow, is an engineering problem.

I consider it coming under operational matters, rather than engineering (tech stack). If engineering is dealing with content, then it is a poor design. It is like hardcoding in source code. Engineering should enable content moderation, nothing more.

[DigitalOne]

Originally Posted by Samurai

I consider it coming under operational matters, rather than engineering (tech stack). If engineering is dealing with content, then it is a poor design. It is like hardcoding in source code. Engineering should enable content moderation, nothing more.

Agree that engineering should only enable content moderation and nothing more. These days AI driven text and image processing are so advanced. For e.g Google photos now automatically categorizes photos as "vacation", "beaches", "family", "birthdays", "weddings" and recently even "Diwali".

My point was just that the number of content-moderators required is low, if the scope of moderation is narrowed down.

[am1m]

Originally Posted by mohansrides

...the classic dilemma - get the work and then get the people? Or have the people ready when the work arrives?...But experienced folk will realise that the cost, in terms of both money and time, of hiring new and dependable people typically exceeds the costs of carrying a curated set of current employees till the tide turns.

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

I work in a mature product company, and we also hired a lot in the last two years. Mass delusions happen more in product companies than service companies.

Balancing these should be the priority.

I'm at a small company right now and we've always prided ourselves in being as lean as possible, "not hiring unless absolutely necessary". Well, all of a sudden we have a big opportunity, a possible big client and partnership that will realize all the founders' dreams (and not to mention stock ). And guess what, not enough people to do the work required to bring the product up to scale and scratch to meet pre-conditions for that to happen. Add to that a couple of key role exits due to job shifts and it's looking like a mess. Since it's a fairly complex product, can't rely on contractors and even finding new people now (and we're aren't) will translate into 3-6 months before they can get productive. Very penny-wise, pound foolish.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

Agree that engineering should only enable content moderation and nothing more. These days AI driven text and image processing are so advanced. For e.g Google photos now automatically categorizes photos as "vacation", "beaches", "family", "birthdays", "weddings" and recently even "Diwali".

Again, the people who tweak those are not engineers who write code. They are AI Data modelers and designers. Since I cater to AI industry as a vendor, I had to learn that difference myself.

[SoumenD]

So except Apple, all M/FAANG firms had mass layoffs or are in process of doing it. Last decade these firms have captured everybody’s imagination like never before and an employment with them is viewed as ‘you have arrived’ in your career. A bit of it has to do with social media as well where you can see youtubers/influencers getting millions of followers churning out content about ‘how to crack M/FAANG interviews’.

Just came across a post on linkedin which talks about how this hype drove her/his judgment .


*hiding the identity for obvious reasons

While in hindsight it looks like a mistake in his case but looking at the larger picture has these layoffs dented the ‘Aspirational image’ of these firms to some extent?

P.S: @Mods, if sharing such posts from linkedin is against forum rules, please delete it.

[Newtown]

Originally Posted by mohansrides

...Deliberate attempts to undermine an org (for selfish gain) are typically crushed with cold brutality, as they should be.

Ideally, yes, they should be - But that is not the case in some large organizations which is what I mentioned on my earlier post.

Originally Posted by mohansrides

The notion that they are all rubbing their collective temples wondering what to do with “useless” employees is highly misplaced.

You have my respectful disagreement on this. I have gone through this 3 times in the last 25 years. This is real.

On the bench - You deduced exactly what I said. There is a need for a healthy bench, the operative word being healthy, healthy in skill and not in volume.

[v1p3r]

Originally Posted by SoumenD

Just came across a post on linkedin which talks about how this hype drove her/his judgment.

Let me state that while I sympathise with this person's predicament, their rant is incorrect. There is a qualitative difference between FAANG/GAMMA - which are tech-first - and JPMC, GenPact, PwC - where tech is a side or support function. A slightly higher initial pay will not mean much because your chances for growth and learning are significantly lower. You will not work on anything remotely cutting-edge. It's the difference between being an engineer at Tata's truck division, and being an engineer at Ferrari.

It is stupid to blame bhaiyas/didis for encouraging anyone to join GAMMA companies, when the whole world values them so highly - just look at the stock indices. Saying GAMMA is 'a hype' and 'a myth' reeks of immaturity, and unfortunately after posting this on LinkedIn, they're not likely to have people form a great professional opinion of them. Having said that, are they still looking? Because I'm always hiring.

[SoumenD]

Originally Posted by v1p3r

It is stupid to blame bhaiyas/didis for encouraging anyone to join GAMMA companies, when the whole world values them so highly - just look at the stock indices. Saying GAMMA is 'a hype' and 'a myth' reeks of immaturity, and unfortunately after posting this on LinkedIn, they're not likely to have people form a great professional opinion of them. Having said that, are they still looking? Because I'm always hiring.

Well I wouldn’t be expecting maturity from a 22/23 year old who has just been hit by a lightning bolt (layoff) in his/her first tryst in corporate world. Anyhow my point was more about the ‘aspirational value’ these firms carry. I’m sure people will be careful before choosing them after this fiasco unlike pre 2022 scenario when these were 1st choices by default. Brand value does blind one’s judgement a bit and I personally have been guilty of the same with a Fortune 50 firm. Thankfully escaped by a whisker before being put in a soup but learnt my lesson.

About hiring, please check out linkedin. Truckload of candidates from tech firms are looking for jobs. A search with hashtag ‘#layoff’ would bring up many such profiles. These guys are definitely brilliant, just sheer bad luck of timing that they landed up in this state. Am sure all of them will soon get their next break/s and this bad experience will be a thing of past. Smart ones will take this as a learning