[hondatoyotafan]

Originally Posted by 100Kmphormore

senior executives able to keep their jobs and not fired like us, especially HR general managers and directors as not much hiring activity is going on and the executives actually doing the work are made to leave. Their only excuse - market conditions. Big executives like Satya Nadella and Sundar pichai who talk of empathy and understanding still pocket their millions.

Having been affected by the layoff train before let me tell you some pointers :

1. The HR and admin staff are one of the last to be fired because they need them for compliance and other legally required activities for the layoff, I worked once for an enterprise software company which wound up and when they laid off all their staff the HR head was the last to be fired by the CEO himself.

2. Senior Executives are entrenched with the C-suite and tend to have a symbiotic relationship with the C-Suite heads. They are really the last to be let go. Even when they are let go they have higher severances and contacts in the industry to land the next plum jobs.

3. The empathy and lean-in talk of big executives comes from their image management consultants and not from their head. Recently met a big executive of a large IT services company as a part of a deal with their company and the executive usually gives out this empathy and fairness gyan all over the business media. But behind closed doors and in a closed group he was a completely different guy compared to the image he peddles to the media at large.

[locusjag]

Originally Posted by hondatoyotafan

Having been affected by the layoff train before let me tell you some pointers :

1. The HR and admin staff are one of the last to be fired because they need them for compliance and other legally required activities for the layoff, I worked once for an enterprise software company which wound up and when they laid off all their staff the HR head was the last to be fired by the CEO himself.
.

I beg to differ on just one point though. From what I've seen in the 2008 recession, HR personnel in the recruitment department are usually among the first to be laid off.

I hope your own layoff was in the past and that you've since landed on your feet.

[hondatoyotafan]

Originally Posted by locusjag

HR personnel in the recruitment department are usually among the first to be laid off.

I hope your own layoff was in the past and that you've since landed on your feet.

Yes you are right the HR Personnel who usually are in charge of recruitment are let go but those who look after compliance or ops are more secure. My Layoff was from the last recession in 2008 and my layoff was a blessing in disguise and my career actually took off after the layoff. But was jobless for a while at that time and it was tough.

[poloman]

Twitter had let go around 75% of the employees. Yet after 3 months the company is working with out any hiccups. Some were predicting that twitter will die a slow death and will become inoperable. But at least technically twitter is doing absolutely fine
May be some advertisers have left, but that was more political.

If one can fire 75% employees with not major impact to operations, we can imagine how bloated these companies have become. They simply hire people with no strategy or real work. Most spent day warming the benches. When ever they see things are not going as per plan, with same ease they all will be let go. The core team of every IT product company will be incredible small.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by poloman

If one can fire 75% employees with not major impact to operations, we can imagine how bloated these companies have become. They simply hire people with no strategy or real work. Most spent day warming the benches.

I see this with large vendors I work with. They usually have a ratio of 1:10 for actual DOers vs paper pushers. But I have to fight the paper pushers for a long time before I get access to the actual DOers. The primary job of the paper pushers is to restrict customer's access to the actual DOers and also slow down the process using paperwork. However, once I get the email of the DOers, I keep addressing them, to the frustration of the paper pushers.

Ideally the ratio of actual DOers to paper pushers should be 1:1 or 2:1, that would eliminate plenty of jobs in IT though.

[DigitalOne]

Originally Posted by poloman

But at least technically twitter is doing absolutely fine

Twitter has actually introduced more features in the last couple of months. For e.g. it now shows two tabs "For You" and "Following". In the "Following" tab it shows completely the tweets of those I am following, without any content moderation (aka, censorship) or shadow banning. In the "For You" tab also I see more interesting (algorithm generated) content than before. Number of views of a tweet is another new feature to counter shadow banning by idealogically driven employees.

Originally Posted by poloman

...Most spent day warming the benches. When ever they see things are not going as per plan, with same ease they all will be let go. The core team of every IT product company will be incredible small.

Originally Posted by Samurai

I see this with large vendors I work with. They usually have a ratio of 1:10 for actual DOers vs paper pushers.

Mark Zuckerberg agrees

Mark Zuckerberg reportedly said he doesn't like seeing 'managers managing managers,' fueling speculation of more layoffs

According to the Command Line newsletter, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly said he's not a fan of all those layers of management.

"I don't think you want a management structure that's just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work," Zuckerberg reportedly said during an internal Q&A session in late January, according to Command Line.

Source

[Turbohead]

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

.
Mark Zuckerberg agrees
Source

Regarding managers managing other managers, honestly how do they create value? I'm in one of those WITCH companies where I can see about 7-8 people between myself and the CEO. I can say that people directly involved in the project last only upto 2 levels above me. I'm honestly curious what the rest do - yes, we have project managers and they've got a lot of bureaucratic stuff to do but beyond that, I'm honestly curious on what they do and how much value it brings to the table. The reason I am is because some of them take up 4-5 certifications per year ( and one over 11) and I have no clue where they get so much time to prepare and write for those certifications without raising any red flags.

[poloman]

Originally Posted by Samurai

I see this with large vendors I work with. They usually have a ratio of 1:10 for actual DOers vs paper pushers.

With in a company also these guys make life hell. There is a category of people whom we call +/++ guys. The customer report an issue which is of urgency. You think that person A is responsible for the particular ingredient and send a mail seeking help. What A does is + B or ++ a bunch of guys with out even taking the responsibility. B will +C or again do ++ and the chain goes on with out any one giving a single useful input. The recipient list would have bulged so big by a day or two that one guy may finally +A again. The biggest issue in a big company is not solving the issue, but to find the right person to help on the issue specially if you are in a customer facing team.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by poloman

What A does is + B or ++ a bunch of guys with out even taking the responsibility. B will +C or again do ++ and the chain goes on with out any one giving a single useful input. The recipient list would have bulged so big by a day or two that one guy may finally +A again.

Yes, this is exactly what I face as a customer. I am amazed at the number of people who needs to be pulled in to for a 5 minute job. And most of those guys who are pulled in don't know how to do that simple job. But each one has an opinion or two.

[warrioraks]

Originally Posted by Turbohead

Regarding managers managing other managers, honestly how do they create value? I'm in one of those WITCH companies where I can see about 7-8 people between myself and the CEO. I can say that people directly involved in the project last only upto 2 levels above me. I'm honestly curious what the rest do

As companies grow and scale, one of the biggest challenges that needs to be addressed is alignment.

Just like every 6-10 individual contributors need a lead to make sure they function as a team, likewise a group of managers needs a senior manager, and a group of senior managers needs a director to make sure that everything stays aligned. Having a pyramid structure which becomes leaner as it goes higher is the time tested proven framework to scale up.

In addition, there are other jobs to be done like - business development, sales, marketing, strategy, counselling, mentoring, recruitment, performance reviews, capacity utilisation, quality reviews, driving cross functional initiatives, research, thought leadership, attending conferences, planning, managing alliances, vendor relationships etc etc.

Not everyone in the middle or top management will do everything. But I hope you get the drift that a large company needs a lot of work beyond project execution to act as a coherent unit.

[Chetan_Rao]

Originally Posted by Samurai

I see this with large vendors I work with. They usually have a ratio of 1:10 for actual DOers vs paper pushers. But I have to fight the paper pushers for a long time before I get access to the actual DOers. The primary job of the paper pushers is to restrict customer's access to the actual DOers and also slow down the process using paperwork. However, once I get the email of the DOers, I keep addressing them, to the frustration of the paper pushers...

Disclaimer: Quoting Samurai only for reference, this is more a general opinion than a direct response to his post.

Also, none of what I say below is to claim organizations don't carry bloat in various forms, they do, but 'paper pushers exist to get in the way of doers' is a rather one-sided view.

A counter-view, for balance.

From a delivery perspective, it's necessary to shield the doers to an extent from external parties, because direct exposure brings multiple risks:

1. Work prioritisation: Doer stuck in lower priority work for 'known' customer while higher priority work is delayed/neglected elsewhere.

2. Undocumented work: 'It's an x-minute job, do we really need to raise a ticket?' The x-minute jobs are usually never a one-off, they become a habit, add up and cause effort estimation and billing issues later.

There's also a critical non-billing aspect. Not documenting a 'minor' action can later impede troubleshooting during a major production outage because nobody would know to look there initially (as the change was never documented).

3. Poaching: Plenty of customers and vendors simply poach doers they want, they don't care if it jeopardizes other projects this doer was engaged on. On sensitive engagements (e.g. Banking and Financial Services customers), replacing a doer with another is time-consuming, even if a like-for-like replacement is readily available. Onboarding them onto the customer environment can often be a weeks-long process, months in some outlier cases.

4. Single point of failure: A culmination of previous points. Known people become single points of failure eventually, because familiarity plus incidences of 1+2 over time means nobody involved wants to deal with someone else, lest they end up needing to explain and remedy all priors. This is also true in case of the doer just vacating the role or leaving the company. The replacement may not want to indulge or continue the 'undocumented relationship'.

From an operational perspective, a doer's job is to do. They often neither know nor care how they're enabled to 'do' their jobs.

Won't get into specifics to avoid divulging privileged info, but I've known issues caused by doers on both sides of a lucrative engagement bypassing the paper-pushers to meet an impossibly tight 'go-live' commitment, that got bad enough that it needed a small army of paper-pushers (accounting, finance, HR, legal, SEZ personnel) nearly 2 years to straighten things out.

Doers admittedly need to be protected from the paper-pushers to do their jobs effectively, but the doers also often fail to realise the amount of paper-pushing necessary to enable their 'doing'. Paper-pushers are like umpires/referees in sport, nobody notices them until something goes wrong, and it can sometimes take a really long time for things to go horribly, irretrievably wrong. All often traced back to someone skipping a small step somewhere they thought was a waste of 'their' time.

[hondatoyotafan]

Originally Posted by Turbohead

Regarding managers managing other managers, honestly how do they create value? I'm in one of those WITCH companies where I can see about 7-8 people between myself and the CEO. I can say that people directly involved in the project last only upto 2 levels above me.

Having reported directly to a vertical head in TCS who was separated just 2 levels away from N. Chandra i can attest that atleast in TCS the top layer is really lean and efficient. I had a similar impression till i worked for them directly. The amount of client management and issue management they do is tremendous.The reason why our client engagements go smoothly is because of the back end work these folks do with the client management.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by Turbohead

Regarding managers managing other managers, honestly how do they create value? I'm in one of those WITCH companies where I can see about 7-8 people between myself and the CEO. I can say that people directly involved in the project last only upto 2 levels above me. I'm honestly curious what the rest do

This is different than what I was alluding to.... Having multiple layers of management under the CEO is not an issue, also long they all have real responsibilities. And warrioraks already answered your question with details.

I am referring to processes the completely spoil the user experience, here is an experience I shared 10 years ago when I was on the vendor side.

Now I am often at the receiving end of similar experience. BS doesn't smell any better despite all the corporate perfume sprayed upon it. Only difference from 90s experiences is that we weren't hiding the DOers then, and DOers were not totally outnumbered by paper pushers. I was facing the customer, but my hands were tied by the process.

[tracerspiff]

Originally Posted by AZT

Can I ask what the severance packages are like here. In the US/Canada I hear it's ~ 1 month per year of service

I got 2 months of severance though according to the employment agreement, it is 1 month.

[GeneralJazz]

Originally Posted by poloman

With in a company also these guys make life hell. There is a category of people whom we call +/++ guys. The customer report an issue which is of urgency. You think that person A is responsible for the particular ingredient and send a mail seeking help. What A does is + B or ++ a bunch of guys with out even taking the responsibility. B will +C or again do ++ and the chain goes on with out any one giving a single useful input. The recipient list would have bulged so big by a day or two that one guy may finally +A again. The biggest issue in a big company is not solving the issue, but to find the right person to help on the issue specially if you are in a customer facing team.

This is something I face as an engineer, who actually has to answer the query. The customer would mail A, A will ++B, B will ++C and so on. By the time it reaches ++Z, which is me, the customer would have escalated the issue, then A will mail me with all the ++B to ++Y in between, asking me why the query is still unanswered!