Katie Sylor-MillerWelp, I got laid off today along with 40% of Block. I’m still totally in shock an have no idea what comes next, but if you have need for a Principal Frontend Engineer hit me up!
Sarah E Bourne@ksylor Oh no!
@sbourne yeah, it’s a total shock. We just had layoffs 2 weeks ago where ~300 engineers were let go. So this massive cut was just totally unexpected
Drew Pickard@ksylor
That is insane.
Layoffs is one thing but doung a small one before a big one means someone in leadership massively fucked up.
That is insane.
Layoffs is one thing but doung a small one before a big one means someone in leadership massively fucked up.
@drewpickard yeah the “small” one was because they suddenly instituted minimum PR count numbers *during calibration* and increased the required percentage of “below meets” to be like, 15%% instead of 7%, and then fired everyone in below because they were a “low performer”. So we all thought we were done & safe for a bit, but nope.
alice, software-defined human@ksylor @drewpickard has this just been happening everywhere? we also had minimum PR count quotas instituted a few weeks ago in the middle of reviews and basically everyone was downgraded because of it...
@alavie I'm not an engineer, so I don’t know, but as a [former] design manager involved in calibrations at previous companies they're *always* looking for arbitrary reasons to cut a higher percentage of people, especially if the 'reasons' theoretically make people work harder (to hit the arbitrary metric)
@alavie @drewpickard all the tech CEOs are in the same group chats
Daniel Barber@alavie @ksylor @drewpickard This sounds like the age old mistake of trying to measure developer productivity by the number of lines of code they write https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html?sort=date
@db @alavie @drewpickard can’t help but wonder if I put a target on my back for the second round of layoffs by vocally pushing back against throwing away decades of research by using numbers that have been debunked. I pushed to use research backed methods for measuring productivity instead. But, who knows
@ksylor @alavie @drewpickard Yeah, that certainly sounds possible. I put a target on my back once by bringing up something that bothered me at a retro. Y’know, that meeting that’s supposed be a safe space for that sort of thing.