Welp, 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!
@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
@ksylor
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.
@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 @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
Folklore.org: -2000 Lines Of Code

@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.
@ksylor @alavie @drewpickard I’ve definitely become less outspoken since then.