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Silent Layoffs?

I recently started seeing few posts on LinkedIn about some people posted about being laid off.. like L3 L4 L5s in engineering, data science etc. anyone noticing anything? I think mgnt figured out a way of staying out of news this year breaking habit of yearly mass layoffs.


HR & Finance: Over 300-400 people Each (Over 800)

I understand that we have to go through a RIF with Engineering and Products.

However, why do we have so many people in HR and Finance? Not to mention the recruitment department where we currently have no hiring to do, yet there are around 50 people in that team. We also have over 90 people in L&D and 100 in marketing, yet we have had to cut roles in Engineering.

Many tech companies cutting the size of their HR departments - even Uber has done so recently. META and Salesforce too.

This feels like a very targeted and poorly thought through process. Arguably, AI is capable of replacing far more roles in these functions than it is in Engineering and Products.


BTC Sales to BMT Electrical

They’re pulling folks straight out of sales teams in India and dropping them into maintenance and engineering gigs on site?
Latest one: Girl with 7 years in BTC sales just landed an electrical engineer role in BMT. And the announcements are full of these examples.
I’m genuinely disgusted and disappointed. When did “fit the role” stop mattering for jobs that keep operations safe and running?

This is pure abuse of L1/L2 visa. Someone should report this


Fidelity Investments Restructures Teams, Adds Engineering Jobs

Fidelity Investments reduced staff at its Covington facility. The company is realigning its technology and delivery teams. This aims to better match skills with high-priority customer work. Roughly one percent of the workforce was impacted by these changes. Fidelity plans to hire many new engineering roles and thousands of other critical positions.

Covington, Kentucky

https://local12.com/news/local/fidelity-investments-layoffs-hit-covington-campus-employment-unemployment-jobs


stock ↑ isn’t really about the engs.

or at least, not directly.

it’s about 100s of billions in capital investment,.. foundries, process tech, supply chains, equipment, capacity, political leverage, u name it - all of it. intel obvously cannot run without good engineers. that part is true. but the reason the market value has exploded is that everything around the engineers suddenly became much more valuable because of the tech cycle and geopolitics.

think of it this way imagine somene from the outside could take over everything the company owns except the people then hire a new workforce from scratch. it would probably take them ten years to make it work. hmmm.... maybe longer. but once they got there, they would be sitting on a money-printing machine.

i’m an engineer too, and i have a pretty high opinion of what we do. no false modesty there.

but at this valuation, i don’t think they’re looking at you and me. they’re looking at the machine.


CCIC at it again?

They cut me in 2002 one month before my daughter was due. As an RF Engineer I tried to explain to them that the carriers have their own engineers and that marketing the towers to them wouldn't work. They already knew where they needed towers. I emphasized that our efforts would be best spent by getting towers, (often disguised as flagpoles, church steeples, palm trees, etc.) through the zoning process before anyone else did. Deaf ears.


They’re hiring junior engineers now, right?

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but from my understanding, Fidelity is hiring junior engineers to replace high paid high ranking individual contributors.

So if that’s the case, what’s going to happen to Fidelity’s leap program? are they hiring these junior software engineers exclusively through leap? If not, what will come of the Leap program?


Total panic

“The machines are coming! We need security! We need quality!”

Amazing, right? For years, engineers were just “resources,” completely interchangeable, no need to listen to them. Now, overnight, they’re supposed to save the company from the big scary algorithms.

So now we get meetings, policies and buzzwords. Security this, quality that. Very impressive words, everybody’s saying them.

But here’s the problem, and it’s a big one: you can’t slap some shiny new technology on top of a rotten, inhumane culture and expect miracles. Doesn’t work. Never has. If you treat people like disposable parts, don’t be shocked when the whole machine starts rattling - AI or no AI.


Stock vs Real Intel

It’s odd seeing the stock shoot to the moon while Intel is still bleeding out engineers and techs. While work life balance dwindles for those who make the wafers, the exs keep hiring their buddies. I guess everyone will keep their mouths shut as long as the stock keeps going to the moon.


Good luck everyone!

No one that works hard and in good faith deserves to lose their job.
It’s an awful predicament to be placed in and I think these companies need to learn how to do business without massive financial success if fellow citizens are collateral damage.
I knew someone that worked at IBM and they were told years ago before the 80’s IBM would never lay off. They’d have engineers painting garages anything to keep from laying anyone off. I think it’s time for companies to bring back good faith and humanity.
It’s inhumane especially since there’s no real safety nets and life is more complicated and complex.
Do unto others…rather than the bottom line.


Architects & Data Scientists

When the dusts of current RIF and ReOrg settle, architects and the data scientists are the two most costly and counter-productive roles that needs the closest scrutinies.

The existence of those helicopter architects is the single inhibiting cohorts to an engineering driven culture. If the premise of those tenured architects is to guide the weak engineering teams, it’s not working and will never work (that’ why you don’t see the architect role in big tech such as Google and Meta):

  • If you keep the architects away from the engineering team like it is today, their lack of current and hands-on knowledge, and their lack of affinity to the day-to-day work on the one hand, stretches a tension with their assumed authority on the other hand. We find ourselves wasting cycles and energy convincing and compromising with them on a good day and misled/delayed on the bad days. We consider those architects good if they stay away most of the time, reverse engineering by themselves or asking us to produce a few pretty diagrams from our finished products periodically, and don’t try to put their dirty fingerprints on everything we do.

If you pull those architects Gods down from the FAE heaven and embed them into the engineering teams, their unwillingness to do the dirty chores and their proud refusal to assimilate will create tension between themselves and rest of the team like oil and water. Neither party will be happy.

That leaves the only option which is to reduce the architect role dramatically if not demolish it altogether: (1) Keep only a few true architects in FAE who either (a) looks cross-functional for duplication and consolidation opportunities or (b) possesses niche knowledge and skills such as security, internationalization or accessibility. (2) Fire the rest or demote them to principal (or just give them the VP title) level IC and disperse them into individual engineering teams.

With the deadweight architects out of hand, we may start growing the engineering team and culture by trusting engineers with the architectural decisions in a collective fashion among the junior, senior, principle and tech leads of a team.

Now let’s turn our attention to data scientists. WARNING: they’re so much worse than the architects!

The complete AI ignorance of the upper managements makes themselves easy targets to the scammed by Fidelity’s fake data-scientists (compared with those who can build GPT):

  • They’re paid at least one level higher than engineers yet what are they doing these days? Developing chatbots by calling vendor APIs or downloading models from HuggingFace. What entails in developing chatbots or the fancier agents? (1) Calling APIs, (2) developing the chat GUI and (3) Crafting LLM prompts. Well, software engineers are better calling APIs and developing GUI, and non-technical business domain experts are better at crafting LLM prompts. Both do a better job significantly cheaper. AI has been demoratized to a point where a high-school drop out may do a better job than an Ph.D. who don’t continuously learn.

Why don’t they train foundational LLMs that utilizes Fidelity’s private data, like Bloomberg, Captital One or Morgan Stanley? They can’t. The whole data scientists community from top to bottom are outdated. They’re stuck in the old traditional machine learning paradigms of regression, decision trees and scikitlearn. They haven’t or can’t learn the new AI paradigm which appeared on in 2017.

That leaves us with three options: (1) Fire majority of them to make room (2) Demote the remaining good data scientists to sort of higher level AI analysts who conduct experiments and compare vendor/HuggingFace models. (3) Hire true data scientist who are either experienced with or educated on the current paradigm of AI, that is those laid off from big techs and those fresh graduates who learned current paradigm of AI at school.

Architects and Data Scientists, the attic where all the dusts collect, need a desperate cleansing. With these two roles straighten up, Fidelity 2.0 may start!


DXC OASIS

DXC does not spin up a truly new platform in 12–18 months, especially given their engineering capacity, budget constraints, and the leadership churn you’ve been tracking.

But here’s the real story:

OASIS is built on the same underlying lineage as Platform X — but DXC is deliberately avoiding saying that publicly.


ASML Restructures Workforce to Boost Efficiency and Speed

ASML announced a reduction of 1,700 staff members. This action targets bureaucratic inefficiencies. The company seeks faster decision-making. It will create 1,400 new technical positions. This emphasizes a focus on core engineering.

https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/us/asml-layoffs-job-cuts-the-king-of-advanced-chip-making-machines-cuts-1700-jobs-in-major-shake-up-but-is-china-ready-to-lure-them-all-and-forge-its-own-asml-empire/amp_articleshow/130441501.cms


Abandon the copper?

I have dealt with many engineering projects were the underground copper was labeled abandoned or when aerial copper was abandoned but used to over lash fiber [fiber now owned by ATT]. If this company exits copper in 2029 [in 3 years], who will be responsible for removing all the abandoned plant? In the current market, it cost a huge amount of money to hire contractors, engineer out the plan, obtain the permits and remove. Cities are not going to allow Bell System facilities to exist on poles, in people's property, in alleys or on street corners rotting away. Will this be discussed in the Copper meeting? Cannot just walk away from this.


Grading for engineer tasks in Canvas (East GNT)

Just informed on an East market call that engineers will now be graded based on the time it takes to get tasks completed in Canvas…. Most of the delays are out of our hands with the tool not working 1/2 the time or vendors not getting their related tasks completed…. The people making these decisions have NO concept of what it takes to keep a network running and just want to stare at dashboards… I’m assuming this will now be used against us for reviews and future RIFs


There is life outside of nike

im an engineer and i was let go in 2022
i was at nike for over 10 years, loved the campus, the people, everything, i still love nike
it was definitely stressful since i have a family
after 6-7 months after the layoff, i found a job, its at a start up,
the pay is less, but im 100% remote, theres no political drama and theres no wasted work.
i know its easy for me to say as im not facing what everyone is facing right now but i just want to say,
there is life outside of nike.
the market is sh-t right now, but there is work out there, contract roles, start ups, temporary roles
i wish everyone the best
good luck