IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Punko

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What was supposed to be a team job turned into a war of attrition.

The other main party is on sick leave until 30/6. Without their support for the rebellion, nothing stands in the way of glorious corporate victory.

They tried to drag me down into the mud, I guess they have no idea about my experiences on the interweb.

Thanks guys, this is the best support forum!
 

Haus

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Yeah every company does layoffs around July/August
This is beyond that and it's a trend that happening across tech companies now. Slews of new high level executives are all of a certain "type" and the new strategy is cutting costs by all means. It's also a resurgence of the belief that "With a spreadsheet you can manage anything, if your row on the sheet doesn't look right? well... TTFN". Combine these factors and you get a lot of reorganization that often doesn't serve the needs of the customers well, but looks great in quarter to quarter earnings calls.
 
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Identikit

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stop working for large corpos and either work for small companies where you are actually integral or start your own business somehow otherwise feel the wrath of being a fucking number in a sea of numbers.
 
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Kithani

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This is beyond that and it's a trend that happening across tech companies now. Slews of new high level executives are all of a certain "type" and the new strategy is cutting costs by all means. It's also a resurgence of the belief that "With a spreadsheet you can manage anything, if your row on the sheet doesn't look right? well... TTFN". Combine these factors and you get a lot of reorganization that often doesn't serve the needs of the customers well, but looks great in quarter to quarter earnings calls.
Microsoft has 228,000 employees according to Google and we’re freaking out about a 3k layoff?

That’s the equivalent to a 100 person business laying off 1 person? I’d be hard to convince there aren’t more than 3k useless people at ANY 228,000 person organization
 

Haus

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Microsoft has 228,000 employees according to Google and we’re freaking out about a 3k layoff?

That’s the equivalent to a 100 person business laying off 1 person? I’d be hard to convince there aren’t more than 3k useless people at ANY 228,000 person organization
3k in this round... Almost 20k in the last 2 months. And it's not the individual layoffs, it's the things they're doing in restructuring internally that are more worrying. I know some people in sales over at MSFT, it's not pretty, getting uglier, and MSFT seems sure "AI will smooth out all the rough spots for us".
 
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TJT

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Call me old fashioned. But going full on AI integrated OS in an already extremely bloated Windows OS is not a good idea. I already hated news and ads integrated into the OS unless you used some trickery to remove them. I read they also destroyed the Window Explorer (file directory tool specifically) in favor of some weird tag system so the OS AI works nicer with it.

Like what? So in Windows 11 you get ads in your start menu, news bullshit everywhere, and a pervasive AI?

It has honestly been nice to be done with that and just use Linux. Which actually just does OS stuff and I don't even mind having to go old school and mess with things now and again or general jank the distros all have.
 
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Rezz

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I could be a little wrong, but I don't think the layoffs are due to any feature growth/development (such as building AI into products or anything).

What a lot of these layoffs likely are, if I would hazard to guess, are people in roles where you could effectively google their outcomes. So like a sales team of 10 people has 1-2 salesmen, 1-2 admins, and the rest are cold callers. (being extremely small here) - your cold callers are just trying to generate leads for the sales people. What if you could instead scrape social media/posts/whatever of a target company and instead of cold calling them you have a bit more granular view of their needs/growth strategy from an outside perspective, without having 1-2 people dedicated to it? Now your cold caller team only has to be a couple of people to filter through the better prospects from the scraping, and you minimize dead ends for the sales team?

Or take customer service/t1 tech support. Your general customer service person is going to answer a bunch of bullshit questions that always lead to similar outcomes. So you invest in a bot that does the work so you don't need the initial CS role. How many people is that at a company as large as MS? Or your T1 escalation chain. It's already 100% sourced to india, and they are literally just reading off a triage/call list. That can be handled (and likely T2 escalations) by a simple bot that just goes up a binary answer tree to get to solutions. For most things... this is probably pretty acceptable. So you lay off more people (it's the 2000s; these layoffs are all whites in most cases).

You generally don't lay off positions you need to generate money or positions you need to keep generating money. You layoff the ones that don't generate money and can be easily automated. I would imagine this is the vast bulk of MS layoffs.
 

Cad

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Call me old fashioned. But going full on AI integrated OS in an already extremely bloated Windows OS is not a good idea. I already hated news and ads integrated into the OS unless you used some trickery to remove them. I read they also destroyed the Window Explorer (file directory tool specifically) in favor of some weird tag system so the OS AI works nicer with it.

Like what? So in Windows 11 you get ads in your start menu, news bullshit everywhere, and a pervasive AI?

It has honestly been nice to be done with that and just use Linux. Which actually just does OS stuff and I don't even mind having to go old school and mess with things now and again or general jank the distros all have.
If you can use MacOS it has virtually all the advantages of Linux but the windowing system doesn't suck.
 
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TJT

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If you can use MacOS it has virtually all the advantages of Linux but the windowing system doesn't suck.
I do use mac. My old PC is just a Linux machine now. I have macbooks for both personal and work.
 

Punko

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at work there is a guy that has been there for a long time

he doesn't understand even the most basic parts of his job, but he is always super positive and friendly

our department has been doing things for him, because it takes less time than telling him how to

quite sure he is the smartest person involved in this situation
 
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Haus

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stop working for large corpos and either work for small companies where you are actually integral or start your own business somehow otherwise feel the wrath of being a fucking number in a sea of numbers.
I've been pondering this recently.

I'm in my mid 50's. I feel I probably have one more "act" in my career to pull off somewhere. Right now I'm a pre-sales technical resource for a large cybersecurity vendor. The pay isn't bad, but the job is definitely becoming less and less my cup of tea. I've been in sales in general for coming up on 15 years now, and I'm of the "Be a technical evangelist while also cultivating solid relationships so you develop the trust of the executives and decision makers at the companies you sell to" model. Where I had a list of customers in my "patch" and my job was to go out, make them love me, our products, and buy shit.

They're shifting the whole sales model to where technical experts are now a "nationwide pooled resource". With the goal being you get tagged to drop in, give a demo, talk, pitch, workshop, then get out. You don't have consistency on what customers (or even what customer sizes, or geographies) it's literally "anybody in the US might be your next stop". I was explicitly told earlier this year "building customer relationships is no longer part of your job". This is not the gig I signed up for when I came on here. But it's where all the big players area heading. So heading to any of the other established players isn't really an option.

The alternative would be go to the reseller space, where I have a lot of friends, but the reseller channel is being destroyed because now AWS, GCP, and Azure are willing to be the reseller for a lot of other companies technologies and are willing to do it for 3% whereas traditional resellers HAVE to have around 8% gross profit on average to be profitable at all. So I believe the cybersecurity reseller world is in big trouble and probably about to evaporate. So I can't run there.

That leaves two options. Strike out on my own and do the consulting thing. I know I have the personality for it, but it still feels dauting to start doing that in my 50's. Or find a small startup and go be their "PT Barnum" technical showman, and we're in a consolidation phase in the cybersecurity industry right now so there are nowhere near as many compelling startups as there were a half a decade ago. Maybe AI will stir that up a little, but the major players are already jumping FAST into that space.

Goal at this point, find somewhere I can like what I do for another 5 years or so and call it a career at 60. Then be Haus who tinkers and crafts and sets up booths at the local arts and crafts fairs. Question is where can I pull off half a decade like that? Or should I just become a "part of the machine" where I'm at and just keep my head down and stay off radars....
 
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Control

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Strike out on my own and do the consulting thing. I know I have the personality for it, but it still feels dauting to start doing that in my 50's.
Maybe give a couple of your favorite customers a 1 year with monthly retainer "offer they can't refuse" to give yourself a softer landing? Either it works or you can't get anyone to bite, then you have your answer either way.
 
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