There's a novel about a company that sells training products, and the main character learns at some point that their only customers are other departments in the same company.
They see it like any technical engineer jobs. Like some oil company that have an accident on site. They fire all of the team involve in the accident and hire new people just so they can report it as solve and it won't happen again.
The new devs get employed, break the app, then a full panic mode is on as they try to get the old devs back as contractors to fix the problem. Tale as old as time.
This is where all the remaining devs jump ship all at once and notify the CEO of the problem where they now have no devs due to HRs decision that firing the devs and keeping recruiters is more important for the company than keeping the muscle that actually makes the company functional.
As much issue as i have with Nintendo, their bold and new strategy of keeping their old employees as long as possible while training new ones as they retire out might be crazy enough to take off!
@@wolf12king17 Judging by what I've seen with consulting firms, I'm not so sure any of their recommendations would have made any sense. So, no. I'm sure they would have never considered the recruiters. OP wrote a really insightful comment that sadly went over most people's head unless they experienced what business consulting firms do. 😅
@@Menon9767 Of course, they want their $1,000/hr contracts renewed for another 6 months. They know the company will implode in about 9 to 12 months and they will be gone.
HR is generally the most overstaffed dept in any company. We fired all of ours and now it’s done by three consultants who only work part time. It’s also an entirely operational spend department. It makes no money for the company. Just cost.
Most companies don't do anything productive anyways. They just survive because they get money from the government. They could survive with our without nay deparment. People are just pretending to work, anyways. The HR team is closed connected to upper management. Some are even lovers. haha
@@firdanharbima6997 I mean my name is a reference to a novel that I read when I was a child. And shareholders are not philanthropists. If they think the CEO is bad then they will fire him. Obviously the shareholder could be idiots but then they deserve to lose money.
I have legit seen this, they did a massive layoff at work and they had 2 managers per employee.😭😭😭 then no work got done and they were like wtf why has performance dropped your all taking the piss. While the managers spent 1/3 of the shift on their phones. The worst thing is they got rid of employees who had worst performance but they did all the annoying jobs for everyone else so we could maintain good performance. So they where the most important and no one could do their jobs since they where all gone. Just to say I was out of there quickly.
And those 47 recruiters will ask you about Leetcode questions which they don’t even know how to solve themselves because they don’t have a single bit of technical knowledge…
@@beneficent2557 yes its true, i worked in a company that started to fire hr and managers only after we lost our 3rd biggest client. They layed off like half of devs who wrote 95% of the code etc. for this particular client. I dont work there anymore but i heard from colleagues that company literally begged some of these devs to come back, only one guy got back for like 2-3 times his previous salary
Most companies don't do anything productive anyways. They just survive because they get money from the government. They could survive with our without nay deparment. People are just pretending to work, anyways. The HR team is closed connected to upper management. Some are even lovers. haha
In 2024 there’s a big push to stop “making things” and start “making more money”. To do that you need a company that’s 90% suits. Those great minds come together to make money materialize by shifting paradigms and circling back to things at a later time.
Funny thing is (not) that they over hired in recent years to show stockholders that they are growing (which was a bull) and now they need to make massive layoffs to keep CEOs able to buy new yachts and cars, and houses.
Yeah, my job canceled all 3 of their openings for new engineers we need because they said we didn't have enough budget to hire more people. And then 2 weeks later, they put 3 job openings for more H. R people.
@@brutusthebear9050 Unless they're just friends with other people in admin so they never have any real responsibilities. They become incredibly senior but also incredibly useless and insecure about it.
@CCRUEnthusist I never said that every person in admin is great or worth having. But this is a false equivalency. Recruiters only are meant to bring new people in. Administrators have an actual job.
@@brutusthebear9050 Recruitment is an actual job. Many admins have jobs like "ESL Coordinator" and show up halfway through the day and literally send one email all day. Just letting you know my experience and a teacher.
Like where I used to work. Halved the workforce and doubled the number of people working in HR while they handballed their work off to external contractors.
"After the outage we had yesterday - which totally had nothing to do with us previously firing half the staff that could've prevented it and the other half subsequently being too overworked to fix it in time - we've decided the best course of action is to make matters worse and fire even more people that could help prevent this from happening again."
My company has nearly 4000 systems engineers, 800 project managers, 300 procurement, 200 HR but just 250 actual engineers across the UK. However it's always an engineering problem when we dont have the resources to complete tasks.
Well... Not entirely true. It's to prevent the company from getting sued in some cases and only internally. Usually big companies do very sketchy sh1t so they have many lawyers.
I've unfortunately fallen into the startup crowd for a decade now and can definitively say... When your marketing department outweighs devs, your company is in its death throes. They're peacocking to make themselves look appetizing to a buyer.
@KnowThings101 Golden handcuffs. I hate this line of work because it's full of cliche annoying people (ego, tech bro, Adderall abusers, etc) but the money is good and I can literally send three words in any groups I'm in and land a job the same week "looking for work".
I'm going to be honest, the company I work doesn't have HR department, and everything goes smoothly. The developers army knows what they have to do and my coworkers are really focused on their tasks. Guess what, this year we increased 10% our salary.
so who is doing your payroll? who is the one who hired you? and how do you scale up the company? at some point, every job ad that you post will have 1000-2000 applicants, how do you pick 1? if all you answers are to hire 3rd party companies, the cost scales much faster than having your own staff to process them
Shareholders are going to be the thing that kills the US economy. I worked at one place that decided to reinvest all profits one year into developing in house software that would save the company millions over the next 10 years rather than paying licensing fees to outside vendors. The Shareholders weren't happy about it and put pressure on the board because the stock price dropped. The need for year to year growth even when you reach near market saturation has killed so many companies because at some point the only way to increase profits is to lay off the people who make you money and cut the quality that made you what you were.
Worst part is this isn't even that far from it. I started at a company, and on my first day I started with 45 other new starters. At the end of the first 6 months about 20 of us remained, at the end of the first year I was one of 3 starters that remained at the company. The next year they did it all again. The people who got fired were all good employees, but to cut cost they just slowly got rid of them till they could operate at bare minimum, over worked underpaid, staff
Join company, rinse it of every possible training opportunity, move to another, rinse and repeat until you can go self-employed. Employment is a race against redundancy at this point.
@@nathansavage8692 Spot on, son. Spot on. Show no loyalty to a corporation that treats you like grist in the machine. Life is too short and we don't get another go.
It happens in hospitals too. My friend is a nurse in a hospital where they're really understaffed. When the higher ups finally decide to hire someone, there hired 3 more people to work in HR while what the hospital really needs is more nurses, cleaners, people working in the canteen... not people sitting in front of a computer all day.
I love this. Company has 30 social media guys, 3 community managers, 5 devs of which 4 are fired Last dev has EVERYTHING on his shoulders and gets fired for being to slow 😂
This is always the way with bureaucrats. They don't have anything to measure their productivity by other than activity, so they value their work highly merely based on the fact that they're active. In the 1980s in the UK, there were hospitals with large numbers of support staff, but almost no doctors or nurses, seeing very few patients. The bureaucrats didn't see it as a problem because as far as they were concerned, valuable work was being done. It was irrelevant to them that their work wasn't supporting the actual function of hospitals. If HR had its way, it'd remove the entire business side of every business, leaving just large HR departments. They operate as if they believe that the fundamental part of a business is HR. Like businesses can't exist without HR or something. But in reality, most businesses could operate mostly fine without HR, especially the smaller ones with under 50 other employees, only having the occasional problem. But if you have no programmers, or designers, or workers, then you have no business, because you have no product.
I work in an electronic factory and they let the people who know how to fix machines go, so now there is only a small handful of people who do know, yet they got a priority list that's very long. So they hire more who don't get proper training, are thrown into fixing machines they are not familiar with and might succeed or mess up what's been done, or finally get some direction from that small handful when they got time. One of the newer guys has been working on a machine for 2 days so far and I need it to test something else because the only other place we can test it is broken. It's brilliant
This hit at home, only instead of layoff they just doesn't care about the developers, so everyone is leaving within a year. Then they just recruit new people, instead of trying to solve the issues that makes people leave.
I had partiality planned a run like this back in 2017. Never actually got far with it cause life was a bitch. Nice to see at least someone was able to commit to it!
This is a similar problem to corporate America. Lay off the people who actually make the products we sell our ship so the managers can connect a bigger paycheck.
I love the subtle connection that the outage that is the reason there is another round of layoff was more than likely caused by all the other layoffs. Therefore the layoffs here are effectively self-justifying. This is what we call a business in free fall lmao.
Back in the 90's I worked for a Sydney-based company producing warehouse automation systems. When I joined they had ~35 engineers, a couple of sales people (including the president), a few manufacturing and an accountant. A few years later they had one engineer, a whole lot of HR and middle management, a couple of sales and manufacturing people, a president and a lot of angry customers. It didn't seem worth sticking around.
Please remember that infighting on this level just helps to distract from the actual mismanagement higher up. It's the executives making terrible choices, not hr.
The best part of this was when they said the investors requested it. Generally, HR knows it's important to not just lay off the core development staff, but the investment firms and nepo babies decide that that's the best way to decrease spending so they can maximize profit for the next quarter.
I heard quite a few people say over the years that HR naturally takes over each and every company as soon as it grows big enough to need an HR. So yeah, HR people will keep their jobs. Meanwhile, other people that made the company it’s money and built to get to where it is get laid off
A lot of my batch mates who are web devs got lay off just a year into their job. I worked in hardware and we rarely have layoffs because it's harder to train us but I can't be complacent
Reminds me of where i work: We have a ton of paper pushers...so much so that half of em dont do anything. What else we have? 3 labour workers for a 10 man workload. A-mazing
It's called "suppressing salaries", it's why they have to keep pushing "STEM". It's because "STEM" is no longer a good deal in this country. Engineers are much more appreciated outside of the U.S. and the UK.
Profit motive will inevitably lead to this, the only solution is a dramatic reordering of workplace relations meaning worker onwership and workplace democracy
the ones that are the worst for this are union in my experience. The HR section is unionized and all the lower levels are temp workers. Unions push "seniority" over competence. So the 60 year old who is actively screwing up the company will keep their job while you the new graduate (HS or College) will loose theirs.
Thank god our board of directors hired those 73 McKinsey consultants that pitched us this solution in their 23 million dollar 12 slide powerpoint presentation
In Bigger Companies this is standard now actually. Not surprising either. Because the People Working dont make Decisions. They aint Importand they just Work. The People making Decisions dont need to Work. They are Importand Decisionmakers after all. Take a Guess who will be Fired if things go South. The Guys Deciding who gets Fired ? Or the Guys doing the Work. Yeah.... And so the Catch 22 Starts. Because ever fewer Workers are there to get the Work done while the Guys making Devisions cost ever more Money. And so ever more People doing Work are removed and ever less Money is made. Until the Company is Dead because the Workers are gone and the Decisionmakers racked up insane debts to Pay themselves despite no Work being done.....
I was risk manager for a small manufacturing firm. One year I polled the c suite about what concerned them most, and ex for HR VP everyone listed HR. 😂
HR has turned into a crazy racket of an "industry". My favorite is someone that calls themselves an "HR Professional" as if it's a self regulated profession like doctors, lawyers, and engineers.
Reminds me of German universities, where in recent years the only group of people with next to no chance of getting permanent employment are those in non-professor teaching positions.
Until the developers talk to each other about how poorly they were treated and all the best devs seek out other opportunities. They used to have a heuristic for early stage business valuation: +$500k for every engineer, -$50k for every MBA.
Recruiting top talent works best when you fire the top talent with a golden parachute and rehire them soon thereafter with a golden welcome handshake. Always getting the best talent there is …
And when you rehire them you can pay them going market rate which is likely 10% more than what the ones you laid off were getting paid because raises didn't keep up with inflation or the average salary of the work position.
It’s f**ked our SaaS Company. They keep wondering why things are not getting done…well…the old adage, you break it, you buy it. 😂 Tell them to pull the plug and plug it in again 😂
Lol The large corporations either purchase the smaller ones, or will offer really good pay just to starve the smaller ones until they flop, then lay off all the excess employees. If hiring excess employees fails, just load the corporation up with tremendous debt to buy back stock so the executives and board get free money using the dying corporation and move on to another corporation while the old one goes bankrupt. This is capitalism 101.
