Interestingly I work at Ericsson Germany and we only got notified of this today. Just six days ago I commented:
> Oh no. Since a large part of many medium-large sized tech companies' management style seems to consist of "copy what Amazon and Google are doing", I am scared of what silly decisions in other companies this might inspire.
I feel that my model of Ericssons upper management has been validated with one more data point, which is one reason why I would not be all that bummed if it turns out to hit me.
Except that in the « old » economy, you would be hard pressed to be allowed to fire thousands of people with a P&L showing billions in profit (at least in France).
Well that's France, where like in Italy and Germany. it's much more difficult to fire any one person, a department, or N% without much advance notification and government approval. For the worker, it's a very good thing.
Americans don't know how bad they have it and don't remember the mass layoffs of the 1980's and 1990's. A time when jobs became scarce because nearly every company was following suit and REAL unemployment, including those who stopped looking for jobs, rose considerably. The REAL labor participation rate in the US is more like 55% rather than 62% due to the rosy and flawed methodology used to count U-1 through U-6. There are millions fewer middle-aged workers now than there were historically. Ageism, discrimination, and other factors discourage workers from seeking to reenter the workforce. Low skill workers have it worst, cannot always move great distances, and cannot always retrain into magical hypothetical jobs that don't exist. Many underemployed people become Uber and Lyft drivers, where there is the perception of freedom but there is net underpayment and abuse (no help with capitalization, depreciation, and maintenance of a vehicle make their effective pay well below that of taxi drivers).
The global situation is the US Fed's fault for giving out free money for years and then suddenly being a Grinch because they don't like "excess consumption" when there have been shortages and supply chain disruptions. US trucking is still a mess.
You can absolutely fire people in France and many companies have done it by the thousands. They just did not happen to have billions in profits at the same time.
No doubt helped by the modern neoliberalism* wave of Macron.
And raising the retirement age.. and more austerity too?
* For anyone unfamiliar with the term: think corporate "Liberal" (conservative lite) inspired by the American Clinton dynasty including Obama and Biden who are pro-neocolonialism, anti-union, anti-worker, and "tough on crime". Macron's type is sometimes seen as a "palatable compromise" compared to the regressive fascist nationalists like Le Pen.
That outlook has a name: "learned helplessness". It's the belief of lacking power that is the problem. There is plenty of power that can be had when workers organize. Don't cross taxi unions in France or they'll burn shit down. Cross French farmers and they will clog the highways and streets of Paris.
As a global perspective: American employees tend to lack testicular fortitude because they lack hope, knowledge, and self-worth.
yeah you can't compare france and the entirety of the us. france is the size of one state in america. the power to change things en masse in america lies in the congress which is outsized controlled by smaller states that want the country to go back to the 1600s. you simply can't understand the power of corporations, common law, and the incredibly conservative supreme court the last 40 years. you know nothing of the scale of america.
Note - I'm not making a statement on the current layoff, as I know nothing about Ericsson.
That logic is flawed. Past performance is not indicative of future results. If you see big slowdown coming, isn't it better to prepare for it early? Do you have to wait till you're losing money?
Google had $60B in net income last year.
Meta had $23B in net income last year.
Amazon had -$2.7B in net income last year. The year before they had $33.3B.
Tesla had $12.5B in net income last year.
Ericsson had $1.8B in net income last year.
Apple (who didn't do layoffs) had $95.2B in net income last year.
Sure, they can't achieve those record profits for four years in a row, but none are losing money soon.
That logic is also flawed. If you see a big slowdown coming, why would you continue making large acquisitions? Why sweep thousands of various ranks rather than tighten your ship carefully where it matters?
Because employees are primarily a cost vs output equation for public companies in particular (and that's even more true with gigantic firms). Acquisitions are broadly viewed as expanding shareholder value (whether accurate or not in a given situation).
The stock market tanked thanks to the Fed rate hikes. It's believed shareholders will respond positively to cost optimizations. So they'll try to hold the line on growth while boosting margins re cost centers.
It's quite straight-forward thinking as it pertains to getting a positive reaction from shareholders.
The question for that context is: are your cost centers well optimized, or can you trim staff (real-estate holdings, inventory, whatever)? That's a very common question that would be pushed at public companies by large institutional shareholders.
Big tech is extraordinarily bloated with labor. They frequently grow at almost comical rates in terms of adding unnecessary employees (they do it just because they can afford to hoover up the talent to keep it from their competition; one common path forward in the hierarchy for managers is to grow their staff count and expand their footprint), and pretty much everyone knows it. It happens with every fast growth era in tech.
We agree, staff trimming makes far more sense. However, what is happening isn't staff trimming.
Are there any papers regarding the labor bloat specific to tech? Everyone believing in something doesn't make it true so I would love to read more about that beyond the usual memes of "girls on tiktok posting about their day in tech".
Actually, this idea that it's done because of bloat signals something interesting. The reply above claims these layoffs happen because of the future potentially showing massive slowdown - however, why are we trusting what these companies feel about the future when they got their pandemic move completely wrong? They thoroughly believed (apparently, so they say in their layoff emails...) that this growth was going to continue, so obviously they don't have the best grasp on how to make decisions for the future. Entirely negating the above reply that this is due to impending slowdown.
Yeah not in the US, if anything the past decade has been very good for programmers when compared to other industries. There are lots of industries in the US that are more ruthless than big tech.
What this tells me is that there is a really big slowdown (Depression?) coming that threatens even the huge COH of that these companies currently have.
This new economy was one of extremely low interest rates.
Few things here: first there's very few big techs in the country, which mean layoffs in the thousands are unlikely. The second thing is that big companies (even the software ones) use an army of external consultants precisely to go around law governing work. They can then go let off people without technically firing anyone.
Or hoarding talent simply to take them off the market and keep them from potential competitors. I feel like this is a relatively new development, at this scale at least.
Tech / IT is of course special, because it was seen (correctly) as an engine of indeterminately large growth: software scales really well, and integrated circuits are almost as good, currently limited by production capacity, not market demand.
For this tech received very special treatment, colossal P/E, a shower of investment, all in an attempt to grab a slice of this wildly growing pie.
But almost every exponent in reality is a bottom part of an S-curve. The growth was indeterminate, not infinite. As growth stalled or reversed, the special treatment did not exactly stop, but its extent contracted severely. Questions about actual profitability started to arise, for instance.
except the tech industry has been immune to layoffs because it would represent such bad PR to be the one company downsizing in the midst of a bull market. Fortunately for the tech industry, the market is now bearish and they're finally allowed to trim the fat that they've been accruing for over a decade, which is why when someone finally blinked first then the rest followed (and continue to follow).
We don't, I already went through this several times since the first .com wave.
And seeing the support we got in several times via the union fellows in the European countries I have worked on, is also a reason why I am quite supportive of them.
All these layoffs we’re seeing were planned well over six months ago. It’s not coordinated or copy-cat. However, it may be that all the bean counters learned the same lessons in the same schools. So, given certain scenarios, their best answer is: layoff people.
My sources are folks who have been in these layoff discussions for six months. I should have said “some” or “many” instead of “all” since I don’t have sources in “all” these places.
To add to this, there's a massive difference between discussing the possibility due to other tech layoffs that occurred last year and actually planning a layoff.
It's definitely not like Ericsson went on a hiring spree during covid, like most other companies that are now laying people off. Their employee numbers have barely changed since 2019.
Well, at least Germany is at the brink of a recession. And the signs are there to see for quite a while now. Companies restructering and preparing for an expected economic downturn can be hardly called bad management. Also, not eveything is driven by Big Tech, nor does everyone just copy ehat FANG is doing.
Germany and the rest of the EU have been "at the brink of a recession" for well over a year. (Remember the gas price increases started in October-November 2021, before the war.) Compared to a year ago, a recession seems almost unlikely by now, and if any, seems like it would be small. The US also seems to have avoided a recession. So this is strange timing to me.
I also don't see any companies outside tech doing massive layoffs.
Chances are that if Russia was taking a good beating, it would have used nukes. It signaled that plenty of times. The strategy with Russia is to arm Ukraine so that the ultimate Russian defeat comes little by little, akin to the proverbial boiling of a frog.
Separately, the actual leadership of Nato is on the other side of the Atlantic. Everything that Germany, or France or the UK, or any other Nato member does, needs to be sanctioned in Washington. If Germany was perceived to be slow, at least part of the reason for that lies in Washington.
While I agree that Germany can and should do more, it is worth pointing out that France, Spain, and Italy are all contributing less than Germany. And Switzerland's level of aid is frankly appalling (too much money to be made in laundering Russian money apparently).
Plus, I don't get it why everybody thinks that it was Germany's, or any other single NATo countries, decision what ang how much aid Ukraine was getting when. First was a bunch former Warsaw pact gear, then NATO decided to send top notch hardware, namely Abrams Leopard and Challenger 2s.
So far, the whole miltary NATO aid for Ukraine, which started years before the actual invasion, seems to work out rather well.
Nothing of that has anything to do with layoffs, that economic crisis was bound to happen after COVID and decades of free money.
True. They also have smaller economies and are arguably less responsible for Russia's strengthening. They are also less vulnerable in case of military escalation.
Don't pay heed to the commenter above you. They have been guilt tripping Germany since decades. Germany would have been better off if it had kept it's own interest first, by drawing redlines around American intentions of taking out nordstream.
And I'm not even German, rather an American. But I do keep my eyes and mind open and realize what's going on. Why don't Germans do the same? Hard to think this is the civilization of great thinkers.
Probably people were "wishing" for the economies not to plateau or go into recession. Remember how they were saying, well, that's not the official definition, claiming the working definition used was not relevant. I think many believed that rhetoric and are now in a situation where they are confronting reality.
I'm a former Ericsson field engineer, These layoffs seem to have more to do with the normal telecom deployment lifecycle (aka LTE and 5G deployment periods winding down) than anything else.
Telecom equipment sales is often very cyclic.
To note further, Ericsson, Nokia et al, shouldn't be thought of as IT companies in the same vein as Google, Apple and Facebook. They exist in a very different parallel universe.
Indeed, telecoms is not the same thing, specially in what concerns standards, patents, kind of software that gets developed versus hardware and so forth, former Nokia Networks over here.
> Nordic rival Nokia (NOKIA.HE) has not announced any plans to lay off employees.
This prompted me to think, is Nokia still around? Then I looked it up and:
> In 2020, Nokia employed approximately 92,000 people[6] across over 100 countries, did business in more than 130 countries, and reported annual revenues of around €23 billion.[4]
The better known part of Nokia for most people was their mobile phone business, which was spun off and sold to Microsoft who then drove it into the ground, but the other parts of the company are still there.
We speculate that when Microsoft bought that part of Nokia, somewhere in the process the Sync.com domain name went up for auction (which appeared to be owned by Nokia just prior to the spin off).
As a startup trying to get going with Sync.Us, rebranding to https://www.sync.com really helped us take off.
If you mean they're not as prevalent as they were, sure I suppose. But they sold the business unit off again to HMD Global, who still make Nokia phones, such as the '3.4', the Android One (which is what led me to it - reasonably stock and years of updates - I previously had a Motorola for the same reason) device I'm typing this comment from.
Well this is a complete tangent, and I'm not at all claiming it's what I meant in GP, but increasingly I'm thinking (or realising) that 'a brand' is all a business is. So much is just the same crap minimally packaged, marked up, and branded to sell for as much as possible.
Even if you, as I do, buy decent traditionally marketed clothes made from natural fibers - the company selling them, unless it's an actual tailor you can literally take some cloth to, is nothing more than a brand on top of an Indian (say, probably - at least in my market) wholesale operation.
My understanding was they sold the branding to HMD Global who are still making Nokia branded smartphones, but also sold the actual feature phone business to Foxconn
“Drove it into the ground” is, I think, unfair. The entire market was moving to Android and iOS. Microsoft and Nokia were late to the transition, tried to catch a section of the market, and failed. The succeeded in creating good products at the time, but having a good product is not enough, especially if you’re late to the market.
You need to search for "Operation Elop". There's a free e-book that details the whole thing to a striking degree (I was at Vodafone at the time, and... well... What I know confirms all of it).
Note - full book on medium - it makes my Firefox on Android cry...
> This page hosts various alternative formats of the Medium book Operation Elop which is an English translation of the original Finnish book Operaatio Elop. You can read the story of this translation project over at Nokia People, a forum for ex-Nokians. The English translation is made available for free, with the permission of the original authors, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
> On Monday, the company, which employs more than 105,000 worldwide, announced plans to cut about 1,400 jobs in Sweden.
While Ericsson did not disclose which geography would be most affected, analysts had predicted that North America would likely be most affected and growing markets such as India the least.
The cost cutting will continue until profits improve.
I mean I agree with you in principle but that doesn't change the fact that as a CEO you are in danger of losing your job if margins compress that much and you don't make a show of doing something about it. Keeping margins up is kind of important if you want to be able to invest in new products and markets and survive as a company into the next generation.
Edit: I was talking about the comment above me conflating wanting higher margins with belief in infinite economic growth. I wasn't making a statement about the morality of Ericsson layoffs nor do I have any insight on their financials. I was simply observing that margins seem to be a thing that investors care quite a bit about.
> if margins compress that much and you don't make a show of doing something about it.
Isn’t the layoff them showing they are doing something about their margin compression?
I truly don’t mean my comments to come across harsh. That’s not my intent and realize families will be harmed by jobless. But there’s not much a company can do to cut costs quickly to boost margins other than layoffs.
I don't know about infinite, but Ericsson is in the networking space, and there is plenty of work remaining to be done in that space. In the US, cell service is pretty mediocre, and 5G is still rolling out in major cities. I still routinely find gaps in coverage, or find myself in a populated area with very slow coverage. And this is a developed country, not even speaking of many many countries around the world still building out their networking infrastructure. I suspect this is actually accelerating as many developing countries have experienced good growth in the last few decades.
There may come a time when we hit some kind of steady state, but we're definitely not close now.
Yes, it's crazy, and yet this is how it's supposed to function. Boggles the mind. Solid healthy profits have little value, and companies are forced to think short term rather than long
As noted in my link, "primarily due to business mix change in Networks and previously announced charges for contract exits and portfolio adjustments in Cloud Software and Services".
If they took that hit and missed significantly on revenue, a layoff wouldn't be as unexpected. To take that hit and then beat on revenue, both quarterly and YoY, and then kick off an 8% layoff, is just corporations being corporations for the sake of it.
I could generate huge revenues by selling $100 gift cards for 80 bucks. But I’ll have no profit to show for it.
If their profitability was cut in 1/2 in just 1-years time, it's actually irresponsible for management to not take actions to get costs/margins under control.
A lot of related companies (Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks) are based in South Bay. If you want to hire anyone from those companies or do partnerships with them, you should probably have a bay area satellite office despite the costs.
Do you disagree with the described strategy? If you think a market is relatively saturated (as I assume the US is from a telecom equipment perspective, especially given growing suspicion of foreign suppliers), wouldn't you allocate your limited resources to markets that have room to grow?
Ex-Ericsson engineer here, I was at the company for 13 years. Regarding the size - lot of people don't realize because it hasn't been a front-facing company since the collapse of its phones business, but it really is invested in tech right across the board - from developing its own real-time operating systems to its own massive-core chipsets used in base stations, to its own ML platforms. Just the research arm of Ericsson is huge in itself, I think they have around 60 000 patents granted, and are doing everything from fundamental RF research, to quantum machine learning. Not to mention a huge managed services business that helps telecom operators run their networks.
Regarding the lay-offs - telecom industry is essentially a sinewave. The "good" period (e.g. from 5G prototype to complete network migration to 5G) lasts approximately 5 years. The way contracts are signed means that you sell X number of network nodes (base stations, core nodes, etc) and some kind of support contract to go with it. After that, there is nothing. Very different from public cloud providers where you pay as you go. Ericsson and most telecom vendors still haven't figured out how to monetize this.
If this was true then we would have seen similar layoffs between UMTS(3G) and LTE(4G) and between LTE and 5G. Is there any evidence of that? Also Telcos around the world are still rolling out 5G and much of the tech's promise of Edge Computing have not yet been deployed or realized.
>"The company faces mounting competition from China’s Huawei and Finland’s Nokia as well as weak emerging markets and falling spending by telecoms operators with demand for next-generation 5G technology still years away."
The layoffs are attributed to three things:
1. Competition
2. A slump in investment in emerging markets.
3. Falling spending(it's not clear from the press relase if that was just spending for Ericsson's gear.)
Additionally there was no global Telecom industry slump in 2016. Just in the US alone it was something of a boom year with lots of activity. See:
They make the software that runs mobile networks and part of the hardware (as in radio towers, even chips in the past), various special purpose hardware used in the past is also still in use. They also operate these networks as a service to telecom providers. The goods and services they provide are spread pretty wide.
Does manufacturing account for a large portion of those 100k+ employees? Ericsson is not a fabless semiconductor firm, after all. They need to produce things like enclosures and PCB's (perhaps that is done by 3rd parties).
Yeah that surprised me as well. It would be interesting to get a ‘tech company ordered by headcount’ list but it would make me nervous the listing would result in some executive deciding they should layoff more people.
Why? Ericsson has always been a back-end networking and telecommunication company.
Erlang was created, at Ericsson, for a telephony switch.
It's shuttered the consumer side entirely (Sony Ericsson was a joint venture, not a group), it's one of the lead developers in mobile telephony, as well as the lead IP holder in the domain.
In Europe also a large player in the broadcast space, though Red Bee Media (formerly Ericsson Broadcast and Media Services): BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Canal+, as well as Channel 4 and Channel 5's VOD. RBM is also a huge provider of closed captioning, signing, and audio description worldwide, by far the largest in europe for more than 15 years (after they acquired Mundovisión and Titelbild).
If the parent was typing the above message on a phone attached to their telecom network, there is a high probability their user and control plane traffic was going through Ericsson systems.
I didnt expect that Ericsson even had 8500 employees to lay off. Kind of disappeared from the radar after the mobile phone era. (Yes i know they still make equipment)
Does anyone at Ericsson still use Erlang? If so I hope these layoffs do not negatively impact internal use of Erlang at Ericsson. It’s a language built on some pretty nifty ideas.
Of course old networks are still operated and maintained. 5G is exclusively "cloud-native" (i.e. microservices on Kubernetes) and most common core components are written in Java, Go and Python. So while Erlang is still being used and ran, most new code is not written in Erlang, as far as I know.
Think about network functions that where these languages do not make sense; then you will find they are not used. You wouldn't write a packet processing router in any of those languages (aka UPF). High availability, fault tolerant applications for NAS and non-NAS signalling speaking to the gNodeB/UEs - same deal.
On a parallel note, when I was at Nokia Networks, the long-term plan was to replace everything that was using a mix of C++ and Perl for distributed computing in HP-UX with Java, leaving C++ only for the low level hardware stuff.
Not sure how much of it ended up happening, after all the layoffs in Germany a couple of years ago.
This is very interesting thank you. I always said to myself if I was writing anything telecom-y I would use Erlang but seems its days are behind us. I wonder if it's just too expensive to hire and train people in it when everyone knows Go/Java/Python already, or if it's more the idea that other ecosystems have sprung up to replace it e.g. K8s.
I've heard that they don't use Erlang at all except for test suites, and I've read rumors that it was mostly politics from C++ people who succeeded in making it so.
Is their business affected by the drop in demand that typically accompanies recessions? I am asking because I honestly have no idea; I don't know anyone who has bought anything from Ericsson in over a decade.
> I don't know anyone who has bought anything from Ericsson in over a decade
In 2021, Ericsson held the largest % market share in radio access network equipment and software [1] (that's what your mobile phone speaks to over the air)
That means that you likely do know of companies that have purchased significant volumes of products from Ericsson, although the statistical probability of this fact deviates depending on what country you live in.
They are an exclusively business-to-business company and their customers are major telecoms. I would guess the whole telco market is not affected much generally, especially not one more link down the chain. I already have trouble believing people use mobile networks less in a recession (or pay for them less by a considerable degree) and telecoms mainly pay Ericsson for goods and services to provide a certain capacity, which I also have no reason to believe would go down.
Let's stand together to support those impacted by Ericsson's layoffs. We must prioritize compassion and action to help those affected find new opportunities and rebuild their livelihoods.
Why do you claim there are fewer gen-z to replace those who retire?
Many of my coworkers and peers are millennials, and I personally also know large swaths of gen Z folks who are extremely technical, more and more people are pushed into tech as a career choice these days - much more than they were in past generations. Statistically it seems likely we're going to see more technically proficient people in younger generations due to more numbers of people in that generation having greater exposure to tech.
Companies like Ericsson could have an issue with their tech not being the same tech that younger generations are learning, but I doubt that'll be a major problem in practice as people are eager to learn and rewrite things with newer exciting tech.
If you're talking electrical and mechanical tech, I'm not so sure. If you're talking software, then yeah, the software industry has exploded over the past 20 years.
But I think that could be a problem rather than a boon: part of me wonders if non-software-engineering engineering is going to face huge problems in the future. Software salaries have really sucked the air out of the other industries, and software doesn't matter without amazing hardware to back it up.
I 1000% agree with you; both my parents were aerospace engineers and when they were going through college that was what everyone was pushed to choose as a career; nowadays it's tech (software) - so I see that problem very clearly.
(in my message above, "tech" refers to software tech, it's an overloaded term so I normally refer to electrical/mechanical engineering just as that)
Everyone was pushed into aerospace? Sounds like a small industry for everyone to be pushed into. Maybe it's a city with an aerospace company or something
My natural reaction to that statement is that this is a subjective statement to say that one generation is more knowledgable than another. Those who are younger may tend to be more gung-ho, but given the lack of experience those who are younger have, more knowledgable may not be accurate. That said it might be that the perception is that a more gung-ho person is more knowledgable but perception and reality are not always the same.
I edit'd my comment (after I saw you say it appeared ageist); that's not what I intended and I can see how it came across that way (esp in the context of layoffs) - there are definitely going to be technically proficient people across all age ranges and I am firmly against ageism.
It'd be a mistake to think baby boomers are irreplaceable by younger generations though (what OP suggested.) I believe we will see more technically proficient people in younger generations statistically due to more people in that group being exposed to tech. Not that they will be better necessarily.
Not many of my peers in school were learning tech, for example, but a good majority of those I talk to now say their kids are learning to go into tech. This is in Arizona, with random people, Uber drivers, etc. so not exactly a tech hub where it'd be very expected.
Cool! I took down my initial ageist comment right after I posted it because I didn't want to be too harsh and get into an un-intended flame war over something that you may not have meant.
More people are going into tech as technology eats the world and people see that there are opportunities here. It is also becoming a required skill for a lot of trades such as working on cars, home automation systems, security systems, HVAC, appliance repair etc..
While more experienced people may be able to bring more value in many cases, often management does not see that and does the penny-wise, pound foolish thing. I have seen that happen a lot. Be it good, bad or indifferent, company owners are looking to make our skills more fungible so that they can drive those costs down. Also, hiring younger workers often translates into lower salaries. This is why no matter how irreplaceable people may feel they are, they are often not as irreplacable as they think they are.
> Why do you claim there are fewer gen-z to replace those who retire?
Math? While gen Z is larger in absolute numbers, baby boomers were a much larger overall percentage of the population at the time they were born. Thus, there is still a large bump in the population pyramid that is retiring en mass.
> Statistically it seems likely we're going to see more technically proficient people in younger generations due to more numbers of people in that generation having greater exposure to tech.
While I don't know what official statistics say, "being able to use an iPad" does not make one technically proficient. There have been a bunch of articles recently (some on the front page of HN) about how much of gen Z is completely unprepared for the technical workforce because they don't know how anything works under the covers. They don't know how to find files on a filesystem, they don't know how to debug computer issues, they don't know how to use spreadsheets, etc. They can of course learn to do this stuff, but the trend of dumbing down technology so it's a black box makes people less able to succeed technologically, not more.
I may have bitched as a kid to no end to figure out how to edit config.sys or autoexec.bat to run some game, but it did teach me skills about how to dig deeper when I hit a roadblock.
Yeah I have no idea how did OP came up with Gen Z being ubiquitous in highly technical roles like the ones people at Ericsson affected by the layoffs hold. Virtually all developer jobs today anywhere in the world are strictly limited to webdev.
But then we’re on HN, where Backend and DevOps is probably what are considered technical pinnacles.
Unfortunately we are shovelling so much in at the top of the stack these days, that while the foundations change much more slowly, there is just so much more to learn. And let's face it, low level or systems programming is just not as attractive and "shiny" as the latest web tech fad or creating a AI/crypto web startup, so I can see why the younger generations go for that instead of the foundational stuff, even if it's dissapointing.
Some of us old-timers are very happy digging around in the basement levels while the web stack grows ever upward.
It's a catch 22. I feel like salaries skyrocket for the top end of people who caught the wave, are already senior programmers, while low level work gets farmed out to india or even if it's not - it's really hard to train junior developers without hands on face to face time like we had in offices.
I am currently training a junior dev. We only see each other every other week for a few hours. His motivation is all that matters imo. He is learning very fast
Perhaps remote learning requires skill and attitude that prevent you from needing someone to frequently co-write code. I don't have much time to spare so I will only co-write code when the jr dev is literally stuck. The rest of the time I give general guidance and let him figure it out - " improve logging here, consume less resources here by doing xyz, improve readability, optionally use advanced pattern to help you out, etc ". I try to give an example of what I mean each time. Each time he cracks things he grows in confidence and motivation
They will hire in India or bring workers from India.
You are being naive thinking gen Z will have any power to influence policies. 600$ for a spot with matress in a hallway to sleep and salary half of the locals, you have millions clamoring for that.
And more and more corporations would turn into dust with that kind of workforce. This is the fate of the west. Look at what happened to Intel, oracle, IBM etc which hired these H1B "coders" and middle management. I'm not complaining, just observing.
I don't think there is correlation between hiring cheaper and a corporation doing worse. The fact is these people are as smart as the rest if not smarter(they had fierce competition), definetely hardworking and motivated(make less, sleep on the floor and send the rest of the money back to family).
It's just the great equalization and dissapearance of middle class in western countries.
Fierce competition does not mean something is good. There's fierce competition for bread that volunteers hand out of UNICEF trucks into a crowd of hungry, desolate people. Neither does that make the bread tasty, nor the winners "smarter".
>definetely hardworking and motivated.
Disagree. My experience, generally speaking, has been that they do not pay attention to detail, and are not that smart. Even though they might be motivated to keep the job, and they do make great corporate drones, but they do not come anywhere near what it takes to make successful product.
Ericsson too, maybe not in Europe but can be in Canada. Anyways looking at Ericson employees stats on Linkedin, most them of the are in India now(29K in India and 19K in Sweden).
All those lay-offs, which are not really big in overall numbers and more a topic at places like HN because if the demographic hit, don't mean the people being layed off stop existing...
This is unbelievably misinformed. This message will have passed through several Ericsson hardware parts between me writing it here and you reading it: radio base stations, hardware for fiber or copper, switches, back-end components...
> Oh no. Since a large part of many medium-large sized tech companies' management style seems to consist of "copy what Amazon and Google are doing", I am scared of what silly decisions in other companies this might inspire.
I feel that my model of Ericssons upper management has been validated with one more data point, which is one reason why I would not be all that bummed if it turns out to hit me.