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AbbeFariaHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", …

My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value. And the QA is usually outsourced to service companies like MindTree, TCS etc anyway. Lot of these companies are bloated from having way too many Engineers anyway. Once you have mature software that brings in bagfuls of money, you don’t need that many people to keep the ship steady. I have seen this first hand at MSFT, we started a new team back in 2019 and it probably had ~40 people full time across US and India. By 2024 when I left, we had about 20 people in India who could easily run the service, the US team was dissolved and they moved to other teams in MSFT. The fact was that new features were few and the team was in KTLO mode. …

Original discussionMeta to cut 10% of jobs, or 8k employees888 source comments · at import
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hn_throwaway_99HN

These West Coast tech companies had some of the highest salaries on the planet, so yes, they took employees from other locales/areas. But also, while there have been layoffs in engineering teams, Ive seen a lot of "support staff" get absolutely obliterated. Things like "agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers, marketing roles, etc. etc. While I've seen most of my laid off soft engineer friends find new jobs relatively quickly, I've seen lots of folks in these other roles suffer long bouts of unemployment, and often leave tech entirely. It's these folks I feel the most for. A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.

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SchlagbohrerHN

What do you think about Cory Doctorow's theory that the AI produced code is going to come back to bite companies due to tech debt / unmaintainability? I am skeptical of Doctorow's theory because it looks like LLMs will continue to improve enough over the near term to be able to handle issues caused by AI-written code from the past few years.

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mschuster91HN

> My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value. "Agile" can go and die in a hellfire for all I care. But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.

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