Silicon Valley layoffs aren’t a cost-cutting measure. They’re a culture reset
vox.comThe Silicon Valley culture was aimed at attracting younger talent away from established companies, with childish perks like free food and video games, and a less rigid work structure. But it was never going be sustainable. At the core, the ‘promise’ that these new tech companies alluded to one day had to actually appear. And the slow creep of government regulation was always going to catch up too.
I always assumed most of these large companies would adapt and survive but it’s looking increasingly like they will not, or cannot.
No it was to keep them on campus and working. Oracle was doing that to keep butts in seats at work & minimize time going to dry cleaners or even dental appointments. Come early for breakfast and also get fed dinnner along with your long hours—on campus.
> childish perks like free food
Ahh yes, food, such a childish thing.
Conveniently dropped the ‘free’ I see. Whenever I interviewed with companies and they mentioned free meals or fridges full of sodas as a perk, that was a red flag. Companies like IBM and Microsoft had on-site cafeterias and coffee shops usually with subsidized pricing and it never came up in in interviews.
Free lunches are childish to you?
Paying for food as a captive audience is very mature? I guess I'm glad to be childish :)
Well you could actually very much look at it as childish.
The "free" food is obviously paid for by the company with money that could otherwise go to salaries.
If everyone got higher salaries and food was charged for, then you could make choices about spending money in the cafeteria or saving money bringing food from home. Adults make choices.
By making the decision for you that you'll take the lower salary but get unlimited food, the choice is being made for you, much like a parent decides for a child.
So yes, there's a very strong argument to be made that "free" lunch takes away adult autonomy and is indeed "childish".
Why are we assuming it would go to salaries? Do budget surpluses normally result in bonuses for rank-and-file employees?
Aren't you still capable of eating something that isn't free?
This line of reasoning makes any workplace perk into an act of infantilisation:
401(k) matching? You mean you let them remove that much agency from your investment planning?
Healthcare? I would prefer to be a big girl and buy my healthcare plan on the open market.
Free parking? I'll decide for myself where to park since I'm an adult.
Nice toilet paper in the bathroom? Do you think I can't provide toiletries for myself? That money could have been salaries.
> Why are we assuming it would go to salaries?
Because companies generally budget for total compensation and then divide between salary and perks, and because employees generally compare offers using total compensation rather than just salary.
> This line of reasoning makes any workplace perk into an act of infantilisation
Of course it can, but it exists on a spectrum. Things like 401(k) matching and healthcare and toilet paper aren't infantilizing because they're cheaper or have tax benefits when provided through the company, and most people use them. So they're simply a win-win. On the other hand, if a company provides a lower salary but free housing, that can be extremely infantilizing since a big part of adult autonomy is balancing a lot of factors in choosing where to live.
Things like free meals, rec rooms, laundry, and haircuts are generally more on the infantilizing side of things, since a lot of employees would just prefer cash instead. Lunches provided at-cost can make a lot of sense though when restaurants are far away though -- it's not infantilizing because you still pay for lunch, but it's win-win because the company isn't making a profit off of you like restaurants do.
>it's not infantilizing because you still pay for lunch
I don't buy it, they've still made the decision of where you're getting your food for you. The only way to escape infantilisation is to never be an employee. Why would you let mommy and daddy tell you what projects you're allowed to work on?
No they haven't, because you have the choice to save money and bring lunch from home. That's the whole point.
And no, there's nothing inherently infantile about being employed, because you're freely entering into a work contract. But what is adult and mature is exchanging your professional work for money. What isn't adult and mature is your company starting to provide things that aren't related to work or the workplace at all.
FTR, I read this thread. You’re 100% right but probably misunderstood because new generations have not known anything else.
To me, when employees took company healthcare insurance in the US as a perk, I think the problems began. It’s worse than infantalising. It is creating servitude. “Work, lest thou looses their primal needs of bodily integrity.”
You can decide to bring lunch from home at a company that provides lunch as a perk.
Either way, I'm glad I don't care about appearing adult and mature to my peers.
The firm I work for did catered lunches daily before Covid, and seems to be rebooting the process as people returned to office. (I'm remote, so I only experienced it during occasional returns to the mothership)
I suspect part of the percieved value is that by making lunch a communal event, rather than everyone grabbing 30 minutes sometime between 10:45 and 14:30, means it's also a time for face time outside of group lines. If you need to talk to someone on another team, you usually have a chance to make contact at lunch.
It's a way to avoid taxes. The company writes it off as a business expense, while it is considered a qualified fringe benefit (non taxable) for the employee.
Furthermore, many of the tech campuses in the south bay don't have enough restaurants nearby to support all of their employees going out to eat lunch.
There's also something to be said for just grabbing lunch at the cafeteria with your colleagues as opposed to figuring out where to go eat, driving there, waiting for the order, eating, then driving back.
> The "free" food is obviously paid for by the company with money that could otherwise go to salaries.
If that food money is transferred to salaries, the 'free market' will do everything in its power to suck all of that money by giving the minimum in return in order to maximize profit. Because that's what it does. It will cost both the organization and the employees more.
TANSTAAFL. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. It’s been in the hacker jargon file since the ‘70s, maaaaan.
Probably because the food isn't good and they're paying for it?
Having worked at a place with subsidized cafeteria onsite, oh boy was the food shitty. The old school businesses I worked at had this really strange view of cafeterias, like they expected their employees to hear the whistle blow and everyone take their tin lunchbox to the lunch room.
I have heartburn and can feel the smell of stale cooking oil in the friers from the cafeteria in an IBM campus I worked ages ago just by thinking about it. Jesus Christ, the food was so awful i used to call it Websphere.
To be fair, the free food was intentionally to create a collegiate type environment.
But I think it’s a universally good perk for more than children. It’s tax efficient (company pre-tax and non-profit expense vs post-income-tax expensive), and it keeps people around the office and around their employees. Keeping employees at work with their coworkers is for sure good for business.
I guess it came as childish because that´s the way those perks were given to us by management. In fact the head of a big studio (around 800 people) I worked on refered to these perks in private as "glitter".
Big boys go for yacht and stuff /s
The most challenging thing I found at a large tech company was building and maintaining relationships. Grabbing food with coworkers on campus is a cheat code for this. Similarly if I visited a new office, I was guaranteed to be able to do the same thing with partner teams.
- Spend most of the day toying with new shiny toys and UIs rather than shipping value
Were the sour grapes free?
> The last real deflation in tech was all the way back in 2000, 2001. There’s almost no one working in tech now who was around for that.
Oh?
My beard's not even grey yet, c'mon!
Almost no one doesn’t mean no one. There’s been so much growth in the industry in the past 20 years that even if everyone working in 2001 was still working now, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were a small minority compared to the sea of new talent
Depends on where you work, obviously. In my organization (at a FAANG), people in their 40s are probably a (very slim) majority.
I'm also at a FAANG, and work with a lot of people in their 40's
They obviously exist but from a quick and dirty google search it looks like there was roughly 500k-600k software engineers in 2000 and over 4 million today in the US. Even if zero of the ones from 2000 attritioned out they’d be ~13% of the work force and I highly doubt none of them have retired in a 2 decade span
Tech companies according to people that don't actually work in them.
When layoffs happen, people project their fears and insecurities about their own fate by attempting to create perceived differences and virtues that separate them from those affected, mostly to convince themselves that their situation is different and it won’t happen to them. “Ha, those childish perks, and immature people working at those companies not shipping value.”
Read that as “I envied them before, but hopefully my suffering will be worth it if I don’t lose my job”.
It’s pretty sad and unpleasant to watch.
Well, yes, with ageism....
I do declare!
As long as tech companies remain fantastically profitable the culture will not change.
I see this as just a sour grapes piece from a journalist who has to cover tech from outside the bubble.
> As long as tech companies remain fantastically profitable the culture will not change.
I think it’s slowly changing. Maybe not getting “boring” and stodgy but changing. The culture from fb and goog in 2005 of crazy perks like food is probably going away. It’s probably be replaced with new things, like WFH and super funded 401ks and cushy healthcare. It’s a sign of an aging workforce and a changing WFH first culture. Eg Google provided digital (and pricy) reusable Covid test kits to everyone during the pandemic.
To add to original poster's point - even with changing perks, wouldn't they always look different (better) than traditional industries like journalism? Even your examples would indicate to that.
I personally don’t want to project an assumed emotion to the journalist, but my point would corroborate not undermine that argument.
Tech has always held a captive journalistic audience either in boom times as a North Star to the future, a scapegoat, or a villain. I don’t know how real people feel about tech tbh, but I imagine it’s now closer to how they feel about wall street than it’s ever been.
East coast money vs west coast money; always has been.
The tech industry greatly predates Silicon Valley so saying this is East Coast vs West coast doesn't make any sense.
Software is one of the best tools we have for dealing with human communication issues (in a variety of ways). While there might not be many iPhone / fb / twitter size jackpots out there (until the next hardware growth enables new opportunities), there’s still tons of human communication problems to be solved.
Software is ultimately about replacing inefficient human communication and we still have a lot of that.
I am of exactly opposite view. Software is about replacing organic direct human communication. Since computers came under roofs streets are empty & local communities died out. Breaking up through electronic channel, creating fake digital public face being examples.
> And as petty a thing as, “We’re going to give you smaller to-go boxes so you can’t take the steak we’re giving you and go feed your family with it.”
That's not "petty" – people shouldn't have been doing that in the first place. A take-home box should be for you, not so you can pile up food to "feed your family".
Some of the criticism doesn't make sense: Providing food, amenities, even accommodation has been a method with which private and state organizations around the world used to cut their costs and better the life standards of their members since the dawn of the modern economy after the industrial revolution.
Especially for organizations that have thousands of employees in one location, providing a cafeteria can be much cheaper for both the employees and the organization than thousands of employees going out to eat in private establishments at lunch time. The organization providing housing to employees to work around the bloated real estate sector can also be beneficial to the employeees and the organization. Similarly, Apple mulling its own health services is a good idea - they can reduce their costs and increase quality of life.
Its economies of scale after all. If you have tens of thousands of organization members in a location, it becomes an economy of scale that can reduce every member's and organization's costs directly.
If you do not provide such services to your members using economies of scale inside your organization and instead leave it to the free market by giving monetary compensation instead, you can bet that the free market will do everything in its power to suck all of that monetary compensation out of the hands of the employees by providing the minimum service in return to maximize profit.
This used to be handled by having a non-free cafeteria.
The cafeteria will still be cheaper for employees than going out to restaurants, and it will be cheaper than the company picking up the tab for everyone.
It used to be common to make a lunch and bring it to work too.
This recent stuff that tech workers are entitled to a free meal at work or to go spend an hour+ to go to a restaurant for lunch every day is a very new thing.
> This used to be handled by having a non-free cafeteria.
Well, if the food can be provided for cheap enough, it may make more sense to give it away free than to handle all the accounting hassle.
> This recent stuff that tech workers are entitled to a free meal at work or to go spend an hour+ to go to a restaurant for lunch every day is a very new thing.
Its not. It was a practice very widespread in most of the world's social democracies, especially in government organizations, in order to lift up the life standards of the members. Its still used in a lot of countries. The US has 'rediscovered' it through the tech companies. Just like its 'rediscovering' company-provided housing and all the other tangible benefits that the rest of the world still practices instead of leaving their employees to the mercy of the market.
>The US has 'rediscovered' it through the tech companies.
It's only spoken of in the media positively in the context of newer tech companies.
My first programming job was at a defense contractor no doubt considered "stodgy" by the cool kids. Their newest office building was environmentally friendly (~70% naturally lit), and its cafeteria complex was large, well-managed and had both innovative and healthy options (e.g. a pay-by-the-ounce salad bar).
This was in 1983.
> And as petty a thing as, “We’re going to give you smaller to-go boxes so you can’t take the steak we’re giving you and go feed your family with it.”
That's what she thinks is petty? I wonder if she feels the same about replacing snack bars and drink fridges with free vending machines to slow down the workers who fill their backpacks full of Odwalla, Monster, and expensive snacks every night.
These benefits were worthwhile when employees appreciated them, but appeasing increasingly hostile and entitled workers is a losing battle.
I can't remember how long ago it was.. before Google and Facebook started pushing crazy benefits Microsoft was kind of famous for it. MS's level of it back in the day was much lower than today, but still generous for the time.
At some point they had to stop as they had caught employees emptying the free drink fridges and taking them off campus and reselling them.
So they had to stop offering that stuff. Though I'm sure they had to re-add it later.
There are always going to be people who take advantage of anything "free". I once worked at a boring large company that didn't offer any of these perks. They repeatedly had to tell people that the office supplies were for work use only. One person was caught selling office supplies on eBay. Another person had been using them to supply the office for his side business.
The Facebook/Google crazy level of perks with 3 meals provided very day, dry cleaning, massages, etc.. ? Free alcohol in the office? That stuff can go, and people will have to deal with.
Some of the other stuff like untracked/unlimited PTO (It's never really unlimited) and free coffee and snacks is nice to have.
I'm in my 40s. I started internships in 1996. All this free food and alcohol, etc.. didn't exist till around 2010.
We would have occasional "hey we're working late so we're getting pizza" in the 1990s and 2000s. We would have "hey we're having a BYOB in the cafeteria friday afternoon." Not this constant culture stuff that constantly wasted tons of money. But Coffee has always been free & around.
It does seem like younger workers who have only experienced the current environment have gotten entitled to it. We used to have crunch time and working weekends and all that nonsense and we didn't have the perks. Sometimes the companies ran out of money anyway. Tougher times can kind of suck. But it still makes these jobs great. They always paid really well. You were still sitting in front of a computer and not stuck doing physical labor.
>The Facebook/Google crazy level of perks with 3 meals provided very day, dry cleaning, massages, etc
I worked for Google at the campus on Crittenden for a short stint in 2015. We had a few folks keep the kegerator stocked with their home brews and a wall of liquor one could sample as needed. I kept the kitchenette stocked with hot sauce on my own accord b/c I wanted to have some handy.
I'm also in my (late) 40s and all of these little perks were very new to me. I quickly grew accustomed to them, but to be honest I didn't miss a single one of them after I left. I don't know that they really moved the needle for me at all.
Except for the shuttle. I *loved* having the shuttle. It greatly simplified the ability to not have a car for the first time in my adult life and it was awesome.
Somewhat. They're an excuse for corporations to cut people they don't really want and to shift their spending posture to austerity.
More of a scare crow. The government should investigate whether there's collusion.
time to start an Union then ?
Yup, this is about reasserting the boss-over-worker structures. The workers were getting to uppity, expecting things like actual work-life balance.
> The workers were getting to uppity, expecting things like actual work-life balance.
Which of these large companies would you say have a poor work-life balance on average? Google, Facebook, Adobe, Microsoft, and others have reputations as rest-and-vest retirement homes. I've heard Netflix can be challenging, along with some parts of Apple, but nothing like startups, investment banking, or big law.
Twitter before Elon was more like "rest" since they were vesting garbage, but he's trying to morph them into Tesla, which does have a terrible reputation for balance.
Amazon and FB have never been "rest and vest". Honestly google in most teams isn't like that either.
I agree about Amazon, but I've definitely heard FB thrown about as rest-and-vest regularly since IPO, and that's the impression I've gotten from developers I've met working there since.
I have heard the AI and other non-FB/IG parts of Meta are pretty grindy-but-worth-it though.
I worked in Investment banking, at Microsoft and Amazon. I can tell you majority of team at Amazon and facebook have 0 work life balance.
When you work in Investment banking you are not expected to get 3 call at 3am every night including weekend and have to wake up get a coffee and work for 3+ hours to fix the problem the intern or idiot from another team (not your team) caused.
in Investment banking you can take a 2 week vacation without the whole company catching fire.
"Tech is mature and growth is over". I remember that consensus headline from the 1980s.
Yeah. This article is repeating the classic rationale established companies use coming into each downturn: Growth is over forever, so let's burn the seed corn.
Fast forward a few years, and a crop of startups (that innovated while the incumbents belt-tightened) blindside previously unassailable monopolies.
I find it kind of ironic that they use Facebook and Google as examples in the article.
Remember when FB bought the Sun campus, stripped it to concrete walls, and grafitti'ed the hell out of it? Google HQ is the fossilized remains of the SGI campus.
The big question now is: Who is going to dethrone the current rudderless big tech companies, and how will they do it?
> The big question now is: Who is going to dethrone the current rudderless big tech companies, and how will they do it?
Watch who hires all of the laid off tech workers over the next few years.
But back 80s there was a lot of irrational exuberance about AI.