Yup, but I need more people for that. One of my failures as a ladder climber is that I don’t want to screw the people who work for me. And budgets are tight. So it’s a slog. Geez, it almost feels like work.Delegate that shit out the door once you've harvested its narrative value.
Boardroom Miscellaneous Thread
- Thread starter Skoop
- Start date
If you have reconsidered - reach out again, perhaps they haven't filled the position yet.
I spoke with a friend on the team of the other company today and they're already into loops with qualified folks. My buddy said he's mention my situation to our old boss, but I'm not going to go past that. I'd rather this company fix the situation, or at least come clean about why they did what they did. I know that's a fools desire, but the truth is I just don't have it in me to voluntarily change jobs right now unless my situation gets worse, not just staying the same.
Now, if this happens next year, once those RSUs are gone I will be aggressively searching. I'm also strongly reconsidering my execution plan for the next 2 quarters. I was being very ambitious, and I'm far less inclined to continue being ambitious in any sense. Who says quiet quitting is dead?
The labor market is pretty shit right now and we’re are en fuego headed for a recession by end of summer.
End of summer? You're optimistic. Given pull back in spending probably could say we're already in it, even if just the very front edge.
My contract counterparty got a new investor and additional investment from existing stakeholders, supposedly on favorable terms. All publicly announced. Given all the uncertainty, it seems timely to get a long runway extension in case they don't hit revenue targets. As much as I dislike being a contractor, and have a few other quibbles, it does look like a pretty stable gig as far as startups go. I still plan to at least entertain pitches, and lowkey look around a little, but I'm not expecting a dream gig to fall out of the sky in the current climate.
This is, unfortunately, the problem. Inflation means jack and shit when it comes to calculating comp. It's all about figuring out what a company needs to pay to fill the roles they need with the skills they need at an acceptable level of turn-over. Good employers will take a long term view of this equation, but it is still the driving force.
I manage a team of 13 developers and analysts. My budget for raises this year doesn't even allow me to give everyone the 'minimum' recommended by our HR software (which takes into account perf rating, salary bands, place in salary bands, etc). I raised this to sr leadership, being very clear about the risk of losing people and the effect it would have on various initiatives, and the response was essentially "don't worry about it, the job market is terrible right now, they won't find anything better".
And honestly, they're right.
We had a guy quit here for $2000 and they refused to match because "then everyone else will ask".
I'm also convinced one of our best PMs is about to walk without a job lined up because they keep dumping all the hard stuff on them and then subsequently freaking out when the hard project doesn't hit metrics. Well... duh, its not hitting metrics because its not easy.
For unrelated reasons, (that some people are aware of) I've completed redone my resume. And I'm doing some courses on the side so I have certs that should give me an edge with hiring during this bonkers economy. Hopefully by 2026 I've finally managed to find a job that isn't toxic. I have a knack for missing the red flags.
Right, it's confirmed after 2 quarters*. However, that means recessions are generally declared 6 months after they started. If 1Q and 2Q 2025 have negative GDP growth, we are already in a recession even though it's not declared yet. While there are lots of voices out there making predictions, the Atlanta Federal Reserve has been saying for a month to expect about -2% GDP growth in 1Q.
Personally, if the trade war and other idiocy from Washington continues - I think 2Q will be worse than 1Q and any recession numbers (especially 1Q) will be somewhat masked/muted by companies unwinding the JIT supply chain as much as they can by prebuying/warehousing more inputs (raw materials, components, etc) due to all the tariff action.
*2 quarters is the common oversimplification and "close enough" most of the time. More detail (for the USA) here.
Given the idiocy of the current administration's policies, or lack there of (it's tantrum "give me or I hurt you"), could end up going all the way to depression. Ugh.
Realistically, I have only asked for COLAs for my people this year. They're mostly all 90th percentile in the market, and we are trying hard to control burn. The fact that the dev labor market is absolute shit right absolutely does play a role in the adjustments I've asked for for my people.
Splitting your brain this way is really f'n weird, because I identify as a developer. It is a core part of who I am, professionally, so my bias is always with the developers.
Developer job postings in the US declined by 30% YTD, and while the job market in the EU saw a 25% drop YTD, compared to the US we have substantial labor cost advantages. All other things being equal I probably pay around 1/3 to 1/2 for what it'd cost me in the US, while thanks to more efficient healthcare/housing/transportation/education systems the folks sacrifice a lot less in QoL than this pay difference would indicate.
This is a systematic advantage that will only increase under the current US administration -- and this is as close to being Boxy as I intend to be in this thread.
In other words, we might end up eating your lunch to save our own. Sorry. :-/
Had a long chat with my boss and he 100% got what I was saying and took some notes on points he personally hadn't thought about (basically the company is performing amazing, and that the CEO should probably pay some lip service to employees rather than just full focus and messaging around share price performance).
I was also told that I'm actually at almost the median of the pay band for our group, which was actually good to hear. I knew prior to my promotion and team change last May I was in the 85th percentile of pay, for my role. Credit to my boss, he has consistently been as transparent as he reasonably can be. He also didn't get a pay increase, so he was also affected by this, directly.
My boss shared some macro-level salary data with me, from some kind of survey we (as an org) subscribe to, and it's showing that, at least in tech, comp might actually be actively falling. Over 30% of firms surveyed had reduced their comp bands going into 2025. Few were below (inflation adjusted) 2020 levels, but they're clearly trying to reign in comp to pre-COVID levels, relative to the broader labor force.
Which is all to say, I'm not unhappy with where I am, but really this was a missed opportunity to possibly grab some really high performers at other firms, and ensure that we don't lose our best folks. To that end, apparently a pool of money exists if managers need an "emergency" comp adjustment, but it's essentially capped way under my comp right now.
Zooming out, I'm seeing things from the folks I work with closest that have had me convinced we're headed for trade-war induced stagflation. Orgs aren't really hiring to respond to growth, at best they're backfilling departures. Anecdotally though, one of the largest resellers I work with just implemented a hiring freeze along with a 5% RIF. They're privately held, so I don't know if the media will catch wind, but they're big enough that they have a major market sports arena in their HQ city named after them, and their client base is, primarily, Fortune 500 and a few Fortune 1000 orgs. Elsewhere, we're seeing our entire GTM ecosystem tightening up, asking for deeper discounts or risk slippage to next quarter, using financing more often, and folks "riding dirty" and dropping support on gear.
Again, anecdotally I have colleagues at other tech firms saying they're on a soft hiring freeze. Nothing official, but anytime roles open up, HR is slow-rolling the recruitment or pausing posting positions for indeterminate periods.
The endless uncertainty of this administration is having quite the effect. If people were quiet quitting during the pandemic, I think it's safe to call what a lot of orgs are doing now as "quiet downsizing." And consumers, given today's inflation, savings and spending news, seem to be bracing for hard times and reducing spending where they can. Walmart yesterday said that they see signs of end-of-month distress from their customers.
Given there's almost zero chance of stimulus out of this government, this could be a long, painful period in our economy.
I was also told that I'm actually at almost the median of the pay band for our group, which was actually good to hear. I knew prior to my promotion and team change last May I was in the 85th percentile of pay, for my role. Credit to my boss, he has consistently been as transparent as he reasonably can be. He also didn't get a pay increase, so he was also affected by this, directly.
My boss shared some macro-level salary data with me, from some kind of survey we (as an org) subscribe to, and it's showing that, at least in tech, comp might actually be actively falling. Over 30% of firms surveyed had reduced their comp bands going into 2025. Few were below (inflation adjusted) 2020 levels, but they're clearly trying to reign in comp to pre-COVID levels, relative to the broader labor force.
Which is all to say, I'm not unhappy with where I am, but really this was a missed opportunity to possibly grab some really high performers at other firms, and ensure that we don't lose our best folks. To that end, apparently a pool of money exists if managers need an "emergency" comp adjustment, but it's essentially capped way under my comp right now.
Zooming out, I'm seeing things from the folks I work with closest that have had me convinced we're headed for trade-war induced stagflation. Orgs aren't really hiring to respond to growth, at best they're backfilling departures. Anecdotally though, one of the largest resellers I work with just implemented a hiring freeze along with a 5% RIF. They're privately held, so I don't know if the media will catch wind, but they're big enough that they have a major market sports arena in their HQ city named after them, and their client base is, primarily, Fortune 500 and a few Fortune 1000 orgs. Elsewhere, we're seeing our entire GTM ecosystem tightening up, asking for deeper discounts or risk slippage to next quarter, using financing more often, and folks "riding dirty" and dropping support on gear.
Again, anecdotally I have colleagues at other tech firms saying they're on a soft hiring freeze. Nothing official, but anytime roles open up, HR is slow-rolling the recruitment or pausing posting positions for indeterminate periods.
The endless uncertainty of this administration is having quite the effect. If people were quiet quitting during the pandemic, I think it's safe to call what a lot of orgs are doing now as "quiet downsizing." And consumers, given today's inflation, savings and spending news, seem to be bracing for hard times and reducing spending where they can. Walmart yesterday said that they see signs of end-of-month distress from their customers.
Given there's almost zero chance of stimulus out of this government, this could be a long, painful period in our economy.
At our employer, all pay bands from entry-level non-exempt all the way up to non-executive salaried exempt are public (well, it's on the intranet). This includes min/max/midpoints and bonus/RSU targets (for applicable bands). I assumed that was typical, are most folks like waubers where you have to infer or ask?
The info might be on our corp intranet (I don't really need to go there very often), but I doubt it.
I’ve never worked for a company, including Fortune 100, where that was the case except for the small portion of staff covered by unions. Even at director level it was hard to get that info for comp and allocations at many places. At VP level, it was usually more accessible but often on request and may not include roles to far outside your area of management.
When I was C-Level at a smaller company, obviously I had all and we were generally very transparent on comp across the company and for most roles the band was very narrow and we didn’t play games. But we were under a 100 people. It was also a place of extremely high retention and productivity.
It also seems to be generally not useful - eg comp ranges of $50k to $300k annually for a given position.
I don't think I've every seen any other pay information or bands for internal comparison at any of my positions.
We had maybe-close-to-CoL this year. Followed by loud downsizing. Plus apparently our profit sharing through the pandemic supply chain hits were actually putting us in the red to maintain employee goodwill. Allegedly Q1 numbers were looking like we'd be back on track, but the rest of the economy might do a great job at putting a crimp in supply chains, again. At least some of the thing's we're working on should be indispensable even with new economic hits.
We had maybe-close-to-CoL this year. Followed by loud downsizing. Plus apparently our profit sharing through the pandemic supply chain hits were actually putting us in the red to maintain employee goodwill. Allegedly Q1 numbers were looking like we'd be back on track, but the rest of the economy might do a great job at putting a crimp in supply chains, again. At least some of the thing's we're working on should be indispensable even with new economic hits.
One of my previous employers used to hang a big print out from Excel up in the break rooms where the hourly employees could walk up and figure out which pay band they were in and what their weekly bonuses were going to be.
I found pay band information on sharepoint once at my previous employer. I’m not at all sure it was supposed to be publicly accessible.
I've never seen that at a single place I've ever worked. The only way to find out is to ask other employees when we're out at lunch or having drinks
My previous employer (large US company that you have heard of) had some salary band public information; at least I remember that I went where I stood in my band. It was one year ago, so I don't remember if I had info about more salary bands and which salary bands people where in. I think I didn't know salary bands outside my country.
I'm the second most senior IC in my department (years of service, not necessarily age) so I've been around a long time and know the company's products and technology better than most. In particular, I know the needs for a role we're trying to hire. So my boss forwarded a stack of resumes to me the other day that he had already screened to some level. Two of them stood out as being much longer than the others and when I read them closely I found a combination of awkward phrasing and irregular capitalization that I am pretty sure is LLM sloppiness. One in particular had sections where they listed skills and technologies that seemed like lists of jargon and buzzwords, but they were applicable to their roles and claimed skills.
I have nothing against a candidate using an LLM to help them with writing their resume, as long as everything on there truthfully describes their skills and accomplishments. It's an advertisement, after all. But I think if I can tell or suspect that it's LLM generated, that's a problem. For me, it's a problem because I judge candidates in part on how clearly they write, and the attention to detail they apply to the problem. To me it suggests that's the amount of care they'd put into a work problem in general, and slop isn't good enough. No matter how they get to the end goal, the result has to look like professional work.
How much tolerance should we have for stuff that looks AI generated? Is that the world we live in now, or am I right to expect a polished, well written resume regardless of whether they used an LLM or not?
I have nothing against a candidate using an LLM to help them with writing their resume, as long as everything on there truthfully describes their skills and accomplishments. It's an advertisement, after all. But I think if I can tell or suspect that it's LLM generated, that's a problem. For me, it's a problem because I judge candidates in part on how clearly they write, and the attention to detail they apply to the problem. To me it suggests that's the amount of care they'd put into a work problem in general, and slop isn't good enough. No matter how they get to the end goal, the result has to look like professional work.
How much tolerance should we have for stuff that looks AI generated? Is that the world we live in now, or am I right to expect a polished, well written resume regardless of whether they used an LLM or not?
My view is: I don't care whether someone uses a cognitive assistant to X, for any X, except insofar as this is part of an action that falsely signals their capacity to X without assistance.
In hiring any use of a cognitive assistant is a red flag for sure, since in hiring one is typically interested in acquiring evidence about a candidate's ability to unassistededly X for all X of interest.
As you say, you might not care about an ability to unassisted X when X=write a resume, but in any case weird writing errors (!!) means you've got good evidence they can't X for some range of relevant X (=produce error free work).
In hiring any use of a cognitive assistant is a red flag for sure, since in hiring one is typically interested in acquiring evidence about a candidate's ability to unassistededly X for all X of interest.
As you say, you might not care about an ability to unassisted X when X=write a resume, but in any case weird writing errors (!!) means you've got good evidence they can't X for some range of relevant X (=produce error free work).
I differ slightly in that I don't want to hire a person to do X without assistance. I want to hire a person to do X well, and I want them to use whatever tools they choose (so long as it's legal) to create a high quality product.
I guess in the cases I'm discussing, whatever they used failed to signal that they can write well. The other resumes I looked at where I didn't get that impression might also have been composed with the help of an LLM, but if so those people delivered acceptable quality products anyway, and that's what I want.
With that, I disagree. I just shouldn't be able to tell if an assistant was used. It's always been true that some people had others write their resumes for them because they were bad writers, and that wasn't something you could tell unless they had a bad writer write the resume for them.
That's how I see it; they can't or won't produce error-free work.
I've always held the same bar for resumes, and AI hasn't changed that: your resume is your one shot to get me interested and get an interview. If you can't be bothered to put out a good work product on your resume, I'm assuming your general work product is also subpar.
A little irony here. Back in the day, if you were applying for a federal position, this is part of what you put into your SF-171, the standard job application form. The personnel department, in addition to overall qualifications, looked for particular and certain terms of art and science that went into the definition of the position being advertised in the vacancy announcement.
If you made that first cut to get on the interview list, it was then up to the hiring peeps to suss out just how much was buzz and how much was actually experience.
Still does, in a lot of cases:
https://help.usajobs.gov/working-in-government/myths/resume-scanned-for-keywords
Resumes scanned for keywords by an algorithm? Sometimes!
The problem isn't using AI to help create the resume, it is they did not bother to read and edit it afterward. When I hire for jobs, written communication and attention to detail are two strong requirements, and I definitely screen out resumes with multiple typos. As wallinbl said, if you cannot be bothered to submit a quality resume, that does not indicate good things about the quality of your work once hired.
Or they did read it and couldn't identify any quality issues with what was written.
Either way, trash bin.
Additional information from the hiring manager perspective - the resumes that come in for any given job are drastically tilted towards “not even close to qualified.” It’s probably 80/20, if not a little worse. I don’t mean like “there are 10 required skills/experiences and the applicant has 6 or 7” - it’s like 0-2/10.
So, yeah, it’s a lot and I understand why folks use machine filters. I try to make the first cut decision on all of the applicants for my open roles, but that depends on talent acquisition actually passing me all of the resumes… they have to sHoW vAlUe and I’m sure cull a whole slew of the wrong ones, yadda yadda