I’m personally well acquainted with many people in tech, especially big tech. Many of them are doing little or nothing, certainly not justifying $300k+ salaries.
What you do has risk but is fundamentally more honest - your skills are around technology and output, not navigating corporate bureaucracy.
I don't think most folks graduate college and think, "You know what sounds amazing? Sitting at a desk doing nothing five days a week!"
I expect most of the time they have good reason to be "unproductive," and would respond positively to those reasons getting addressed, or you're not capturing their contributions accurately with whatever metrics you're using to find "slackers."
And people are doing things, I’m not saying they’re sitting making paper airplanes — just things with no value or that drain their value. I had a high school friend who was brilliant, but his career got nerfed when he stuck with a bad tech/business unit.
If you’re the world’s premier expert in some peculiar process that only exists in one place, that’s no mas. Companies have been rolling in dough for a long time and some have way more people than they used to. One big company I deal with went from an account team of 6 to almost 50.
Some of it boils down to ineffective management and lack of mentoring, for sure, and could be addressed in a better way. Some of it is people getting in way over their heads.
I worked at a company where utility companies sent us data files and we created, printed and mailed bills.
In 2008 during the financial crisis the next time I looked for a job (my third), I had two offers relatively quickly - one programming point of sales systems and the other that I accepted programming ruggedized Windows CE devices for field service workers.
Fast forward to 2020 at the height of COVID, I got my one and only BigTech job working at AWS (my 8th job).
Unlike the author of the submitted article, when I got Amazoned 3.5 years later, I shrugged, my $40K severance was deposited in my account and I reached out to my network and targeted outreach to some recruiters in my niche and had four interviews and 3 offers within 3 weeks. Why would I waste time getting emotional about a company knowing that the CEO is 6-7 positions up on the career ladder and I’m just a random number to most of the organization?
A year later in 2024 around 9:00 PM I had a “1-1” with my manager invite for the next morning. I already had my suspicions and told my wife that I am probably going to be laid off in the morning. She said let her know how it goes and we went to sleep.
I woke up the next morning, was notified about my layoff asked when I would get my severance and responded to a recruiter that reached out to me about a week prior.
I started the interview process and three weeks later I had a job making the same as I was making at AWS.
I don’t need to “justify” what I’m making. I have a skillset and experience that are in demand and companies are willing to pay me for it because by employing me they get a positive ROI.
And knowing how to “deal with ambiguity” and focus on how to add business value. If you look at the leveling guidelines of any tech company, anything above mid level is focused on “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”.
Knowing AWS really well is just a tool and it doesn’t hurt that I have a stint at AWS ProServe on my resume
Notice “codez real gud” is not a differentiator.
There is no hard skill you can learn that thousands of of others don’t know that will set you apart.
Well except for some vertical market stuff that will leave you pigeonholed.
Sources:
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
https://dropbox.tech/culture/sharing-our-engineering-career-...
There is also COBRA that lets you stay on your employer’s plan. You have to pay the entire premium. I pay $600 a month now and my employer pays $1200 a month. That’s me + family.
If you would work non-contract here in Poland for an equivalent of ~$120k you would pay around $1k USD. If your wife is working she will also pay, of course this also covers all you kids.
So lets say both of you make around $120k here - so you would pay $2k monthly for "free" healthcare and its quality is atrocious. Even for serious stuff you many times need to wait 1-2 years for something, all hospitals are understaffed, the care quality is abysmal.
If you are ambitious and make good money the US is better. Europe in general is better for people that don't aim too high and want the state to enforce some minimum of QoL for them at the expense of the rest.
