Most of the "fun innovations" are awesome ideas that would get a small startup a ton of business and make them widely successful. But the problem is that these companies are so large, that even those successful innovations barely make an impact on the company. So many initiatives at these companies have to be pitched as huge and game-changing in order to be funded in the first place. Which means they need to hire huge staffs, to justify their importance.

The managers make extremely optimistic forecasts: they have to, to get the project funded at all. Then, when the project is successful (but not as successful as promised) the bean counters scale it back to the size it should have been in the first place. So the headline is all these layoffs, when the real problem is that these companies are too darn big to operate efficiently.

That's what happens, when the two grading choices in your language class are either 0%, or 100%

You always needed the money, but imo it seems like the culture has been shifting away from making tech products to gaming profits, in a way that seems more unrelated to the product than ever before.

Like my company has had two rounds of layoffs last year, mass exoduses, but all I see from the Bamboo HR emails is us bringing on enterprise partner managers, growth hackers, etc.

Meanwhile the actual product is maintained by an ever dwindling rosters of devs, many of whom are certainly at least soft looking for other work.

Depends on how you put it. Realistically, to a degree. The issue is that with any new business type, they are forced to prove their worth at first, so it's always ran by passionate people. Later on, it all slowly transitions into the clusterfuck we have today

Friend of mine had a heart attack in his early thirties working for AT&T in the nineties. I ended up in the ER with acute chest pains working for UBS.

These days, I'm generally able to weather the daily shit storms, but I'm mostly dead inside just waiting for the sweet, sweet relief of the real mortal deal.

I kinda wonder what the machine is going to have at its disposal to extract more out of me after I've left this mortal coil. Reanimated labor I suppose.

I got a pretty decent raise a couple weeks ago. As I usually do, I expressed my appreciation, but added the commentary that when a hundred percent of my time away from work is spent bedridden from exhaustion, what's the difference between an $X thousand dollar raise and an $X million dollar raise.