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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

> ”In his message Tuesday, Mr. Tenev said the new round of changes at the company are particularly concentrated in its operations, marketing and program management departments.”

People here on HN often say how bad is to be an engineer in a non-tech company. It seems that it’s much worse to be a non-engineer in a tech company.

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In general the non-engineers at tech companies get treated pretty well and I don't think they are more likely to get laid off than they are at other companies. They also generally get the same kind of RSUs/options/stock comp as anyone else at the company: those are not normally restricted to engineers, although engineers often get more compensation than others.

Marketing, advertising and sales people are especially vulnerable at any company: if the company expects consumer confidence and purchases to decline, those are some of the first roles that get cut anywhere.

We honestly aren't treated better, and as you point out, are usually the first out the door. This has been my experience as a marketer over the last 16+ years. So, so many of my compatriots let go in these lean times (and often not backfilled), leaving those left behind to do 2-3X more work and get the ol "you're lucky to have a job!" speech. I've been laid off twice in my career, despite being considered a high-performer, once mid-way through Covid, and am staring down the barrel of another looming layoff. Honestly, being a marketer sucks but I don't know what else to do at this point.

If it makes you feel any better layoffs are nothing personal, it all comes down to box ticking on a spreadsheet, to make numbers balance.

This is a weird thing to say. Not only is it functionally false, we have plenty of cases where companies made layoffs due to personal reasons and also where companies are making a profit, but also comes across as condescending.

If you figure it out, let me know. I'm a content marketer recently laid off, and I've been dabbling in learning Python in my downtime as a general interest but also as a horizontal skill that... may prove helpful?

In the meantime, kicking down every door I can to find a great company looking for great content.

Hey.. check out Superpath and Content & Pros Slack communities. They post tons of jobs and you can usually direct message the hiring managers - sure beats the endless blind application game. I can send you some other resources - DM me.

Any suggestions for someone looking to market their biz? PPC, SEO any guides?

As a nontechnical person, I can say I don't blame co's for cutting these roles first. Marketing, HR, program management, etc. are great at creating additional layers and busywork that makes it seem like they're absolutely critical to a company functioning. I was mostly in sales/bd and what I did love about the job was that there were pretty objective criteria to look at to see performance- how many partnerships or deals were in the pipeline, how many did you close, what dollar value, what was the csat on closed deals, etc.

I don't disagree on cutting these roles first, but I don't think it's a function of these roles being non-important; rather when a company stops growing these roles have less utility. Less about the role and more about the company priorities which shift when growth stalls. No one is sales is going to advocate for less marketing spend.

Program managers have very little utility. Ops should really be automated (i.e. it should be half run by SWEs that automate everything they can), so real ops headcount should stay constant as the company grows as automation is increased. I would hope marketing is data driven on things like CAC, but who knows at a lot of companies. Lots of marketing people are not quantitatively fluent.

Same thing I would say.

In my view the difference between a tech company and a non-tech company is what percentage of the company's value is stored in the intellectual property rights of their software. The higher that number the more of a 'tech' company you are.

In non-tech companies software engineering is a cost center and at tech companies things like operations are cost centers. In both cases you need them for the business to function but they don't deliver lasting business value on their own so you look to minimize costs.

Many non-tech roles have the problem of being easily replaceable while many tech role have the problem of being expensive.

Some company will always need a person who can actually make things work, definitely.

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