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And FAANG was able to hire and layoff massive numbers between 2020 and today while increasing revenue. Google is famously a bullshit factory that churns out products only to kill them.

It's a hell of a thing to realize that your only real function in an organization is as a part of some VP or other's empire.

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One unfortunate thing is that it pays well. If it didn't pay so well, perhaps there would be more intrinsically motivated folks who would attempt to accomplish something worthwhile regardless of the organization's myriad dysfunctions. As it stands, when I worked at Google, I mostly met people who treated earning the most money as the ultimate objective of their lives, and behaved accordingly (gaming promotion metrics, empire building, angling for peer/spot bonuses, etc.) — there wasn't much of a conception of eudaimonia, or if there was, it was a 'someday I will...', with no plausibility behind those aspirations.

One way to look at that particular event is companies needed to ramp up on product (Zoom, Teams, <remote tools>). It takes a lot to build a product, less so to maintain/operate said product.

When the monkeys are finished writing the story on the typewriter, it doesn't take as many monkeys to hit print on the copier.

And yes, there are bullshit jobs. Lots of them.

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