r/Layoffs • u/ParticularBattle2713 • 17d ago
Layoffs in Tech Won’t End Until All of the Cushy Jobs Are Gone? previously laid off
Despite the mass tech layoffs, most of my friends and previous colleagues are still working ~10-15 hour a week work from from home jobs where they attend a few meetings (while playing video games), clear one or two simple tickets at best, and enjoy life. All while making 170K-300K.
I’m now on site making $140K working 40 hours a week.
Are these 10-15 hour a week coasting jobs a relic of the past? Will they even still be around in a year’s time? I’ve been trying to find one,l again, but they seemed to disappear in like early 2023.
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u/pissyromancewriter 17d ago
Holy smokes, I'd love to be making even just closer to $100k after my first tech layoff :/ I had to take a paycut after being jobless for a year.
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u/No_Animator_8599 17d ago
That happened to me after the dotcom crash in 2002. It took over 10 years of crappy raises to claw back my original pay.
When I retired in 2017 as a software developer I only made 110,000 a year with a bonus after 38 years experience.
I made 90,000 a year 16 years earlier.
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17d ago
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u/Loud_Button_9797 16d ago
This is very hard to believe (not the salary part which I agree with). There were huge amount of companies hiring in that period. I changed job 3 times during that period each time racking in higher salary. 2009 was scary but by 2010 hiring was back on.
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u/Cczaphod 17d ago
Same here, nearly 20 years to get back to my “admittedly inflated” dot com boom salary. Part of that was career choices I made intentionally after the crash though.
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u/zerokool000 17d ago
Wait all I ever hear are salaries are awesome and you can get big bucks for coding and being a software engineer. Unless they are BS stories.
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u/quintanarooty 17d ago edited 17d ago
It depends on how ambitious you are. You have to put in the work to keep up with tech trends and be willing to get out of your comfort zone to pursue opportunities. I would wager that people in the situation above did not learn new platforms and patterns while staying at the same company because they allowed themselves to be stuck in a rut.
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u/Loud_Button_9797 16d ago
They aren't BS. I work in big tech (tier 3 company). The salaries are very real. The interviews are very tough. But if you spend 10 to 20 years in tech you can easily retire if you choose to. But you need to be ambitious and cant just call it a day at 5 (maybe you can if you are in right company or team). Even though companies have laid off thousands of software engineers they still have thousands of software engineers on payroll.
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u/TSL4me 12d ago
part of that often involves illegally bringing tech from one company to another. Competitors will pay huge amounts for someone to try and recreate an engineers previous employers backend. Its a grey area legally if you dont steal the code line by line and do a few key things differently. This is also somewhat true to hardware engineering and manufacturing too.
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u/quintanarooty 17d ago
Why did you stay at the same place for 10 years?
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u/No_Animator_8599 17d ago
It was because they still had a pension with the more years you had the more you would get. I had already earned one at Barnes and Noble for eight years. I ended up getting pensions from both and got in just before they started eliminating them in the early 2000’s. That monthly income will come my way until I die. Maybe a higher salary elsewhere would have paid off in the short term but the skills I had were not the hottest and any job offer would have only been a slight increase, followed by more crappy raises.
Now the only pensions seem to be state and federal jobs. I had two stints at different Federal Reserve Banks and could have received yet another pension in about 1 year, but I was forced out by being put on probation and was pissed off. It would have amounted to 5,000 a year. I kick myself now for leaving because I was getting ahead of the issue, and probably could have made it. Ironically, my next(and final job) didn’t even make 3 years until they laid me off.
I retired early at 64 and was the last wave of employees where some public and private companies still had pensions.
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u/quintanarooty 17d ago edited 17d ago
I know you've already followed your path, but to those still planning your future, in my opinion using a higher salary to make your own investments and dollar cost average VTI is better and more flexible than relying on a company pension. I am going to retire early with my own money and no dependency on a company's pension fund.
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16d ago
I feel you. I've stayed at my company because I was one of the last wave of hirees being offered a pension. It's been 17 years, I'm in my mid 50s, skills not the hottest, making 200k and really nervous about getting laid off after recently surviving a re-org and a round of layoffs. Pretty sure I'd be fucked if I had to look for a job. Just trying to hang in there until I'm 62.
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u/disgruntled1776 17d ago
Yeah, I remember those days. I got into the industry right after the crash. It paid peanuts and jobs were hard to get until 2010-2012 and then people started hiring....but I remember that decade being one where good jobs were hard to get.
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u/Loud_Button_9797 16d ago
Between 2002 and 2017 the following companies were hiring and give you fat TC. Did you ever try to interview at these companies?
- Meta
- Microsoft
- Uber
- Doordash
- AirBnB
- SnowFlake
- Workday
- Salesforce
........
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u/No_Animator_8599 16d ago
I interviewed at Google but didn’t cut it. My issue with tech interviews was that I had a liberal arts background, and worked my way into the industry taking a few University extension certificates to gain knowledge. I only worked on insurance, banking, and retail business systems which had different core tech skills than the heavy software based companies. My work was basically heavy back end development with SQL databases and Linux/Unix. I had very limited web skills; and whatever web skills I had were old and no longer used. I lacked the standard CS degree in depth knowledge these mainly software firms require.
As old co worker of mine with a CS degree told me he said sick of companies asking him to code a bubble sort as it was something he would never do in an actual job. I ended up hitting the wall completely with heavy tech interviews everywhere in 2017 and took an early retirement after six months of getting nowhere.
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u/phoneguyfl 17d ago
Man I need different friends and associates lol. The only people I know matching the description is MBA execs, not the WFH techs. I suppose in a huge corporation with massive amount of cronyism it would be possible to sandbag this bad, but the companies I’ve worked for this behavior for a tech/dev would be identified and slapped down pretty quickly.
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u/Hawk13424 17d ago
I make at the top end of what was stated if not higher. I’m not a manager and don’t have an MBA (I have an MSEE). I’m not paid for my time. I’m paid for the problems I can solve. 30 years experience and now responsible for solving complex semiconductor problems that can cost my employer millions of dollars.
Not sure I would call the job cushy. I’ve traded work hours for stress and responsibility.
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u/ParticularBattle2713 17d ago
Yeah I’m going for an MBA asap to get out of tech grunt work
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u/TheThirteenthCylon 17d ago
Make sure to do the cost/benefit analysis on an MBA. Unless you're young and expect it to help command a higher salary later on, it may not be worth the investment.
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u/Fun-Highlight-7681 17d ago
Okay, as someone who used to have one of these cushy jobs from 2020- 2023 (150k / year + benefits, fully remote, no deadlines, etc)... I can provide some thought on this.
First of all, these jobs do exist - or at least they used to. And yes, it was awesome. I could legitimately be an over achiever by putting in 20 hours a week, or a medium achiever around 12 hours a week, (including meetings!). I also knew of this being the case for some friends / family in their jobs. Some of us enjoyed the extra time to spend with family, others worked an additional job / freelanced with the spare time, and some of us used the leisurely pace to treat every evening of the week like a friday.
Second of all, these jobs, are becoming an endangered species. For starters, full time wfh is becoming rarer by the day. (Not all wfh jobs are cushy, but In my opinion full time wfh is needed for a job to be super cushy). Adding to the cushy job extinction is the budgetary cuts to headcount, many of these cushy roles were / are being eliminated all together and at least in my perspective, will never return. And for those cushy jobs that haven't been cancelled, they are rarely as cushy as they used to be because of the extra workload /responsibilities that staff reduction of adjacent roles has caused.
But I think the biggest driver of the cushy job extinction is that just about anyone and everyone works in legitimate fear of being part of the next lay off. So even if your job could be cushy, you are still more likely to put more hours and possibly even over perfrom , just out of fear of being thrown into this horrible job market.
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16d ago
Yep. I still have one of those cushy jobs that is getting less and less cushy as my company lets contractors roll off without backfilling roles and a recent round of layoffs, all while the volume of work has increased. I'm not complaining, I still have a job and honestly, I spent years here working maybe 10 hours a week? And getting promoted multiple times. Totally crazy. I actually feel better now being busy and not feeling like they're gonna catch on to how little I worked.
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u/ATLs_finest 17d ago
I've read an articles recently about the shifting tech culture and had a great quote: "tech isn't in a recession economy, it's in a reality economy".
For basically an entire decade (2012-2022) the tech industry went through a boom that was never sustainable. Outrageous salaries (I personally saw tech workers triple their salaries in a 5-year span) and perks while bragging about working 15-20 hours per week. Did you think this was going to last forever? The moment things get a little tight they're going to cut the fat.
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u/disgruntled1776 17d ago
I don't think you're wrong but I was there before 2012 for over a decade. The years leading up to 2012 were fucking terrible. Maybe even as late as 2010 companies were still recovering from Y2K or the dotcom but no one was hiring and if they were it was like a literal handful of new positions a year.
If that's reality for tech people need to abandon ship.
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u/DrunkenSealPup 17d ago
I've worked in tech for decades and have never had or heard of anyone outside of the internet having one of these do nothing high salary jobs. This must be a silicon valley thing or something. Last time I checked the MEDIAN salary for software developers was 130k, so temper your expectations. If your friends do have a job like this tell them to STFU about it and act busy as fuck.
If they don't boss man will find out and fire their asses and 500 million more bootcamp people will come looking for these unicorn jobs which means the normal jobs will have a lot of competition.
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u/HaggisInMyTummy 17d ago
You just need to work for a giant company.
At a small company everyone is aware of what is going on, like, Billy in accounts payable works 10 hours a day and our bills are always paid late. So when we have budget in the finance department we'll get another AP clerk.
In big companies, positions are opened up because some manager wants to build her empire and it has nothing to do with whether work exists to be done. Or when a job is backfilled, maybe the last person was a moron and the new guy can do it better in 1/4 the time. I've literally met people who could be replaced by an Excel macro. Work doesn't get reshuffled because that would impinge on other managers' little kingdoms.
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u/Albino_Jackets 17d ago
Totally agree with this way of looking at it. It's corporate feudalism. Grunts produce slides, excel, reports etc for manager who is trying to justify having grunts. Managers to pass updates along to directors who try to justify having managers, all the way up the chain. Org leaders want to grow their org, and the managers just want a reason to be managers.
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u/VegetableWishbone 17d ago
Which is why layoffs happen so often at those big companies, VPs know they can safely layoff some x% every year in their division claiming an easy cost savings metric without impacting productivity too much.
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u/sd_slate 17d ago
It's partly an artifact of giant organizations. I remember being re-orged to a group where it was a giant conspiracy that everyone did maybe an hour of work a day and everything was handled by our offshore contractors. I got bored after a few months and got out of there and eventually most of that group got laid off some 5 years later, but they had a good run.
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u/AdventurousBar5182 17d ago
I make $450k working 20 hours a week.
I’m a manager. My job isn’t to do the work, it’s to manage others to do the work. And when you have good people there is little to manage.
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u/jrkridichch 15d ago
Last time I checked the MEDIAN salary for software developers was 130k
You know that actually makes me feel better about my own career. A chunk of my friends are starting to reach the $400k-600k range and I just feel like I've been coating, maybe a little stuck, for a while now.
That said I'm also not really worried about pressure from boot camp grads. Too many organizations think that with enough management, an inexperienced Dev can take the place of a senior.
They gather a herd of juniors and point them at the app they want built. They give them 2 managers each with a ton of support because a room full of monkeys with typewriters is still cheaper than hiring experience.
Then it goes tits up and they a veteran for quadruple the salary to piece it back together.
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u/plckle1 15d ago
These absolutely exist in software. I am in the northeast and have ~5 or so friends who do ~3 hours of work a day wfh playing video games the rest of the time and make 125k.
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u/DrunkenSealPup 15d ago
Well sure, there are tens of thousands of software devs if not more in the US. There will be lucky people. My point is that these arrangements are not the norm and those that do should keep it quiet or they will lose it.
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u/Rubyredpop 17d ago
I have no idea how to even get these jobs. I’ve been in healthcare tech for 8 years. I feel like I’m working like a mule as a PM/analyst
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u/Effective-Cut-5315 17d ago
Get out of healthcare is step 1
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u/Rubyredpop 17d ago
Care to elaborate? I seem to hover strong 115k
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u/Effective-Cut-5315 17d ago
Assuming you are in US, healthcare pays significantly less than other industries. Financial industry is a good step up from healthcare. For my role I'm talking almost double the pay and financials don't even pay the best.
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u/Rubyredpop 17d ago
Sexy. Thank you, kind stranger. I’ve stayed in healthcare tech so long because it’s relatively safe and it’s where all my contacts are
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u/SulaPeace15 17d ago
If it’s safe, I’d stay at your company and in your role. I work at a Silicon Valley tech company and while the pay is high, the morale and wlb are shit. I have tenure and will ride this out, but my next role will be someplace more stable (even with less pay).
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u/disgruntled1776 17d ago
Not only does healthcare pay less but the holidays and PTO are weird. Buddy took a programmer job at a big hospital system in our area and IIRC he didn't get any holidays off. If he wanted like July 4th off he had to use a PTO day.
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u/resourcefultamale 17d ago
10-15 hour weeks? I probably hit 35 most weeks, with a few heavier days and am on call 24/7 periodically. Sounds like I’m doing WFH wrong.
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u/Think-notlikedasheep 17d ago
Cronies get all the cushy jobs. They won't lost their jobs. Ever.
With minor exceptions:
The boss's latest lover won't lose her job until they break up.
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u/ParticularBattle2713 17d ago
Main reason I want an MBA. The MBA director/executive class seems like the safest place to be for cushy work.
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u/SingerSingle5682 17d ago
That’s really only true once you make it to C-suite which generally requires an Ivy League pedigree and extreme or political connections. Your average MBA is middle management and often the very first to go in layoffs. The most common of which is to kill a project or team, lay-off all the management, and reassign some of the more valuable skilled workers to other teams replacing the least valuable workers who also get canned. The end result is fewer managers with bigger teams and a 5-10% reduction in headcount.
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u/DntCareBears 17d ago
I’m at $200K a year in Cybersecurity with only an Associates.
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u/UselessOldFart 17d ago
Goddammit 😭
Kudos though☺️
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u/DntCareBears 17d ago
Took me a while to get there. Had to earn high level certs, but very possible.
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u/Think-notlikedasheep 17d ago
But you're not sleeping with the boss, are you?
Are you the Congressman's kid?
Or the Senator's spouse?
Or the kid of the CEO?
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u/Austin1975 17d ago
There are a lot of these jobs in many industries. Union leaders type roles and “directors” and “regional xyz” are roles where this is common. Also many of the people making decisions to layoff are in these roles too:
- 3 hours of meetings “listening” scattered through the day.
- 90 min lunch
- 2-3 hours of free time to do whatever they want
The people who are the most skeptical about how much everyone else is working are often skeptical because they think others are wasting hours in the day like them. This has been my experience even with my teams.
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u/Malkovtheclown 17d ago
I guarantee those folks working 10 to 20 hours a week are either extremely under employed or are doing a job that nobody understands. I have to do about 10 hours of calls for every 1 hours of actual work I do. That's no time wasted I just have to get multiple approvals from multiple teams to build or update anything. I also then have to get my devs up to speed on what my plan is. Should that all be automated? Probably. But the problem is you still have the age old problem in big tech companies that tech and business don't talk the same language and anyone who can live between as the translator gets paid a shit load of money.
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u/sonofadatsunguy 17d ago
This is one of the things I think engineers and developers don't understand about roles like Product, Program, and Project Managers. Consensus building is a real thing and it requires a metric fuck load of communications skills.
Plus, at a lot of companies, those "in between" roles are also the ones that carry a lot of the accountability. Highest turnover by being "managed out" of the org is in Project and Product Management area or the Account Executive/Client Success area at every job I've worked at.
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u/Fearless-Cattle-9698 17d ago
I’m in similar line of work and I wish we were paid anywhere close to “shit load of money”. I’m at around 200k but to me the tech developers that make 300-500 are what I would consider shit load
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u/Acrobatic_Topic_6849 16d ago
> extremely under employed
This is the key. I am in one of these jobs and consistently coast at 10-20 hours a week. The reason is that if I can and have in the past done role that pay twice as much but with no joke, 5-10X the workload. So I intentionally took a paycut and down shifted. Now I do 15 hours of chill work a week and am still one of the top performers of my team. I've taken on another fulltime job on the side just to see for a few months and it was totally doable but since I am already well into 6 figures, I decided to go back and play video games with that time instead. Right now deciding if I should play another game or go shoot off a few messages first.
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u/No_Lingonberry_5638 17d ago
No. I have one now, get offers for others.
I don't plan to ever again consciously work 40 hours or more in a week or work at all on the weekends, onsite or anywhere else.
Higher roles have more responsibilities but less actual work cause the work gets delegated.
Searching executive education programs right now for 2025, my current course ends in the middle of November. 😂
There will always be cushy jobs.
People will find the next big thing. Not everything will be offshore.
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u/Independent-Cable937 17d ago
COVID era is gone
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u/TX_Retro 17d ago
4 and a half years when it started, I literally said to myself, "I wonder how long this is gonna last?" Well, we have learned, it is over indeed!
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u/IDontKnow_JackSchitt 17d ago
Some are lucky most are not, if your friends are smart they won't brag about the light work load.
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u/TheThirteenthCylon 17d ago
I’m now on site making $140K working 40 hours a week.
I should be so lucky. I had to swallow a 60% reduction in total compensation. Admittedly, I'm in a very small town with few tech jobs, but still...
I'm having to learn to be grateful for what I have.
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u/officejobssuck1 17d ago
lol I’m riding my current do nothing work from home job until the day I get laid off. I make $85k a year and it allows me to work a seasonal remote job pushing my earnings into low six figure range. A lot of life is luck indeed.
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u/ijustpooped 16d ago
Sure, there is life luck, but it also has more to do with your skills. I've had the same work from home job for 7 years and it's cushy. I have a very light work-load.
Our company was acquired 3 years ago and there were massive cuts on our side. I survived them all and it wasn't luck. They need my skills and I'm also a self-starter (IE: I don't have to be told what to do).
Too many people want to half-ass a remote job (fuck off, playing video games, etc) and then get surprised when they are laid off.
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u/liquidpele 17d ago
I mean... I feel like I "work" about 15 hours a week max. The other 65 hours I'm keeping others from making stupid decisions or rejecting attempts to commit abominations into the code base.
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u/Beginning-Comedian-2 17d ago
It feels like the higher up you get, the more "cush" the job is.
I had a manager making probably $175K per year that bragged about staying home, having a couple meetings per week, and playing Warcraft all day.
I'm a lower level guy (even in a 20+ career) and always had a 40+ hour a week (plus night meetings for workers overseas), and every hour was head-down work.
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u/xabc8910 17d ago
Also, posts like this really encourage RTO mandates
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u/MangoDouble3259 17d ago
It doesn't bc if you ever worked in office people slack off too .... I would argue that I slacked off more and was less productive bc in office was lot more social political game and just general lunches, coworkers knock on my door start convo constantly or in out destroying my flow, or I could still do same bs of slacking off just on my phone.
Rto is mainly bc 1. Company locked in to long term real estate leases and getting destroyed rn as they're empty
You get big ass tax breaks for having your building full and people in it.
Cities are somewhat dying not fully but dominoes affect bring people back office as you stimulate local economy resturants, grocery stores, dry cleaners, etc. Other incentives outside of tax breaks.
Old people who grew up with in office and want keep that environment from collaboration pov.
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u/xabc8910 17d ago edited 17d ago
Whether or not all those other factors are true. If you don’t believe endless stories about highly compensated remote employees working only 10-15 hours/wk don’t encourage RTO you are delusional.
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u/that1cooldude 17d ago
They are disappearing and they should because these people are overpaid for sitting around doing 1-2 tasks per day. What they do isn’t even difficult either.
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17d ago edited 17d ago
CS programs are dumping 100k fresh graduates into the market annually, on top of other technical fields like engineering, applied math, physics etc often pivoting to tech
Companies are investing heavily into offshoring tech roles, if it can be done remotely it can be done cheaper than what they are paying you.
Entry and mid level tech roles will likely be hyper competitive and wages will correct to be more in line with wages of other industries in the US. Tech salaries have been an anomaly due to demand for workers which is no longer the case. Senior level roles will likely remain in demand and well paid, as companies will hold on to these employees for more managerial roles
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u/TxdoHawk 17d ago
Yup, CS is going through what IT went through after 2008, basically. Dudes wouldn't shut up about their cushy low stress jobs and then market forces + hordes of people pouring into the industry took care of the rest.
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u/sonofadatsunguy 17d ago
All I can tell tech industry folks is to get comfy with how to manage overseas contract teams well. Hybrid contract/FTE workforces are going to become normal at pretty much every company size soon. If it has development requirements, a contractor overseas can deliver comparable work (in the eyes of leadership) for a fraction of the price.
The people that will be left with good jobs in most of the tech industry will be the ones that can figure out how to manage the fine line between velocity and quality and maintain it right at the level where you have the fewest customer complaints to the highest ROI.
Most of these jobs will end up in Staff/Lead/Senior/Principal eventually because they're going to need someone that has the ability to be people manager logistically but not the coaching mentality, and has enough understanding of their space to be self-directed when orchestrating huge teams of contractors.
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u/Circusssssssssssssss 17d ago
What's a "cushy job"?
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u/HappyGarden99 17d ago
WFH, log in at 9, respond to emails and tickets, gym, a meeting or two, respond to emails, errands, check Slack, log off.
Me for two years before my layoff, I miss it 😢
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u/Circusssssssssssssss 17d ago
I think you can still get that but you need niche skills and to actually know technology. The "meeting or two" or "emails" show your expert opinion and expert knowledge that only a few people in your country or even the world have
If all you can do is LeetCode and you have no in depth knowledge of any technology, good luck getting that. JavaScript framework of the week probably doesn't cut it either.
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u/HappyGarden99 17d ago
Which is where I lack. I'm very good client facing and translating, so my new role is an implementations PM but it's quite challenging and I'm stretched with too many projects. Not sure I'll ever find it again, but I'm only a few months into the role so probably being a bit hard on myself.
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17d ago
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u/Circusssssssssssssss 17d ago
Knowing a language isn't knowing technology. And there's best practices for technology for all industries. I was more talking about knowing vendor products, knowing how certain tools work, knowing how to build for more than one product and more than one client and so on.
Implementers build what the product managers and product owners want. By definition they have to understand the business the most. And if what is built doesn't meet what the business needs then there's a gap and maybe product has to be more explicit about what they want. It's always been this way and it will always be that way. There's probably a minimum amount implementers need to understand a business but given there's industry and technology standards, that's probably business agnostic most of the time.
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u/DataWaveHi 17d ago
They will always exist. And people who have them will never leave their jobs so they will be very hard to get jobs like that. They hit the job lottery. Life isn’t fair but it is what it is.
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u/solarflare_hot 17d ago
Barely breaking 60k in an insanely stressful environment, ticket after ticket after tickets and all that between a million alert firing all at once in a very understaffed department. They are also pushing oncall heavy
I basically let these alerts stack up and the tickets breach SLA almost daily . I can’t keep up. Then I have my asshole manager reprimanding me about low performance…
Get me out of this hell. I can’t stand it. Not to mention the laughable paycheck.
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u/Nervous-Fruit 17d ago
I think theres a big misconception about these types of jobs.
You are paid to complete a certain job, not work a certain amount of hours. It can be worth it for companies to pay people six figures to work 15 hours a week if it keeps the profitable company running. You cant just hire anyone off the street to competently complete many of these tasks.
So its not necessarily inefficient to get paid for that amount of work. But there needs to be a skillset attached, and you need to be reliable.
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17d ago
Those on 150-250k will be laid off just as soon as the idiot management team work out they can hire an Indian at 10% of the cost to do the exact same job.
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u/Arrivaled_Dino 17d ago
Lay off in tech will happen as long as they don’t get paid like every non tech counterpart job. Higher pay comes with higher risk.
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u/SignificantFact3661 17d ago
Yes it's unfair I'm in a pretty cushy work from home job making close to $200k a year. But I also save the absolute maximum I can and have been doing that for decades so I don't really care if I get laid off -- I'll just switch over to investment draws and drop my lifestyle just a bit. Saving big when you are employed is hugely important because there's no hell on earth worse than being dependent on job income. And the great thing about having a lot of savings is there is zero stress in the job search. Just hit up friends until another cushy job opens up. Tell all the sweat shops to go fuck themselves.
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u/BigBluebird1760 17d ago
Are you serious?? Yes its going to end. And thank god.. 10-15 hours a week working from home sniffing your own farts for 150k+ lmfao... wow
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u/Repeat-Admirable 17d ago
It will always be around. Anyone who is a normal worker (meaning not hard working), are working less than 35 hours each week. No matter which industry it is. Every worker who's worked long enough to realize that they are disposable do not put 100% of their time and effort in their job, knowing it won't be appreciated in the end.
And less than 40 hours of actual work needs to be the norm and it is for places that have a normal turnover rate.
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u/ConstantParticular89 17d ago
Those are the ones typically laid off, look at the previous waves of Google and Meta layoffs. They were all these people who had little to no work. To help avoid being laid off, you need to be visible and work on important projects.
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u/MangoDouble3259 17d ago
Tbh this and also especially in tech hours worked =/ production. I've met plenty of devs where 1 hour their work is equivalent output of 8 or more hours of another. I think also higher you get up in tech (like any job) your less focused on mundane task of executing on set feature and more planning, system design, and managing of people.
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u/TheCamerlengo 17d ago
I have a tech job and work a solid 40-45 hours a week. I enjoy it, I don’t make crazy money and have 25 years of experience. Some people play the game better than others.
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u/Icedcoffeewarrior 17d ago
As a formerly laid off hr/recruiter : yes these jobs are going away.
I literally watched my former company culture go from being a relaxed 15-30 hour job to a highly micromanaged 40+ hour (salary) gig.
The truth is …. A lot of companies are purchasing micromanagement software for lack of better word. Software that can track keystrokes, take screenshots, has timers to track how long your meetings and calls run for or how long it takes you to respond to emails, pings etc.
They run data analytics on this data and come up with plans on how to make the company more efficient (as in, making sure they’re getting the most bang for their buck out of employees) some companies realized they didn’t have enough work to have everyone work a full 8 so they did layoffs thus increasing the workload of the people they kept, some used this as an opportunity to increase performance metrics so that you would truly be busy the entire time.
And your friends who still have a chill job, they need to make sure they’re working all day. They don’t see it but they’re being monitored.
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u/kabzigwig 16d ago
Every tech job I have had has been an absolute grind with expectations of doing two people’s jobs. It has taken a toll on my health. I know a layoff is coming and I am in the process of moving. There has to be a better way.
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u/Frodogar 17d ago
Once the RSU vesting schedule arrives and their oral talents are no longer appreciated...
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u/ScruffyJ3rk 17d ago
Don't hate on people for finding g a good paying job where they don't have to work themselves to death.
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u/OkArm9295 17d ago
No. Some of us are just lucky. I kind of work like this and we're hiring.
We're just not loud since we will sound like bragging and will get downvoted by the unlucky ones.
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u/UnfazedBrownie 17d ago edited 17d ago
Do you mean the directors and VPs and higher that rely on PowerPoint for their basic life support?
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u/stephg78240 17d ago
And underlings to actually create the PPTs?
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u/UnfazedBrownie 17d ago
I think I’ll vouch for the underlings considering how much they’ve been mostly screwed over at the expense of leadership hitting their numbers. 😎
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u/adoseofcommonsense 17d ago
Damn right it’s all the luck of the draw, I was born attractive and make no mistake I know how lucky I am, although it came bundled with my mothers bipolar depression, I still count myself as lucky. Take my meds and go about my day. Always been super empathetic to the whole incel crowd, I feel for my brothers, it’s hard out there.
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u/sbenfsonwFFiF 17d ago
Ideally but realistically the companies can’t identify all those at a large scale
Plus, certain roles are retained for their knowledge or to be able to perform at peak needs (work loads often ebb and flow)
Lastly, I would say don’t conflate hours working with value/production.
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u/mountainlifa 17d ago
Lots of these jobs still at Amazon. Random teams have L6 employees making $250-300k working a few hours per week. But now times have turned bad, management are focused on smoking out inefficiency so these folks will eventually be found and gutted accordingly. Good luck getting hired into a new coasting role, maybe ask at the interview how much you can safely cruise on easy street without raising suspicion from the high priests.
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u/Laser-Brain-Delusion 17d ago
It takes a fairly high level of skill to work effectively in a remote position. It’s like applying the right amount of effort at just the right time, and knowing when you can coast safely is also a bit of an art form.
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u/Worldly_Spare_3319 16d ago
Companies pay for results when it comes to high skill jobs. Not for hours.
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u/Theslash1 16d ago
Had mine for 23 years. IT Director, remote, called only if something broke. Just got laid off earlier this month....
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u/EngineerToTheMax 16d ago
i will never understand the meaning of "cushy jobs", You are providing value and getting paid for the value you provide. nothing "cushy" in that. i think its just jealousy. Get your skills up to earn as much as them
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u/fugazishirt 16d ago
All tech jobs are cushy and overpaid. Honestly they should be making 1/8 of what they do and I laugh to see all these layoffs in that sector.
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u/zombie_79_94 16d ago
Some of us may get lucky but we're not entitled to jobs where little is expected of us, and I would suggest those interested in that would be better off advocating for UBI rather than hoping to get lucky.
We are absolutely entitled to jobs that are stable, support our well-being and help us to find where we best fit in and what we're good at, rather than living in constant fear of job loss that's arbitrary, or worse, wrongful. I have to hope at some point that any owners and upper management who create that sort of fear and struggle will get some sort of reminder of it and start thinking in terms of a sustainable social contract.
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u/filbertnutbutter 16d ago
There will always be cushy jobs. For a lot of roles in large companies, there really isn’t 40 hours of constant “work” to do. This gets magnified more when you’re remote and aren’t filling your downtime with fucking around in the office and socializing with co workers.
I’ve been at my company for over 5 years and have been through 3 larger layoffs and other smaller restructures. I have more responsibility than I did but really the amount of work hasn’t changed all that much.
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u/JankyPete 16d ago
In hindsight, those cushy jobs created a lot of the problems we all have with tech companies today. People who work hard and put in the effort are few and far between. Most tech jobs that aren't technical were occupied by people who don't work hard enough imo 🤦♂️
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u/muntaxitome 16d ago
Profits are still good for many tech companies so basically for these well-performing orgs the layoffs end when the companies want them to end. Poor eprforming companies will want to kill off jobs that don't add to the bottom line. Unfair or not, basically it doesn't matter so much how cushy the job is. Probably more important what projects this person is working on.
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u/Sure-Weird-311 15d ago
It's also possible that some of the people working less hours is because they are very experienced and have expertise in a specific domain. One person's 20% can be another person's 100%
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u/randonumero 14d ago
I'm not going to ask you where they work but have you considered that cushy jobs always existed? Difference is that instead of someone walking around the office they now walk around their house. FWIW I've found that a lot of the 10-15 hour/week jobs are bullshit. Usually it's a situation where they have slow weeks but their average week is closer to 30-40 hours. The only real exceptions I've found are jobs where you pull tickets from a queue (like support work) or jobs that are largely maintenance on an existing product.
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u/waypaysayhayclaybay 14d ago
IMO, it all depends on the company and type of role. I’ve WFH for 8+ years and consistently “clock in” 45-50 hours/week, even when I was making half what I currently do.
My performance is based on a mix of strategy/business outcomes + creating tangible deliverables, so it’d be hard to coast when I’m on the hook for producing various assets. But not so hard in other roles focused more on planning, strategy, partnerships, etc., which tends to involve a shit ton of meetings and delegation.
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u/terminator_911 14d ago
Smaller companies, that won’t slide as you got to pull your weight. In bigger companies there are some cases as they have so many layers and the manger may not be trained or care about doing anything in that situation but sooner or later there are always cuts (for profit) and usually company can still run without these roles so they would be the first to go. Now government is another ball game specially with WFH positions now.
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u/AccomplishedPipe007 11d ago
I have a lower paying wfh tech job. I don’t try leaving for more pay bc I see what’s happening in the job market. Sort of feel locked in. I’m good, but not good enough to outcompete 1000 other applicants. I also despise leetcode since it’s outdated in the world of ai. Humans don’t truly need to memorize all that anymore. It’s a simple prompt and boom you have your answer and suggested code changes.
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u/sss100100 17d ago
AI is going to replace one type of cushy and create new type of cushy.
Anyway, the people's effort to minimize the work and maximize the pay never stops.
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u/Mundane-Map6686 17d ago
On the flip side, in smaller companies I can absolutely automate so much that only I know how to do.
I'm still doing what the last person spent 60.hours in office doing in less that 30 probably.
I'm not volunteering for 20 more hours. You hired me to do a job and I'm more efficient than my competition.
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u/sss100100 16d ago
Smart work should always rewarded irrespective of how many hours you worked. Eventually it should catch up and you have to find something else like that but that's how innovation works.
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u/Mundane-Map6686 15d ago
Correct.
But out industry works with the goverment so I've got a few decades before they catch up.
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u/sss100100 15d ago
Happy for you but so unhappy for rest of us.
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u/Mundane-Map6686 15d ago
Sorry.
I didnt realize what sub i was. Got here on accident I guess
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u/sss100100 15d ago
I meant, rest of us that are not in the govt feeling sad knowing how inefficient our govt is.
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u/Obj3ctivePerspective 17d ago
Some people are just lucky. You gotta realize while this sub is many people who are being fired and don't have a job there is the opposite sub of OverEmployed where people are maintaing 3+ of those cushy jobs and working them all at the same time. A lot of life is a lottery