Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

I’ve seen this claim that Google and others had some plan to over hire.

From my time there that was not the case. There was the natural demand for more people on existing projects and lots of (often good) ideas for new projects.

The money just poured in. We could never actually hire close to the approved levels. Internal “fights” were over actual people, not headcount, everyone had tons of open headcount.

I think there was just so much money, revenue growth and margin that management (which was dominated by engineers) just did not care. Fund everything and see what happens, why not?

Counterpoint: I worked there for years and the demand for more people wasn't natural. It came from (1) typical employees not getting much done because they were either not very motivated, not very competent, or stuck in meetings all day, (2) proliferation of people managers who weren't producing anything — product teams of 200 with 50 of them being managers, (3) managers playing the headcount game because it was a path to promotion — all things being equal, who's getting promoted: an L6 manager with 3 reports or an L6 manager with 12 reports? Constant headcount battles

Also: telling a senior SWE (L5) that for good performance reviews they must act as a tech lead and spend most of their time in "alignment" meetings with other TLs and managers. Also: a team of 3 SWEs where each claims to be a tech lead of an area, purely for good performance reviews.