Is it the fundamental nature of tech that companies must undergo a hiring boom followed by layoffs and cost-cutting?
Say you want to build a new product. There’s a lot of upfront work. So we staff our product-building teams (eng, UX, PM) as fast as possible and iterate until we’ve captured the majority of the opportunity.
This period of build and capture more and more value, doesn’t last forever. We hit diminishing marginal returns. So we lay-off the workforce that was hired to build the thing in the first place.
So this may just be the circle-of-life for tech companies. If you’re an employee, enjoy the fruits while they last. Don’t assume they’ll last forever. You’re a surfer of the waves of the build-and-cut cycle.
Engineers have dedicated years of their lives to optimizing every part of the bicycle. Even simple parts, like brake levers and foot pedals, have been studied in excruciating detail. Why? When these parts come together, you get one, holistic biking experience, and that’s what that people want (and are willing to pay for). But it only takes one bad part to cheapen the whole experience. We can learn a tremendous amount about products by taking a look at the bicycle.
- Two things make a bike “high-end”: the parts and their integration.
- The experience suffers to the “min” of the parts.
- You’re always selling an experience, not technology.
- Aside for engineers: the value of your part is derived from the whole.