this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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I imagine, this is more about software devs than sysadmins. Sure, you'll hire a couple more sysadmins to help with the massive user growth during the pandemic. But especially combined with loans basically being made free in the same time, it's suddenly worth hiring a bunch of devs to build the Next Big Thing™.
Once those loans start costing again and the user numbers fall off, you quickly have lots of devs that you can't find tasks for, that are worth doing.
Management loves them some rank & yank - not only are you culling the low performers, you're retaining the doormats who you know will put up with all kinds of BS going forward.
Where I worked, stack-ranking was a way to get rid of people who were non-compliant with management bullshit, and also to punish those who took on the technically difficult or risky work. So, if you worked on a project that didn't achieve its goals because the requirements were inconsistent with the laws of physics (real example, too bad I can't share details), you'd be punished, while someone who's a predictable performer at a simple, low-risk task would be spared. With (dis)incentives like that, you can guess the result.
Also, note that Andreesen is a big investor in AI, so he would say that, wouldn't he? Gotta keep that bubble inflated!
I think most of those people are gone. The pandemic was 6 years ago. We’ve had significant layoffs in tech 2022-2026.