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Notes -
This is about layoffs in tech and what they underscore about modern economy.
https://blog.interviewing.io/how-much-have-2022-layoffs-affected-engineers-vs-other-departments-we-dug-into-the-data-to-find-out/
This passage feels obvious. Of course companies will let go those employees first who contribute little to the bottom line. Of course companies will hold onto their critical resources--engineers and salespeople in this case--until the very worst moment.
But underneath this is a statement about how many bullshit jobs are there in our economy. Jobs that are merely simple busywork. Jobs that exist solely as a way to redistribute the fruits of capitalism from those who have found a way to way to produce for society and those who didn't. It's basically a giant social contract about providing for a rather large part of society that would not otherwise be able to sustain itself.
If anything, this speaks of how deep our humanism runs. Instead of sawing off the sickly branch, we embrace it with care, doing so in a way that doesn't over-infringe on the patient's dignity (Consider how powerful a mark of status it is to provide for the weak and poor--now this status-marker has been democratized).
Thus we learn something practical: don't take anything HR says or does too seriously. They play an unpopular, minor role in the fabric of a company, relegated to the equivalent of keeping the litter box clean: ensuring legal compliance, tackling on/off-boarding paperwork, and organizing company celebrations. That, and be wary of HR departments that seem to outgrow their function. A fat, active HR department is a sign that a company isn't allocating its funds efficiently. Or that it usurps power from more important departments, eg. the power to design and run the hiring process (they should only take care of the mechanical parts; the candidate qualification process should be in the hands of subject-matter experts). Either way, it's a bad sign.
Like many here I'm the type that would be one of the engineers in this list and I'm a little skeptical this the first jobs to get let go in a contraction can tell you all that much about which jobs are "bullshit". People have already covered that recruiters, much like fracking, can be essential and have good value returns when engineers or oil is difficult to extract and worth a lot are less important when supply is abundant and cheap. But just in general this isn't the right way to look at businesses. The telling part is that sales people aren't let go. At least in my experience the sales people are making the value directly, they're contacting syndicators or clients or whatever directly and bringing business. The engineers support the sales people with new tools but in very harsh times they can be scrapped and sales people can make due with the older tools. recruiters are even more easy to let go because you can keep improving with the engineers you have. Each role is useful and not a bullshit jobs but their relative usefulness is more or less correlated with whether the company is being lean to survive or attempting to grow and improve and that is more responsive to the economy than anything like inherent usefulness.
The problem with recruiters is that 95% of them can be replaced with a python script and a picture of a IG influencer.
To be fair there are a lot of engineers that when let go their team productivity will go up.
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