The reason engineers and other tech staff will lose their jobs is because 1) politics above them, 2) lack of adequate technical understanding amongst mgmt to recognize how to usefully allocate technical staff, and 3) lack of political capital amongst the technical staff themselves.
That's a wonderfully over the top and appropriate article on the subject. And it resonates with me because the solution I've generally taken as an engineer is to annoy everyone around me with facts and benchmarks until I find someone in the management caste that has the same goals as I do and then jump ship to their team.
Considering the author, it's amusing that this blew up in my face at Google. Facts were irrelevant there, only status, and this was pointedly explained to me in an effort to get me to conform. So as a powerless new senior engineer blind allocated into something random and unsuitable, I found someone at another company with similar goals and jumped ship shortly after starting when it became clear that was my only other option.
In retrospect, had I endured the tedium of my initial assignment, everything I was saying ended up relevant once they hired people with status making use of my skillset to improve search.
https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/how-the-othe...
The reason engineers and other tech staff will lose their jobs is because 1) politics above them, 2) lack of adequate technical understanding amongst mgmt to recognize how to usefully allocate technical staff, and 3) lack of political capital amongst the technical staff themselves.