I did a double-take when I saw Twitter posting[0] in the Who's Hiring thread.
What's the rationale here? Why are they firing and hiring at the same time?
What's the rationale here? Why are they firing and hiring at the same time?
Because downsizing via attrition is a death sentence. The worst people are the most likely to stay and then new hires will be unlikely to stick around and deal with the code from the worst people.
Once the spiral starts it's hard to get out of.
1. Hiring is a noisy process. You can tune your hiring test to lean more towards false negatives or more towards false positives, but you cannot (at this juncture in history) eliminate a large amount of bias (error) from evaluations of candidates.
2. Regression to the mean ensures that any hiring process that sets a "high bar" will result in pool of developers who are on average below that bar.
3. as an employee remains at a company, the bias in your evaluation process should decrease dramatically. One can, and probably should try to weed out false positives, especially if one is trying to reduce payroll.
Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool.
The solution to that is challenge it with clout equal to the business. And that means unions. Only when 2 powers butt heads, will there be any fairness out of that.
Exactly. Even if one disagrees with a thought process (actually, especially if one disagrees with a thought process), one should still seek to understand it inasmuch as possible. Otherwise one is doomed to repeat it.
Whatever my beliefs or situation though, it's not hard for anyone to understand how a medium-to-large scale organization with a high hiring bar could make a rational decision to "hire the best" while still making an effort to release the least valuable developers in the company.
An alternative strategy is Google's. Google tunes their hiring process to produce almost exclusively false negatives rather than false positives (they very deliberately reject qualified candidates far more often than they hire under-qualified candidates). With this hiring strategy in place, it wouldn't make as much sense for Google to "weed out" developers.
And for the record I think 20th-century impersonal, statistical business thinking is toxic, but that doesn't mean I don't see its use or that I know of a better way to do things.
Answer: Google can do what they do because of their scale, culture, systems, access to pots of money etc.
Google are Google. The rest of us are not and can't calibrate our hiring process to turn up only false negatives. We'd never hire anyone.
Funny because companies necessarily say they aspire to have a representative workforce, one which reflects the community (local/national workforce, users, the founders?) but then when it comes down to it, they only want to keep the ones who will provide some value (which is obvious) but then remember the community is made up of all kinds of people with different abilities --so we realize we are all in it for ourselves --there is no "community" where we look after each other. It's me or them, really.
It's necessary because, well, we live in a competitive world where your competitor isn't going to say, well, let's take it easy on them, they are keeping on a bunch of underachievers, and keeping underachivers employed is good for community, so we should give them a break.
There are still some elements in the 'best of all job seekers' (= employees) who qualify as worse than the rest. You don't even need to change the trait(s) 'best' and 'worst' refer to.
In practice, in my personal experience, mass layoffs are a nightmare for everybody, and end up affecting also those not directly involved (especially since in most cases they don't know if they are until the layoffs are done).
So:
- Many of the "productive" people will leave on their own accord for better pastures, even before the layoffs are carried out.
- The rest will find themselves with an increased workload (and the nagging feeling they should have followed the lead of the previous group).
It has absolutely nothing to do with productivity of the people getting laid off, it's more to do with a failure of some kind in management.
If you let somebody go just because you didn't like them but you lied and said it was for performance reasons, they'll have to fight to get unemployment, and they may very well sue you for their troubles. On a similar note, if you do want to fire someone for performance reasons, you better have that lack of performance well documented.
Because of this, a lot of companies don't bother claiming cause: they classify all firings as layoffs and don't contest anyone's unemployment. I worked for a company like that once.
Laypeople like me usually reserve "firing" for people who are fired "with cause." When companies fire people "at will," they often use words like "reduction in force."
Perhaps a better way of thinking about it is the consequences of being fired. If you are fired "at will," then you are entitled to things like unemployment compensation, COBRA benefits, etc. If you are fired "with cause," then you lose those benefits.
If an employee is a klunker, they will often wait for business to slow down, fire them "at will," and pay the benefits, to avoid potentially getting sued for false termination.
Obviously, people have different talents, and can't do equally well any task you ask them. But I really doubt Twitter even tried. No company tries. More likely they froze their employees tasks beforehand so they could be better evaluated.
Healthy companies at scale and size equilibrium should be doing both at roughly the same rate, averaged over time.
> Hiring, at least in theory, pulls in the best.
... or that working in your company causes a serious damage and suck out all the talent of the people before to let it go totally burnt.
Fixed it for you.
Something I've seen at at least a couple of companies where it resulted in killing the company, and one of those was the storied Lucent (forced to sell out to Alcatel, which itself didn't fare well, evidently most of it was sold to Nokia in January this year).
The managers even made a point of telling us how their firing a particular key guy showed no one was safe. Well, the same was true of the project, which was de jure and de facto necessary for Lucent's continued existence as an independent entity, it was a media gateway, which along with a media gateway controller such as their very well received Softswitch replaces a unitary switch like their 5ESS.
(It was a very interesting project, BTW, we were working with 5ESS types in Cincinnati, and like that storied system it was a true 5 9's system, no faking it for scheduled maintenance, people expect their telecom systems to be available 24x7 absent acts of God.)