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Comment by pololee | Hacker News Reader

The VP also mentioned they were thinking about the plan in Jan. So why the hell did you hire me then? I joined at the end of Jan.

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Mass layoff decisions like this are typically made at a higher level of the organization. The executives don't give much advance notice to the middle managers who make hiring decisions for most engineers in order to prevent leaks.

hiring at oracle is weird. when i worked there my offer had to be approved by larry.

If Larry is approving hires it's just as a rubber stamp. There's no way anyone at the head of a company that size could think about anything at the employee level.

Don't underestimate Larry. Not in this regard anyway.

No kidding. We were a 500 person shop that was gobbled up by Oracle. First meeting with Larry - we were all suited out. Walk in, he is in jeans and a teeshirt. He asked, 'why you all dressed up?' A very, very technical discussion on our company's software. He had been thoroughly briefed on our stuff and asked very insightful questions on how our J2SE app worked.

At Google, hires had to be approved by the founders as of 2013. This was when the company was hiring a few hundred people per week, so the founders got a spreadsheet with links or something like that. And apparently they did sometimes say no to some people.

It seems like a bonkers practice to me. I understand that it is important to hire good people. But this could be delegated several levels down, at least for entry-level hires. I suppose the top dogs could worry about promotions and hirings starting at the level of the junior managers, if they wanted to.

For the longest time, APMs had to have a phone screen with Marissa Mayer before they got hired. My main question when she asked me if I had any questions was whether this was the best use of her time. I don't know if that had any influence or not over their decision.

Don't leave us hanging - did it have a negative or positive effect on the outcome?

Candidates aren't told why they were accepted/rejected from a job.

Hey friend, don't take it personally. A layoff indicates a failure (of planning, of budgeting, or whatever) at a much higher level of the organization than you

Your position may have been opened before the layoff decision was made, so they decided to leave it open so as not to raise suspicions (managers will rightfully get upset if headcount is taken away from them with no explanation). They might've know the number of people they needed to cull in January, but not decided where it would happen.

There's a lot of work in Seattle. If you're cunning maybe you can get a second hiring bonus in Q1 2019.

>>Hey friend, don't take it personally. A layoff indicates a failure (of planning, of budgeting, or whatever) at a much higher level of the organization than you

And yet it is always the low-level folks who get fucked, while the executives who make the lay-off decisions often are rewarded with promotions and bonuses at the end of the year.

It is entirely plausible that they hired you so that they won't have to lay off someone they actually care about.

Well they laid off the entire team, so that's unlikely. These are typically product pivots, not financial downsizings when it's entire teams.

They could have done it on the division level. Pad your org with a relatively useless team just before the forced 10% layoff and you've dodged the bullet.

Are you trolling? You're accusing management of onboarding an H1-B, paying a sign-on bonus, paying relocation expenses and then paying them for 2 months to surreptitiously "pad the relatively useless team" so you can initiate a layoff instead individual firings. Nope. Generally, firings at big corp go like this: 1. Create an improvement plan for your under-performing worker. 2. Evaluate worker based on that plan in 1 month. 3. Fire worker.

When you have several layers of middle management trying to sabotage one another in pursuit of better chances at the next reorg, even weirder things could happen. Been there myself.

Why would you lay off an entire team for a product pivot? Unless all of the company's other products are fully staffed... how often does that ever happen?

This has happened to me. Two weeks in the door and a massive layoff of peers occurs but I survived the hatchet as I came via a recruitment agency charging 20% of base salary. Higher ups can’t disclose plans until they’re executing them as it’s a warning sign something is afoot if a sudden hiring freeze occurs mid-quarter. Could be seen as disposing financial info unfairly.

Sounds to me like "the left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth" at Oracle. At least with regard to your department. But I agree with the guy who said not to take it personally. You shouldn't. It's more a commentary on the state of corporate flux than it is on your work, that's the healthiest way to view things.

Sounds to me like "the left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth" at Oracle. At least with regard to your department. But I agree with the other guy in this thread who said not to take it personally. You shouldn't. It's more a commentary on the state of corporate flux than it is on your work, that's the healthiest way to view things.

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