Hacker News Reader

Comment by adriancooney | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. It's a private document so it's hard to pull any stats out. I did manage to get the top ten companies (back of the napkin hack so take it with a pinch of salt):

  amazon | 13
  thumbtack | 10
  student | 8
  wework | 8
  wayfair | 6
  google | 6
  uber | 5
  cisco | 4
  oracle | 4
  adobe | 3

Surprised to see Amazon at the top. I thought they were the best poised against this. Again, it may not be signal of a wider problem but interesting nonetheless.

There was also an interesting row from a senior (VP level) at WeWork that would lead you to believe that they aren't in a good state ("f'ed"). Again, take it with a pinch of salt since we can't verify any of this data.

View on HN

Amazon is almost certainly using this opportunity to "trim the fat." Not saying these people are bad developers, but Amazon seems to require a very specific personality type.

Can confirm

I was hired originally as a contractor but was converted to full-time as I had a competing offer, I was fired despite exemplary performance for a very "at will" reason. After getting some legal advice I may comment further but they're actively firing folks and not converting good contractors. If you're still at the company watch out.

Isn't this more reflective of Amazon running right on the wire operationally and needing to fire people to stay there? Why would they need an excuse to trim the fat from a purely fit point of view?

Nearly every large company has those merely competent people that they can't really justify getting rid of from a performance perspective, but these people are a bit too comfortable and the company feels like a new hire is likely to be more productive.

A downturn provides great cover for the company, since they can get ride of a bunch of these people en masse with minimal legal fuss. HR and Legal can be prepared and do it as efficiently as possible. Plus, it will look good on the balance sheet for the next quarter (if that's important to the company).

they have thousands of people. 13 layoffs is probably any given week.

There was also an interesting row from a senior (VP level) at WeWork that would lead you to believe that they aren't in a good state ("f'ed").

That is a good summary of WeWork: "SoftBank, which is run by the Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, announced on Thursday it was terminating a $3bn share tender rescue deal hammered out last October to save WeWork from collapse."

Combine that with a lot of long term and expensive real estate leases with nobody working in the buildings... f'ed.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/02/wework-foun...

There's lay-offs and then there's "I got fired this week." Does this document tell the difference? Because those numbers look about right for an industry that does have some involuntary turn-over week to week.

Yeah it's around the time that the yearly 5-10% stack ranking based forced attrition causes people to get fired. Don't think it has to do with COVID.

fwiw most of the the Google rows look to be consultants, contractors or vendors. Amazon had fewer with details but tentatively had full-timers.

though IIRC at least a couple of the FAAMNGOs try to keep C/C/Vs from portraying their jobs as being employed by the contracting company. Perhaps Google doesn't or perhaps it's more for linkedin than arbitrary spreadsheets or resumes.

I got picked up by an Amazon recruiter just before the outbreak. I was really tempted but I'm now glad I took the time to think about it.

I wonder if the Wayfair people are just still unemployed from their layoff in Feb.

I'm seeing a bunch of interns in there too which is kind of interesting.

You can get to the raw data, even for private documents, by downloading as csv/xlsx.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com