Hacker News Reader

Comment by ruffrey | Hacker News Reader

I have to continue this train of thought. It is dangerous that people consider layoff as a performance indicator for the employee. It’s just too hard to tell.

I was laid off recently along with many others because an entire experimental project was killed because the market shifted (crypto, I know). Prior to that I’d received top performance marks and had been promoted to team lead. They gave me a great recommendation for the next gig.

It’s as easy to get a low performer who’s on a PIP and employed, as a high performer in a risky company. Hard to tell which one you’re interviewing.

View on HN

I wouldn’t worry about it - it’s internet message board know-it-all syndrome.

Layoffs are financial and political decisions. Sometimes people layoff idiots when given the chance, other times they layoff the smartest people to protect their friends. I consulted at a bank where a SVP would reorganize non-core business units into his org specifically to meet his reduction target while minimizing business impact. Those people were cannon fodder from day 1.

Hiring is the same way. If you only hire pristine resumes without gaps, you’re selecting for survivors - not the same as performers. It’s more of a statement about the hirer-er than hire-ee.

> I consulted at a bank where a SVP would reorganize non-core business units into his org specifically to meet his reduction target while minimizing business impact.

You never know when you need a sacrificial lamb, eh.

> It’s more of a statement about the hirer-er than hire-ee.

Yep. Before the IPO the task came up to increase our development team size to 200 people, cause “people would rather invest money in 200 developers than in 30”. We would hire anybody who was able to say anything sapient about the task “insert an element into a double-linked list” (and were amazed when 80% of applicants were unable to pass this simple barrier).

On the other hand - when layoffs came they were rather reasonable and the worst people were let go. (None of them were among the people who passed the above-mentioned barrier though).

> insert an element into a double-linked list

I’ve been programming professionally for 20+ years and I had to look this data structure up. Granted, once I reviewed it, node insertion is trivial, but I hope you gave applicants that opportunity. Or perhaps your line of work commonly deals with stuff like this.

I’ve spent my career in web and mobile product development, usually with a business focus of some kind, and it still surprises me sometimes how little I’ve used certain topics from college, like mathematics. I think most of the math I’ve used I likely learned by grade 6.

Leetcode interviewing is a hot mess, but "insert an element into a double-linked list" is literally high school computer science.

More importantly, having the general problem solving skillset to reason through this problem in 20-30 minutes seems super important to many aspects of front-end development...

Similarly to the person you’re replying to, I needed to confirm that a doubly linked list is what I thought it was because for me, high school and college were decades ago. I just haven’t had to use that knowledge in many years of professional development. Now I’ve refreshed my memory on the data structure, inserting an element is straightforward. In other words, the harder bit for me is the boring trivia of what is the data structure with this name, while the far more interesting questions how do you use it and what are its advantages and disadvantages are easy. I would expect that a good interview would focus on the more interesting parts.

Probing for information and not being too afraid of "looking dumb" to ask foundational questions about the assignment are, in fact, part of what's assessed in a leetcode-style question. If we're honest, that's probably more important than the actual problem.

At most places I've interviewed, each interview question is a 25 minute - 30 minute session. Since white-boarding the solution takes perhaps 5-10 minutes max, in this case, there's plenty of budget to refresh definitions and provide a clean interface from which the actual task begins.

Critiquing "insert into DLL" as an unreasonable question does a disservice to the "less leetcode" position :(

> Probing for information and not being too afraid of "looking dumb" to ask foundational questions about the assignment are, in fact, part of what's assessed in a leetcode-style question. If we're honest, that's probably more important than the actual problem.

Exactly! We were not looking for A+ CS students, we were looking for people we can work with.

I don’t know what high school you went to, but “literally high school computer science” at my school was “here’s how to format a business letter in Microsoft Works”.

I know only because I volunteer in AP CS classrooms. Linked Lists are covered fairly early in the course. Doubly linked list insertion is one of the standard reversed classroom (?) labs in one of those teacher's courses (but not others; we spent more time on trees in one class and one of the teachers was quite bad and spent a hilarious quantity of time on String.format). In the DLL lab the kids do just fine in an hour or so. They do not see DLLs before that but it is the final lab of the linked lists section.

My high school did not offer CS except as an independent study (you could technically do anything as an independent study, so "offer" is shorthand for "convince a teacher to let you sit in their classroom during planning period and find a way to sit for the AP CS exam").

There have existed high school CS courses since the 80s. (The AP CS exam was introduced in 1984.)

Fwiw, AP Computer Science must have gotten better.

I took AP Computer Science in High School in 2012. The whole curriculum was based on this “Grid World” Java program where a Grasshopper extends JumpingBug extends Bug or something like that, no not as an analogy for OO, the classes were literally named like this. And, the AP test asked specific questions about Grid World's implementation, so you had to learn about it even if you understood the underlying computer science concepts.

I wish we learned about linked lists. I didn’t get that until college.

You took it after they switched to Java, which abstracts away the mechanics of collections.

Linked lists were much more fundamental (and covered much earlier) when they were using C++.

Oof—I had no idea that was a thing. Especially at that age, I would have loved to learn C++, due to some misguided notions of what constitutes "real programming".

My high school offered “computer math” and we had state of the art Tandy TRS-80s. Model 4s

Wasn’t too much learning about double linked lists going on in that class.

> I had to look this data structure up. Granted, once I reviewed it, node insertion is trivial, but I hope you gave applicants that opportunity.

We couldn’t - there was no Google at the time of our IPO. (More importantly there was no mobile Internet). But the reaction “please clarify what are you talking about” is absolutely sapient, so you would have passed. But note that this:

> node insertion is trivial

- is much less sapient. In my alma mater “trivial” meant that you are able without a pause to write down a proof - without a single error. And this particular task is not designed to be rushed through, there are a couple of potholes. Anyway, hire / no hire was not based upon the absolute correctness of the code. It was mainly based upon the applicant’s reaction to me pointing some “obvious” error in their code. We were not looking for A+ students, we were looking for the people we can work with.

> It is dangerous that people consider layoff as a performance indicator for the employee.

Hard agree.

I've hired high performers from dumb layoff situations like start-ups going belly-up, companies resizing, contracts getting prematurely terminated, etc. I wouldn't consider a layoff a negative metric unless the interviewee outright admitted "they were trying to get rid of me."

I'm always shocked when people bring it up as signal vs. noise in regards to interviews.

There's also always the possibility that someone is struggling in a role or company or project, bored and unmotivated or burned out, and they will be amazing for you in the role you need.

And it's also possible they were actually high performing in their last role but they managed to bruise someone's ego and wound up first on the layoff list as a result.

There is just way more to firings and layoffs than performance.

People also are only fungible to a point (depending on role). If a company makes organizational or directional changes and the role someone was hired into doesn't really exist any longer, there's no guarantee that they can do a very different role equally well and/or that the company will necessarily be interested in making a person who would never have been hired into that role from the outside work out somehow just because they're with the company already.

Mind you. Companies can do more with internal development/retraining and institutional knowledge is a thing especially with large organizations. But, at some point, no one's going to be happy.

> Companies can do more with internal development/retraining and institutional knowledge is a thing especially with large organizations

I remember, many years ago, being tasked with teaching PHP to the mainframe COBOL team - we’d retired the mainframe, and all our COBOL apps with it, but we’d kept the team, and management had struggled with finding them something else to do. It was a painful experience, they were getting it, but very slowly. Didn’t help that I wasn’t the best teacher, I had to slow myself down a lot and found that a struggle - but I was young and inclined to say “Yes” to everything.

Eventually, they were all laid-off - and pretty much straight-away found new COBOL jobs (with a higher salary too). I think, in the end, they were happier that way.

It's almost as if every human being is complex, multifaceted, and always growing. Perhaps every one of us who's interviewing and writing perf reviews would benefit from questioning a system that tries to reduce human beings to a handful of sentences on a CV.

On the other hand... grinding LeetCode is way more measurable. ;)

They've had decades to question this the moment researchers came out with evidence of the complexity of the entire matter, and the status quo failing to capture any of said complexity. 'Intuition' has still reigned till this day regardless.

But but but...they have a gap in their resume/CV....can't possibly hire them...bad...bad

Let me continue this train of thought even further. Your last sentence nails it. Even a firing for "performance" is not necessarily an indicator that the candidate before you would be a low performer at your company.

Sometimes, people are fired for "performance," when what that really means is "new manager/tech lead didn't like them." Interview enough people and you'll see this at some point. Sometimes, low performers in one environment are star performers in another. This is what happens when founders are replaced by more experienced executives, among other scenarios. Sometimes, people with impressive credentials (PhD + significant publications + previous experience, for instance) will completely bomb your interview because they can't figure out which of their language of choice's container types is suitable to the task. I literally interviewed that candidate once. Sometimes, people are fired for straight up illegal reasons that have nothing to do with performance. (This literally happened to me at a big company you've probably all heard of and used their product.)

As a company and an interviewer, the best thing for all involved is for you to have a structured process with which to evaluate all candidates for a given position, and follow it. No interview process is perfect at either selecting good candidates or rejecting bad ones, but if you have and follow a structured process, at least you should get consistent results out of your interview process, and you can calibrate your hiring bar from there. I don't want to go into much more detail regarding "structured processes," but if you search on HN for u/tokenadult's hiring comment cum copypasta (albeit an informative copypasta), most of what's there still holds true according to the best and most current research on hiring.

I was laid off a few years ago because the company that hired me hadn't actually won the contract they thought they won. Really hard to pin that on engineering's performance.

Recently laid off under conditions that I'm convinced are similar.

I was at my org for roughly 9 months, I came in as part of a large class of new hires across the entire org.

The last 4 months we were in crunch mode trying to land a big client that leadership continued saying would be a game changer for us. My eyebrow was already raised, because if one company is that much of a game changer, what happens if we don't get that client?

Sure enough, as I was texting with a friend who was spared, he let me know as soon as the last person left the office that day from layoffs, company had the weekly all-hands and announced sure enough, they didn't get the client.

I've seen this in the past, though it hasn't bitten me... I'm really against 'pre-emptive' hiring for this reason. Its not fair to mess with people's livings just because you promised something in a contract that you can't currently fulfill.

The worst part is it isn't like they don't have another option. Could choose to hire a contractor or let people know upfront about the risk of the job not being there in a few months, but that would drive up the rates people would ask.

Yeah, and the new hire potentially turned down a long term job for something that evaporates before they even start...

> Its not fair to mess with people's livings...

Given that this is the status quo, employees should adopt the same attitude. When working for an ethical employer, I'll work 48h/day if the situation requires it, but for everyone else, I'll bill them for the "quick question over the phone" outside of my agreed upon working hours; and I'll quit when someone else makes a good offer. Once a (spectacularly unethical) employer tried to pull the "think about the others in your team" stunt only to be amazed when I found them better jobs within a week and everyone else quit, too. I cannot say he learned from that experience, but I equally cannot say I regret my decision.

I have never been laid off. Not because I'm an especially good engineer, but because I have a good understanding of business and internal politics. I would have been fired from 4 of my 7 jobs eventually if I hadn't left.

That sounds pretty prideful, attributing what is also somewhat luck to your perfect insight. No amount of "understanding of business and internal politics" can prevent it. But it is better than being ignorant to it all.

It can mitigate the chance of being laid off. Keeping your head down and working hard isn't enough anymore.

It never was. If everyone else is doing that then your value is a commodity. At some point soft skills and other differentiators come into play most of the time.

Certainly awareness of your performance, your relationship with your manager, what's happening with the company/your project etc. all may send signals that it's time to start looking elsewhere. But sometimes executive decisions happen without a lot of warning. And sometimes, to the point of a lot of the discussion here, something may be affecting the sector as a whole (or wider) so it may not be easy to find another position. A lot of people who post here seem to assume that getting a new job is something you send a few emails about and expect to get deluged with interview offers. That's not true of many people even today and certainly isn't true at all during downturns.

It also seems to conflate 'laid off' with 'fired', which makes it a little harder to understand. Is GP saying he would have been fired (for cause?) at these jobs? Or is this just using the term 'fired' in the colloquial sense of 'involuntarily terminated, for whatever reason'?

I don't read it like that. Some people have a spidey sense for this sort of thing. I've only ever been laid off in my life twice. The first time I was completely blind-sided, because on a the Wednesday you have an all-hands meeting and see your name on the org chart the CEO puts up, and on Thursday they decide on a different direction. The second time was quite recent, but I already had one foot out the door, was actively interviewing, but the lay off came a little sooner than expected. Some people just pick up on the natural ebb and flow of a business and can sense when the winds are changing. I am as dumb as a box of rocks in most regards, but I have a good sense of when an organization is beginning to shift under my feet and no longer feels like a good place to stand.

To add a differentiator between laid off and fired, I've been fired twice in my life, once after I quit (toxic manager), and once when I refused to do something clearly illegal (another toxic manager).

how can you be fired after you quit? that's like somebody murdering you after you died. I'm all for asynchronous communication but some things are unavoidably sequential.

Give two weeks notice, and get shown the door that day?

In Germany that results in a mutual agreement to end the job contract. I would call that quitting without notice.

Layoffs are usually seen from a mile away. If you pay attention and don't want to go through a layoff it does not take luck or effort to leave before. I, for one, went through several layoffs that were completely predictable. I don't mind getting WARN money and some severance but some people feel that they are better looking for a job without competition from their former colleagues.

Flex aside, anything you can share?

I’ve had a similar experience. It’s usually obvious to all the ground floor engineers when the building is on fire. I’ve left roles twice where shortly after there were large layoffs, including a fairly well known startup a couple years ago. My motivation is usually because I can see the company can’t be saved and I’m burned out trying.

Agree 100%. I’ve been through 4 layoffs so far and while there is some correlation with performance, politics still dominates layoff decisions especially at more senior levels.

You can be at the top of the layoff list for nothing more than voicing your criticism of company strategy at some random meeting.

I’ve seen very talented VPs go from “hero” to “zero” in the span of a month when the CEO decides to change direction and concludes those people aren’t “aligned with the new direction of the company”.

I was laid off once because the company I worked for went out of business. So there's that. Although maybe some would say it was my fault for not programming better so that the company stayed in business?

Unless your company was 4 people that is an unreasonable expectation.

I was never laid off, but I once quit three weeks before a company went out of business. When I heard that someone's paycheck had bounced, I was out of there.

This also depends on the definition of "performance". A top performer at one company may be considered useless at another. It all depends on who they hired. Then of course you can have poor management - someone may not be great a context switching and if manager keep asking to look at different stuff every day or if there is a ton of junior developers needing help with everything, then you may not have mental capacity to do quality work on the stuff you are measured by.

Not to mention the same employee can flourish or flounder depending on the project, team, manager, culture, company, etc.

Working in crypto you accepted this risk with open eyes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com