Comment by int0x2e | Hacker News Reader

Comment by int0x2e | Hacker News Reader

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I love your thinking, but sadly most large corporates seem to suffer from very slow and very bad deciding making processes.

Some examples from the tech giant I called home for 5+ years until I recently quit: 1. When the pandemic hit, mangement froze all hiring and emphatically urged us to optimize costs so we wouldn't have to lose anyone. 2. When the pandemic concerned turned into the hype of 2021, we tried to hire at a crazy rate, often competing with insane offers. 3. When the war started, we again went into a hiring freeze, and now a round of layoffs.

In my experience - our management basically did what everyone else did, which meant we couldn't leverage any of our unique advantages and beat the market in some way.

The reason I joined the company I did after the megacorp is that they had a very simple strategy for hiring - hire top talent in strategic areas when you can find it, but ignore anything else, don't lower the quality bars, don't make insane offers, etc. It's almost as if having common sense is such a rare thing now, that it's become a winning strategy...

When the pandemic hit I was working at a name SF company that immediately -- day one -- cut all contractors & consultants. They pivoted from working on things that had 2 year delivery timeframes to things that had 30 day delivery time frames. Then everyone who was left got run into the ground because their business boomed (one of those companies that thrived during the pandemic).

So sure, they didn't need all those other people when they were trying to build big things that took years of development, but those same people were cut and left to fend for themselves while the company recorded record revenues and profits.

Now, in the case of the pandemic, these things were hard to predict. Contractors & consultants know they're expendable, they're paid to be (though, not like they used to be).

But now companies are giving at least three orthogonal messages: 1) we're doing fine but productivity requires everyone to please come back into the office, and 2) we're not in a recession but we're going to cull the herd in big numbers anyway, and finally 3) we have to control and minimize corporate spending.

It's hard not to think that the cullings are part of an effort by the big corps to assert greater control over their employees. There's a collective hurt being spread across the workforce, a quelling of employee pushback against RTO policies (the pandemic is still happening, in actuality), and a desire to bring salaries back down by minimizing the opportunism of mobility via strategic attrition.

I do wonder a) how the orgs that are remote-first in hiring are faring in this climate, and b) if this will start a tumble in housing in HCOL areas.

I think this is just another case of "history repeats itself"

People who went through COVID will now have an experience that will shape how they handle this situation in the future. This generation won't make this same "mistake" again, but a future generation may.

Just like how people who grew up with extreme bank instability (i.e. the Great Depression) stashed large sums of money in closets and dressers but we don't. Our decisions are largely based on the context of our experiences. If we don't have a certain experience, it probably won't be a factor in decision making.

Of course, you go to school to learn about past mistakes, but

(1) There are a billion mistakes that have been made in the past so even if you learn about them, without direct personal experience, you will probably repeat some anyway.

(2) In the end, we sort of want people to repeat mistakes because sometimes the conditions are different and the outcome could be positive. What happens when we get old is that we encounter negative experiences that discourages us from trying the same things in the future, which is great for survival but extremely negative for innovation. In the case of someone who grew up stashing money, they might be disdainful of banks and this could actually turn out to be a pretty bad trait.

So in the end, it is what it is. Cycles will always be a thing.

> hire top talent in strategic... don't make insane offers

How does this work? I left Google after ten years last year, when the market was still competitive, and I had multiple strong offers. I wasn't going to leave...lets call it significant money on the table if I somehow had a "non-insane" offer somewhere else...

It's interesting, because I took a pay cut to join this startup. I had grown tired of not being challenged and not learning as much anymore, and I definitely got tired of the corporate politics and endless bureaucracy. Don't get me wrong - I did cool stuff, and I did have impact, but nearly as much as I thought I could.

At the startup, I was really impressed by the caliber of folks I met, and over the past 2 months I've been here, I've only grown more happy with my decision. It's so thrilling to see what a team of A players can get done when you set clear goals... I think it's worth the pay cut (to me at least), and I am very hopeful for a further exit to make me more than happy financially as well...

That's awesome,.I'm glad it worked out for you. But if you could have had a challenge and a strong team and more comp, why not?

I suspect there is a strong element of “it depends”. If your company needs to grow rapidly to capitalize on an opportunity, having a process that makes hiring this slow doesn’t work. If on the other hand playing the long game is viable, like maybe with a lifestyle type company, this approach is far better. The problem with the pandemic was that it suggested there was a new and big opportunity that made it hard for companies to distinguish the right approach.

> most large corporates seem to suffer from very slow and very bad deciding making processes

I think that's an accepted fact of life. I don't expect big companies to be fast and make good decisions.

But I do expect people not to be hypocrites.

The fact that even with all that I can't tell which tech giant you're talking about feels like a strong signal of the problem you described.

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