Comment by frankc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frankc | Hacker News Reader

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"The average person has more business sense than the CEO of Zoom and its entire board of executives who allowed rampant hiring because I could've guessed during COVID, despite the surge in demand given all of the work-from-home during lockdowns, my company most likely won't grow forever, therefore I won't triple my staff over the next 3 years and then need to just end up laying them off"

I don't mean this to be snarky but this is like saying its stupid for a department store to hire in the lead-up to Christmas. They are going to have to lay many or most of them off after. Couldn't they see that Christmas wouldn't last forever?

Think of it this way - if there is a huge market/demand expansion, and you don't meet that need/demand, someone else will. Even if you think that much of that expansion is temporary, you will have fallen behind competitors in technology and market share. When the boom ends, they lay people off and you don't have to, but you are still behind now.

I think there's a valid discussion to be had about whether we as an industry should expect massive hiring binges to be temporary and necessarily followed years later by layoffs, but these weren't billed as temporary jobs, so I think some shame is warranted. People probably relocated for these jobs, expecting them to be stable. I don't really want to become complacent to working in an industry where major players just lay off thousands of people periodically.

I think an argument can be made that all jobs are temporary jobs. If you're increasing headcount during a period of high growth then there is often hope that the growth continues enough to support those numbers when things taper off but it's not as easy as people seem to be saying.

It looks like they grew somewhere around 300% since the start of COVID, a rif of 15% doesn't seem too far off estimates to me.

Agree with all of this. It's a lesson to all of us that when looking at a prospective job, we should be cognizant of whether that company has had massive increases in number of employees lately, and whether that company is one of the ones that has a tendency to do massive hiring followed by massive layoffs.

> I think there's a valid discussion to be had about whether we as an industry should expect massive hiring binges to be temporary and necessarily followed years later by layoffs

Devil's advocate but at the end of the day, if you're an engineer and Zoom wants to offer you a low-six figure job ($100k-$300k/yr total comp I'm sure is within the normal range for most people), as an employee are you "grateful" and just shut up and take it and don't think twice from the perspective of, who cares if I get laid off in 18 months?

Like the company doesn't owe it to you to keep you employed, so the question becomes, do they owe it to you to at least give you a heads up that your full time job isn't really that permanent? No company really gives any salaried employee any guarantee like that. Who are we as employees to say "hey, I think I deserved more communication in your intentions with me/my job"?

They definitely don't literally owe us anything, but I think it becomes a question of company reputation. It's definitely going to make me think twice about jumping on any all-time-high hiring surges in the future at certain companies. As for "who are we as employees to say...", I think the answer is that to a large degree, we're the limited resource that gets to say what kind of hiring/firing practices we're willing to put up with. That's a bit diminished at this precise moment, but it's not gone. If you can command a $300k salary, you're in demand enough to be able to filter out companies that will treat you as seasonal work.

Lots of companies in lots of industries can be very cyclical. Try working for an aerospace company--or one of their many subcontractors--if they lose a big contract.

> I don't mean this to be snarky but this is like saying its stupid for a department store to hire in the lead-up to Christmas.

You aren't wrong, I'd say the only subtle difference there is, when you are hired for a Christmas seasonal job, you're informed that it's seasonal and are expected to be laid off, right?

Yes, from what I recall, from working in retail in highschool and beyond, it's specifically temp work and typically staffed through a temp agency.

Yeah, a lot of layoffs make a lot more sense when you re-evaluate the assumption that these CEOs are hiring people with the intent of keeping them indefinitely. For many, I'd bet this was the plan all along

I don't even think it requires that in a strict sense. No one knows how long the cycle time is or if you are will reach a new long-term mean or not.

Another important point is its not the case that all the hiring is LIFO. In fact we know that many old-time googlers were let go. I am sure many of the more recent hires have stuck around.

To the extent it doesn’t overly impact institutional knowledge, etc. hiring/firing should be FIFO, if you want to minimize costs. Hire new people, train them up, fire (some) experienced people that cost more.

Whether that’s a “good” property of the system or not, I suppose depends at some level on how you feel about capitalism. Should a business owner be allowed to fire an employee to maximize their company’s value, and eventually their own income?

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