One wonders why Apple gets high praise for "hiring cautiously".
But I think if you go back and look at who is criticizing Nintendo, they're not the same people criticizing Google and Amazon. They're opposing sides. It's move-fast-and-break-things versus do-it-right-the-first-time. Both have their merits.
But when you move fast and overhire, you upend people's lives when you have to let them go.
When you move slow, you provide fewer opportunities for people, but noone upends their lives over it.
For my comfort, I choose employers who prioritize keeping the team intact, even if that does mean fewer opportunities during boom times.
Its well understood that layoffs destroy the morale of your employees, and that they drive out a huge percentage of employees, and specifically the ones who have the best alternative options.
But I imagine that measuring the impact of brain drain from a layoff after a subsequent overhire compared to potential growth losses from not overhiring during the boom is one of those things that is extremely hard to measure.
Good on Apple and Nintendo for having strong enough and competent enough leadership to make that call, instead of the typical metric based CYA.
You've got it. The number of companies I've worked with who talk about being "data-driven" and who do not use any data for a majority of their decision making is ridiculous.
This is true, and goes double (at least) for anything that is at odds with maximizing superficial short-term profits, or with absolute control by management over employees' existences.
There are many studies at this point showing how much more productive and profitable companies can be when they treat their employees well and pay them at or above market rate, but the neofeudal mindset and the idea that this quarter's profit growth are the only metric are so deeply ingrained into so many people's heads that it's very, very hard to make any inroads.
Have you not read this forum for the past week? It's been riddled with techies ragging on tech CEO's for "blaming the economy" and not blaming themselves for over-hiring.
Okay, so the job wasn't the last of your career, you didn't get to commit the rest of your life to the company. But come on, it's not the 1950s anymore. People change jobs all the time, it's normal. If a company overhires for a few years then eventually corrects itself, that's the company screwing itself over but I think workers offended by this are getting emotionally over-invested. You got paid for your time and you got more out of the relationship than the company which never actually needed your labor in the first place. That's a win for you and a loss for the company, but not all good things can last forever.
The HN mob in general is pretty level headed, but its like someone kicked over the beehive.
Mass hiring distorts the entire job market. It draws people out of safer, more stable jobs. It draws people into the industry from other industries. It draws students into the industry, and into industry-related academic areas. If the gains were only short-term, that's not necessarily a good tradeoff for employees.
Some fairly straightforward examples of why dumping tens of thousands of people into financial precarity isn't a positive or neutral action:
* Rent is still due at the end of the month. Hopefully you don't have too long left on your lease if you find a job in another city.
* Many companies seem to be doing it simply because they can, rather than out of any kind of financial necessity.
* Recent hires likely haven't recouped their relocation costs.
* Finding a new job is more complicated when the market has been flooded with literally hundreds of thousands of people in the same situation.
* People lose part of their social circle, especially bad for people who gave up their existing one when relocating.
* Many applicants, especially graduates, have had accepted job offers withdrawn, putting them in a financially precarious position where they've turned down other offers and now need to scramble to find a way to pay their rent.
The fact is that most people only ever have a few months at most to find a new source of income. Losing your job in an environment where finding a new one is more challenging than normal is going to be hugely stressful for most. To be honest, I find it really odd that you're totally unaware why someone losing their job might affect them negatively.
I think the "I take full responsibility ..." that seems to be a regular fixture of layoff announcement suggests otherwise.
Meanwhile, PlayStation 6, Pixel 9, and iPhone 16 are foregone conclusions.
So as a metric it's very context-dependant.
If priority #1 is shareholder value, then doing all 3 of those makes sense.
If priority #1 is something other than money, then maximizing profit can lead to a negative impact on the true mission.
So I do agree it's context-dependant, but perhaps a slightly different context than you had in mind?
For example paying people less might impact your ability to improve your money stream. Similarly having fewer people may lead to some missed opportunities.
In India the size of organization that you manage signals the status of your position, and since a lot of engineers are from India - no wonder this practice becomes norm in the US
If you let manager choose whom to manage: 10 brilliant scientists in a research group, or 100 engineers building a product - almost every Indian manager will choose the latter
From what I recall Nintendo’s hiring was never the issue but the pay