Databricks counts being laid off as “red flag”
teamblind.com
teamblind.com
Agreed. You should not lie in interviews.
A common way of avoiding having to lie is registering your own consulting company after getting laid off. No resume gap! As far as if it fools recruiters, no idea. It's got to sometimes, right? I see it too often on LinkedIn for it to be useless.
Let's assume that there are facts that a person has a legitimate right to conceal in a particular context. What if the only way to conceal such a fact is to create a false impression?
I would hesitate to call that lying, because the word lying ususally implies that it is not legitimate, which contradicts the assumption.
When pressed it can be as simple as "maintaining a corporation for any work I do (when not working as a FTE/salaried employee) is preferable for accounting purposes". Of course if they press further you should probably have your accounting in order/understand the topic so you can explain this without looking like an idiot but it's unlikely they'd press you much further than that.
"Consulting" is the programmer equivalent of claiming "Entrepreneur" as a job title. Sure it exists, but it generally translates to "Unemployed".
It does not even seem to be limited to IT.
Myself, I've been either an entrepreneur (had a company with up to 12 employees for a few years) or doing consulting pretty much exclusively in the last 16 years.
So no consulting/contracting doesn't mean unemployed.
When Silicon Valley was less toxic, less exploitive, and not so riddled with useless frat boy brogrammers, there generally didn't used to be any stigma attached to being laid off.
I was loyally working at Kaleida (a joint venture of Apple and IBM) for a long time, and then applied for my dream job at Paul Allen's Interval Research Corporation, but they took a while getting back to me with an offer. But in the meantime Kaleida announced they were shutting down and laying off all employees (after having been steamrolled over by the Java Juggernaut).
Apple and IBM allowed Kaleida to pay out generous layoff packages (even converting worthless "KVAR" virtual stock options to cash) and gave job offers to most of the technical staff (which I turned down, because Interval was much more fun and interesting to me).
I told Interval that I wanted to delay accepting their job offer by a month or so, until after the Kaleida layoff, so I could qualify for the financial compensation in the Kaleida layoff package, and they understood completely and were just fine with it.
During that time period and before, Apple would even lay off batches of employees for a while to downsize, then eventually hire some of them back again, restoring all of their accumulated benefits and seniority.
The real question is, will "consulting" fool the people who would reject you for a resume gap?
No different to any other job.
Yeah, I tend to agree. It is depressing, but we are where we are. That said, I might be naive but I think things are fair most of the time. But mostly because people tend to do the right thing, often nudged by laws and regulations and not because they cannot get away with figurative murder, which some employers do.
> I don't know what the fix would be, but it sure seems like there's something fundamental that needs fixing to make it so that when a would-be employer and a would-be employee meet to decide if they want to work together they meet on equal ground.
I am not sure either. A good step would be to increase the bargaining power of the employees, which implies strong trade unions and a working social safety net. Employers have no qualm making informal agreements and coordinating hiring policies. Otherwise employees or would-be employees have intrinsically the lower hand: if they don’t work, they starve but employers don’t lose sleep over a worker’s life.
In an ideal world, this would be unnecessary because a bad employer would soon have trouble finding workers and an equilibrium could get established. We are not in an ideal world, and the equilibrium is unstable.
I did that one time when I quit for a 4 month break, no one seemed to ask if I had quit yet and interviews went fine?
Sure, some people would claim "It's just about putting your best foot forward and presenting yourself in the best possible light," but those people are such liars they lie about lying. Lying by admission is still lying.
How would it be any different if you had simply lied about Android experience? As in, you simply were never remotely competent at it and you just said it had been awhile?
Fake it until you make it is age-old advice and you being lucky enough to have an interviewer who cared isn't really an argument against it.
You: "because I wanted a new challenge"
We all know that in most cases thats a lie. But if you were to tell the truth you would stand a high chance of being punished.
Why?
But as always, there's lying and "lying". Saying you quit when you were laid off, I would consider lying. Telling you needed new challenges when in fact your boss was so toxic you wanted to quit the universe, not lying.
In the end, a job interview is a courting dance and you'd want to put your colorful feathers on, but at least they should reflect your reality.
True, these places eventually fall away, whether it takes 2,4,6 10+ years. They eventually perish.
Doing recruiting rounds as a candidate in the early 00's taught me that you have to lie in interviews. All the questions were "give an example of a time when ... " - everyone displayed leadership when they were captain of the national championship winning football team, and overcame adversity when they climbed the three mountains taller than everest in the same day. At the end of the day ... it worked.
Much like social media etc today - real life cant compete with the fantasy of the 100x coder who added $50mil of sales to the bottom line of their last employer.
You should also consider lying to your doctor when they ask how much you drink / smoke / exercise. They will just assume that you are so 2x whatever you say for drinking and 1/10th the amount of exercise you self report - because everybody lies.
On the one hand I agree with you, on the other, you can't pay your mortgage with dignity.
Would I judge someone for fudging the dates of their last employment to get around a ridiculous recruiter screen like this? Absolutely not. Would I judge someone for directly lying about their experience or knowledge? Yes, that’s unethical.
My favorite piece of advice from interview.io's interview coaching was an emphatic "There is no place for honesty in a behavioral interview."
It might even be demonstrably securities fraud.
https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2022/06/22/can-sec...
Much greater incentive to absolutely silent rejection. You know nothing you can't sue.
TLDR Have your paper trail in order if you suspect illegal behavior, everything else is then logistics with counsel and/or regulators.
(not an attorney, not your attorney)
walk them right into small claims for 25k
Discrimination (including "unemployment discrimination") during interviewing should be an automatic, hefty fine, with a significant portion going to the target of the discrimination (assuming the claim is found to be valid). Just riffing, maybe set the fine to something like the equivalent of total yearly compensation package for the average employee in the position being sought. That would be penalty enough to encourage putting it right in the front of any training for anyone making offers, particularly HR.
This is exactly how I feel about tenant laws in the US. It's great they exist, but who's going to get a lawyer to stay somewhere they aren't wanted. All these laws that protect the vulnerable still require a lawyer to enforce them. Lawyers aren't accessible to most.
This is the language in the universal declaration of human right: “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status”. This is not US law, but the fact that this was written and accepted by the vast majority of the countries on earth at least indicates that we (including nominally the US government) tend to hold that discrimination itself is morally wrong, regardless of whether the reason was put on a list or not. So it is not an unimaginable concept.
I'm not all that familiar with US law fwiw, but I understand there's a concept of 'protected characteristics' very similar to here in the UK & EU countries. I don't really see that there's any other way of doing it - you have to use something - if you're not allowed anything then you can only pick randomly. (You may as well take the first applicant, except maybe that's not allowed either because it discriminates against slower applicants.)
If I had to guess, I'd suspect the hiring committee found reason to suspect this person was laid off for performance / behavior. For example, perhaps their company has not conducted a large layoff, or is known for laying off based on performance.
We also don't know what else happened in the interview. Perhaps he talked ill of their former employer in relation to the layoff. He may have cleared the technical rounds but the interviewer noted this, and the HC weighted it negatively.
All of this is conjecture - for all I know Databricks' HC is really made of idiots, but it's probably not the first assumption to make based on a Blind post that lacks context.
But that's basically the definition of a layoff; the elimination of roles from a company due to reasons unrelated to the performance of the laid off people (e.g. lack of work, economic conditions). If somebody loses their job due to reasons related to their individual performance, they were not laid off. They were fired.
One company I worked for had two rounds of layoffs - the first round got rid of exclusively low performers (they didn't announce it that way but it was clear) while the second cut across the board. If someone had that insight, they'd be right to consider someone cut in the first wave as a red flag.
But more generally, I don't think people stick to this definition, especially when talking about themselves. "I was laid off from X"... No dude, you got fired for harassment.
Again, all of this is conjecture - we have no idea what the situation in question actually was nor how the person communicated with the company about it.
I have had the opposite experience. Every company I've worked for, the employee ranking matched my perception of that employee pretty well on average.
Also as a manager, sat in plenty of calibration meetings where we lined up rankings across managers.
The problem is when people are doing something useful the managers haven't noticed. (Or is successfully bullshitting instead of contributing anything.)
Given you have one of them replying in the comments on that site and throwing around vague accusations, I'd say they are idiots.
Even if true, this is something the recruiter and/or some of the interviewers should also have been aware of. The candidate should not have to go through the entire interview loop (I would imagine at least 5 rounds) only to be rejected for this reason.
Glad they named and shamed. I would't do any business with this company, nor attempt to work for them.
A RIF has nothing to do with a person's performance .. at least officially. One has to assume it was a business decision only, not performance based, although with a large reduction it seems improbable that the people left would be, now or in the past, under-performers. More than likely, the person being laid off was due to their salary being high, and their function being covered by someone else. Nothing more complicated than that.
On the flip side, we too can ‘red flag’ Databricks and other companies that operate that way and not work there or buy their products.
The thing, is we want to believe that a company makes careful decisions about whom to lay off. We know it doesn't quite work like that but as you said yourself there can be a bunch of reasons. And with that context you're still looking at the reality that the company didn't deem the laid off workers important enough to keep.
I don't agree with what happened to the candidate here and we are all at risk of being laid off after all, but at the same time we cannot just assume the companies didn't have reasons to select one person over the other. And being overpaid itself might be a red flag for some hiring managers.
What I mean is, we cannot have it both ways, saying RIFed doesn't mean anything while at the same time assuming that companies follow a rational decision process and don't just play roulette.
I've been watching the layoffs affect former colleagues, former workplaces, etc lately - and pretty much all of them are pseudorandom.
Got assigned to a project that's being cut? You could be the worlds strongest worker, a 9001x engineer, you are still gone.
Everyone wants to believe that the people and organizations holding their careers in their hands are competent, rational, and trustworthy. Unfortunately that is often not the case.
Is this meant to convince you to take the offer, or is this just to vent off some steam before closing your file?
Oh no! Oh, the humanity!
As expected. They will all attempt to drive down salaries. It will probably work
I worked there for about 3-4 years and people would try to make you feel bad or guilty for all kinds of things. Sharing you got laid off was an automatic disqualification from any interview. Lying your way through was the only way. Now I think it could have been systemic or cultural.
My advice to OP, you really dodged a bullet. This isn’t a healthy workplace culture that values you as a human being. Pat yourself on the back and move onwards and upwards.
It's OK, we all guessed it was the US ;)
They should display some more empathy and should read the situation correctly. A significant portion of the recently laid off people are from HR and recruiting.
Wow what a nice place, that's the mindset i want from my future employer. A truly nice place for builders i see... ;)
As a large corporation, do they care about something else other than money?
Instead: "Mr. Cochne, we're sorry that we can't match your salary expectations this time. We do find you a good fit for the company, so please think about us in the future."
There. No hard feelings. No burning bridges. Professional. People come and go.
Run, don't walk away from them...
The sad reality is this industry is full of assholes, I don't even mean they trying to pay as little as possible, that's "business", I mean unprofessional people who play "good cop, bad cop" and all the childish games they learn on TV movies.
Some of them really think they are the "new Steve Jobs", and act like one.
Do you expect your car sales guy to be professional? I’d love for that to be the case, but the reality is usually not so.
I'm sure some people here will say DS and Algorithm questions like that are perfectly reasonable to show off CS skills, but the question was just so far removed from anything a frontend engineer could expect to do that it showed that they just had no respect for the specialty and were hiring for the wrong thing.
"I'm very sorry (not sorry), I've decided to spend more time with my family."
It would be like if someone is selling me their car and I run the car history report and see it was in a minor collision but was repaired. I look over the car and see the repairs were done fine. In fact I bring out a mechanic I trust and they tell me that yes the repairs were completed with high quality and everything is great with the car, am I really justified in calling myself rational if I reject the car anyway because of some metaphysical spookiness I think inhabits cars that were in collisions before?
I was trying to get at where you don't need to trust someone else's judgement of something, you can just ... go look yourself. Or hire your own expert. Because why do those other things if they don't actually change the outcome?
It also doesn't seem like a good idea to avoid hiring laid off people. Hiring is a lemon market regardless of layoffs, and plenty of great people get laid off. It just doesn't make sense to reject a great candidate at the very end of the process because you realize they had been laid off. Either they weren't a great candidate for other reasons, the Blind post is an unreliable report of events, or the hiring committee really is stupid.
"Asking for references after clearing interview was also Dik move tbh" (sic)
Is this a straight troll? Because if it's not, stop and think that through, will you?
I have no idea how many people have listed me as a referee over the years - quite a few (and enough that I know plenty of companies don't check references) - but if every referee is asked to provide a reference for everyone who has listed them for every job for which they pass CV/resume sift (or even some stage part was through the selection process), well, that's a lot of references.
Now, of course, you could write one reference for each individual and send that out to everyone who asks, but lots of companies have forms you have to fill out and they're not all the same. And you'd be doing this for a lot of jobs your applicant either wouldn't get or wouldn't take because they have competing offers on the table or are going through a process with multiple organisations.
So you know what the result would be? Referees won't give references.
This isn't a "dick move" (ah, sorry, I mean a "Dik move") by the hiring company but a sensible strategy to avoid wasting referees' time.
> denied by multiple Databricks employees in the [Blind] thread, who clearly said...
That proves nothing. HR departments shill on Blind.
How exactly, again, did you verify their identity as a hiring manager?
He took a few months off to recover and is now back in the game at a small consultancy with some incredible peers. Half the pay but absolutely worth it.
[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/pre-employment-inquiries-and-unemployed...
More specifically, you compete with developers at your level of exp.
More specifically, you compete with developers at your level of exp and field of expertise.
Those layoff are meaningless.
You can see that from Google there are 300 entry level SWEs, 500 mid level, and 200 senior level. The whole industry had 12,000 Google employees, but you’re only competing with a few hundred SWEs of your experience level (using payroll level as a proxy for experience).
You can imagine this is repeated for various companies, and could still be thousands of new job seekers, but it does limit the perception of a “flood” of engineers.
I don't know if it's true, but it definitely sounds like something that could easily have happened.
Maybe the candidate is missing some information (references didn't go well for example). Why would a company spend all the time to interview someone they weren't going to hire? Even if Databricks found out later after the interview loop, they gain nothing by telling the candidate that specific reason for the rejection.
But there's so much variance within those groups! The very _worst_ way of using that information that is:
- Interview everyone; run them through the full assessment process
- Once you have a successful group through the process, nix anyone with this trait
It is totally reasonable for counting being laid off as a red flag, it puts a ceiling on your performance - if you were really that productive, they would have kept you.
But there are also many other reasons why otherwise productive team members will be made redundant. E.g. sales are flagging and the company needs to cut cost, and are cutting whole teams because they've already cut the low performers.
It is worth probing a bit of someone has been laid off, but I've personally had to make people redundant who I'd have rehired again in a second while keeping lower performers because they were essential in some way or other, and we couldn't justify making them redundant only to move someone else into their position (even with the ridiculously weak employee protections in the UK that'd suggest it wasn't actually a genuine redundancy; but even places where it's legal, it doesn't mean everyone will do it).
Your suggestion about a project to fill the gap might be worthwhile if the gap is long enough. Otherwise it'll just add new questions about why you're giving up so soon.
Now, those companies need data infrastructure. Azure ML studio is horrible. Azure data factory is somewhat okay'ish, but far from ideal. Azure Synapse is a steaming pile of junk that doesn't seem to improve. Azure data lake is kinda functional as a data lake, but lacks any decent ways to analyze that data.
Spinning up jupyter notebooks is not something most IT teams understand, they want a managed service.
As far as I know, Databricks is then the only solution offered by Microsoft. That's why they get such a high adoption rate. Not because of merit, but because they are the only somewhat acceptable solution on Azure. Good enough to just work. Not good enough to gain a competitive data advantage.
I hate what the world has come to, but sadly IT procurement has too much influence and CTO's dont understand the modern world enough. They just care about the big Microsoft contract, because it makes them look good (look at all these savings!)
If Microsoft would showcase Teradata or Dataiku or a bit of Snowflake, all of those run through the azure marketplace anyway,... we would be better off. But consultants and premium partners naturally only care about Databricks
This is the author's perspective and it's not necessary true. There's a tricky part in hiring process on the employer side, and it is enormously high cost of false positive. If I hire a wrong person, company should spend a tremendous trove of resources before the mistake could be corrected. Thus it is intuitive to just put a "no hire" resolution in case of any doubt.
Seems like a poor heuristic that results in them losing out on talent
So it makes sense to not want someone who is the worst in a company.
May as well be shutdown of a department or project, where everyone gets off-boarded. Believe a lot of the recent GOOG reductions included very senior people who just happened to be on low-priority projects.
You are on low-priority projects because you aren't trusted on high-priority projects or have been out-maneuvered for them by other senior team members, or don't have enough political capital to convince others of the importance of your project to make it high-priority.
Both involved in activities that generated Google a boatload of community goodwill but likely not a lot of direct revenue.