Comment by 0xCAP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xCAP | Hacker News Reader

Premise: not referring directly to Hashicorp employees, as I'm sure they're leagues above my average colleagues.

As a SWE who's been in a couple of companies of small-to-medium size, and now in a relatively successful fintech scale-up that's running a (very long) hiring freeze, I can say that I've seen this layoffs season coming from a thousand kilometers.

Now matter how successful your company is, you can't start hiring bonobos with no clue about how a computer works just because your investors asked for an X% increase in head count and then be like "sorry, we didn't plan to fire you as soon as things got serious" with clueless employees. And people have been gifted tech jobs for years now. It's not people's fault if they're not good at their job yet they get hired for senior positions, just to realize something's not working as soon as the job market needs qualified professionals in tough times. Now we're all in a bad predicament: we have to waste countless hours interviewing "senior" engs with basically no skills to speak of, and they are getting depressed because nobody's gifting titles anymore, but have no clue on how the whole process actually works.

Now somebody has to tell Jessica that posting screenshots of code on Twitter is not devrel, and Guillermo that not knowing React 18 is not totally ok for a tech lead of a React shop. And I totally don't want to be that guy.

I ran into the opposite situation. The people they hired were pretty good, but like you said the VCs gave the CEO a headcount target to hit in engineering and he did it because I guess the VCs are the ones calling the shots.

Instead of just being honest and saying "oops, we need to cut spending, they created bullshit KPIs and useless metrics to start marking people as underperformers"

So I suspect a lot of the VC funded companies have had 10%+ stealth layoffs.

> I guess the VCs are the ones calling the shots.

"He who pays the piper calls the tune" is a saying that's over 400 years old. If your company is depending on VC funding for ongoing survival, the VCs are calling the shots. If your company is generating its own sustainable cashflow, the CEO is in a much stronger position to call the shots.

KPIs are also killers of quality. I just planned a tech migration that the whole tech team agreed on, and that would bring countless advantages to the company, that got ultimately rejected by higher-ups just because "it doesn't fit into your (mine) semestral KPIs".

KPIs are a good way to make sure nobody overperforms or shows signs of cross-functionality. The moment KPIs take over a company, people get turned into bots.

Yep. These are basically the people that never bring any value during incident response or when any crunching time needs to be put in. The problem with title inflation is that on a surface level they’re indistinguishable from actual professionals, so there’s no way to skip the interviewing part.

I understand the frustrating experience you have had but I tend to consider the underlying problem to be leadership recruiting/hiring in the situation you described. Like it's not your fault your leaders are unwilling to correct their hiring mistake and needs wait for a company wide layoff as an excuse to put their foot down. That is just terrible leadership all the way down.

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