Layoffs Don't Work
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Failing companies go through layoffs. Companies like Sun Microsystems, Kodak, Sears, Circuit City, Kmart all went through lots of layoffs. But everyone knows that's not what killed them.
Another addition I'd like to add here is more often then not wrong people get booted while the "dead weight" tends to stick around and becomes even deader due to a motivation fall from the layoff. So maybe it doesn't kill, but for sure exacerbates an already bad situation.
Love how your typo turned into a beautiful metaphor for infrastructure being cut.
Save the trams!
It always strikes me as weird when a product fails and the decision is to eliminate everyone from the product manager down... and then make no other changes. Then they bring in completely new people for whatever the new product line is. Sometimes, sure, an individual or group might cause a product to fail that should otherwise succeed. But it's weird to default to the production team. Is it a design problem? A maintenance problem? A product price problem? A sales and marketing problem? A management problem?
Like, the Pontiac Aztek did not do badly because one welder from Mexico screwed it up. It failed because it was ugly. It was ugly because the styling didn't survive the requirements to use the same parts as the Buick Rendezvous and the same basic platform as the Pontiac Montana. The process of making that vehicle fit into GM at that time killed the product. Today the Chevrolet Equinox, a direct descendent, is one of the best selling vehicles on the road at a time when there's a lot more competition.
Good people like to stick together. Get rid of a couple and the rest will start to leave.
Layoffs will lead to people leaving, regardless of how surgical or random they are.
How many times have we seen a company fire whoever they consider "dead weight" but keep the universally hated guy because he's a 10x rockstar whatever?
(And I'm not sure why I'm downvoted for this. Nothing about that should be controversial?)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474893 (2017) (133 points | 130 comments)
Working to not be laid off usually means just keeping your head down and going with the flow.
Today the question is why companies making good profits are making layoffs. And looking at the damage they cause is relevant in trying to predict company performance
They at least secured management a final big bonus for dealing with that, so management and shareholders cash in a bit on the way down.
But i get it, it's like junk food for execs, easy to do, crisp in the action (even if not in the effects). But consumed carelessly its bad for company health
I think that is one inference too far? Layoffs may have saved some of those companies from bankruptcy. The Bain study is looking at share price performance and offers no data that would resolve that question.
Sometimes you can do things more incrementally but other times it makes sense to basically close up shop and maybe shop your brand and some assets while keeping the biz afloat at some level with a lot of people still collecting a paycheck.
And then there are non tech industries that just go through cycles, like oil.
The quoted text is a good example of this. If a company is struggling strategically or economically, and doesn't do a layoff, it's just going to struggle more, and fail more quickly. Companies that aren't laying people off are likely not even considering layoffs, because their businesses are actually doing well.
So, it's pretty obvious to me that companies in that cohort would see the biggest stock price appreciation, because layoffs are an indicator of poor future performance.
If you can lay off people without cratering the company, it means you hired too many people in the first place.
Of course: that's why they are on chemotherapy!
There are a few basic accounting principles employees need to understand. It all revolves around Assets = Liabilities + Owner’s Equity. If you think otherwise, take a "Cost Accounting" course. This is a pure numbers game. Everyone wants to wrap a psycho analysis into something that has ZERO relevancy.
If a company is bleeding revenue, it cannot sustain the overhead of employees. They have to go. Cutting hours does nothing for those on a salary, and those that are hourly, benefit costs are far more expensive than their wage. If a company has stagnant growth, that means leadership has made bad decisions, and things have to change.
Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement. There is not a "Employee's Feelings" column on the ledger. Everyone can be replaced. No one is special, unless you're a majority shareholder.
In tech the employees also tend to be shareholders which I think is healthier.
The general public are all stakeholders that are affected by the actions of the corporations they allow to exist. They ought to have a say. In practice, we as a people have pretty much given up that say, and the world as it exists today is the result: Corporations running amok doing whatever they want, answering only to shareholders.
Working on things owned by others is the basic idea of employment - and is a relationship that has existed forever.
And the framers might have a say, it depends on the company.
The owner has a bunch of space and equipment they can grant power over, but that's only half a company. They don't naturally start with power over the employees.
It’s not an analogy. It’s another example of ownership in another context.
Employee’s authority over something owned by another party is delegated by that party and varies according to the trust from that management.
Employees do not own goods or services they have produced and sold. And do not continue to have authority or rights to them.
> They don't naturally start with power over the employees.
Indeed. What they have power over is what their employees do while the employee chooses to rent their time to them.
The details of this are defined in the employment contract. Which tends not to include voting rights in regards to the owner’s property.
If you seek voting rights, you should negotiate that as part of your employment - or don’t agree to it. Many white collar employees receive this in the form of stock.
Right, and it shows that ownership isn't the one factor that matters.
> Employee’s authority over something owned by another party is delegated by that party and varies according to the trust from that management. Employees do not own goods or services they have produced and sold. And do not continue to have authority or rights to them.
It's not like delegation is optional.
But more importantly, the suggestion had nothing to do with ownership. The suggestion was voting power.
I am glad you seem to have stepped back from the "someone else built" language you originally used.
> The details of this are defined in the employment contract. Which tends not to include voting rights in regards to the owner’s property.
And sometimes it's good to negotiate parts of employment contracts as a whole society, by putting it into law. It's not "entitlement" in any derogatory sense. It's a very mild limit on which things can be negotiated.
And some of those people you're laying off did revenue generating activities, so, as above, yes, it may be necessary to reduce costs, but it has to be done carefully.
Most of the time, company valuations are completely divorced from valuations. And much of what public companies do these days is try to game their stock price.
Government employment is 95% the time completely divorced from reality.
That being said, private companies employee a lot of people and this is very relevant.
This is a pretty big claim to make without any evidence to support it.
The government, whether it be state, local, county federal etc. does in have a different pace and certainly like with any big organizations can have issues such as waste, but to say it’s completely divorced from reality, especially in context of somehow private (as in not government or NGO) companies don’t also act completely divorced from reality is a really big claim
VC funded startups are a VERY small percentage of jobs compared to ALL private company employees. But, sure, there is much shenanigans there.
Public companies can play tons of games as well - but the vast majority of people employed at public companies are at relatively efficient and profitable companies.
Government services are under no obligation to be efficient.
Often people vote for them to be LESS efficient, hoping that they'll get similar benefits from their private employers.
Though, hope is a bad strategy, and it rarely works for non-government employees.
But there's enough state employees that you don't have to win over that many private employees to win votes for things that make the services less efficient (like ever juicier retirement benefits).
Half of this statement is true. A private company definitely can’t run at a loss forever. Although in the era of ZIRP a few definitely made a solid go of it.
However nothing requires an any company, and especially a private one, to be efficient. If an otherwise profitable and privately-held company wants to swell its middle management ranks or spend lots of cash employing the owners’ dubiously capable relatives, there’s nothing to stop it.
Incidentally that’s mostly true of public companies with diverse shareholders, too.
The idea that private enterprise is always efficient is a myth, as is evident to anyone who’s worked for a large enough corporation, or even a small one where management weirdly shields some obviously incompetent people for internal political reasons.
The only correcting factor is that companies can fail, and smaller competitors can sometimes find ways to undercut large, inefficient firms. But often the small company gets acquired or out-marketed. So there’s nothing inevitable about any of this.
They sure need to make money or they’ll go out of business, but efficient is not required. I think nearly anyone who reads HN regularly could tell you multiple stories through their own careers about waste in the private sector, bizarre politically motivated decisions etc. and that’s just this community as a sample size. I’m certain this holds if you cast a wide net
The fact is most businesses are not the paragons of efficiency that is being postulated.
It seems you've never worked at a private company and just believe the invisible hand fairy tale?
Not what happened with some of the recent layoffs. Some big tech companies generate huge revenues, laid off 5-10% of people (sometimes with false pretext of performance), and do keep hiring at the same time or soon after. This happens not to reduce cost but to stress out remaining employees.
Or to cull the low performers.
I personally am less stressed when the competition I outperform gets fired.
The low performers are usually managed out anyway. The last lay off phase was quite arbitrary.
Also note that high performers often do get promoted, and may become low performers at the next level.
That may be your experience, and kudos to companies that do this, but particularly in tech I've seen that not be the norm. Egregiously low performers are managed out, but performers who are basically just "low mediocre" can hang on for a long, long time in my experience, and tech companies often use layoffs as an opportunity to get rid of them. To be clear, not everyone who is let go in a layoff is a low performer (a lot of time it's just the luck of whatever business unit you're working in), but companies certainly take advantage of layoffs to get rid of low performers without needing reams and reams of documentation.
If there's an interview for a position and the candidate is 30 minutes late or no shows, maybe there is a legitimate excuse and it's a rare event, but the system is that both parties give up on that relationship to damage candidates that do that constantly.
Just look for another job and in the long run you'll be successful. Variance is part of life.
Too many times, I’ve seen layoffs followed by acquisitions of 10x the cost reduction from the layoffs — often even in the same quarter. And when parent company has a track record of driving acquisitions into the ground from mismanagement, where is the profit?
Sure they do. Just in the sense that employees feelings need to be controlled and made to fear any collective action or sense of agency.
1. Big tech companies doing layoffs are not hurting on revenue, so your basic assumption is wrong. 2. "Cutting hours" needs to be steelmaned if you're not going to anything but a charlatan. That means you have to interpret it as taking a paycut, as in a salary cut. This has actually been done before in worker-focused companies to survive covid, and in one instance I'm aware of the company gave workers back pay after surviving covid.
You also ignore all the intangibles that are no easy to measure, because of course the business acumen of "make number go up this quarter" is too short sighted to care about institutional knowledge or long term strategy.
There is a bigger picture.
Developed economies across the globe are experiencing stagnant growth, and the trickle down economics they have engaged in has failed to fix that.
Knowing this, the wealthiest, through their proxies in corporate leadership and government, are cutting back their biggest cost - employees - to maximize their near term returns, which will then be put into relatively fixed-supply assets, rather than risking capital on new ventures, and the employees that traditionally requires.
Corporations are betting that "growth" going forward is going to come from AI-enabled efficiency and productivity gains, not more employees making more product or innovating on product/service development and delivery. While it's too early to say whether they are right, many signs point in that direction.
No, they don't. During the dotcom bubble my company gave us 2 choices, layoffs or 20% pay cut. We took the latter. Everyone stayed and we had our pay back to previous levels in a couple years and the company remained profitable.
You can, in fact, treat people as people and still run a company.
> Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement.
This is only true of companies of a certain (large) size, when all semblance of employees being people have been abstracted away. In companies of more reasonable sizes you must take employee moral into account or you will lose critical employees which could kill the company.
What's infuriating is a business culture that includes layoffs for outrageously profitable companies. I work at Google, which made 100 billion dollars in profit last year. More than $500,000 in profit per employee. Google is still conducting layoffs.
Layoffs are used as a tool of capital against labor. Amongst other things, it generates unemployment and people who are willing to accept lower pay due to the precarity of their situation (everybody needs to pay rent and eat), pushing down pay for the entire industry.
The more nuanced point is to note that simply reducing the world to accounting equations omits all of the human detail. Morale is a meaningful thing, or if you prefer, knowledge, expertise, Metis; these are damaged in layoffs, especially repeated rounds. And furthermore, the recent tech layoffs were not generally about fixing unsustainable businesses, they were about juicing profit margins for already profitable ones.
On the other hand, of course the OP title is wrong and layoffs can work. There are many examples even within tech where cutting deep is the only way of surviving.
Complex systems are complex.
Also many of these layoffs are NOT coming when companies are "bleeding revenue". E.g. Meta and Twitter enacted massive layoffs after posting their most profitable quarters yet
I see this in the public sector where you often find people who have been working at the same dept for a decade or more. These people feel very safe and know they don't really need to try that hard. They also know nothing about how things function elsewhere so they'll put up with using spreadsheets and fax machines because that's just how they've always done things.
It seems rather obvious to me that a good economy is one where employers feel some nervousness about losing good employees, so offer pay rises and perks; And where employees feel some nervousness about layoffs so work hard and try to be as productive as they reasonably can be.
If a company is not cutting a few percentage of their least productive workers each year they're probably doing something wrong imo. I think it's far to argue big tech companies built up a lot of these under productive workers over the years.
do you (or anyone else) have a good course to recommend?
The research is probably misleading. The damage was done to companies when the over-hired people who couldn't add enough value to justify keeping them employed. The layoffs are just when the damage is recognised.
It is like borrowing a huge amount of money, using 90% of it it to buy prawns and leaving them out to rot for a few days. The damage is now done, the borrowed money is lost. It won't be recognised for a while though. There is even enough left over to pay an interest payment or two to string everything along. But the damage is done.
A lot of people treat economics as though damage didn't happen unless someone acknowledges it. That isn't how it works. Not acknowledging that something is value-destructive just means more value is destroyed by the time people are forced by market forces to confront the truth.
> I've seen enough 10x engineers get laid off...
2) That is sensible for the company. They have no idea how to use a 10x engineer, as can be detected by the fact that they're having layoffs. They don't know how to create value in the market and they're being forced into a position where they have to squeeze what they can out of what assets they have.
It isn't economically rational for them to employ 10x engineers in that sort of environment. The global and local optimum is to let those engineers go so they can do something valuable somewhere and keep some more 1x style engineers on the cheap.
If a company is having layoffs, that is the invisible hand of the market writing on the wall "THIS MANAGEMENT TEAM DOESN"T KNOW HOW TO MAKE MONEY AT THE MOMENT, STOP GIVING THEM IMPORTANT RESOURCES". That includes 10x engineers.
I know it's ridiculous to expect them to blame themselves but the fact that we just accept this lack of accountability from executives/management in the corporate world is insane to me.
Okay, now explain why every company is encountering these issues where they're frequently laying off people and are unable to create value. The frequency of layoffs is diametrically opposed to your thesis because otherwise companies would behave in a way to reduce layoffs. Such as hiring fewer employees and encouraging longer term retention.
> If a company is having layoffs, that is the invisible hand of the market writing on the wall "THIS MANAGEMENT TEAM DOESN"T KNOW HOW TO MAKE MONEY AT THE MOMENT, STOP GIVING THEM IMPORTANT RESOURCES". That includes 10x engineers.
This is basically the Just World fallacy but applied to the free market. If something occurs then it's justified as a perfectly rational action of the invisible free hand of the market. In reality layoffs are rarely conducted by the people most equipped to do them, but via a mandate from heaven that you must cut your team for the sake of Number even if you're one of the most efficient teams in the company.
Creating value is hard.
Edit: Please reply with concrete evidence of widespread accountability of executives
> THIS MANAGEMENT TEAM DOESN"T KNOW HOW TO MAKE MONEY AT THE MOMENT
from
> THIS WHOLE INDUSTRY IS FAKE
or, worse,
> YOUR SOCIETY HAS REACHED THE INFLECTION POINT OF A YEARS-, DECADES-, OR PERHAPS CENTURIES-LONG PONZI SCHEME. SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH
But the ones being discussed in the article are the consistent ones. The ones you do while you’re ahead to make your balance sheet look better. Those come with a temporary balance sheet boost and all of the negative effects of any layoffs.
That has to be matched with a strategy of intentional overhiring though, and the damage is being done there. That is the insight that should be drawn from the research - intentionally doing something silly (in this case, overhiring) is a classic form of waste and economically destructive. Layoff or no layoff, the problem is the management team has set up a situation where they believe a big chunk of their workforce is unproductive.
This does raising the question of why boards and shareholders tolerate these clowns. To me the obvious answer being that the major central banks have a history of printing money and handing it out to asset owners, so hiring competent managers for said assets is a lot of trouble for limited gains - even weak managers are enough to drink from the money hose. But who knows, maybe the analysts think that a small amount of sillyness averts a greater problem.
No, doesn't have to. Looking at the article, sometimes they had hired the right number of people, but (new?) management decided to let people go because that looked better short term (saved money, higher profits), but was bad long term.
This feels like a "no true scotsman" argument. The headline of the article is literally "Why layoffs don’t work", not "why consistent layoffs don't work". The only mention of "consistent" layoffs were when referencing Jack Welch's management style, but that was more of an attempt to argue that layoffs are bad by citing the worst possible example, than trying to introduce nuance between the types of layoffs. The studies cited also did not distinguish between the type of layoffs.
I believe we took different things from the piece and I imagine you'd disagree with my better headline. I understood the piece to be telling a story starting with Welch and Dunlap of how layoffs as a way to improve numbers actually damage those same numbers in the long term.
I worked at GE when Jack Welch was there. First of all we never had a systematic firing of the bottom 10%. That is a myth. We ranked everyone each year and clearly identified the bottom 10% but they were not always fired. The manager did have to have a development plan for these individuals.
More importantly, GE did have consistent layoffs. I assert this was a good thing. I vividly remember asking an EVP at GE Capital when I first joined GE why we did this. It seemed inhumane. Wasn’t it better to try and fix the so-called ‘C’ players? His response fundamentally changed my view on hiring, leadership, and firing. He told me two things. 1) Hiring people is always a gamble. The best interview/onboarding processes will not produce 100% success. There will people that do not have the skills that are needed. There will also be people for whom GE is simply not a good cultural fit. 2) In good times, when a GE business unit is doing well, they always over hire. People working 50 hours a week want to work 40, process problems that have built up need to be addressed (similar to tech debt), etc. Over time this leads to bloat and inefficiency.
For these reasons, consistent layoffs make sense for the company. They also make sense for the employee. By not waiting for an economic downturn and then making dramatic cuts, the exiting employees would have an easier time finding the next job as odds are the economy would doing well. Particularly in the case where the person was not a good fit for the GE culture, they learned this and could find a better fitting role elsewhere. And GE was great on the resume back in those days (sadly not so today). If we waited for the downturn, then the exiting employees would be looking for a new job in a bad economy with everyone else who had just been laid off. Not a good situation.
Finally, an additional point I learned later by observing when and where we made headcount reductions. GE made many bets on new markets, new products, etc. We had to if we were to grow by 10% each year (GE Capital’s rigorous requirement for business and strategic plans). The successful GE leaders understood is was easier to grow revenue to achieve 10% net income growth than to cut expenses. Unfortunately, not all new business ventures worked out. In those cases, we had to make a decision to shut them down (all new ventures had off-ramps). As a result, some people were repurposed, but others had to be let go. I posit that is consistent with the tech approach of “fail early, fail often.” In industries with significant people required to try a new approach, the consequence of failing will be layoffs.
What percentage of people on PIPs didn't leave the company within a year or two?
I worked at a firm that for 2-3 years straight would report great Q1,Q2,Q3 numbers.. tell employees it's looking like a good year. And then Q4 report a total wipeout loss that negated the quarterly earnings and swung the company to flat or a loss. Whoops, sorry, no raises, cutting bonuses.. and need to do some layoffs.
Behavior like this reminds us that the numbers are not real real in a scientific sense, but only in a relativistic accounting sense.
Also would do incredible things like mandate firm wide sending all consultants home for rest of year in early/mid December to save 3-4% lol. Did this at least twice in 5 years.
One year there was a fairly large failed projects with a dozen senior devs and they had nothing to do but also weren't fired because "we don't have budget for severance". This was in July. Guys started showing up to work in sandals and baseball caps.
This was all at a bank with over 100k employees.
This is what I call the TV effect. People are trained from an early age, by consuming media, to only construct what is "real" by what is announced. And it's not just economics, but all sorts of aspects of life.
That depends upon the employer. Layoffs occur for a plurality of reasons and the persons selected for termination are selected by various different criteria that may include quotas or random selection.
I'm not sure how you got the impression that OP implied it's the worker's fault. If during the 2021-2022 boom, some startup hired a bunch of junior programmers for $200k/yr, I think describing those people as "people who couldn't add enough value to justify keeping them employed" is a fair assessment of the situation. It doesn't imply that it's the junior programmer's fault, any more than it's not my "fault" if I'm asked to play a musical instrument with no prior experience, it sounding terrible, and people asking me to stop.
In cases like that, the layoffs really do seem likely to be damaging to the companies. If circumstances change for a company and they can no longer effectively use all their employees, the most obvious solution is to get rid of employees, but it then makes it far more difficult to recover when positive opportunities present themselves. I think companies trick themselves into believing that since hiring and firing employees is relatively quick, it's a good tool to adapt to changing circumstances in either direction. But that ignores the time it takes for a new employee to become fully productive and the increased difficulty/cost in hiring new employees if your company has a reputation as an unreliable employer. It also ignores the potential boost to productivity that can come from employee loyalty and job satisfaction and security.
Note that here I'm talking about firing good performers because you have "too many" of them. Firing bad performers because the estimated cost of training them is not justified, I can understand.
The only explanation I found satisfying is that investors heuristically care about profit per capita(ppc) as well as total profit, and employees who don't produce _enough_ profit reduce ppc and thus investment to point the opportunity cost of firing them aligns. You'll make investors happy, which will raise valuation, more than what you are losing from the lost profit. But this is not "rational" in a full information economic sense. It's essentially the company virtue signaling that they are capable to fire if they had to, even at the cost of actual dollars.
Under new leadership, we executed 1/3 layoffs framed as a "culture refresh" and to briefly lift the stock. It wasn't about survival, we had plenty of cash, okayish growth and fantastic ARR - more about a new corp-backed CEO adopting a "do-it-like-Elon" approach.
Being mostly Europe-based but US-led, it turned into a massive and costly process (Americans don't exactly dig EU/UK workers rights - Spain was the biggest shock), stalling most productive activity for half a year. Internal trust and brand perception tanked. Since it began with ousting old execs, it quickly devolved into a blunt-force exercise with no internal knowledge, led by scared managers with percentage targets - many good people were cut. Managers hesitated to shield talent, given the "culture reboot" framing. I ended up personally cutting entire offices.
When the CEO's broader strategy failed (for reasons beyond layoffs), high performers started eyeing the exit. Ironically, many first saw the layoffs positively - COVID overhires had left uneven team dynamics, and some dead weight was on high salaries. But when it became clear there was no coherent plan, people began leaving.
That triggered a chain reaction. Senior hiring pipelines dried up (reputation matters, esp. when your top-talent is on the way out and is loud about it), and panic set in. Eventually, it turned into survival mode. The CEO didn't last long after that.
I’m actually curious to hear your take on it - what’s your experience been?
Spain/France were an employer’s nightmare. Anyone without another job lined up secured a "special deal"—workers have massive leverage, they know it, and they’re actively litigious. People on parental leave had close to a year of guaranteed no-shows. The reaction was, of course, "never again" rippling across American corporate circles.
The rest of Europe was okay-ish.
US was predictably the easiest. We were generous with packages, but it's easy to see how the system can be used to screw people over.
Middle East was the roughest. Visas in UAE/Qatar expire instantly, and the local tech market is almost non-existent. We extended until the end of the school year to help with visa concerns, and some people managed to arrange golden visas. But for many, it was a massive shock — losing both jobs and residency overnight.
I see this more any more, to the point of wondering what % of execs and decision makers are actually meaningfully good at the job? When times are good, any exec action will turn out fine. But when times are tough, who is worth their salt?
And if all these decision makers are bad at decision making, what would a better organization look like?
As a new CEO, you have to impress the board and investors without really knowing the company. You probably get two earnings calls - six months at most - to prove yourself. That's nothing, even for a senior dev, let alone an exec. And if you're being brought in, it means the company isn't in great shape - or is at least perceived that way.
You don't have time to really figure out how things work, and even if you did, it's political suicide. The board didn't hire a "looks fine to me" person. They hired a fixer. So, it turns into narrative games and rapid actions with massive tail risks.
I don't think it's a people problem. It's a system problem. Leadership replanting is hard, but it's one of the very few tools in the board's toolbox.
They also didn’t used to be a regular feature of business.
It’s funny how such things become “ordinary” and “obviously good things to do sometimes” that haven’t always been the former, and may not really be the latter either.
Business management is vibes, trend-following, and fear of straying from the pack. And the best of that is vibes! That’s how bad it is.
A lot of what happens in the boardroom or C-suite is "stick with the crowd" — e.g. template-based "tech modernization." (That's often a new CTO's hedge if the real problems are too hard. Just "go Cloud" or "go AI" for five years — four vests, one to jump off.) You broadcast confidence, you own the narrative. Which means never, ever saying "I don't know."
This is especially common in PE "turnarounds" or post-IPOs after founder exits. And it's especially harmful there because current staff is often seen as a liability, not an asset.
I thought a lot about this after the layoffs, and I think it boils down to how "professional C-levels" see execution as a commodity. They tend to overemphasize leadership (sometimes self-serving, but often genuine) and resource availability. The focus is on "what?" and "how to pay for it?" — with "how?" left to be figured out on the go.
I don't think that's completely wrong. Sometimes execution is a commodity. But not when you're short on time and planning for a rapid sprint.
This all sounds like a hand wavy hypothetical.
The top people have the best opportunities elsewhere, so they leave first.
Even if they don't quit outright, they are likely to quiet quit, because why put in the effort when it is rewarded with disloyalty?
Some percentage of top performers report to deadbeat managers, so in an environment doing mandatory layoffs, they'll know that it doesn't matter how much they knock it out of the park, their manager will screw them. So of course they'll leave.
I read posts here all the time about how hard it is to hire. How do top performers distinguish themselves as they go out for new jobs? When did this become easy?
During an interview process, and by using your network. Top performers aren't usually slinging applications through LinkedIn in my limited experience
> When did this become easy? It isn't, they're referred to as top performers for a reason. It's easier for folks who excel in their fields, and that holds true across domains.
In most cases, someone you worked with before who liked working with you suggests to their employer or someone in their professional network they hire you. Could be an old classmate, coworker, open source collaborator, even someone you know through a hobby.
Though I've never personally been laid off, it's a black mark on the company that I think you can never recover from. It means I will never trust anything said at a quarterly all-hands. The projections they give us employees are spun to be more positive than they really are.
During COVID, my company told us that we were going to be able to save money by breaking the lease on our office building and stop paying for amenities like the snacks in the break room and catered lunches (since nobody could use them anyways). This, they said, should save us enough money that we don't need to lay anyone off!
10% of the company was laid off a week later. The next day, I would later discover, the company applied for a PPP loan: they had laid people off pre-emptively so that they wouldn't be penalized for it next year when they sought to have their PPP loan forgiven.
It illustrated to me that you can't trust leadership, ever. Once a company initiates a layoff, it's a permanent black mark on that company
It gutted moral, basically.
But lying off isn’t firing someone for performance - it’s admitting “we don’t have enough money to pay you”
And that’s something that should be scary to everybody in the company.
When your shitty coworker gets fired, you shrug and say, yeah, saw that coming. When your shitty coworkers get laid off, you look around nervously and think phew, l lucked out.
Sometimes layoffs are unfair, and sometimes the wrong people are let go. But often it's entirely necessary and the right people are let go.
[1] - Which makes the whole gruelling, multi-month hiring process positively ridiculous. It would be much better for this industry if companies hire fast and fire fast, instead of delusions that they're finding the magical employee base that will be with them forever.
Also, Google's median tenure of <1 year was due to hiring, not employees leaving. In other words, that number included people who hadn't left yet. I think if you look at people leaving Google, average is about 3 years.
Google would have to be growing at >300% per year for this math to make sense.
But even if it's 3 years ({X} doubt), that's still cartoonishly low for a hiring process that drags on for months and months.
>I think if you look at companies like Citadel, which routinely fire the bottom 10% as part of the job description
Almost all tech companies target firing/pushing out a considerable percentage of employees per year. It actually is incredibly common, even if it usually doesn't make the news. They used to do it overtly via stack ranking, but now they just do it more quietly. Microsoft punted 2000 "low performers" in the first two months. Brutal firings with zero severance, immediate cancellation of health coverage, etc.
> Almost all tech companies target firing/pushing out a considerable percentage of employees per year.
Not firing, but managing out. It's very different culturally.
The guy I replied to did say median tenure (where I was talking about mean or average tenure), so relative to a median tenure sure, doubling the staff would do that.
But you said average, in which case no that isn't true. Google is a 26 year old company. If you randomly distributed tenures across a hypothetical employee base (1-26 years), it would take something like 1200% growth to get the average tenure under 2 years. And of course Google's actual employee count growth rate over the past decade and a half is more in the range of 12%, so a couple of factors off for that.
Even when people say the average tenure is 3 -- doubtful -- that still requires an insane level of turnover for a company growing so slowly, relatively, and being so old.
https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/why-googles-high-turnover-rat...
This isn't some Google specific thing. The cargo cult "look at our super exhaustive, endlessly demanding hiring process" is a farce everywhere. It's actually a bit paradoxical because it actually selects for employees who don't want to actually stay with you, they just want to be able to say they were willing to endure your gauntlet.
I’ve worked in places where people stuck around for years because they believed in the company and technology and wanted to successfully ship a product. In fact, I still view repeated 18-month stints as a bit of a red flag.
It’s a big industry. There’s a difference between a norm and something that a sizable subset of people do.
Within six months, about a quarter of our employees, mainly top performers who could easily find other jobs, left voluntarily.
The whole thing self-destructed within another year, and the product we worked on was abandoned.
> We got acquired
Can I just ask about the reason for this? Was it owners wanting off the ride?
Buyers bought it because they had a very specific problem that the product was designed to solve, and thought that it would be a competitive advantage to deny the solution to their competition. On paper, it was a good decision.
That sounds grotesque. Who would choose to work at a company with that sort of bullshit dangling over your head?
Every layoff I have ever survived the staff inevitably ends up talking about how so and so manager and his favorite buddies are still out golfing every friday. Why the f are they still here etc.
This resentment builds and builds.
Why do tech workers get so wrapped around the axle of layoffs when most people are in a chronic state of tech job hopping? I know multiple people who have worked their entire career thus far without ever staying at a place for more than 3 or 4 years. Some no more than two. Tech job culture is practically a mono culture with "hop jobs" being a hallmark.
From an employers perspective it's not laying off a bunch of family members (Southwest has an average tenure of 11.5 years), it's laying off a bunch of people who were gonna dip in 6 months to a year anyway.
I know this is controversial take, but recognize that the tech industry is an outlier industry, with outlier amounts of money and outlier amounts of volatility.
Some people work hard and take pride in their work. And on top of their gaming down our wages with h1b workers and low benefit contracting they have the gall to assert we're low performers when what they want is a $20 million bonus for their execs.
But yeah, I see your point.
I have way too many “lifer” friends in big tech who are deadly scared of layoffs and job hopping. They are also the ones who rarely got promoted and havent had a significant pay bump pretty much ever.
On another hand, half my team at a big tech company got laid off back at the start of 2023. 4 months later, I caught up with them over drinks, and the results were rather interesting. They all got around 4-6mo worth of severance pay, spent 2-3 months just skiing/traveling/hiking/vacationing, then 1 month or so interviewing, and then starting their new jobs shortly after. All seemed rather happy, both with their new positions/pay (which had a significant paybump) and, essentially, paid vacation break they took right before.
It seems like the heavity majority of those stressed about layoffs in big tech are lifers and those who are chronically averse to and dread the interview process.
Anecdotally, the LC bar for many firms has risen to the point that passing requires at least one through of the question before. If you Time bound your practice per question to 20 minutes, this means that you can solve most LC problems at least once in around 8 weeks of 40 hour weeks. Or 6 weeks at 60 hours.
Not a pleasant way to spend two months - but not impractical. I'm unclear what employers are deriving from this exercise at this point.
It filters out the complete frauds.
Yes, there are people who know all the right things to say in a job interview, but cannot code at all. If you hire one of them, it takes a bit to find out they cannot code, and a bit longer to fire them, so you're out $$$$ paying their salaries for nothing.
For example, a recruiter I know will ask a tech candidate "what is 20% of 20,000?" A significant percentage cannot answer the question. Some even cry. It's shocking.
A friend of mine was looking at getting a FAANG job. He was worried about the leetcode tests. I suggested he spend a month going through the leetcode books studying them - that the return on his time investment doing that will be one of the best ROIs he's ever done. He did, and got the job. (Although the LC was just a first gate one had to go through to get to the real job interview.)
Personally, I have no idea how I'd do on an LC test without prep. But I don't have a problem with studying it to get a top job.
I generally do not use clever algorithms in my code. I just use straightforward ones. Rarely, I might need a better one and go looking for it (like a better hash algorithm). I rarely use a data structure more complicated than an array, list, binary tree, hash, or single inheritance.
What I have, though, is decades of experience with what works and what doesn't work. (My favorite whipping boy is macros. Macros look like they are great productivity boosters. It takes about 10 years to realize that macros are a never-ending source of confusion, they just confuse and obfuscate every code base that uses them. I could go on about this! ...)
I have become pretty good at writing modules that minimize dependencies, and pretty good at the user interface design of a language.
But still, if the job wanted a leetcode test, I'd take it, no problem. I'd study up first, though.
If a young tech bro was interviewing me, I'd suggest he show me his best code, and I'd do a review of it :-) The point of that would not be to humilate him, but to demonstrate the value I can bring to improving code quality.
If I was being interviewed for a job writing a faster divide routine (the ones I wrote were shift-subtract, slower but bulletproof), a better random number generator, a cryptographically secure hash function, a tighter compression algorithm, a faster sort, I'm not the right guy for that.
We all have our blind spots. I do, too.
Beyond the obvious lesson about experience and sunk costs it was also a great lesson about how much time you assume you have for maintenance: when he’d first written that code as a grad student he’d been obsessed with performance since that was a bottleneck for getting his papers out but as his career progressed he spent time on other things, and since it wasn’t broken he hadn’t really revisited it because he “knew” where it was slow. Over time the computer costs eventually outweighed that original savings.
I have interviewed many people employed in tech as programmers for their entire career and they can't code. I don't meen leetcode, I mean they get confused trying to write brute force substring search. The nested for loop seems to be too complex for them to keep in their head all at once.
I have had numerous people cry. Again this was a screen, not leetcode. I'm asking them to check if text has mismatched parens, or find a substring. Things you do for homework in your 2nd programming class freshman year. Things every competent programmer can do while chitchatting about the job.
I would estimate that more than 10% of screens are like this, again these are employed people in the industry for years, sometimes tens of years.
Edit: I understand that people can get flustered, I understand that some people have trouble under pressure or while being observed. That's why I pointed out multiple times that the problems I gave are extremely, EXTREMELY easy. I'm basically asking them to write down their name and they sit and look at the pen like they've never seen one before. If you can't write a 5 line function to find whether a substring occurs in a larger string when given 45 minutes, your choice of programming language, and as many attempts as you need to debug and try again you simply will not be able to do any useful work as a programmer. If you don't know that to match parens you need to use a stack (or at least that it's one way to do it) you either have a very poor memory or no training in computer science at all - either of which is frankly disqualifying. Anyone borderline competent would invent a stack when presented with this problem if they hadn't already been told this fact a dozen times during their education or even light reading about algorithms.
I feel like a good middle is to allow Google for documentation searches, not solution searches. Without searching (or IDE with radix completion), I'd probably fail the test for not knowing the syntax off the top of my head.
I never mesmerized strstr(). But using it frequently makes it stick in my mind.
The latter has more in common with an open mic night, the prospect of which the vast majority of people are terrified and would break down if they attempted it.
I recommend that when there's an opportunity to get up in front of a mike, take it, and get comfortable with it. It's a skill that will serve you well.
Might as well put a suitcase with $200k and a copper clock ticking away on the table next to them.
Surprisingly, I have an 80% fail rate on the first question usually, which is just “find the second largest number in an array of numbers” for a 5 YOE role.
I think HN is just overwhelmed with people who somehow got hired into technical jobs but can't do them. Anyone who thinks that 'finding second largest number in an array' or 'finding if a string is a substring of another string' are hard, or that the pressures of an interview are a valid excuse for being unable to do it are simply not intelligent enough to be successful in this field and they are casting about for some excuse to protect their ego. These are problems that a bright 12 year old with no programming experience could do for fun, and these folks are purporting to be educated, experienced, professional programmers.
As much as people like to say 'muh anxiety', I've yet to meet someone who can't do very basic coding in an interview but also they are capable of basic coding in any other context. I would suggest that this sort of person is so rare that you will probably never meet one over the course of a normal career.
I guess they could just by lying "to protect their ego" but in that case why post their comment at all?
It really is the case that some people sometimes completely go to pieces when stressed, and mocking them by saying "muh anxiety" doesn't stop that being true.
To some degree the interview is not about getting the question right but also how you respond to questions about your answers. I would rather have someone who started with a totally incorrect answer and then reason back and forth with them til they got on the right path, than someone who came up with the right answer and then clammed up and refused to explain how they got there. (I once had a candidate tell me, verbatim, "I don't think analyzing performance of an algorithm is part of an engineer's job.")
I would prefer if there were a more humane, less stressful, and scalable way to do an interview. The problem is that as a profession we lack the continued examination/licensing of other fields like engineering or medicine, so we don't have a good barometer of skills otherwise. And I often have to sift through massive numbers of people clearly overshooting their shot to get a good position.
Yes maybe someone can't come up with this in an interview. My point is 99.99% of the time when someone fails this they are lying about their work history or they are so stupid they can't hope to do the job. 00.01% of the time they could do this easily and the stars aligned to give them a rare bad day. The best way to deal with that is to just assume everyone who fails this can't do the work, and the 00.01% person just interviews somewhere else and doesn't have another bad day. I don't even know what the alternative to that is, just hire everyone who claims to be qualified and hope for the best? Give everyone who demonstrates very very strong incompetence signals 2 or 3 more tries?
def matched(str):
count = 0
for c in str:
if c == "(":
count += 1
elif c == ")":
count -= 1
if count < 0:
return False
return count == 0In an era where linters and autocomplete and IDEs have existed for decades it’s silly to fail an interview based on tiny error checks.
I think this is good evidence that, in fact, it's not vanishingly unlikely that someone genuinely competent flubs what should be an embarrassingly straightforward coding task in an interview.
That doesn't, unfortunately, mean I have a good suggestion for a better way of telling who is and who isn't capable of writing code. Maybe this is the best we can do. If it really is just a matter of "sometimes, at random, people have bad days"[1] then provided it's fairly rare this issue doesn't matter too much. I'm more worried about the possibility that it's more "a smallish fraction of otherwise-good people often have this sort of bad day", because then that smallish fraction of people may be getting completely overlooked, which is bad for them because it may take them ages to get a job and bad for employers because it effectively reduces the pool of good people to hire.
[1] In this particular case, the "bad day" seems to have included an obnoxious interviewer, which it's reasonable to hope wouldn't be repeated at another company's interview.
But, again, pointing out a problem unfortunately doesn't guarantee having a good answer. But, equally, not having a good answer doesn't mean the problem isn't real. It would be very nice to believe that all the people failing interviews because they fail to solve an easy coding problem are undeserving incompetents who should be bombing out of the interviews, but it looks to me like that ain't so.
Lets say we interview 100 (N) people for a role. (100 is a lot but pick a number yourself and follow along)
The probability that a random interviewee is a top programmer is lets say 1/50 (T). So in our pool of 100 we have on average 2. Give everyone this problem, and if they get it right they move to round 2 which is 4 more interviews. Lets say 20 (P) people pass to round #2.
We are paying for a total of 100 + 80 = 180 interviews (N + 4P). To give everyone who failed the first round another try would require another 80 (N - P) interviews. So for almost 50% more cost (N-P)/(N + 4P) we gain (T * N * 5%) = 0.1 additional top programmer making it to round 2 on average. Just interviewing another 80 people (same cost) would get us (T * 80 * 95%) == 1.52 additional top programmers to round #2 on average. There's basically no reasonable % you can pick for how often people screw up where it makes sense to do anything but just ignore the possibility.
Before, you were saying: anyone who says "muh anxiety" is just trying to cover for the fact that they're incompetent.
I suggested that we've got pretty good evidence that interview stress really truly can, and not only-vanishingly-occasionally, make competent people fail to do simple interview-type coding tasks.
So now you're advancing a different claim: even if some competent people appear incompetent in some interviews because of the stress of interviewing, you should make interview decisions as if those people are just plain incompetent, because most people who fail to do simple interview-type coding tasks really are incompetent and identifying the few who were just stressed out is difficult.
That could very well be true! But it's not what I was arguing against before.
... But I'll argue against it just a bit, even though I mean it when I say it could well be true.
1. There may be much less inefficient ways of catching the competent-but-stressed candidates than "just interview everyone twice"; completely incompetent people probably don't interview exactly the same as competent-but-stressed ones. (I don't know for sure because, of course, when you interview someone and they don't perform well you don't generally get to tell which category they were in. But I bet it would be possible to find out.)
2. If the situation is that some people are particularly susceptible to interview stress (but that this doesn't make them bad at actual programming jobs unless they're in an extra-stressful environment), the "eh, just reject them" strategy might be good for companies that are hiring but punishingly bad for the people affected who just can't get a job because they are bad at interviews. If there were a good way to identify people who are good but fall apart readily under interview-stress, that might be a big deal for those people. (Which someone on the hiring side might not care about, of course; but it's sad when some group of people gets systematically screwed over.)
I repeat, as I have said before, that I don't have a solution to this problem nor even good reason to believe that there is one. I'm just pushing back against the blithe assertion that there isn't a real problem here.
Unless you mean using a "substring" function or regexes... coming up with the naïve O(n^2) algorithm is indeed easy, but finding a fast algorithm like KMP is, I would say, non-trivial?
For the "second-largest number in array" it's rather easy to come up with an O(n) algorithm, so I would consider the two cases to be different.
It's not as if testing for performance under stress is useless: Tough on call rotations happen, and you might need someone that does well under pressure at 3 am in the morning. But the picture you get on a screening isn't as clear as it appears.
1. study the leetcode books in advance
2. do lots of interviews
In the military, there's a saying: train hard => fight easy
On a stop-the-world production incident at 3am I know that codebase like the back of my hand, and my job very likely doesn’t depend on whether I solve it in the next 30m. There’s barely anything stressful about it.
On an interview, with my future on the line, and presented with an unfamiliar problem?
Imagine a person with a pilot's license refusing to fly tandem for an airline interview.
That’s not a great comparison since a pilot has already passed substantially harder tests to get that license and a flight is exactly what the job is. If you have a candidate with a pilot’s license you can assume at least a baseline level of capability which you can’t assume for a software engineer. That has pros and cons but it definitely means interviewing is a noisier process.
The other problem, however, is deeper: the job of flying a plane is exactly what’s tested to get a pilot’s license but what many places do for developer interviews is wildly unlike the actual job so it’s more like interviewing pilots based on trivia questions about the number of rivets on a B-52 and how well they can solve 3-D puzzles, and then being surprised when there isn’t much correlation with real world performance. For example, only at the most toxic companies will the interview be one of the least stressful parts because the rest of the job is a team effort. What makes the interview challenges stressful is doing it without your normal tools while someone else is looking for reasons to fail you, but in a normal job your coworkers are trying to help you succeed because even if you’re not friends you are all better off when your company succeeds. At a startup, trying to ding someone for trivia challenges is like hitting the iceberg to prove that the navigator made a mistake.
Airlines very strictly test pilots and insist on check rides regardless of what official qualifications pilots show up with. They do this because they are professional organizations with decades of experience and it is necessary for safety. Giving someone the benefit of the doubt because they manage to meet the absolute minimum standard that makes operating an airplane legal is insane.
In contrast, we don’t have anything like real certifications for developers and many of the interviewing questions are very unlike the actual job. Hiring would be easier if we did have something closer to what a pilot’s license conveys, but that’d also slow the field down since programming has changed a lot more over the last 50 years than flying.
I always try to give everyone I’ve interviewed the benefit of the doubt. You never know what’s going on in their lives, and even if they fail a trivial question it doesn’t mean they are faking the ability to code.
I joined Facebook back in 2018. Didn’t study at all for the interview and passed somehow. Then I probably conducted 200-300 interviews in my time there, so I became quite familiar with the questions. My performance ratings were all exceeds or greatly exceeds. I voluntarily left on my own after four years to join a unicorn startup. I didn’t prep for that interview either but passed it too. Well, the startup failed and many people went back to Meta. So I actually prepared quite a bit this time and scheduled a mock interview with them. The mock interviewer said I did great and not to change a thing. When it came time for the real screening interview... I failed the matching parentheses question.
I generally try not to make excuses. Almost every interview I’ve failed has clearly been my own fault. But in this particular one the interviewer kept interrupting me every two seconds and I absolutely could not think. I had done matching parentheses many times before in practice, but the constant interrupting rattled me to the point where I totally lost focus and bombed it. Not a great experience.
So yeah, I’d just recommend giving people the benefit of the doubt. Everyone has difficult moments occasionally, but it doesn’t mean they’re stupid or can’t code.
Something I have changed my stance on a bit is automated coding interviews. I used to be adamantly against a company giving candidates automated code tests, but I see now that it takes the interviewer out of the equation.
It is really entirely up to each interviewer how the interview goes and they are usually scheduled between 2 other meetings so often the interviewer is distracted.
Very strange system imo, lots of randomness
There have been times I’ve received answers in interview that weren’t the written answers, but I looked it up afterward and tested it out… and they were right. I learned something news and tweaked the answer reference as a result. If those questions were in the pre-screening instead of asked directly by me, it would have filtered out good people.
I remember fighting to get access to the pre-screen data to see what the answers were and find if there were any other cases like this, where the non-technical pre-screener was filtering out potentially good candidates, because we couldn’t give them exhaustive answers to questions being asked.
Well yes, that's why I'm against it. A one way "interview" is an audition, not an interview. There's nothing worse than wasting 2, 5, 10+ hours on something that ends up with a template rejection letter.
That's great for the interviewer, but devastating for the interviewee. They can't even get feedback on how to improve.
There is also nothing worse than wasting 2, 5, 10+ hours on an in person interview to just have the interviewer flunk you our be unfair to you.
I still believe that personal interviews are important, I'm just raising the fact that a large portion of an interviewee's success is based upon their interviewer.
>There is also nothing worse than wasting 2, 5, 10+ hours on an in person interview to just have the interviewer flunk you our be unfair to you
The interview stage inflation is definitely a problem, but speaking with actual people still has benefits. You get an idea of their culture and you can still network even in such a situation. It's not guaranteed but you get a much higher chance to get advice and feedback on or off the record if you're polite. People are flexible, some standardized exam may never even reach a human.
>'m just raising the fact that a large portion of an interviewee's success is based upon their interviewer.
Indeed. I'm just stating a viewpoint where an interview needs to be personal. An audition in this software space is about as impersonal as you can get.
Wat? Feeling the pressure is even worse when you're young!
Think about this contradictory statement for a while. Can it actually be true? Or is there something else going on?
If the interviewee has nothing but sub-1yr stints on their resume, perpetually getting fired before vesting at any company, then yes, it's very possible they actually can't code and just fake it at every interview.
But everyone else... if they have spent years at tech companies writing production code then obviously they know how to code. They might be great or maybe mediocre, but guaranteed they at least know how to code.
So, if your interviewing technique is concluding something that is obviously impossible, then start by considering how to improve the interview technique.
In a large environment, someone may rarely need to start from nothing, so the interview format throws them.
That said, I think being able to break down a problem to solve it with code is a really important skill. Without it, the person will always have to lean on others to fill that skill gap.
How, exactly, would you do that?
Say you open a new position and you get 100 resumes a day, every day, until you shut down the role and pick someone.
How are you hiring the best candidate overall?
How long are you waiting for "the best"?
How many resumes are you really evaluating per day? With 100 coming in, how do you know you didn't miss "the best" one?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem literally tells you exactly what to do in your situation. I'm sure someone, probably a professor or fun video on social media has told you about this a dozen times in your life, but if you didn't pay attention you can always Google it or ask ChatGPT https://chatgpt.com/share/67d3a121-13e4-8006-9ae3-625838875e...
2. While I said the goal was to hire the best candidate, this was as compared to someone who is just barely better than not filling the position. Hiring a top 5 candidate is also very good. The argument in GP was (paraphrasing) "I know people that aren't good programmers but they can manage to do little changes to existing code therefore you shouldn't give interview problems these dummies can't solve."
I could talk for hours on this subject with concrete examples if anyone ever asked.
I think another problem is that there are so few engineers/architects who really "get it" on this subject. I can only think of a few ex-coworkers with whom I could have the kind of in-depth conversation about app design and organization that I'm picturing.
I've never worked in big tech, always for startups or non-tech corps with a few rock star devs and a lot of decent devs. So maybe it's different at a FAANG. But in my head I'm picturing a bunch of algo-geniuses whose code turns into a big mess over time when requirements take a right-turn and break all their beautiful abstractions. I've worked on a few apps like that and it's not fun.
Your template sounds like a fine way to ask such a question. I think the issue is managers or someone above simply don't want to invest in proper interview questions and instead just do that FAANG does. Even though very few companies need such core algorithmic knowledge but need people who can properly navigate legacy code. FAANGs will actually make sure new hires learn the code base, unlike many companies thst want you to "hit the ground running".
Haha I hate all the code I wrote more than 5 years ago.
But being able to break things down and come up with a solution is not necessarily something that needs to be done quickly, in the time you have for an interview. Quite often I've been faced with a new problem and done absolutely nothing visible for ages. Literally just reading around the problem, asking questions, and sketching in my mind without writing a single line of code.
This is often faster and better than starting immediately.
My guess is computer science has a similar issue.
Lots of people with programming in thier job title but they don’t actually program. And based on ltbarcly3’s empirical measurement, “lots” is above 10%. ;)
And yes, this is part of why the obsession with FAANG on resume is very overrated. Very few companies require the skillsete FAANG needs. Some of thst FAANG culture is orthogonal to what medium/small sized companies require.
I feel like you kind of vaguely are aware of these topics but have never actually had a job or something because you seem completely unfamiliar with the basics of how hiring is done in the industry. Are you from Eastern Europe maybe?
>No HR doesn't investigate candidates or do background checks before you interview
An HR screen isn't a background check. It's "can you talk about your roles and provlems solved like you actually did it. A good HR screen should make sure they aren't blatantly lying
>that would be very expensive and silly.
Let's both not pretend the interview proces is in any way optimized for any metric. You have often non-tech roles create a description for a tech role (leading to famous blunders like "have and jave script is the same") . You have an increasing amount of rounds of interviews to go through for a job that may not exist or may already be reserved. And more and more of the parts are being outsourced, leading to power quality candidates. All that before throwing a reckless reliance of AI on everything.
The most optimal hiring is to focus on high quality hires brought in as fast as possible. Or not to hire if you don't need to hire. But we're not really running on sensible business practices these days.
Correct. While not perfect, if you have good HR hiring team they will do a decent job at feeling out the people before they get to you.
> I can apply to 100 job and interview for 10 that all fall through.
Part of the difficulty is that (despite any myths around engineering shortage) there are so many qualified people for every role that it is overwhelming.
I just opened a new job req last week, I have over 1100 resumes in the queue already. And this is a pretty specialized technical role in a specialized department, not a generic "javascript software engineer" role, either.
Obviously I can't read all of them, which makes me sad because someone took the time to send their resume and I feel like I should give them the respect of reading it, but there are simply not enough hours in a week. While HR does the screening, I also go and do a random sampling of the resumes and everyone who has applied seems at least moderately qualified. But of course I can only talk to about 1% of them at best.
An HR screen will sometimes remove frauds (not usually because they can't really tell, it removes uncharasmatic frauds only), but it also has a very high probability of removing anyone on the autism spectrum - no matter how qualified. I really don't want people on the autism spectrum removed from my hiring funnel for software engineer. If you ever looked over the shoulder of a recruiter or HR when they do a first pass on resumes you will be horrified at how many of the best candidates they pass over because they have no idea what they are reading, and how many very poor candidates they pass along for very stupid reasons like having 'Yale' for their college (despite it being for History and despite it being the extension school, true story, and this person ended up getting hired despite negative interview feedback and then fired for incompetence a few months later).
V = I * R
I = V / R
R = V / I
And yeah, I've been trashed multiple times for this opinion, but I'm not backing down!
Or is this ironic?
It was utterly mundane code.
If someone asks me what the time complexity of something or the other (I literally had to go look up the name), I completely freeze up.
Whether you know the term doesn’t matter when you understand the basic concept that for inside for == bad.
Anyhow, it seems to be working out pretty well for me, so while I’m also annoyed by incompetent people the idea that it’s due to lacking CS fundamentals sounds bizarre to me.
You sure it's not nepotism, or an inability to make sure the resume fits the person? Or any other number of non-merit based criteria from HR?
For context, back when I was interviewing I encountered many interviewers who process involved simple questions with simple solutions but with extra gaslighting on top. 'Are you SURE that's the right solution?' while I'm in the middle of throwing out a correct answer. It's actually very easy to guide someone away from a correct solution into the wrong one by simply making them second guess themselves under pressure.
It was something that I started to be extra cognizant about when I was the one interviewing people, that it's really quite easy to throw someone off track.
And, and having to explain everything, well, this person had never heard of it. And, and for the more, didn't know what modulo was, like, how do you, how do you say you know Java?
I suck at programming but I could bang out 100% of the things mentioned in this thread. In like four languages, including FORTRAN.
Not just that. They block the hiring process. Maybe there was just that one open position on your team, and that bad 3 month hire postponed a good hire by 6 months. It's also very incomfortable to fire and start again.
My interviews contain questions that are basic, and any new team mate should know. I keep asking them because 90% of the candidates actually can't answer them well. You should know what a "dot product" is if you want to work as a ML engineer, that kind of stuff. Or be able to open a text file and count word frequencies.
I can appreciate the gating process because it's a real drag to get hired and then spend more time than necessary not doing my work but trying to help coworkers catch up on very basic and fundamental skills in order to be able to collaborate with them.
During our interview, we ask candidates to design a history system. The key is to realize that our database is only 8Gb, and storing a year of updates is only 160Gb, so $2pm in AWS. Once there, a simple DB table suits, no need to set up Amazon S3.
So we ask them for the multiplication. First we give them the data, and if they don’t do the calculation, we nudge them, then we ask them, then we write the multipliers for them, then we take the calculator out and write the result for them.
Those are Masters degrees. They can’t even do calculations, let alone getting it right, because 500MB x 200 days a year = a few petabytes apparently. And after that, they’re exhausted, it’s impossible to ask them the rest of the questions like “So is it worth worrying about a Rube Goldberg machine when you’re in for $2 of AWS costs?”.
That said, I'm not above your bar as each cloud provider have their own pricing model. I'm not even above your bar for AWS---which I've used the past six years---just for the sheer diversity of their offerings, not to mention regional variations. I know how EC2 servers are priced relative to each other but when we include ECS, DynamoDB, Lambda, etc., I'm gonna need a cheat sheet.
Perhaps I'm naive, but I suspect that hiring based on a candidates ability to produce optimal solutions to LC Hards will bias strongly towards candidates who can't code, but are very good at interviewing.
It's not about skills at this point, companies just want to pretend to hire while not admitting we're now heading towards a recession.
Glad they exist and I fully support all candidates using them aggressively.
Once you're on the team, you are mostly practicing plays, doing clinics, and simulating competition, but to get on the team in the first place you have to prove your general fitness by running, say, a 6 minute mile.
You may not be able to do that again easily right away once you've been on the team for a while because you don't practice running for pure time at that distance, but it's a level of fitness you should be easily able to obtain again if you had to, and it's a very useful benchmark to a scout.
When you're laid off, it's time to start doing that "roadwork" again. It will be a bit hard at first in practice, but if you've been a solid contributor, you should be able to get fit enough again to prove that.
Notwithstanding, I have long argued that a non-profit credentialing body for SWEs offering cerification exams (which also required regular updates) akin to passing the bar or USMLE could go a long way to solving this problem. It would come with other drawbacks, perhaps not worth it, but we have to accept that constant tech interviews is the price we pay for refusal to standardize and professionalize.
Thinking back on it. Not really. I’ve had a few people be outright incompetent, but I’ve never been at risk of them stealing the credit for stuff. The closest I’ve come is people that should probably be fired, but manage to barely hold on by being experts at self promotion.
They're not testing your limits, they're testing for basic competency.
Pro teams have scouts, draft based on college performance, trade or poach players from other teams. They don't even have tryouts 99% of the time. You have to be a proven performer for a team in a developmental league.
Lol, considering most big projects are not on github, you're just showing your own lack of clue.
You're going to spend half your waking life at work. For me, that's too much time to not want to do so at a place where I have real relationships with my coworkers.
On a related note, it is odd that HN comments rarely seem to include a manager’s perspective.
Fix this and a lot of the job hoping problem goes away.
An employee doesn't have much control of suddenly being locked out of their workspace.
>it is odd that HN comments rarely seem to include a manager’s perspective.
Managers can be screwed by the company too, yes. I understand such decisions aren't always their call.
Just joking :) I firmly respect your opinion on the matter, and understand different people value different things in life.
not if you’re gonna FIRE asap
Now I know people I used to work with who have been without work for many months and having a hard time getting interviews.
Granted, I'm not in the Bay Area, so. But the market is saturated.
The reputation for googlers on the market right now is very bad, and it will keep getting worse as the group of ex googlers who are basically unemployable keep interviewing over and over and over.
I'd argue for the $70k person. They are less likely to have experienced lifestyle inflation and looking at this position as a "slumming it until they can get a job making $300k+ again."
It further complicates the issue that most companies don't have Google scale problems and don't have the engineering culture for a Google scale solution.
There are several factors working against even not incompetent former Google employees - especially if their experience is entirely within Big Tech.
A bit ago a former Tesla person was in the set of interviews and it became clear that they wanted to make the organization that was considering hiring them into a copy of how Tesla works... and that wasn't something that was going to be doable. The post interview discussion was "this person is going to try to make us into a copy of Tesla for six months, and then leave shortly after they realize that we weren't a place that could become another Tesla."
Big Tech experience may be a positive signal for getting hired at other Big Tech companies... but it can be a negative signal at a company that isn't trying hiring for an organization that can't become a Big Tech company - especially if that is the only thing that is known.
Hiring isn't necessarily picking the "best" person for the role, but rather the least risky. Former Big Tech employees are often riskier than other candidates given their lifestyle expectations and the mismatch of the engineering cultures.
Personally when I left Google and interviewed elsewhere I made clear to potential employers two major things:
1. I never expected to be paid "Google level" money again. I was nowhere near high up in the pay tier there, but it was still almost twice what local shops were paying, at times (depending on how RSUs worked out, etc.)
Google can pay what it can because of the ads firehose, and it was actually, more than anything, a strategy used to deprive the competition of talent.
2. I never actually liked the Google internal culture, so although I was there for 10 years I was constantly aware of the things that I didn't like and the things I would not be trying to bring over to future gigs. And I had 10+ years work experience before Google. Which didn't serve me well while I was inside Google, but definitely has afterwards.
Before I worked in FAANG, My subjective view of big tech SWEs was they were very skilled, in a different league.
My current view is that it "just" takes very good preparation and a decent resume to get in. And they've hired so many people that it's not so special anymore to be an "ex-Google". There are just a lot of them.
That being said, I think someone who gets hired in such a company, and manage to stay for many years has to be quite productive and competent. Especially if they reached higher levels.
Productive, not necessarily.
Google is not a "produce a lot of code" place. It's a careful and deliberate and systematic type of place.
One thing I think ex-Google does bring especially to the table is a disdane for over-complicated and overly trend-driven solutions.
For one Google's internal review culture is (or at least was when I was there) very stringent. Pointless complexity and showboating is usually spanked.
For two, because Google basically rolls its own everything in regards to frameworks and the like, developers who come out of there have been mainly cured of "flavour of the month" and "my ego wants us to use this new shiny new-coloured tech".
lol. Nothing newer than a brand new framework created at google!
I haven't worked for any massive companies with thousands of employees where there might be a lot of bureaucracy, but the few I've worked for ranged from ~100-700 and it was pretty easy to get interviews for referrals. One of my employers encouraged referrals and offered bonuses if it led to a hire.
Smaller teams are also more tight-knit so recommending a new potential dev wasn't a matter of process - it was literally head down a few doors and have a chat with the director.
I'm sure it's significantly different for huge enterprises where even the teams within the R&D department are heavily siloed.
If your manager is inexperienced or not very good then there's nothing you can do about that.
Post layoff, a person on H1B has 2 months to sign a new job offer or they must leave the country.
Majority of Indian and Chinese H1bs do not have green cards, and are the main group that suffers. Some of these folks are well into their 30s, with kids and houses in the US.
If you have good life savings, you can convert to tourist visa, and stay in the country for an additional 6 months and a higher hassle when restarting your career.
You can leave the country, and get back as long as your H1b is still valid.
If your spouse is working, you can be convert to being a dependent on them with H4 visas.
At the end of the day I think the government should not let people end up in such a situation. After the 6 year H1b deadline, I would prefer if the government just sends a notice to those that it thinks can immigrate long term and send the rest back. At least then we won’t have the ridiculous situation of upending families and children who have started schooling just because their parents lost a job.
If you pay your monthly installments and have solid financial health (good credit score, high income, paid your taxes) then you'll get a standard deal. H1b Indians are on 30-50 yr queues for green card. Buying houses without residency is the norm, not the exception.
What do you mean by this? Surely they don't have to stay and work 30-40yrs before they can expect permanent residency?
Indian wait-times are expected to be between 20-60 years. It is ~10 years of the Chinese & Mexicans. Everyone else gets a green card within 1-2 years.
Dealing with poverty in my youth, homeless at 16, no parents to help me, debilitating ADHD, tourettic OCD, bipolar type II, CPTSD from 10 years of intense childhood physical/emotional abuse, my full-ride college scholarships illegally stolen from me by a high school who knew I was homeless and had no recourse and allowed a teacher to illegally modify my grades out of pure spite, malnourished, intense, crippling sciatica, fused lumbar discs, possible fibromyalgia, and then developing excruciating daily pains and physical disability which greatly impacted my life and sometimes made me suicidal, which turned out to be an autoimmune disorder that took 10 years for doctors to figure out... an extremely intense case of gout developing since my teens...
I just keep pushing on but every day I see people who take so much for granted, and who are so ready to pass judgement without appreciating the basic privilege of good health.
I've had to deal with so much struggle that the average person wouldn't even want to take the time to hear all of it much less believe it, once someone momentarily realizes that they'd have it comparatively easy compared to others, they often get defensive as they begin to realize that their life doesn't have nearly as many barriers as they've convinced themselves, and they have to come to terms with not applying themselves harder. It's easier for them to be dismissive and tell me, "all your problems would go away if you worked out more" or tell me to get on a keto diet, or whatever have you, as if I haven't tried every single thing I can think of.
And the insane thing is I am still quite privileged compared to some people in war-torn countries, even if they are able to move around without swallowing a truckload of ibuprofen. Reminding myself of that is a source of strength and determination to keep moving forward.
The generous interpretation would be that you have sufficiently good health that you do not have to structure your life around it, and therefore lack understanding of the challenges faced by those who do.
The alternate interpretation, that you do understand and choose to ignore and dismiss, would be rather less generous to you.
I think their quibble was with a different item being used as evidence there (i.e., having a family), not necessarily with all that was said.
I think helping one another to build empathy is a good thing, and even if the person I replied to is unable to do so, it's possible that observing them tell a disabled person that they don't think their life is any harder will help other third parties such as yourself build that empathy.
I did not flag their original comment, but it's not for no reason it was flagged to death.
In other cases downvoted posts are often the most interesting precisely because they trigger people with points they don't want to consider. I certainly wouldn't cite it as proof of any position.
As for bringing up children, I did make the leap that that is generally a big difference between younger employees and older employees.
It sounds like what you think you wrote, is not in fact the words of yours that everybody has been reading.
A double negative is risky without typos, though.
In my follow up comment I attempted to clarify my comment in response to giantg2's reply. "I do not have a disability (my wife may disagree) and I agree it makes life more challenging (wouldn’t be called a disability otherwise)." I completely agree a disability makes life more difficult. I simply added that it is not the only thing that makes life more difficult. All of these things need to be considered when making career/job decisions.
> In my initial comment I said "I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.” I still maintain that comment.
> I completely agree a disability makes life more difficult.
Do you not see how it's hard to square the first statement, with the second? You do not agree that life is much harder for some people, but you do agree that a disability makes life more difficult?
It sounds like you have very little experience with people outside your socioeconomic class. (Or you do have that experience, but have drawn the wrong conclusions from it.) It is an obvious, proven fact that life is much harder for some people than for others.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently. A former boss and good friend who is incredibly smart and effective in the work place asked why the two of us had never gone the PE route and been more successful. While he is very successful by most standards, he sees people flying private jets all the time who do not appear more skillful, yet have been more successful. As I think on this, I feel I simply was never willing to go all in on the risk required to achieve that level of financial success. I tried co-founding a company once when I was 28 while engaged and importantly, before children. I felt I could take the risk and if I failed, could bounce back. I did fail - company did ok but my I ended up disliking working with my senior partner - and I did bounce back, ending up at GE.
After that, I did not feel comfortable taking that level of risk until my children were off to college and no longer dependent on me an I had enough money saved that my wife and I would be ok for a long time. The people I know who have been jet-money financially successful took huge risks. They were all in on their venture(s). Frequently this cost them their marriage and/or relationships with the children. This was their choice. Their cost/benefit analysis to optimize their success criteria. Some regret the decisions - they underestimated the effort and impact on those they cared about. However, most have not. They are happy with how things have turned out.
Different strokes for different folks.
Many people do not fall on the good side of that random chance.
Some of the "free choices" you claim people can make, will only be possible if some other people don't make those same choices.
Many also don't have the choice to start a family, no matter how badly they want it.
As for starting a family, I agree not all can. My mistake was jumping from their assertion that I must be young to mean I did not have the responsibilities of an older worker such as taking care of a family. The less generous interpretation of that accusation is what? I am stupid? Ignorant of life? Not suffering from the impact of issues that I did not choose?
If you're single and have no responsibilities, sure. The second you have a mortgage, medical conditions that need health insurance, or need money because you had a family emergency and had to dip into savings, it's not "funemployment" at all.
During dot-bomb I was relatively lucky if not necessarily super-well compensated but I knew a lot of people who basically dropped out of the professional labor market.
Access to cheap labor is what really drives economies. Market forces are what drive labor salaries. More people cheaper labor.
It used to be in the 60s, 70s, and to some extent the 80's a single wage earner was enough in a family. By the end of the 80's it became clear that 2 wage earners was how people got ahead in life.
Oh, and not doing 2 trillion in tax cuts for the rich would help.
A significant portion of the world population works themselves to the bone while barely scraping by. This is not the mark of a successful civilization. It's gross.
Maybe as a start, we put limits on the ratio of executive compensation to the lowest paid jobs in a company. And require that a significant percentage of profits be distributed to employees rather than shareholders.
Yes, that will slow economic growth. But even as someone reasonably well off, who depends on investments for his future, that seems much more fair than what we're doing now.
Tech "layoffs" are something of a euphemism for terminating (rather than pausing) employment for business reasons.
Some businesses are seasonal, so it might make sense there as well.
"Originally, layoff referred exclusively to a temporary interruption in work, or employment"
The last time I was looking for a job at age 48, I interviewed at a bunch of startups and only got a second interview from one. It was clear that most of them were never going with someone my age unless I'd written a book or had patents or something (or was ex-FAANG), even if they didn't consciously realize that.
Of course, that's its own problem, but particularly in places where it's hard to get headcount, the management structures get wider and wider...
You shouldn't need a job. You should have FIREd.
https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics
https://research.com/education/average-time-to-repay-student...
https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college
Even at a relatively average college, debt repayment is often measured in decades.
As I understand it, tech employees are typically paid a small fraction of the revenue that they bring into the company.
Outside of tech, employees are underpaid, and wages haven't tracked productivity growth since the 1970s. Profit growth has greatly exceeded wage growth since the early 2000s, with the exception of the 2008 recession.
You can't go off mcdonalds sandwiches, and you can't use the economic indicators that ignore food and fuel.
I've heard wild numbers from "the dollar is worth 50¢ compared to 20 years ago" to "the dollar has lost 98% of its value in the last N years."
I'm not an economist, but I do know my electric bill has been thr exact same dollar amount for 12 years, and I've halved my usage twice in those years. That puts the dollar purchasing power for power at 25% of 2013.
Gasoline changes prices so much I can't really say, it's about twice as expensive for 87 here as 12 years ago, but 93 is 2.5+ times higher.
Food? Don't get me started.
I live in the rural south. I don't really care about price fixing in Los Angeles or silicon Valley.
There are many people who do jobs worth much less than $32/hour. That min wage would just make them illegal to employ.
>You can't go off mcdonalds sandwiches, and you can't use the economic indicators that ignore food and fuel.
You can't use economic indicators that track volatile commodities either. We use baskets of consumer goods and the inflation tracking is very accurate in short time frames but it becomes harder to compare the further out you get. A TV today is much better than a TV even 10 years ago but it is hardly even the same product as one from 1970.
>I've heard wild numbers from "the dollar is worth 50¢ compared to 20 years ago" to "the dollar has lost 98% of its value in the last N years."
What is wild about that? If you had 50c then and you had invested it in even relatively poorly performing investments it would be worth much more than $1 now.
>I'm not an economist, but I do know my electric bill has been thr exact same dollar amount for 12 years, and I've halved my usage twice in those years. That puts the dollar purchasing power for power at 25% of 2013.
That you are not an economist is obvious.
You are aware that dollars buy more things than energy from your energy provider according to your energy plan, yeah?
A livable wage in the geographic jurisdiction they are in. Including stuff like transportation, healthcare, food, heat, housing, and insurance.
Glad you asked.
oh, the company can't compete without exploiting workers?
oh well.
This is called the Iron Law of Wages. As its name implies, it's neither prescriptive nor pleasant - but it is guaranteed to be liveable.
> Including stuff like transportation, healthcare, food, heat, housing, and insurance.
The thing that trips people up is that the word "liveable" is a synonym for "subsistence," not "fullfilling." A wage that's only liveable would feel quite exploitative to most people.
The "iron law of wages" is instead an economic principle that wages tend to trend downwards until people are paid the minimum possible for subsistence. It's not meant to be a goal.
Regardless of what FDR said, a living wage is guaranteed because people will not accept anything lower.
The problem with a "decent" living is that reasonable people can disagree about what that looks like. Roommates? Children? An unemployed spouse? Vacations and retirement?
It's not the government's job to guarantee all of that stuff and I would rather we focus on stopping wage and tip theft and protecting the rights of workers (banning noncompetes, decoupling health insurance, etc.) instead of increasing the minimum wage towards some poorly-defined goal.
There's also the other side of the minimum wage debate, which is that most of the specific numbers people list as "liveable" do actually result in some folks losing their jobs and becoming unemployable. There was even a recent BERKELEY study that showed this!
Nonsense.
There most definitely IS a definition of a fair minimum wage -- it is the definition used when it was originally introduced into law:
The wage necessary for a full-time (40hr/week) worker head-of-household to support a family of four above the poverty line -- spouse & kids in a house/apartment, food, medical, education, etc..
We have Walmart workers collecting $6 Billion in benefits per year to stay above the poverty line while the Waltons sit on a $250Billion fortune, it is clear we are subsidizing the rich by failing to set an above-poverty minimum wage.
EDIT: typos, add referenced line
Food of what quality? That available in the 1930s?
Medical of what quality? 1930s medical care?
Education to primary level as most had in the 1930s or more than that?
You don't have a natural right to receive the fruits of the labour of others.
>We have Walmart workers collecting $6 Billion in benefits per year to stay above the poverty line while the Waltons sit on a $250Billion fortune, it is clear we are subsidizing the rich by failing to set an above-poverty minimum wage.
Then stop giving benefits to people that have jobs.
There are standards for virtually everything. Meet the current basic standards. For food, a basket of FDA/USDA-approved for distribution food to make a basic but nutritious diet for the family of 4. For housing, you could go with minimums for HUD housing. For education, through public high school. These are not hard to figure out (but may be a bit tedious). These are also minimums required to maintain a functional workforce in a modern society.
>>You don't have a natural right to receive the fruits of the labour of others.
>>Then stop giving benefits to people that have jobs.
Right. So what you want is a Dickensian crabs-in-a-bucket labor market where the wage level is set by the most desperate person, who will work for hours to get a crust of bread for his/her next meal. A market where employers can abuse workers at will because there really are 500 others outside the gate who will take his job if he isn't willing to take the beating?
We are no longer living in a frontier society where 97%+ of the workers are producing food.
That insanely over-simplistic model has been tried, and it is a resounding failure, both for every society, every country, and every individual living in it. Those societies inevitably collapse or grow out of it with minimum standards for everyone. And while it is obviously awful for the workers, it is no day at the beach for the oligarchs either, who must live in secured closed-off areas, always frightened of everyone in the public as well as their rivals in power. Unproductive misery for everyone is what you want?
So, NO, the solution is not to just make the people at the bottom more poor, more hungry, and more desperate.
The solution is to stop giving benefits by ensuring that their employer pays the workers sufficiently that they do NOT NEED benefits to survive.
If an employer cannot pay their workers a living wage they do NOT have a business model.
They have an exploitation model.
The exploitation model specifically violates your above principle saying that the employers have a natural right to the fruits of the workers' labor to whatever degree they can exploit the worker by their desperation.
You aren't saying the no one has a right to the fruits of anyone else's labor, you are only saying that no other worker has such a right, but the employers do.
You are saying that if someone has power or deception, whatever they can take is their right.
I say, NO, that is the most dishonorable and amoral of societies.
> If an employer cannot pay their workers a living wage they do NOT have a business model.
> They have an exploitation model.
as i replied to someone else who asked "what does livable wage mean [to you]?":
A livable wage in the geographic jurisdiction they are in. Including stuff like transportation, healthcare, food, heat, housing, and insurance.
Glad you asked.
oh, the company can't compete without exploiting workers?
oh well.
Of course there would need to be provisions that it not be abused and just used for all positions. E.g., it cannot be used for workers 21 years old or older, etc. And the rules against abuse need to be solid, as we can guarantee that whatever rules are made, employers will work hard to abuse and game the system to their advantage and at the employee's cost.
I really want to like what you're saying, but I see too many problems. I don't have answers.
Exactly that sort of scenario is why I included those phrases.
ANY large system will have imperfections, inadvertent waste, and openings for abuse. Of course these should be minimized, but that shouldn't stop us from making a system. Better a few people benefit undeservedly than many who deserve and need the benefits go hungry.
> Better a few people benefit undeservedly than many who deserve and need the benefits go hungry.
Agreed. Now consider that regulations exclude people, not include them, overall, by far. (I say this with a job that sees that daily, and where a frequent criticism is that implementing those regulations is government waste.)
What I'm taking away from this is, contrasting with an option I generally dislike, that option actually looks much better than I have previously thought, and it looks definitely better than raising the minimum wage. That is raising the corporate tax rate, which is at historic lows from what I understand, and increasing public benefits. You mentioned Walmart's profits being subsidized by benefit programs, but that valid and important complaint seems to be taken care of this way. This also starts to sound a lot like UBI, which I may have never really understood and have never supported. Maybe I should support it.
That could be a good solution to increase the corp tax rate and provide more benefits and more broadly. The problem is corporations, especially large corps, have historically bought favors from congress, with the result that the tax burden falls on the middle class.
UBI is an astoundingly good concept, especially when people get automated out of their jobs — tax every producing entity at a level required to distribute funds and services (e.g., healthcare) to everyone just above poverty level.
The cool thing is that with UBI, there is basically no need for a minimum wage. First, potential workers are already being supported above poverty, and second, corporations will need to offer a wage and working conditions that together are worth it for workers to bother getting up and going to work. UBI would essentially give everybody "F.U. money", i.e., the option to get up and walk out anytime without endangering their family's ability to live. Studies testing UBI also repeatedly show people consistently spend the money well and do not squander it. The principle once advocated by some conservatives that the people themselves know best how to spend their money is really true (not absolutely, but at a very high level).
So
this isn't really as difficult as everyone makes it. "Minimum wage is a company's way of telling you that if it was legal to pay you less, they would."
If a company can't afford to pay cashiers at different rates based on their tenure and skill, then i guess the company will have to deploy self-checkout, and some people don't like that, so they'll take their business elsewhere. If that means that all grocery stores go "self checkout" then i suppose farmer's markets will become a lot bigger.
This is all about grocery cashiers, please do not try to extrapolate my words to anything else, i am speaking to this very narrow thing.
I did not talk about paying cashiers at different rates. I addressed the single minimum rate from the earlier comment, where a household's single income can "support a family of four above the poverty line -- spouse & kids in a house/apartment, food, medical, education, etc [without relying on assistance programs]". According to the back of this envelope, that would be $70,000/yr = $33/hr. In some areas or with other decisions, maybe only $50,000/yr = $24/hr.
A grocery store would be rare indeed that could afford to pay their lowest-skilled, lowest-tenured cashier at $24/hr. Surely society can come up with a better answer than telling so many grocery stores that self-checkout is the only practical way to stay in business.
for years^, i've been saying this, since 2018 or 2019. $33 an hour. So if you re-read what i actually said, i explain that i don't really care if a supermarket can't afford to pay cashiers at a livable wage. they can suffer from lack of staff, or go full self checkout and robots, or go out of business. I don't care, like, at all. "But genewitch, what about the families of the shareholders and CEO and board?" uh huh, luckily they can go get a job and make a livable wage somewhere else.
^i've only been posting on HN since 2020, but my point stands
> A grocery store would be rare indeed that could afford to pay their lowest-skilled, lowest-tenured cashier at $24/hr. Surely society can come up with a better answer than telling so many grocery stores that self-checkout is the only practical way to stay in business.
I'll take you at your word that you don't care to come up with a better answer, and that means I'll gain nothing further from discussing this with you. I'll bow out. Take care!
Sure there is. It's the amount you have to pay someone such that they can work a reasonable amount of hours (40/week), such that they can afford all of life's essentials while having a little extra to save for a rainy day, as well as have a little fun.
But certainly some people's poilitics ignore the human aspects of the world we live in, and think that the "free market" (something that doesn't actually exist) will sort it out.
The minimum wage doesn't make anyone be paid more. It only causes anyone paid less than it to instead be paid $0, and instead be paid an unemployment benefit. How is that reasonable?
When Seattle raised the minimum wage to $15/hour, everyone screamed it would lead to mass unemployment. That never happen. Suddenly the lower class had more money to spend, which boosted the economy as much or more than higher wages hurt bottom lines.
>which helps the working class so that they aren't working and on medicare, section 8, food stamps etc. - as many Wal-mart workers currently are. That saves us money in the long run.
A higher minimum wage leads to lower employment not higher employment.
>When Seattle raised the minimum wage to $15/hour, everyone screamed it would lead to mass unemployment. That never happen.
It has been shown many times that a higher minimum wage causes less employment. It is also obvious from first principles and basic logic. Price controls are a very bad idea, and wages are no exception.
Tech employees don't "bring in" the company's revenue. That makes the mistake of attributing the products and services of a business to its workers.
>wages haven't tracked productivity growth since the 1970s.
Propaganda. Productivity growth literally is just wage growth, by definition. It is impossible for them not to track each other.
The graph on this page disagrees, can you explain please? I haven't heard anyone say the two concepts are the same before.
As I have heard it "productivity" is roughly gdp/hour, which can be different from wages/hour (but you generally expect the two to be related / correlated).
I don't understand what you mean by this. If i own a business, and employee productivity increases but i don't increase wages doesn't that disprove your statement?
No, it is the opposite, whether you are measuring Units Per Worker Hour or especially Units Per Worker Dollar.
You have a dozen $25/hr workers in a factory producing 50 widgets/hour, and you now introduce new tools, techniques, and/or materials and they now produce 80 widgets per hour, productivity per hour and per dollar has risen, but worker pay is exactly the same.
If you instead cut their pay to $22/hr their productivity in Units/WorkerHour is unchanged but productivity in Units/Labor$ has risen.
It is ONLY in the limited case where you are paying 100% by piecework that productivity tracks wages, e.g., if those workers are paid $6/Widget produced and they manage to make 50%more widgets/hr, then their pay rises with productivity. But that is uncommon and labor cost is rarely the only input.
Edit: typos
That is precisely how it is measured: by measuring wages.
>You have a dozen $25/hr workers in a factory producing 50 widgets/hour, and you now introduce new tools, techniques, and/or materials and they now produce 80 widgets per hour, productivity per hour and per dollar has risen, but worker pay is exactly the same.
As is unlikely to surprise you, productivity as a macroeconomic indicator is not measured by lookikg at factories and the tools and techniques they use.
96% of the gap can be explained by the fact that these figures compare productivity growth of the whole economy with wage growth of some workers (the lowest 80% of them - leaving out... the most productive workers), count the productivity growth of the self employed but not their wages, dont take into account overtime, bonuses, or health insurance benefits, and intentionally use different means of measuring inflation across the two figures in an attempt to inflate the numbers.
At the end of the day they track very closely because they are both measures of wages. Productivity is just net output by hour worked and wages is just net output by hour worked. If you use different methods for calculating each you can make either look higher but it is pure methodology.
Again, NO.
Just go to the Bureau Of Labor Statistics and their description of how productivity is measured [0]:
>>"For a single business producing only one good, output would simply be the number of units of that good produced in each time period, such as a month or a year."
Notice not a single mention of wages
It then goes on describing how they measure aggregate output in sectors of the economy. Wages is only mentioned ONCE, for charities and government organizations (since their output is not sold).
>>Government services and the output of nonprofits are not sold in the marketplace, so these types of output can be difficult to measure. For example, what is the output of a charity? Often these outputs are measured by the wages and benefits - compensation - paid to workers producing these outputs.
and then they point out:
>>
Since productivity compares output to input, if the output is measured by the input, any time the input grows, the output grows by the same amount.
>>Measuring output by labor input is similar to including the same amount in the numerator as in the denominator of the labor productivity ratio.
>>This implies no productivity growth for that group of workers, dampening productivity change for the industry and sector. For this reason, BLS productivity measures exclude government, nonprofits, and private household production.
So the ONLY mention of wages is specifically EXCLUDED from measures of productivity.
Then the summary: Output is measured primarily as an index of product revenues, adjusted for price changes. Adjustments are made to ensure that output that is sold to another business within the same measuring unit (industry or sector) is excluded to prevent counting it more than once.
Again, no mention of wages.
I have no idea where you get your misconceptions, but you really need to study some actual economics before posting pages of obviously wrong nonsense.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/k12/productivity-101/content/how-is-prod...
Sure they do. Every employee contributes to the revenue a company brings in. If they don't, then they should be fired.
> Productivity growth literally is just wage growth, by definition.
Completely false. You accuse a commenter in a sibling thread of not having a good grasp of economics, but that feels like the pot calling the kettle black, here.
By your logic, "cost centres" (like IT, HR, and office management) within a business are bad because they don't bring in any revenue. Except of course in reality they are the same: they provide a service to the business that the business makes use of in providing goods and services to its customers.
I am being pedantic but for good reason: there is no a priori reason why your pay should go up just because your employer has become more profitable, except that it is in the interests of employers to make use of resources efficiently. If they are profitable then hiring more people so they can make more money is good. But it isn't a matter of "deserving" to be paid more or something. Pay isn't based on what you deserve for many reasons, including that you can't attribute the business's profits to its workers and ignore, for example, the investment in capital resources (including IP) required to enable the workers to work effectively. Mainly though because of supply and demand.
If an improvement in productivity makes you more efficient then there should be higher demand for you and you should be paid more. And indeed that is exactly what happens: people in industries that have productivity improvements are paid more afterwards than before.
Only if the following conditions are true:
1. You spent your entire career in the US, ideally on the West Coast
2. You entered the industry early, ideally right after (or in!) university
3. You did not spend significant time in low-paying segments of the industry, such as in academia, hardware, games, idealistic open source, or the public sector
4. You did not need a significant career break, such as for major medical issues, being a SAHP, or caring for sick family members
Even if all of the above applied, certain wealth-destroying events such as an expensive illness, legal trouble, or bad divorce, might have made FIRE infeasible.
That being said, once I got bored in the job, I sniffed out that the parent company wanted to lay a few people off, and hinted that I was open to it. It worked out well for me.
I was just too busy in my personal life to look for a job on the side, and honestly I didn't want to walk away halfway through a project.
Situation, part 2: All tech products have a life cycle. At some point they go into maintenance mode where there's no active development of new features.
Situation, part 3: Although we were a market leader in our niche, we just couldn't compete with what was coming from Microsoft.
Thus, I had a 1-1 with the department head. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I probably alluded to wondering what I was going to do when the feature I was working on was complete, and hinting that, after working on this product for a decade, I was getting kind of bored.
The package was confidential, but given that my last day of work was February 29, 2020, I made out rather well. :)
Edit: This is not a judgement, but if you felt like it was, I very much want to hear about it.
Yes, buuut many will be players from 25 to 35 (with some degree of flexibility), that's why it's still an age thing. Yes, there are persons that are players for life, sure. But IME they are a minority.
Or maybe I'm just projecting, who knows?
Unexpected or deliberate change was an opportunity, a challenge, a stimulant! Job hopping (or hopping around relationships) when young can be about exploring the world, finding yourself and your values and isn't inherently bad.
Then you discover what you are good at doing and that you like doing and dedicating time to (or perhaps another person with whom you want to spend all your time) and your priorities change.
Then you might have kids and the work becomes more about financial security for the family then about your personal growth. And so you aren't looking at layoffs and unexpected change as opportunity because you are happy with what you've got.
It just often is an age or 'stage of life' thing for many people.
They are are more likely to set strong boundaries, demand fair compensation, and expect strong leadership. They are less willing to work nights and weekends, accept subpar pay, or tolerate workplace abuse, unlike younger, less experienced employees who may be more naive or eager to conform.
Not helped by the fact a lot of interview processes - unless you can rely on word-of-mouth and the corporate structure allows for shortcuts - are byzantine, maddening and/or don't have much relations to the work one will be doing afterwards. No fuck you I'm in for a sysop/cloud position, I won't waste my time doing Fizzbuzz. Give me a laptop with internet and an actual work task if you want to judge my competence.
I wanted to be a "lifer" (you don't build expertise jumping jobs every 2 years) but I more or less knew going into games that that was never going to truly be the case. But this bad market only amplifies the issues.
The added social and political mental load that has crept in over the past decade or so has effectively pushed me to burnout.
And I was a happy "lifer" making subpar salary writing government software. I got to work in a large dark office with other nerds and joked about esoteric things.
But once software development became formalized, homogenized, and micromanaged, I couldn't conform.
Anecdotally speaking, I spent 6+ish years at my first "old tech" company. My org in this (very large) company was constantly simmering with resource actions (mostly small scale layoffs). There was lots of negative energy there. I left to take a programming/data analytics gig in a large, privately held financial company that had never had a layoff. This was unfortunately timed, 2 years later the financial crisis of 2008 kicked off and I (and my entire team) were all laid off. I have been with my current employer for approaching two decades and several of my peers have been on our team for that much time.
I have had a SINGLE manager in that time window. I can't even name all the managers I had in my first job due to near-constant re-orgs and layoffs.
(Well, there was one hiring manager idiot who could not conceive of anything other than linear non-concurrent contracts as being honest - that interview did not go well, but I dodged a bullet!)
I've not experienced a layoff, but I also think its extremely abnormal to be in a position for so long and only have one manager.
It's also the case that the "everything is transactional, fuck your coworkers, leave your job the minute you can plausibly say you learned something and move on, chase impact at any cost because you only have one career" live-to-work contingent is just much louder online, especially here. After all, these are people that are investing a lot in their career, while IME most of my coworkers, even managers (though I don't personally know very many VP-and-up managers) are work-to-live people, mostly interested in their families and hobbies, and seem to rarely post on forums like this.
In any case, I'm fairly certain that there are (or were until recently) Labor Department researchers who have figured this all out empirically and could give us an answer if we knew where to look.
That said, I don't think one can blame the devs for it, since it is the companies themselves that have created the environment where the above holds true. I never understood why - intuitively, it doesn't make sense for the company to underpay its devs to the point where they leave for a competitor, and then come back and get rehired at a much higher salary anyway. But it is what it is, and the workforce has caught on.
It's because they are unable to tell who is worth what. So they outsource it to the market. If you managed to pass the interviews and get hired at the other big tech company, that's proof of value.
It's also self-reinforcing. If you don't leave, it's a signal that you don't trust your own market value to be higher.
For every dev that is able to make the "Microsoft -> Google -> Amazon -> Microsoft" circuit, you have n others who look hardly distinguishable to management who can't do that if they tried quitting. In other words, quitting is risky, in game theoretic terms it's a costly signal of competence.
I also wouldn't be surprised if it had some internal politics reasons that there are certain rules/power games around salary raises that don't apply when someone is hired from scratch.
Regarding this:
> It's because they are unable to tell who is worth what. So they outsource it to the market. If you managed to pass the interviews and get hired at the other big tech company, that's proof of value.
They still hire people who do not come from other big tech, though, so there is a process in place that at least claims to tell who is worth what.
The other problem is that the filter is in practice not for competence but for tolerance of risk.
This is different than what GP asked, it excludes anyone who might prefer stability over fast raises. Are the job-hoppers the majority, or are they just more visible because they're always interviewing?
At my last job people came and went, but I'd say that the job hoppers would be more inclined to say for 3-4 years rather than 1-2 years.
As a further insight, I'd say that my current job is at a big company, and in my town there are probably only four or five other companies of comparable size, while my previous job was medium sized and there were probably a lot of companies of that size that you could move to.
And so, layoffs are not "just another bump" in people's career. They represent a major net negative for people who would otherwise have much more control over the trajectory.
And to be frank, layoffs are scary for any industry, because they usually are correlated with layoffs at other companies. A rising tide lifts all boats, but a sinking tide is difficult to escape. You might be laid off at a time when there is no other job to hop to.
This has been a lot of my career. All my long, successful jobs have lasted around 2-3 years, and it's the time it takes for the company to realize the initiative wasn't worth it. I count four of these stints where I left, and the team was essentially dissolved within a year. I'm not saying I was the key person for the project; I just saw the writing on the wall.
It's been career limiting not having a large-scope project on a growing team, but I don't know if this is something about me, something about the projects I'm a good fit for, or the reality that a lot of projects and teams don't survive 5 years, and I've been exposed to some survivor bias of smart people who have gotten lucky.
Another example is the changing nature of the contracts people are hired under. I'm a scientist, and a lot of positions are inherently term-limited. You end up with a lot of organizations with two different groups of employees: employers who have worked there for decades, and employers who are temporary and work there for a few years hoping to be converted to permanent. Just like in the situation you describe, if you end up on a project that just isn't working out, that does not bode well for your own prospects. That has nothing to do with your own capabilities or how hard you worked on the project. And just like you mention, a lot of the "permanent" people have survivorship bias and do not really understand that they ultimately got lucky and timed the market well.
(Or many of the permanent people were hired as permanent staff originally and do not understand the conditions under which new staff are hired.)
There’s a reason for the low tenure at most firms and it’s primarily due to the lack of rewarding experience and depth of field knowledge at most companies. When you have to get a new job just to get a salary increase that keeps up with inflation you are going to see a lot of job hopping when the skills of the workforce are generally in demand.
How often is it that someone leaves because they can get paid better elsewhere? Why do we think this wouldn’t drive the primary cause of people leaving companies?
Where the fuck is the company showing any loyalty to its workforce?
They have been and are out there. But all it takes is a change on C level and cost cutting suddenly is everything, loyalty a thing of the past. That is, you cannot count on loyalty anymore, even if the company you are working for is currently showing it (or seems to).
You can really see what people are made of when they face adversity. Good luck.
They don’t award experience and depth of knowledge in any way that is indicative of fostering retention
Anecdotally, I’ve heard of many cases of “up or out” in FAANGs, which in other terms is a negative preference for loyalty.
(This, in fact, is one of the reasons people working in those companies perpetually seem to be practicing interview questions and Leetcode every day.)
I mean by that definition, they wouldn't be hiring much, so you don't see them o. n the radar.
Citation needed. The vast majority of people in tech that I know do NOT job hop. So please, I need a citation, not your feelings.
edit: Actually curious about the dead comment. What companies have multi year 401(k) vesting?
Every company I have worked at or seen does a match on a 12 month schedule or less.
Are they thinking of stock options?
per this article, Amazon 401k has a cliff vesting on matched funds at 3 years of employment. After reading around, it seems like 3 years is the legal maximum for 401k cliff vesting, with 6 years permitted for incremental vesting.
https://www.consiliowealth.com/insights/breaking-down-amazon...
At the end of the day, everything is a balancing act, and the amount of change most of us can make as individuals is a drop in the bucket compared to the unfairness that people have to deal with every day. We all have to make judgement calls on where to take a stand and where to play it safe to avoid making things harder for ourselves without actually making a difference that ends up helping anyone, and if people are acting in good faith when trying to make those choices, I don't see any value in criticizing what they end up deciding. If anything, most of us in tech are probably in far more of a comfortable position to be able to speak out against employers (either or own or those in industries where workers are treated even worse), so I think there's a reasonable argument that it's more important for us to because of that. It's not a zero-sum game though; pointing out tech employer hypocrisy doesn't inherently take anything away from pointing out even worse things that other employers do.
Honest question, as a European who doesn't fully understand tipping culture: don't you think that this might be perpetuating a culture of exploitation? Wouldn't you rather spend your money on taxis that at least have some regulations if you are afraid the drivers are getting the wrong end of the deal?
In the micro sense, I find it pretty unlikely that I'm single-handedly making much difference personally in the New York economy. While as software engineer in tech I'm undoubtedly better off than average, I'm certainly not anywhere close to wealthy enough that even spending my entire net worth on tips would affect anything at all.
Layoffs means reducing headcount, your team ends up weaker than it was, and everyone is left wondering if they are next.
Like, I've gone from 200 connections at FB to less than 100 over the years of layoffs.
Most of us job-hop because we have to, not because we want to.
There's a class of people in the tech industry who like to write blogs about how fun and fulfilling it is to constantly change jobs and roles. Those people are highly visible but not representative. Most humans find constant change and uncertainty stressful, not exhilarating.
- Detail-oriented nerds with a rich mental framework around things like optimization, making decisions based on data, perhaps statistical approaches to uncertainty get frustrated when they see their organization making big, irreversible choices without the benefit of all available information. From the IC or line-manager level there may be a bunch of information which you can tell was not taken into consideration.
- Process-oriented people who have put a bunch of effort into planning, goal-setting and measurement based on seemingly reasonable assumptions like "this team that provides service X will continue to exist for the duration of project Y which depends on X" get frustrated when execs throw everything into disarray ... and then 3 weeks later want to know why Y is off track.
As the article describes, often lay-offs end up being bad for the company, not just the employees who get terminated. Even if you're not let go, or even if you just care about the value of your vested equity, it can be quite frustrating to see this happen. And often, because layoffs are generally planned in secret, leadership explicitly precludes the possibility of getting input from the experts in their organization.
While perhaps some layoffs ultimately turn out ok, I think generally the people who go through them can tick off a list of parts of it that were ill-considered and needlessly disruptive, in part b/c of this lack of trust and communication.
I’m not sure how it works with support staff, but aircraft crew have contract structures that so heavily favor seniority that most pilots and FAs will never leave a major willingly during their career.
Your observation, to me, seems more like: tech companies reward new employees over old, airlines do the extreme opposite.
For those industries, I don't think they're getting much from the layoffs besides the short-term "we did layoffs" C-suite bonus. If you're in the Widgetmaker Control Systems industry, why do you want to make your workforce think they have to leave in 3-4 years?
- visas may be dependent on employment, and can make changing jobs harder. In the United States, lots of visa rules are at the discretion of the government (eg how long one may live in the United States on an employer-sponsored visa while unemployed)
- the recent (and dot-com era) tech layoffs have been cyclical: many companies are in layoff-mode or hiring-spree mode at the same time. The time when many companies are not hiring is the worst time to be thrust into the job market
- people may have other job security worries – big tech companies tend to always be growing so it is worrying if they are laying people off instead of moving them from a failing business line to a new one
- in general some people may have a lot of anxiety about changes to income. If you are applying for new jobs while currently holding another, there is much less pressure than if you’re unemployed and need to find a new job (and possibly at a pay cut requiring outgoings to be reduced) before you run out of savings, especially if you don’t have much in savings compared to outgoings, which may be the case for some tech workers (some people spend a lot, or have much of their wealth tied up in property or have a family which requires spending more on eg housing or school fees). The much-worse consequences of failing to get a new job may increase the pressure/stress/discomfort
- this reveals an obvious truth about where the power lies in ‘engineering-focused’ companies and people don’t like it
- people can see a layoff as being like a firing and therefore be unhappy due to hurt pride (or worries about being less desirable in the job market)
- the lack of agency in a layoff is unpleasant. It is quite different from choosing to apply to other jobs.
And besides, the last time I was laid off, it was from a place I’d been at nearly 5 years, a place that did feel almost like family - that’s why I stayed as long as I did.
Sooner or later you'll start to reach a ceiling, and have to defend your salary more. The idea is that if you can end up hitting that ceiling in 10 years by job hopping, that's better than spending 25 years at one place to hit the same figure. The earlier you have maximized your salary, the more you can invest and hopefully retire earlier.
Now, once you hit that ceiling - it kind of sucks to be in a constant state of job hopping. You actually don't get rewarded, and it is more stress than anything. And the older you get, the more stability you'll value - after all, you probably have a mortgage, kids, and all that to account for.
I joined my company with the naive hope there would be some sentiment of family/community and that I'd do a big chunk of my career there. But after seeing how they treat employees, I'm looking for the way out.
That's not everyone, it's just who's on HN.
Most employees of these companies are just regular people wanting regular jobs.
Anecdotally, I've also worked at many startups that became big companies through acquisition and Let me tell you - J&J has a lot of employees who have been there more than 5 years, thousands. They also had several big layoffs of such people during the process.
There are deep differences in expectations and attitudes in these areas, driven by family, culture, and upbringing.
It’s worth mentioning (as a public FYI) that it’s not smart to _expect_ to stay with a company for 10+ years, from a risk mitigation perspective. At least not in 2025.
It’s kind of like picking a stock. Purposely picking just 1 stock for your portfolio carries great risk. Likewise, picking 1 job and/or 1 tech stack and hoping for the best is also high risk. It’s smart to at least dabble in new trendy technology for 1-2 days a month. Maybe review basic leet code questions once a year. Maybe every 2-3 years, apply somewhere else and go through the interview process strictly for practice. Who knows, maybe you’ll get a great offer? Just examples of what one can do to reduce the risk when a layoff occurs.
Regardless of what your culture taught you, try to reduce your risk. It might be outside your comfort zone, but better to be uncomfortable than unemployed. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket (one company, one tech stack). Keep your interview skills a _little_ sharp so that you don’t panic if a layoff occurs. It’s just common sense.
I see wave after wave of job hoppers hired to “transform” the organization and all they ever do is repeat the same old mistakes, which we could tell them if they weren’t too arrogant to listen.
Every job hopper I’ve worked with has simply been a distraction to the greater goals of the organization to serve the customer. I’ve lost all patience and respect for the people who practice it, and the companies that set themselves up in a way which encourages it.
I don’t know how we find our way back, but I think companies and employees would all be better off with some stability and more long term thinking.
Corporate bureaucracies often move slow, and they also want to see you can do the job first. I’m seeing most younger people don’t seem to have patience for this.
They also grossly overestimate their knowledge and ability. I’ve seen a significant number of people talk like they mastered a job after 1 year, then they stared asking me how they could get on my team doing what I do. I did the job they were doing for 10+ years. The reason they think it’s easy is because I defined the processes of how to do it all, wrote all the documents on how to do it, made a training program they went through, and worked with other teams to remove a lot of the toil. I then started building tools to make it easier for anyone off the street to do a lot of the work, and do it at scale. Thats why I have the job I have; it wasn’t given to me, I created it out of a desire to make the team better after realizing we could only go so far if I just worked faster. They didn’t see any of that.
For those that seemed interested, I’d give them the tools they needed to help, to see if they were the type to do this kind of stuff. I’d provide feedback, answer questions, or do anything else I could to help them. Out of the dozen or so who asked, only 1 person has done it to a limited degree. Thats why companies don’t just offer it up quickly and easily. A lot of people talk, but not many back it up.
So when my team lead quit I decided to look around to see if I was right to think I was underpaid, and the first place I applied offered me more than a 20% raise. I think I've been patient, but I'd much rather have money now that later.
Is it possible that "the market" has wages that are higher than the company's revenue per employee?
The last one was the chief architect on a project I was assigned. She turned the org upside down, left the day after her bonus hit, came back 6 months later, turned the org upside down again, and again left the day after her bonus hit. If she comes back a 3rd time I won’t be engaging.
I’ve been burned by these people a lot. They have absolutely obliterated the culture and the stability of our infrastructure, and in a few short years destroyed what I spent a decade helping to build. They replaced it with fragile systems without any kind of support model, which now get full re-writes every year… just because.
Short form: Lack of headcount at the various levels, and the responsibilities at the different levels would skew to "staff developers doing junior tasks because there are no juniors."
--
Many times promotions need an available headcount at that level. The promotion also reflects a change in responsibilities.
The company couldn't have an entire team of staff engineers thinking about things without writing code - so there's an entire setup for "this is how much is budgeted for these roles and these responsibilities."
You could have headcount for 20 developers (1:3 junior to mid), two tech leads, and a staff level architect. That doesn't you could hire / promote 23 staff and have them writing code.
So when a mid level progresses, it isn't always possible to say "you're a tech lead now" as that would mean fewer developers writing code... Unless you're also going to get to the point where your 23 staff engineers are also being tasked with writing the unit tests as if they were a junior developer still learning the codebase.
So in many cases, the mid level developer looking for more has to go somewhere else.
This isn't as much of an issue in a large company where there's more room to move between teams and new positions opening as attrition happens (in the organization I work for, attrition is most likely to happen from retirement).
There's also the aspect of not every company has the same revenue. If you are at the point where you want to make more and the company can't budget for that... then you're looking somewhere else.
Additionally, I think fewer people are job-hopping considering the market is so competitive. I would expect new grads to start staying at their first job for longer, too.
to the new grad, it's "wow half my team just got laid off when the company seems to be doing fine, i guess i better not get too comfortable here"
Adding more rapid-fire context (for the sake of brevity):
* Parents changed jobs every few years growing up, which meant a new city, new home, new schools, and a complete cycling of relationships (forcibly out with the old, forcibly in with the new)
* I watched layoffs in non-tech sectors gradually go from tech-style severance packages, to no packages beyond the required WARN notice period payouts, to filing the notices and hoping nobody asks, to now just paying out any damages after-the-fact in lawsuits
* I spent ~15mo unemployed during the "Great Recession" of '08, ending up having to move to another region of the country for work and spending a night homeless, followed by six-months couch surfing, then another month in a hotel before finally having an apartment again
So all that put together, layoffs and job changes are incredibly traumatic experiences I do my best to avoid at all costs. I am one of those "lifers" who would much rather hunker down for a good wage today, buy a home, sock away savings, and work my way up an internal career ladder than throw myself into an entirely new workplace, colleagues, culture, and standards every year or two. I claw for multiple roles in an org (at the most recent one, I was juggling roles on Private Cloud & Public Cloud, Governance Councils, leading a CaaS ops overhaul, plus other PoCs) specifically to make myself as indispensable as possible and position myself on the internal promotional ladder, because I'd rather stay with one org provided I can eke out a modest living and take care of those I care about (myself included).
Now all that aside, there's also the reality that wage growth from job hopping hasn't turned out to be as big as folks thought. The real growth comes from career promotions, which companies hate doling out internally for profoundly stupid and arbitrary reasons (hence job hopping). I get the impression most folks would stay put if they could get the growth in their career they wanted, but companies would rather hire someone externally to fill a spot than promote someone internally operating at that level; I am very much in that group myself. Heck, we're seeing that now with folks not leaving jobs because they're having difficulty finding that growth (in comp and title) elsewhere, as everyone kind of knuckles down for tough times ahead. That taste of stability will create more "lifers" as you put it, especially when the world outside is increasingly unstable; it's natural that humans (and most animals) will seek stability in times of crisis, taking only as much risk as necessary to preserve their survival.
Something the article doesn't get into is the knock-on effect of layoffs in future business: if workers are let go for what they perceive to be arbitrary or irrational reasons, they're less likely to want to do business with that company again in the future. This is particularly why tech companies offer such good severance packages, as it's their mea culpa of sorts by trying to buy themselves a good reputation on the way out the door. When everyone is doing it though (like the current layoff cycles), it becomes a broader disgust or distaste for established vendors in general, and those workers - when they land a new role - are likely to want to migrate off their employer's products unless their career is tied to it somehow. This can reduce business after cuts had already been made, potentially putting an organization into a cycle of self-harm wherein more cuts are made in response to declining business, which then causes more declines in business, which leads to more cuts, etc. This in turn leaves a huge opening for new startups to enter the hole left behind by established players, undercutting them on pricing and providing better service.
So taking all of that into context when reading the article again, and it paints a pretty telling picture of widespread mismanagement at companies doing unwarranted and highly traumatic layoffs. If the only thing your leadership can do to grow the business is to layoff staff, that's a pretty telling sign that business ain't doing so great in general and leaders are out of ideas to improve it.
When I leave a job, I leave on good terms, they're always sad to see me go but understanding, and I always give my employer 6 or more weeks notice with the additional offer that they can still reach out to me for help if they need after that for as long as my memory remains helpful. A couple even took me up on my offer and asked to pay me for my time.
The time I got caught in a layoff I had the door slammed in my face literally minutes later and barely two weeks severance contingent on signing away rights. So, fuck me I guess.
Maybe the workers who complain understand that circumstances are not always equal.
1. When the product has failed market-fit and company is not raising anymore capital.
2. When the backlog has been cleared.
Tech workers get more pay by job hopping.
I have. You know what striking difference I found with BigTech and their layoffs? These companies don't do layoffs. They are stable, employees feel secure and can evolve in their career without leaving. You know what employees say about their company? "It doesn't give the highest salary, but it's safe and rewarding, and you can actually evolve in your career". Turns out that if people are actually happy, they stay.
Old tech. Places like Motorola and, at least until recently, IBM.
1) Because layoffs are a timeline not in your control.
Leaving a job under my timeline is very different than suddenly being out of a job on somebody else's timeline. On my timeline, I know what my financial situation is and have likely planned around it. Layoffs, on the other hand, can catch people at vulnerable points. Even if you don't get laid off, you will likely have hoarded cash and adjusted major purchases just in case you did.
2) Because most "tech" workers are NOT in a chronic state of job hopping.
Most people working "tech" are in boring businesses doing 8-to-4, have a mortgage, a spouse, and maybe a child or two. They have friends and support networks where they are. They are reasonable at their job, but nothing outstanding that would set them apart from the masses. Moving to another job in the same area is probably not an easy task--either the area has a single big employer or the scattered "tech" jobs are kind of rare. And even if the area has another job, your commute may change from reasonable to absurd. In the worst case, your spouse also gets laid off since tech companies are like sheep and will do layoffs simultaneously for "reasons". Now, you may have to completely leave the area to find a new job.
This all sucks for people who are just getting by day to day.
3) Unless you have really good personal networks right now, job hopping is really difficult.
Sure, senior people can just call up "so-and-so" and wind up with an interview tomorrow. Junior people, not so much.
If the title was "Tech Companies Don't Work", then this might be a good segue into discussing layoffs. For example, layoffs could be evidence of so-called "tech company" dysfunction or mismanagement. But, for some, the "outlier amounts of money" suggest these companies do "work". If the companies survive after layoffs, then clearly layoffs do "work" for the purpose intended.
In addition, let's not pretend thos also isn't by design from the companies. They stopped doing tenure based rewards and are harder than ever to get a raise from. Those people are simply reacting to the terms the companies set.
I know lots of people hop jobs to get promoted. It's understandable too: promotion has become a prestige. It hurts to see coworkers get promoted yet oneself stays at the same place, let alone promotion is the only way to get a larger package. Personally, I think the promotion culture, especially the one popularized by Meta, is pretty ruinous to the tech companies, as many people exclusively focused on getting promoted. That means first write less code but draw more boxes, then draw fewer boxes and write more docs, and then write fewer docs but go to more meetings. Soon it's hard to distinguish a high-level engineer from a technical PM, from a director (except that the IC does not have direct report), or even from a program manager. The end result is that the company gets more bloated, slows down every day, and produces bullshit systems. When those ICs go out to interview, all they can do is throwing around a few terms and fail miserably on even the most basic questions.
BTW I worked for 6 years at one company, then I started job-hopping every 2-3 years. Much better for career.
1. People like to control when they leave a company and join a new one. Most people will have a new job lined up, papers signed, before they put in their resignation at their old job. Getting laid off means a scramble to find something new. There's generally a big power imbalance between an employer and employees; the employee having the power to interview around and leave on their timetable is one of the less common cases where the employee has control over their own destiny.
2. While sometimes layoffs are isolated to a company, at other times (as we've seen over the past several years) it's indicative of an industry-wide trend. In this case, employees should definitely be worried about layoffs, as there well be a lot of their fellow workers competing for a smaller number of job opportunities.
Some observations:
1 - It’s rarely one round.
2 - Companies tend to be the most thoughtful on the first round. Then it looks easy and the precision (and severance) of future cuts goes down. That’s why it’s smart to take a voluntary offer.
3 - Cuts that are broad based (“Every department cuts 15%”) are a sign the company doesn’t know what’s going on or prefers harmony over hard choices.
4 - Layoffs can be a crutch for firms that don’t do performance management. (Less work to do a layoff than have managers counsel bad performers out)
5 - Managers should never promise “No layoffs”
Us former chumby developers were working primarily on the front-end across a variety of embedded-system-like devices (writing code for early versions of 'Smart' TVs from the likes of Vizio, etc) while another team was creating the backend and whenever they would show us the infrastructure diagrams of what they were working on they would just place a "HADOOP Server" wherever they had no idea how they were going to solve some large difficult problem, it was effectively a stand-in for "magic happens here".
Got to the point where there were a hilarious number of layers upon layers of little cylinder icons in the system design titled "HADOOP Server" all interlinked in non-decipherable directed graphs.
I'm pretty sure every single one of us left the new company within 6 months, I lasted about a month and a half.
Edit: removed supposition
From a tech perspective, the company was indeed massively bloated with tons of people clearly not contributing anything.
People were aghast at the brutality of the layoffs, and ideological direction. However, my impression was that there was in fact a tremendous amount of bloat.
And what's that about Grok AI being better than the competition? I think I misheard.
They mostly haven't added new features either, just turned on some flags for features in testing.
It’s not the devs who are bloating development costs. It’s the layers of management making hour long meetings to discuss button placement.
It’s the hours of retros, design meetings, and skip-levels designed to remove any personal investment or sense of ownership from everything.
Since so few individuals are trusted with real decision making power, you need a lot more people to achieve some kind of consensus/buy-in so that you can ship anything.
The devs are at the extreme bottom of this totem poll.
It’s like blaming construction workers for houses being expensive.
And, ofc, that goes without mentioning the multimillion yearly bonuses for C-suite, but we can just forget about that and blame the lowest ranking corporate employees (devs)
Source: I worked at a large tech firm for many years and saw this over and over again.
Blaming developers in such scenarios is silly.
Ofc decisions can have consequences, but that’s what the high pay should be for.
It’s not a black and white issue and I don’t think you need to present it like one.
I don't want to present the problem as black and white but merely express a simple idea : developers DO want to be managed to simplify their lives and focus their time on more important things for them
Yea, duh.
The more your decisions affect the company, the more you’re compensated.
It’s why C-suite commands the biggest salaries.
It’s another reason why orgs are so low trust.
People are not equations.
Let’s define risk in this discussion.
Risk is the relative impact your decisions have on the org at large. If you make the wrong choice as the CEO, you can tank the company.
If someone’s job involves risk, and you pay them peanuts, they’ll either go to a job that doesn’t involve that much risk or make decisions that are always maximally safe, regardless of potential upside, usually at the cost of company growth.
You want your staff to feel comfortable taking risks so that the company can grow, because a stagnant company will die. So you pay your positions more when they have more risk.
I've worked at shops with agile coaches, consultants, product teams, multiple management layers, etc all attending agile planning/retro/blab sessions. They always had really strong opinions on the minutae of each footstep (tickets/sprint), but couldn't speak to where the path was to take us. Essentially zero quarterly let alone annual planning.
A lot of management these days is the equivalent of driving and saying "I'll decide where I'm going when I get to the next stop light", repeated every 2 weeks.
Surprisingly, this type of iteration can actually work; but the caveat is that the people behind the wheel, and reading the maps, need to be very good, and also, experienced enough to make sound decisions. If mediocre (or inexperienced) people try it, it’s a disaster.
From what I can see, the entire tech industry has been institutionalizing mediocrity, so this type of approach is not really available.
If you’re copying this approach from someone who copied it, after hiring an agile coach and reading the phoenix project, you are likely definitionally mediocre.
Also it’s not a one size fits all solution even for the competent. Requires a more direct interface and two way dialogue with users than most devs actually face.
If your leadership is good and competent, they can drive the company any way they feel and have it work.
The most productive I’ve been in my career was when my PO put all tasks that needed to be done in a Google sheet and the whole dev team spent a week just picking tasks off the list. It ended with us shipping our app on time.
No planning, no grooming, no nothing. It was a high trust, high ownership team.
I miss those days.
Sort of worst of both worlds. Everyone develops learned helplessness, checks out or leaves.
Lots of that, going 'round, these days. Companies are firing (or driving off) all the people that can do it right.
They've just removed a huge amount of manager discretion and initiative through multiple top-down dictates that are pretty much killing any low level desire to really innovate and try risky initiatives.
IBM, but with same level product market fit as IBM had for its mainframes, but in this case for markets 100x more important for the global economy.
It's just sad.
You also have to consider that developers are not sales people. They are a cost center.
… devs don’t hire the teams… management does…
Most devs I worked with prefer smaller teams.
It’s like you stopped reading the comment halfway through.
Don't blame managers, they just follow money, why else would they work those crappy jobs. Blame idiots who think short term bonuses should be massive instead of some long term performance and investment of oneself in company's success.
There's many many companies and leadership who want their big empires of people. I'm not too sure they want to fire 80% or be more efficient.
Layoffs today seem more like execs following management fads for easy visible actions and this data would suggest that the actions are actually detrimental to company profits. Juice the numbers for a quarter but add another long term drag to the company
Sudden drastic moves if the business is delivering profits seems like the out-of-control action to take. If the business salary structure is off, or if you need to a different skill mix there are ways to shift that in a profitable business without sudden layoffs damaging the very organization that delivers your current profits.
I don’t disagree with what you said though, simply sharing thoughts - I think it leads to markets being more sensitive to macro strategies rather than actual fundamentals
Such investments are typically market cap weighted, which means their effect on stock prices are neutral. Moreover there's still room for hedge funds (and other sophisticated) investors to engage in price discovery.
Maybe by "HFT" you only mean "those evil hedge funds that are pushing companies to chase next quarters' earnings", but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with high frequency trading. Market making[1] is high frequency trading, and basically involves offering to both buy and sell and given stock, and pocketing the spread. That increases liquidity, making it easier for other traders to buy/sell stock without taking a huge loss. It's unclear why you'd want to ban this, or how you'd distinguish this from whatever evil HFT you actually want to ban.
Liquidity is "real world value". Being able to buy/sell a stock instantly without a massive premium/discount makes stock ownership for the average person possible. Contrast this to an liquid market, like buying houses, where you need to spend months house hunting, and pay a 6% commission on top.
Conclusions and policy implications
To return to our initial question: does stock market liquidity deteriorate when HFTs compete? The results suggest that competition among HFTs increases speculative high-frequency trades, which could lead to a deterioration in market liquidity.
High-frequency traders (HFTs) are market participants that are characterised by the high speed with which they react to incoming news, the low inventory on their books, and the large number of trades they execute. All this is possible for HFTs because they use automated, algorithmic trading, which enables them to analyse markets and execute trades in under a millisecond. The high-frequency trading industry grew rapidly after it took off in the mid-2000s. Today, high-frequency trading represents about 50% of trading volume in US equity markets. In European equity markets, its share is estimated to be between 24% and 43% of trading volume, and about 58% to 76% of orders.
Honest question, why do so many companies strive to go public?
I remember many years ago telling a senior executive that I had concerns that some of the steps we were taking to boost current quarter financials would negatively impact business performance in the long term. He just chuckled and said, "there's no such thing as the long term, only a never ending series of current quarters".
Wouldn't that be insider trading? You can't short your own company before announcing bad things to make money from it.
“If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease,” he said. “I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.”
I think the biggest issue is that it is far too often the _first_ tool that companies reach for, instead of the last. Oh, the market feels unstable? Better cut 5% "just to be safe". There's a national event that might impact our business? We're going to drop 10% of our employees before we know anything.
While it certainly doesn't apply to every company, I wonder what it might look like for executive leadership to make a pledge that it always comes from the top first: The leadership team agrees that it will take a (public) $X financial cut for N months in the event of a layoff-level event/period to help guide the ship through the storm (with compensation on the other side). If it works, you have the loyalty/respect of your employees. If it doesn't, you do the layoffs anyway and those who remain know that you tried.
It has an impact of morale, but not nearly as bad I imagine. I wonder if that is one of the reasons why Europe companies tend to be smaller companies, while US tend to be bigger. Expansion is easier when you can fire at any time, smaller companies are more likely to succeed if they don't over-hire and keep talent around.
It does create some problems but not nearly as bad.
It always baffled me how could a businessman fail to understand that loosing a reliably working employee (even of mediocre productivity) is like shooting your own leg - resulting in having to look for a replacement, train them and hope (certainty is value worth money as well) they are going to be as good. To me it seems it is always better to increase the wage to avoid losing people already working for you so you save yourself from the hassle.
So my opinion is, yes, the damage is done (or being done) but like GM, it'll probably take 10-15 years until we are in the visible territory. Maybe a bit shorter because this is tech.
And the decision to overhire/overfire, set bad strategy, etc all resides in the C-Suite who rarely fire each other or themselves when it all goes wrong. It's only the employees that suffer for every mis-step.
They benefit for the overhiring mis-step.
They had 3 other contractors working on the same functionality and they were all let go within a couple of weeks, because I could get it done 2X faster and without many integration issues.
I would have gladly kept working as a contractor, but when I refused a full-time work offer, they cut all contact off with me.
I would talk to the FTE frequently and they were always overworked and on multiple teams.
Off topic, but I'd like some more specific thoughts regarding what you are aware of for specific automotive technologies that GM has innovated over the past decades, to make this statement.
Intuitively, GM cars do not do well internationally, have been known to have creaky interior build quality, have silly features like turning the reverse lights on when you unlock the car in a parking lot, and are not competitive on a scale of luxury compared to their European and Japanese counterparts.
Traditionally, GM sold other models overseas through brands like Holden or Opel, but these have all been sold off or shut down over the past decade or so except in China. GM now has a much heavier reliance on trucks and SUVs in the North American market. They sell some of those same product overseas still, but in much smaller quantities than before.
Even their foreign brands are widely considered bad cars: "barely Holden' together" etc.
The best guess I have is that the number of layoffs in each year is indicated by some sort of measure of the "overall height" of that slice of the image, so e.g. somewhere around 2020 the number is very large. But it's not at all clear, and it's especially not clear which if any of the various small-scale ups and downs we are supposed to take seriously if this is how it works.
It's a good candidate for the worst statistical graphic I've seen this year. (The opening-door one earlier in the article is another.)
It's gotta be the worst graph I've seen in multiple years. Like someone just overlayed some axes on a desk.
The real purpose of layoffs is to get people to do more work for the same or less money (by firing people and distributing their responsibilities to those who remain) and to suppress wages because nobody is asking for raises when they fear for their jobs.
Big Tech is really out of ways to grow their business. The only way they can keep growing profits is by cutting costs and the biggest cost is labor. It's really that simple.
That's how it works. You have someone who is a great leader who started a company and treated their employees well, then the behemoth corporation waits for them to die to start gutting their values. It happened at my company. It's basically just a lite version of a private equity takeover.
You answered your own question. For a lot of layoffs, cost reduction isn't the goal; it's disciplining the workforce who were increasingly assertive at work about direction and conditions.
It’s just the easiest way to make the stock price go up.
Layoffs caused twitter to bump in price. Same with Microsoft when they laid off all those game devs.
C-suite don’t care about profit or losses in tech, just the stock price.
In the 2010s, hiring devs increased stock prices. In the 2020s mass firings do.
It’s just money. Simple as.
For many companies the largest cost is labor. Also in many companies, managers amass power by the number of people they manage. If the C-suite doesn't explicitly push for layoffs they will likely not happen, causing them to not reduce costs as quickly as they wanted.
Regarding "managers try to amass staff," I've seen some of that for sure, but it's not universal and acting like it's some kind of iron rule of organizations is an op.
Most managers are evaluated based on the impact their organization is having, not the size of it, unless the firm is incredibly poorly run.
What does happen, and where these layoff edicts come from, is that the executives fear the management is more loyal to their directs than they are to leadership. They feel that if they want to inflict something on the workforce they have to "force" management's hand, because otherwise management will resist.
If your Labor doesn't tangibly produce quantifiable profit, than you must furlough staff to stay in business. Assigning fault in such situations is a fools errand, as everyone suffers losses in the end ($18k to $45k in lost training resources per person etc.)
Best of luck, =3
The trick is being profitable to have around, and knowing when to leave on your own terms for something better. =3
Do non-science journalists just not know about correlation vs causation? Does it really not occur to them that maybe the companies that didn't do layoffs were healthier and that's why they overperformed? Wouldn't a 10 year old know that?
Correcting for it: I don't know. It would be very hard. You could try to control for variables like profitability, etc., but there are so many and you don't know what you don't know. But the correct response to absence of valid data isn't drawing conclusions from obviously bad data.
It just cracks me up that one paragraph later the author points out:
"Mass layoffs are often symptoms of unsound business strategies and don’t do anything to cure the larger problem."
and yet somehow didn't see that that sentence alone proves his previous one was pointless.
> There are findings that suggest layoffs lead to both short-term and long term issues, including: > - A 2x as likely chance of bankruptcy compared to companies that haven’t done layoffs.
Obviously! Because a huge number of the companies undergoing layoffs are about to go under and are using layoffs as a last ditch survival effort.
The author may be right, but every fact and figure presented in this article fails to distinguish between healthy companies in healthy industries using layoffs as a lever to increase stock prices, and layoffs happening in industries/companies that are collapsing.
Or maybe the culture is already rotten before the layoff. I've seen so many companies in the bay area have become so bloated and bureaucratic. Directors and VPs have very senior engineers who exclusively go to meetings to "align". Directors who report to directors who report to directors who report to VPs who report to VPs who report to VPs. PMs and engineers and managers are all gatekeepers who focus exclusively on ensuring that a project will not fail before it is even conceptualized. Distinguished engineers draw bigger boxes and pass them to Principal Engineers who draw smaller boxes and pass them to Senior Staff Engineers to draw even smaller boxes until a poor E5 or E4 engineers implement the whole thing. We have so many professional box drawers, expert meeting goers, seasoned report writers, fierce gatekeepers, anything but engineers who can implement systems end to end. As a result, a 6-month one-person project gets finished half assed by a team of 60 with 5 layers of report chain. A 3-week project requires 3 months of approval and another three months of PoC.
In such case, what can a company possibly do to at least survive a little longer, even in hope of improving its culture? I guess layoff is not a bad answer.
It's about power, and inculcating fear.
The CEO who "cuts" people at a company is like the Aztec priest who plunges the knife in atop the pyramid. The bloody spectacle is the point. It's as much about everyone who's watching as it is about the specific victim. It says, "I can do this to you. I can inflict pain without reprisal. Behold my power."
That's the whole point. Who is afraid of whom?
These people have the money. We depend on that money in order to live. They are reminding us of that fact. Now they demand obedience and harder work. 40 hours? Not enough. Elon sleeps at the office, why don't you? You have to be "super hardcore".
Partly, this is punishment for the challenge that was raised to CEO power from around 2016 to 2022. CEOs have been furious that they have felt fear of their workers. Now they want those workers to feel fear. In interviews, Andreesen has said almost exactly this, if not in quite so many words.
A similar theory is at the root of Fed policy, which hinges on the idea of a "wage price spiral". In their view, inflation is caused not by the accumulation of capital within a price-insensitive upper quantile, or by the constriction of economic chokepoints by consolidation, but by workers' ability to bargain for higher wages. The solution to inflation, they essentially come out and say, is to put workers in their place.
There is a united front here. It is about who fears whom, the end. It is about your emotional state. In a literal sense, it is terrorism.
So in that sense, yes, layoffs work. Are you financially independent? No? Are you afraid? Yes? Then they're working.
In round numbers, that's enough money to cover roughly 10,000 employees for 25 to 50 years (depending on how much you think the salary averages out to).
Regardless, the CFO said one of her priorities this year was more cost cutting.
I was pointing out that there doesn't seem to be an immediate need for layoffs at Google, based on the fact they have more money on hand than some small countries. Even with horrible future revenue projections, that seems like a reasonably large buffer.
But now that you mentioned it, there's nothing wrong with a corporation looking out for the long term interests of their employees. It would actually be smart for Google to act like a "jobs program" and retrain staff, or find work until the business cycle comes back around.
(Brandolini's law is alive and well.)
Every problem/opportunity seems to just need a few more headcount.
Lots of managers are actively trying to increase their headcount for self promotional reasons.
The whole thing seems really counterproductive.
Maybe not quite that, but investors and the board (hah!) should ask really hard questions about how they got there.
I'm not sure what you're claiming here. Civilian employees are less than 3% of federal spending, so it won't have a measurable effect on spending. Some employees, like IRS employees, bring in revenue.
It's mostly about conformity. They heard that all the serious companies are laying off. So they've got to lay off too. Can't be seen breaking convention.
With big tech, a few years back when over-hiring was the conventional wisdom they were for that too.
Atleast 2 of the fast growing companies I have been a part of have had serious layoffs that were very successful in cutting dead weight that had accumulated because of fast and loose hiring and poor middle management. So it can be done well.
By and large though they are a sign to jump from the soon to be sinking ship... so it's very important to know what kind it is and act accordingly.
Well obviously.
It’s like saying surgery doesn’t work, because people who have recently undergone surgery are more likely to be experiencing health issues.
I think that company culture stands for a framework that enables internal cooperation within the company. Now i am not sure if cooperation is currently valued over internal competition in the tech industry, but my impression is that the opposite is the case for most shops. So the question is: how did we get here? what are the factors that have led to the prevailing choice of priorities?
The article says its the stock market that values short term gains over anything else. Now maybe its really because running fast and breaking things is the only way we know how to do things in tech?
A large company in actual financial distress will sell off a division.
Will they cut the right 50-80%? Chances are close to nill.
And the article is right that layoffs curb morale. Then again, what hurts morale even more, especialy for your true performers, is not laying of the incompetent, the 0 net contribution carreer ladder climbers or the pfiepdom pyramid seat fillers and the bloated 'management support' departments.
When your choice is basically having someone incompetent on the team vs not having the guys who carry it the most, I think most people will take the former. Incompetence can be managed to minimize damage, but there's no substitute for lack of competent people.
Ah, the old strategic realignment PR BS. "Its not cost cutting because our C levels are clowns and screwed up. Its a strategic realignment for AI investment ". Lol. Didn't Salesfarce and Fakebook both use that one?
When will AI replace upper management? It can't do any worse.
> “You could blame the workforce,” he says, “or the managers and leaders who are leading that workforce.”
They often do fire large swaths of middle managers - when Musk bought Twitter cutting out the middle of the hierarchy and the orgs that didn't need to exist was a big part of it. It's the same with DOGE. After the twitter layoffs they've shipped more features, faster, with better margins (and he fired the CEO). Meta and Coinbase over hired during the covid 'zero interest rate phenomena' and had to fix it. Reducing hours instead is a joke - I find it hard to believe anyone being honest takes that seriously.
Of course layoffs are correlated with bad company performance. I dont know if they help, but i would expect the pattern either way.
Especially the FAANG folks - they get pissed when getting fired from there like DUDE you are literally in the top 0.01 of earners on the planet get over yourself. Poor financial planning and overleveraging yourself are not excuses when you get laid off / fired!!!
Just go read stuff on Blind for more of what I am talking about... i.e "got laid off... nervous to retire with 7 million?!?" like hey, some of us here will probably never see that kind of money in our entire lives
Paraphrasing: "I, an engineer, am smarter than an economist therefore the article is wrong."
Nothing of value to be found at the top of the comments.
I've been laid off, eight months after a hiring blitz for the exact division I worked for. Now, I could've told them the acquisitions they did were stupid and that the products were never going to be profitable, but I don't live in Manhattan, so those decisions are above me. But that didn't stop them from juicing the stock price and ruining our lives anyway.
Fuck these companies. They could do better, and they choose not to. And every last sycophant here is complicit.
I hate layoffs (from both perspectives), but the article sounds like whining "we shouldn't break up".
The alternative of furlough only works if everyone else is doing it. If everyone else fires left right and center, the people being furloughed will still have low morale.
I think it's better to avoid it in the first place, by not over hiring, as others have pointed out.
Layoffs don't help companies unless they can reliably remove the worst parts. At most large public companies, the cancerous bureaucracy protects itself and the parts removed are closer to median performers, or even above-median performers. The system gets smaller and less efficient.
Layoffs can be necessary to get the company to fit through a certain sized hole (in the form of cash flow constraints), but it won't be better at what it does on the other side of the hole, it will just continue to exist.
Layoffs work when there is an accurate discriminating mechanism for who stays and goes. The best example of this (outside of private equity turn-arounds that are not widely known) is Twitter. Outside engineering talent was brought in as an oracle, immune to Twitter's bureaucracy. It reliably discriminated between value-adding and not. As a result, the company became incredibly lean and even consistently profitable.
If you mean a negative cash flow and operating income - it doesn't mean much, as we need to know why.
Taking into account the jump in "Revenue", positive "EBIT" and so on, I would imagine that it was because of some sort of "strategic investment", like some acquisitions probably?
What am I missing? I would definitely be happy with such reports if that was my company.
Also, by all accounts their revenue has dropped so much they're having issues even covering the loan payments, much less having enough for any semblance of profit.
I just happened to watch some old talk or interview with Gabe Newell recently, and he said industry thinking at the time Valve was founded was of a certain kind, and Valve took the opposite approach from the industry - the industry was looking to get cheaper programmers, and Valve went the other way and looked for the most expensive programmers, and so forth. Valve has probably less than 400 people working there (don't know the 2025 headcount), but makes billions a year in profit.
The basic problem they face is that they pay a fixed wage for complete IP ownership (horrible deal) and so they intentionally do not measure and reward actual performance because they do not want to compensate high performers based on the value they create.
There isn't really a solution because these companies are making rational profit maximizing decisions, it just happens that mediocrity and managed decline of locked in revenue streams is profit maximizing for them.
Ten years ago, an oft-repeated quote: “you’re not paid what you’re worth, but for the value you create.”
In light of that, is the argument that performance is institutionally obscured so that devs don’t realize how much leverage they really have? I can see traces of that in seeing shipped products as less the result of one/few devs working hard and more as multiple teams, as you now have two levels of personnel abstraction to diffuse potential leverage (individual/their team, and the teams among themselves).
Most stuff I have done would probably be worthless without the sale people and customer relations in place. Like 0$ value.
Twitter has literally issued authoritarian threats to advertisers to come on its platform or else because of how much its valuation has dropped and how much money has been lost - this is the worst example of "engineering oracle fixing things" I could possibly imagine.
You tell a decent story at the start, but your choice of example couldn't be worse.