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Ask HN: Who is firing?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#141

Post by expertentipp »

elcct wrote: post #137
expertentipp wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Berlin... 'start-up' > backed by Axel Springer These are already two red flags, enough for a person familiar with the Germany's job and tech markets to stay away.

Care to elaborate?

Berlin startups are infamous for hiring foreigners from countries with low salaries, ideally from outside of EU (so no free movement of workers with Germany) and paying them below the market salary. Low pay + dealing with German bureaucracy + sky rocketing prices of everything in Berlin = person has a problem.

As for Axel Springer - their understanding of internet innovation is quite... "skewed". e.g. as some kind of manifest they blocked their tabloid's website (bild.de) for web browsers with enabled ad blockers or they are notorious for suing developers of ad blockers:

http://www.reuters.com/article/germany-advertising-adblockin...

Their philosophy seems to be "the internet is a platform to deliver advertisements" - quite toxic in my opinion.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#142

Post by a3n »

yarou wrote: post #139
a3n wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful. It doesn't matter enough to risk your wellbeing.

The truth always matters. I'd rather be a truthful mendicant than a lavishly rich liar.

To the point of winning a lawsuit but losing everything else?

It doesn't matter in the sense that most of these disrupters are just going to disappear from lack of need anyway. They're so much spaghetti, thrown on the wall by VC to see what sticks. The lie is that most of it matters.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#147

Post by xyzzy123 »

yarou wrote: post #139
a3n wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful. It doesn't matter enough to risk your wellbeing.

The truth always matters. I'd rather be a truthful mendicant than a lavishly rich liar.

Mm how about a polite, forgiving person who is decently well off?

I would say that it pays to be forthright, but understanding. Granted there are exceptions.

Bear in mind that one person's "unvarnished truth" might come from a lack of experience or high expectations that are difficult to meet at scale and in a commercial environment.

There are generally a lot of tradeoffs being made in companies. A "tire fire" of php might be compensated for by testing and deployment practices or hell it might just be a fun place to work if you can live with the mess.

On the other hand, you might have "architect driven design" where everything is a diamond on paper but the implementation is 8 kinds of design pattern wrong.

Or you might have a great technical team and codebase but no actual value proposition (the funny part is that success itself invites people and pressures that unsuccessful products don't have - some of the best places I've worked had unsuccessful products but great management and teams... once success and revenue kick in, suddenly there are a lot more suits and stakeholders)...

Or you could have some kind of situation where not only is the work pointless, the organisation is so utterly dysfunctional that... you'd definitely leave if it didn't pay so damn well.

One person's "super messed up" is another person's "this is exactly where I want to work". Some people function well in less structured environments and some in more... so what is truth versus just a perspective?

(agree there are exceptions where the truth must be told. I draw the line at not getting paid...)

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#148

Post by buro9 »

throw1988_9121 wrote: post #107
hinkley wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much my experience. Once one useful person gets laid off, everyone can't help but think they're the next useful person to get laid off. And in small groups it feels personal. So now you're playing CYA instead of taking the good kinds of risks with big payoffs.

In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds? I've only seen the later happen, and personally I think I'd prefer the first one. If you know that after that large layoff round the rest of the company is safe, I'd venture that might be better for the morale of the remaining employees.

> In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds?

Both hurt morale.

I've seen many rounds of redundancy and layoffs in UK companies and both the huge layoff rounds and the slowly trimming back everywhere.

With the big rounds, the "We'll only do this once so we'll do it big and won't do it again" is never true. The whole company knows it's just time but at least you can prepare.

The axe is on a pendulum and if you give it a lot of momentum and swing from a great height it will swing back in good time and take off another chunk of the company.

With the small rounds of denying there is an issue and trimming a person from each team, it feels like you are being hunted and it's easy to walk around and see that the company isn't doing enough to address whatever the issues are, it's too cautious.

The axe is on a pendulum and if you only swing it a little the cadence is much higher and it will swing often and constantly slice of a little.

The axe is on a pendulum, once it starts swinging it will swing again. It never swings just once.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#149

Post by Naritai »

throw1988_9121 wrote: post #107
hinkley wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much my experience. Once one useful person gets laid off, everyone can't help but think they're the next useful person to get laid off. And in small groups it feels personal. So now you're playing CYA instead of taking the good kinds of risks with big payoffs.

In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds? I've only seen the later happen, and personally I think I'd prefer the first one. If you know that after that large layoff round the rest of the company is safe, I'd venture that might be better for the morale of the remaining employees.

The small layoffs are not usually done for morale reasons; they're done to avoid having to give a WARN notice [1].

Even in cases where a WARN notice is not legally required, it is a PR problem to be admitting that you're laying staff off. People gossip, they think your products must not be good, new candidates have second thoughts, etc. But if you're just firing 1-2 people a week, then (you hope) nobody notices and you can keep putting on a happy public face.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#150

Post by soVeryTired »

flukus wrote: post #100
ryandrake wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt part of it is how these companies are funded. There's so much private money, and nobody knows what to do with it so it gets tossed at these hobby projects, and by some miracle one of them turns into a unicorn. But there are other differences now too. You can't simply ridicule anything anymore. Back in 2000 we could point to a company trying to sell designer kitty litter on the Internet and laugh at how stupi…

> Maybe this is an old-timer's "get off my lawn" rant, but I preferred it when it was OK to poke fun at things that you knew were ridiculous. It came off as an old timers rant, but I still enjoyed it :) Maybe we strayed a bit too far from the "greed is good" 80's. There's nothing wrong with starting a business to make money. It's more pervasive than just dotcoms though. I see the same things we stuff like solar roadw…

Too many people mistake skepticism for cynicism.
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