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Of all the national leaders that could be considered scary - Putin, Xi Jinping, etc. - Jacinda Ardern scares you?
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Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
911–920 of 1001 posts
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#912All these companies have way more employees than they need. 90% of employees mostly add complexity and the remaining 10% spend most of their time trying to refactor all the unnecessary complexity. So I'm not surprised by this.
I hope these layoffs will be good for the industry as ex-employees join competitors... Maybe in such competitive environment, people will care about writing maintainable code again. The effects of the corporate employment bloat are visible all around us.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#913Earlier quoted context omitted.
New Zealand gets the unfortunate legacy of having to share the "zero COVID" mantra with a small group of fellow partners like China (which the NZ PM promoted harder than any other leader via speaker circuits). But otherwise I don't know much about NZ to critique.
NZ does not have a zero covid strategy, and never did. Pretty much all of NZ's covid restrictions have been removed, and there are thousands of reported cases at the moment.
> The country moved to a nationwide lockdown on 17 August 2021, after the detection of one new local case outside of quarantine in Auckland.
This is the very definition of "zero-COVID".
They didn't abandon zero-COVID for another 5 months (Oct 21) when they finally admitted the data showed it didn't work.
Of course it's good they stopped using the strategy. But I remember vividly how the NZ PM promoted zero-COVID (and this was cheered by the media in Canada) as a working strategy until it no longer made sense politically or scientifically.
China has the bulk of the blame for continuing this failed strategy, but they were far from alone in the reasons why it was adopted it in the first place.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#914Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of all the national leaders that could be considered scary - Putin, Xi Jinping, etc. - Jacinda Ardern scares you?
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Hi, can you please refrain from posting political flamebait here? It's not very productive, and it's against the commenting guidelines
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#915Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Hi, can you please refrain from posting political flamebait here? It's not very productive, and it's against the commenting guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Didn't this conversation become political flamebait with the remark about the NZ PM "scaring" someone?
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#916Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too. I was laid off at the beginning of October. I got three good offers, picked the best and signed the contract. I went through about 15 interviews and applied to maybe 50 positions.
If I were at 5-10 years experience, I'd probably have much better luck. That seems to be the sweet spot.
Are you trying to interview for principal eng positions? Imo it’s hard to do except for some super early stage enterprises no matter the market conditions
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#917Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I were at 5-10 years experience, I'd probably have much better luck. That seems to be the sweet spot.
Are you trying to interview for principal eng positions? Imo it’s hard to do except for some super early stage enterprises no matter the market conditions
imo the meaning of "principal engineer" is wildly different between companies anyway. That means something if you're in a FAANG shop but if it's some place nobody's ever heard of it's just needed because all the midlevels already have senior titles.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#918Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are rarely if ever any serious consequences to top execs screwing up wealthy companies. That is because any exec worth her salt would negotiate a generous golden parachute even before starting the job. And why is she able to do that? Because there are very few competent candidates available in the market. If you think the job is easy, just go and get one of those exec positions and you will learn.
"Because there are very few competent candidates available in the market" Just because you're hired for one of those positions doesn't mean you're competent.
Yes, but that is not possible to know a priori. So people rely on heuristics. And if things go wrong, execs want to make sure that they have a golden parachute.
Do you have an idea to judge exec competence effectively? If so, you can have a very successful company based on that.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#919Earlier quoted context omitted.
New Zealand gets the unfortunate legacy of having to share the "zero COVID" mantra with a small group of fellow partners like China (which the NZ PM promoted harder than any other leader via speaker circuits). But otherwise I don't know much about NZ to critique.
Zero Covid may actually be plausible for small, isolated island nations with limited entry points, like NZ, even without locking everyone inside their homes like in China. And it's probably wise for countries to be using COVID as a test run for something worse. We live in the age of pandemics now, and will probably get hit by something worse eventually. Something like an airborne Ebola strain (50% mortality) or airbo…
> Zero Covid may actually be plausible for small, isolated island nations with limited entry points, like NZ, even without locking everyone inside their homes like in China.
So why doesn't Japan and Sri Lanka and Hong Kong and Taiwan and every island Caribbean/Pacific nation not have limited zero-COVID policies right now? It works right? The data shows Delta is still kicking.
At least be honest they made a very serious gamble with their citizen's freedoms, the economic well being of the poor, and the livelihood of small businesses and it didn't work. And every time a compromise is made in the future it will be easier to make the second time.
You can argue it might have worked, people were scared, they were working with limited information, the media cheered them on for acting boldly, etc, etc. But that's how we evolve. We learn from mistakes. Which is critically important for discourse going forward.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#920Earlier quoted context omitted.
Calm down. Demand is super strong, even right now. It's almost impossible to get a decent software engineer who has a strong command of the English language and can articulate himself. Most developers hitting the market with CVs are bootcamp generated and they don't have the slightest idea (and neither the interest) of what they are doing. They'll disappear as soon as the money does. Unless you have a family and live…
It's almost impossible to get a decent software engineer who has a strong command of the English language and can articulate himself. No, it's not.
A 5000+ person company I have consulted for is hopelessly unable to find anyone who has advanced Python ecosystem experience for less than $200k. There's lots of boring companies that pay competitive-ish salaries ($140-180k), but most people gravitate to the shiny big companies that look good on a resume.