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Databricks counts being laid off as “red flag”

teamblind.com

101–110 of 201 posts

Re: Databricks counts being laid off as “red flag”

#101
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a deeply important change you'd provoke. Much greater incentive to absolutely silent rejection. You know nothing you can't sue.

Possibly, in which case someone on the inside would have to be incentivized to be a whistleblower, either due to moral or financial considerations if silent rejections were covering up the illegal activity. With that said, people are lazy, they slip up or they become demoralized, disgruntled, and comfortable with spilling the beans. More so in a volatile macro with layoffs compressing more work amongst less staff. TL…

Whistheblowing is a red flag, and you can be sure this is a matter of public enough record for them to know

Re: Databricks counts being laid off as “red flag”

#102
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would then leave a genuine red flag on your CV.

If you dont stick to a bad job and leave within a few months… just don’t put that short term job on your CV. The CV doesn’t need to include anything that’d make you look bad.

Depends on how the rest of your CV looks like. If you just have short term jobs, sure it’s a red flag. If you have one ones in a while, everyone will understand that it just didn’t work out.

Re: Databricks counts being laid off as “red flag”

#103
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just glanced at their career page and all the US based engineering and product management jobs are in the bay area. California doesn't have protected status for being unemployed.

It is very weird that your precise case has to fit a couple of narrow criteria to be protected against discrimination in the US. From a moral perspective, discrimination is discrimination regardless of its grounds. The default position should be that it is illegal. This would avoid endless sterile discussion about whether this or that is a protected class.

So all hiring, all decision-making about people would be presumed illegal, until proven to be based on unprotected characteristics? Sounds.. inconvenient? Not how the law generally works?

Re: Databricks counts being laid off as “red flag”

#105
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this is the best analogy because if I had a choice of cars I would almost always pick the one that has not been in a collision :p

That's fair. A car that is in a collision is always at best as good as a car that has not been in a collision, whereas that's not the case with an employee who was terminated. I was trying to get at where you don't need to trust someone else's judgement of something, you can just ... go look yourself. Or hire your own expert. Because why do those other things if they don't actually change the outcome?

Maybe closer one: You stop dating a prospective partner when you find out it was their ex who instigated their breakup.

Re: Databricks counts being laid off as “red flag”

#106

In a labor market where Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft haven't recently released collectively dozens of thousands of well-qualified workers into the pool, I suspect this situation might have ended differently. It's "buyer's market" out there now and employers can afford to be extra picky. This dynamic may not have applied to the poster's case since those other available resources would have been laid off as…

You do not compete with tech workers, you compete with developers. More specifically, you compete with developers at your level of exp. More specifically, you compete with developers at your level of exp and field of expertise. Those layoff are meaningless.

To build on this with concrete numbers, warn tracker used public data to break out the number of affected employees by more specific data.

You can see that from Google there are 300 entry level SWEs, 500 mid level, and 200 senior level. The whole industry had 12,000 Google employees, but you’re only competing with a few hundred SWEs of your experience level (using payroll level as a proxy for experience).

You can imagine this is repeated for various companies, and could still be thousands of new job seekers, but it does limit the perception of a “flood” of engineers.

https://www.warntracker.com/?tab=charts

Re: Databricks counts being laid off as “red flag”

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find strange in OP's story is that HC and recruiter actually gave a reason for the rejection. Most companies after they reject you are tight-lipped. > denied by multiple Databricks employees in the [Blind] thread, who clearly said... That proves nothing. HR departments shill on Blind.

I agree “HR departments shill on Blind” but the claim made by several people in that thread (at least one who said they are a hiring manager) that Databricks has recently hired multiple people who were laid off is verifiable as true or false. It’s not just a generic weasel statement like “it’s not our policy to…” or “we treat all applicants fairly” or something like that.

[deleted]

Re: Databricks counts being laid off as “red flag”

#109

There's a missing bit of context here about what "laid off" actually means in this person's case. We are assuming it means a non-performance related reduction in force, but it may be something different. If I had to guess, I'd suspect the hiring committee found reason to suspect this person was laid off for performance / behavior. For example, perhaps their company has not conducted a large layoff, or is known for la…

> for all I know Databricks' HC is really made of idiots

Given you have one of them replying in the comments on that site and throwing around vague accusations, I'd say they are idiots.

Re: Databricks counts being laid off as “red flag”

#110
post #15

This is asinine, discriminatory and unfair. I'd even say it's borderline malicious. Glad they named and shamed. I would't do any business with this company, nor attempt to work for them. A RIF has nothing to do with a person's performance .. at least officially. One has to assume it was a business decision only, not performance based, although with a large reduction it seems improbable that the people left would be,…

For anyone like you (and me) who says being laid off doesn't mean bad performance you have someone else saying it's good that Meta, Twitter, etc. are cleaning house, getting rid of all the slackers. Those are the folks calling it a red flag later. The thing, is we want to believe that a company makes careful decisions about whom to lay off. We know it doesn't quite work like that but as you said yourself there can be…

Wanting to believe layoffs are selective is brainworms.

I've been watching the layoffs affect former colleagues, former workplaces, etc lately - and pretty much all of them are pseudorandom.

Got assigned to a project that's being cut? You could be the worlds strongest worker, a 9001x engineer, you are still gone.

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