Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy • Hacker News Board

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#181

Post by scarface74 » Wed, May 24, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

Tade0 wrote: post #62

underratedbug wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are presupposing that boom and bust hiring is bad, and worse than a more steady state approach. If one assumes perfection is impossible, it seems you suggest erring on the side of perpetually under-hiring as opposed to ever over-hiring. Why is that better?

People often have to uproot their lives to get into a new role. It's only ultimately worth it if it's a long-term commitment on both sides. Also later in life having to suddenly switch jobs is neither easy nor desirable.

Anyone who thought that any job was long term was naive. Did they not read the whole “at will” work thing that I have signed before accepting any job.

I have never in my 25+ years in tech thought that any job was going to be “long term”.

I also sacrificed more compensation for the stability of my family until my youngest graduated and then I took a job at BigTech.

It didn’t require me to relocate. But it could have required extensive travel.

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#182

Post by scarface74 » Wed, May 24, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

newswasboring wrote: post #108

bilvar wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cry me a river, the same people who demand a long-term commitment from their employer will jump ship in an instant for 10k more after 6 months of employment. Companies are full of them.

When a person moves to another company, the company doesn't have to move to another state and restart its social life from scratch. The person with more power, needs to take more responsibility. Holy batman, sometimes I feel like people don't even have a heart anymore.

Isn’t it your responsibility to weigh the pros and cons and risk for uprooting your family for more compensation?

It’s business. It’s purely transactional. Why would you expect a company to “have a heart”?

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#183

Post by tombert » Wed, May 24, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #160

tombert wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah; the thing that kind of triggered me on this was the Google CEO saying in December or January that he "takes full responsibility" for all these layoffs. "Full responsibiliyt"? Really? How are you doing that exactly? By still getting your full paycheck and bonus while you fired twelve thousand humans because you didn't consider that the economy after years of a pandemic might be volatile?

Would those 12 thousand people at Google have been better off if they hadn’t work there? Would you have not taken a job at Google if you knew that you would be laid off four years later or would you have saved aggressively and been preparing for your next role?

Four years I would have taken it. Four months? Not so sure.

My understanding is that a lot of people who were fired were only hired in 2021 and 2022, just to be let go in the tail end of 2022.

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#184

Post by scarface_74 » Wed, May 24, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #51

underratedbug wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are presupposing that boom and bust hiring is bad, and worse than a more steady state approach. If one assumes perfection is impossible, it seems you suggest erring on the side of perpetually under-hiring as opposed to ever over-hiring. Why is that better?

> Why is that better? Because it doesn't create unnecessary suffering for the unfortunate people who find themselves out of a job because some executive over-allocated for a particular role or department. Fundamentally, we want people to still participate in the capitalist system and not reject it because they're constantly treated like cattle.

So who suffered from getting a job at Google for three or four years or any other large tech company?

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#185

Post by giraffe_lady » Wed, May 24, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

bell-cot wrote: post #165

FWIW - does anyone know of a tech employee who took this fallacy into account when making a career decision? Say, they looked at a company, concluded that it was over-hiring during a boom, and would likely be cutting heavily during the inevitable bust. So - they didn't apply, or told the recruiter "sorry", or rejected the job offer, or made a career move to a more-stable ship?

I know people who accounted for this but took the offers anyway. For mid-level engineers during the pandemic the jumps in pay were absurd. So I definitely had friends who took a 40% bump knowing a layoff was possible/likely in a couple years but figuring it would still be worth it.

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#186

Post by stavros » Wed, May 24, 2023, 2:19 PM UTC

permanent wrote: post #135

auggierose wrote: post #133

> Just the law of large numbers says that eventually you reach all of the people who are likely to be your customers and you stop growing (see Netflix). That has nothing to do with the law of large numbers. That's just discrete and strictly monotonic growth hitting any upper bound eventually. What a bullshitter.

Agreed. Truly despise when otherwise smart tech bloggers use jargons (incorrectly) to appear authoritative

Ahh, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#187

Post by wokwokwok » Wed, May 24, 2023, 2:25 PM UTC

auggierose wrote: post #133

> Just the law of large numbers says that eventually you reach all of the people who are likely to be your customers and you stop growing (see Netflix). That has nothing to do with the law of large numbers. That's just discrete and strictly monotonic growth hitting any upper bound eventually. What a bullshitter.

eh. Who cares?

Come on, thats a fallacy right there. One of the classic ones right? Instead of countering the argument by the opponent, you just pick one little part that you can nit-pick some element of and attack that instead.

Suuurrreee... the law of large numbers isn't a thing. So what?

> What a bullshitter.

Hm.

Call it whatever you want, secundum quid, inductive fallacy, faulting forecasting... who cares.

There's a point being made here and it's got nothing to do with the specifics of what the curve is called.

It was bad, incorrect and incompetent forecasting to speculate that sudden sharp trends will continue as the 'new normal'. That's what people did, and it's blown up in their faces.

The point being made by this article is not that a bunch of people screwed up, it is:

> Your job isn't to assume things will always continue just as great as they are now. Your job is to be realistic about the future and position your company for whatever comes next.

Doesn't seem that unreasonable.

Seems like the sort of thing a whole lot of people in senior roles could have done a better job at.

Seems like advice that people right now should be paying attention to.

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#188

Post by machinawhite » Wed, May 24, 2023, 2:29 PM UTC

bilvar wrote: post #104

Tade0 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often have to uproot their lives to get into a new role. It's only ultimately worth it if it's a long-term commitment on both sides. Also later in life having to suddenly switch jobs is neither easy nor desirable.

Cry me a river, the same people who demand a long-term commitment from their employer will jump ship in an instant for 10k more after 6 months of employment. Companies are full of them.

Are you serious right now? You can talk to your therapist about it, noone on this earth cares about some corpos losing money or workers.

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#189

Post by machinawhite » Wed, May 24, 2023, 2:30 PM UTC

bilvar wrote: post #168

Eisenstein wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason no one shows loyalty is exactly because it is not reciprocated. Why should the employee have to be loyal when they are just a number to an HR department and the CEO will strike off their job without a second thought? You have things backwards. People used to be loyal, back when you could work at a place, grow your career, and retire with a pension. It wasn't the laborers who broke the loyalty deal.

The first part of your response is just equivocation. The latter is just an assertion lacking substantial evidence.

You're delusional.

Re: Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy

#190

Post by kiliantics » Wed, May 24, 2023, 2:31 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #167

samsari wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are doing their job for them. A worker with slightly better prospects than others is still just a worker and ultimately still in the same precarious situation as they must still seek employment to earn a salary to live.

So is the CEO also just a worker who must seek employment to earn a salary to live? Why or why not?

In some sense yes, if they couldn't live only from the return on their investments, they are technically a worker. That would be the Marxist definition but it's obviously more of a spectrum than a binary. CEOs in most large companies of course have enough wealth that they could live on that alone and they are only working as CEOs in order to increase that wealth. Their work also plays an anti-labour role in collaborating with the shareholder class against the interests of the worker.