191–200 of 801 posts
I wish those departments tasked with busywork would be able to build skunkworks inside these dysfunctional molochs and be able to keep what they create. Fired into becoming a startup.. a man can dream.
Real talk here, and I'm sorry for being "that guy" 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 employ…
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.
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software development costs are out of control the whole industry is one big grift, there’s no accountability anywhere, 20% of the devs are doing 80% of the work, the business would instantly terminate the 80% for cause if they could only discern the difference, but they can’t, because the business side is also a big grift with the exact same problem all the way up to the founders recursively
Got news for you. 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 c…
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I cannot speak for layoffs in all industries ever, but I agree with your assessment of layoffs in big tech from personal experiences. 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…
Big tech interviews tend to be daunting. Many long term employees lose the skill, and fear the impact of work interruption on their resume as well as their ability to get in again. 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…
Glad they exist and I fully support all candidates using them aggressively.
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I cannot speak for layoffs in all industries ever, but I agree with your assessment of layoffs in big tech from personal experiences. 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…
A few months of skiing sounds nice, but not as nice as the profound pleasure of working on a team of people I've know and cared about for over a decade. 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.
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Twitter was profitable before the takeover and now it is not
Maybe we disagree about what "profitable" means. Posting an authoritative source, so others can decide for themselves. https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/twtr/financials/
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.
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I cannot speak for layoffs in all industries ever, but I agree with your assessment of layoffs in big tech from personal experiences. 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…
Big tech interviews tend to be daunting. Many long term employees lose the skill, and fear the impact of work interruption on their resume as well as their ability to get in again. 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…
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Also, failing companies that use layoffs to restructure can succeed. For an example see IBM in the 90s. It’s hard but possible. And since the article uses stock price as a proxy for success, IBMs stock struggled for a long time afterward. It hit an all time high in 2025. And then there are non tech industries that just go through cycles, like oil.
IBM is up 40% from its previous 2012 high point. In the same time, S&P is up nearly 400%.
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Big tech interviews tend to be daunting. Many long term employees lose the skill, and fear the impact of work interruption on their resume as well as their ability to get in again. 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…
> 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 $$$$ paying their salaries for nothing. For example, a recruiter I know will ask a tech can…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big tech interviews tend to be daunting. Many long term employees lose the skill, and fear the impact of work interruption on their resume as well as their ability to get in again. Anecdotally, the LC bar for many firms has risen to the point that passing requires at least one through of the question before. If you Time bound your practice per question to 20 minutes, this means that you can solve most LC problems at…
> I'm unclear what employers are deriving from this exercise at this point It filters out the complete frauds. Yes, there are people who know all the right things to say in a job interview, but cannot code at all. If you hire one of them, it takes a bit to find out they cannot code, and a bit longer to fire them, so you're out $$$$ paying their salaries for nothing. For example, a recruiter I know will ask a tech can…
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.