Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I'm curious how you'll feel about this comment in 10 and 20 years from now.
Hard to say. Perhaps Boston Dynamics, or Canada will have a solution to their problem.
Layoffs Don't Work
391–400 of 801 posts
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#392Earlier 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…
> For example, a recruiter I know will ask a tech candidate "what is 20% of 20,000?" A significant percentage cannot answer the question. Some even cry. It's shocking.
During our interview, we ask candidates to design a history system. The key is to realize that our database is only 8Gb, and storing a year of updates is only 160Gb, so $2pm in AWS. Once there, a simple DB table suits, no need to set up Amazon S3.
So we ask them for the multiplication. First we give them the data, and if they don’t do the calculation, we nudge them, then we ask them, then we write the multipliers for them, then we take the calculator out and write the result for them.
Those are Masters degrees. They can’t even do calculations, let alone getting it right, because 500MB x 200 days a year = a few petabytes apparently. And after that, they’re exhausted, it’s impossible to ask them the rest of the questions like “So is it worth worrying about a Rube Goldberg machine when you’re in for $2 of AWS costs?”.
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#393Real 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…
Many of the stereotypes you mention are for startup founder / early employee types.
That's not everyone, it's just who's on HN.
Most employees of these companies are just regular people wanting regular jobs.
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#394Real 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…
Many of the stereotypes you mention are for startup founder / early employee types. That's not everyone, it's just who's on HN. Most employees of these companies are just regular people wanting regular jobs.
What % of the your coworkers have been there 5+ years?
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, getting fucked out of your 401k money 6 months before it vests stings some.
Is that an average time given a 12 month vesting schedule? edit: Actually curious about the dead comment. What companies have multi year 401(k) vesting? Every company I have worked at or seen does a match on a 12 month schedule or less. Are they thinking of stock options?
IIRC Amazon has a 2 years 401k match vesting period.
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#396Had been advocating slower hiring & targeted reductions in a mid-sized tech firm for years after COVID, but it happened much faster under a newly appointed CEO. Under new leadership, we executed 1/3 layoffs framed as a "culture refresh" and to briefly lift the stock. It wasn't about survival, we had plenty of cash, okayish growth and fantastic ARR - more about a new corp-backed CEO adopting a "do-it-like-Elon" approa…
> Americans don't exactly dig EU/UK workers, right? I’m actually curious to hear your take on it - what’s your experience been?
UK was horrible. No real protection for workers - just layers of mandatory legal mumbo-jumbo with zero actual chances for people to keep their jobs. It was like ripping off the band-aid 1mm at a time for four months.
Spain/France were an employer’s nightmare. Anyone without another job lined up secured a "special deal"—workers have massive leverage, they know it, and they’re actively litigious. People on parental leave had close to a year of guaranteed no-shows. The reaction was, of course, "never again" rippling across American corporate circles.
The rest of Europe was okay-ish.
US was predictably the easiest. We were generous with packages, but it's easy to see how the system can be used to screw people over.
Middle East was the roughest. Visas in UAE/Qatar expire instantly, and the local tech market is almost non-existent. We extended until the end of the school year to help with visa concerns, and some people managed to arrange golden visas. But for many, it was a massive shock — losing both jobs and residency overnight.
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#397This is a terrible opinion piece. Layoffs do work. Cutting hours does not work. I am always amazed how few people understand how a business operates. They think its a community organized event where there is unlimited revenue. There are a few basic accounting principles employees need to understand. It all revolves around Assets = Liabilities + Owner’s Equity. If you think otherwise, take a "Cost Accounting" course.…
A good friend of mine has a PhD in labor economics and is now a senior management consultant for a big firm and I've been told that in general just cutting people is bad for businesses and most businesses will be worse off by just cutting people, especially without changing any of the underlying systems that got the company to the position it's in. Next time I'll have to ask him about the studies on it but there definitely isn't a consensus that general layoffs help businesses in the medium/long term. He was saying the times they seem to work best is in the context of a broader restructuring, (which in my experience is not common for companies).
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of the stereotypes you mention are for startup founder / early employee types. That's not everyone, it's just who's on HN. Most employees of these companies are just regular people wanting regular jobs.
What % of the your coworkers have been there 5+ years?
I work at salesforce. 100% of my immediate team and gotta be over 50% of my broader team. We’ve barely hired since 2020.
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of the stereotypes you mention are for startup founder / early employee types. That's not everyone, it's just who's on HN. Most employees of these companies are just regular people wanting regular jobs.
What % of the your coworkers have been there 5+ years?
100% (I have owned and worked at my own company for 10 years)
Anecdotally, I've also worked at many startups that became big companies through acquisition and Let me tell you - J&J has a lot of employees who have been there more than 5 years, thousands. They also had several big layoffs of such people during the process.
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#400This is a terrible opinion piece. Layoffs do work. Cutting hours does not work. I am always amazed how few people understand how a business operates. They think its a community organized event where there is unlimited revenue. There are a few basic accounting principles employees need to understand. It all revolves around Assets = Liabilities + Owner’s Equity. If you think otherwise, take a "Cost Accounting" course.…
> If a company is bleeding revenue Not what happened with some of the recent layoffs. Some big tech companies generate huge revenues, laid off 5-10% of people (sometimes with false pretext of performance), and do keep hiring at the same time or soon after. This happens not to reduce cost but to stress out remaining employees.
It is still to reduce cost. Hiring would often be in cheaper geographies. The reason to reduce cost is not to e.g. save a business from collapsing but it is to improve the financial results with the hope of making the stock price go up.