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Layoffs Don't Work

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Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#441

Post by Retric »

deviantbit wrote: post #437
tdb7893 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 defi…

[flagged]

No, just cutting people across the company tends to be bad.

Restructuring aka cutting programs and the people working on them has fewer downsides.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#442

Post by shagie »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #216
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story is changing. There is now an oversaturation of us ex-BigCo people in the market. I quit Google before the layoffs, after being there for 10 years and sick of it. The first year was serious ego boost, having Google on the resume opened doors all over the place. Then my ex-coworkers started getting laid off and things began to shift. Now I know people I used to work with who have been without work for many m…

Its not that the market is saturated, its that a lot of incompetent ex googlers are interviewing now. People usually have a pretty good idea they can't do their job. They find a niche where a manager is not paying attention, or they can obfuscate and take credit for others work, etc. These people don't usually job hop, the interviews are way too hard and then they are very unlikely to find another long term safe nich…

There's also the "we can only pay a third of what Google paid you..." and given two candidates that interview equally well, one is former Google and appeared to be making $300k and another is from somewhere where they were making $70k before...

I'd argue for the $70k person. They are less likely to have experienced lifestyle inflation and looking at this position as a "slumming it until they can get a job making $300k+ again."

It further complicates the issue that most companies don't have Google scale problems and don't have the engineering culture for a Google scale solution.

There are several factors working against even not incompetent former Google employees - especially if their experience is entirely within Big Tech.

A bit ago a former Tesla person was in the set of interviews and it became clear that they wanted to make the organization that was considering hiring them into a copy of how Tesla works... and that wasn't something that was going to be doable. The post interview discussion was "this person is going to try to make us into a copy of Tesla for six months, and then leave shortly after they realize that we weren't a place that could become another Tesla."

Big Tech experience may be a positive signal for getting hired at other Big Tech companies... but it can be a negative signal at a company that isn't trying hiring for an organization that can't become a Big Tech company - especially if that is the only thing that is known.

Hiring isn't necessarily picking the "best" person for the role, but rather the least risky. Former Big Tech employees are often riskier than other candidates given their lifestyle expectations and the mismatch of the engineering cultures.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#443

Post by soerxpso »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #150

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…

That's kind of a chicken and egg issue, isn't it? Why is it that employees can get more money/promotions from a company they have no relationship with, than from a company where they've already been working for multiple years and have more company-specific knowledge than their replacement will? Unlike with government work, years at the company isn't really considered when deciding who layoffs are going to hit. You're proposing that tech workers should loyally stay at the same company for 10 years, make less money, and then get laid off just as easily anyway?

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#445

Post by al_borland »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #354
throwaway151883 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> check if text has mismatched parens I always try to give everyone I’ve interviewed the benefit of the doubt. You never know what’s going on in their lives, and even if they fail a trivial question it doesn’t mean they are faking the ability to code. I joined Facebook back in 2018. Didn’t study at all for the interview and passed somehow. Then I probably conducted 200-300 interviews in my time there, so I became qui…

I run coding interviews at BIGCO. Half of the candidate success relies on the skills of the interviewer. A bad interviewer can bomb the best candidates. Something I have changed my stance on a bit is automated coding interviews. I used to be adamantly against a company giving candidates automated code tests, but I see now that it takes the interviewer out of the equation.

Pre-screening, depending on how it’s done, could eliminate good candidates.

There have been times I’ve received answers in interview that weren’t the written answers, but I looked it up afterward and tested it out… and they were right. I learned something news and tweaked the answer reference as a result. If those questions were in the pre-screening instead of asked directly by me, it would have filtered out good people.

I remember fighting to get access to the pre-screen data to see what the answers were and find if there were any other cases like this, where the non-technical pre-screener was filtering out potentially good candidates, because we couldn’t give them exhaustive answers to questions being asked.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#446

Post by cmrdporcupine »

yodsanklai wrote: post #418
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story is changing. There is now an oversaturation of us ex-BigCo people in the market. I quit Google before the layoffs, after being there for 10 years and sick of it. The first year was serious ego boost, having Google on the resume opened doors all over the place. Then my ex-coworkers started getting laid off and things began to shift. Now I know people I used to work with who have been without work for many m…

> The first year was serious ego boost, having Google on the resume opened doors all over the place. Before I worked in FAANG, My subjective view of big tech SWEs was they were very skilled, in a different league. My current view is that it "just" takes very good preparation and a decent resume to get in. And they've hired so many people that it's not so special anymore to be an "ex-Google". There are just a lot of t…

Competent, yes. Intelligent, yes.

Productive, not necessarily.

Google is not a "produce a lot of code" place. It's a careful and deliberate and systematic type of place.

One thing I think ex-Google does bring especially to the table is a disdane for over-complicated and overly trend-driven solutions.

For one Google's internal review culture is (or at least was when I was there) very stringent. Pointless complexity and showboating is usually spanked.

For two, because Google basically rolls its own everything in regards to frameworks and the like, developers who come out of there have been mainly cured of "flavour of the month" and "my ego wants us to use this new shiny new-coloured tech".

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#447

Post by ltbarcly3 »

al_borland wrote: post #431
jjav wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have interviewed many people employed in tech as programmers for their entire career and they can't code. Think about this contradictory statement for a while. Can it actually be true? Or is there something else going on? If the interviewee has nothing but sub-1yr stints on their resume, perpetually getting fired before vesting at any company, then yes, it's very possible they actually can't code and just fake it…

I know a lot of people who can tweak code that already exists. However, if they are sitting in front of an empty text editor and given a goal, they don’t know how to break the problem down and build a solution with the tools the language gives them. In a large environment, someone may rarely need to start from nothing, so the interview format throws them. That said, I think being able to break down a problem to solve…

The goal when hiring isn't to find someone who is barely skilled enough to just slightly come out as better to have on staff than not. In fact these are often the worst hires as they slow everything down and create work for you to find tasks they are capable of, but it seems unfair to fire them because they aren't totally useless all the time. You hire the best candidate overall, and you are very far from describing that.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#448

Post by DarkContinent »

eastbound wrote: post #392
WalterBright wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

Does your interview process require knowing cloud costs off the top of your head? Because that's hard to track tbh

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#449

Post by culi »

andrewlgood wrote: post #316

Unfortunate click bait title for such an important topic. The various metrics quoted of why companies without layoffs appear to do better do not address the idea of underlying causes such as companies doing better do need mass layoffs while companies not doing as well likely to reduce expenses with actions to include layoffs.

The article compared companies within the same industries (e.g. the airline industry) which faced the same problems

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#450

Post by karparov »

cratermoon wrote: post #408
karparov wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 10x person who brings down 20 others to a small fraction of their potential and causes other rockstars to leave is still net-negative. Good management understands this. (And I'm not sure why I'm downvoted for this. Nothing about that should be controversial?)

Exactly. So the company keeps the guy everyone hates after laying off people that get along. The next people to leave the company are the ones disgusted by the move.

Depends on the company. I've seen the opposite case were such a person was let go, much to everybody's relief. Some people had to clean up his mess, which was genius in the sense that it worked flawlessly, but nobody else could maintain it, so he had locked in a minimal bus factor. Which makes such a move harder to execute, but the earlier the better.
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