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Layoffs Don't Work

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Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#541

Post by wilg »

ryandrake wrote: post #340
deviantbit wrote: post #334

This 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.…

I mean, everything you said is true, but only because we have deliberately set up the system as such. Shareholder Primacy is a choice we have made as a society. It's not some natural law or something carved by god into stone tablets. It's not hard to imagine alternatives, but obviously the shareholding class is going to work hard to ensure that only their preferred rules have traction. Whether or not alternatives are…

Nobody is stopping anyone from running a non-profit tech company, or a PBC or co-op or various other structures. It's not even true that a US company has to prioritize "shareholder value" or whatever over anything else. You can kinda just do whatever you want. So the interesting question to me is, why don't more people try to operate companies/workplaces in the way they think would be more ethical and better for business?

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#542

Post by milesrout »

csomar wrote: post #27

The layoffs are not the issue. It is the decision makers who took the two decisions to both over-hire and then mass-fire shortly after. GM is a great example. The company was the largest and one of the most innovative car manufacturers in the world. It doesn't stand a chance against BYD today and it is not by a lack of money (though maybe with a C-suite change). So my opinion is, yes, the damage is done (or being don…

GM is not innovative. Tesla is innovative. GM is a creaking giant that was bailed out and is reliant on trade barriers to have any domestic customers. Nobody outside the US wants any American cars except Teslas or ever has. They have a terrible reputation except amongst muscle car enthusiasts who like them for reasons other than their actual quality.

Even their foreign brands are widely considered bad cars: "barely Holden' together" etc.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#543

Post by ryandrake »

throwaway3572 wrote: post #477
heeen2 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of places take vote on what you can buy, eg weed, alcohol, which additives are allowed and so on

The creation and transacting of corporate shares is also highly regulated. But it doesn’t address the question of why a third party should get a vote that helps decide a particular corporate action. Votes that limit the possible actions of all corporations equally are a different thing.

Ultimately, the corporation is operating (and gets legal support like corporate personhood and limited liability) because the public permits it through the state approving its corporate charter. The public allows the company to exist, and in exchange, the company is supposed to serve at least some vague public good. Technically, the public has the power to revoke the company's charter if that's in people's best interest.

The general public are all stakeholders that are affected by the actions of the corporations they allow to exist. They ought to have a say. In practice, we as a people have pretty much given up that say, and the world as it exists today is the result: Corporations running amok doing whatever they want, answering only to shareholders.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#544

Post by acdha »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #513
acdha wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine a person with a pilot's license refusing to fly tandem for an airline interview. That’s not a great comparison since a pilot has already passed substantially harder tests to get that license and a flight is exactly what the job is. If you have a candidate with a pilot’s license you can assume at least a baseline level of capability which you can’t assume for a software engineer. That has pros and cons but i…

Go on youtube and watch NTSB / FAA investigation reports. If you think that a pilot's license demonstrates that someone is a competent pilot you are very very mistaken, and there are scores of counter examples. Airlines very strictly test pilots and insist on check rides regardless of what official qualifications pilots show up with. They do this because they are professional organizations with decades of experience…

Yes, that’s what I was referring to with “baseline level of capability”. It doesn’t mean everyone is the same, or that they’re all super pilots, but anyone with a commercial license has at least 250 hours doing the primary job function and that makes it’s reasonable to ask them to do a test flight.

In contrast, we don’t have anything like real certifications for developers and many of the interviewing questions are very unlike the actual job. Hiring would be easier if we did have something closer to what a pilot’s license conveys, but that’d also slow the field down since programming has changed a lot more over the last 50 years than flying.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#545

Post by int_19h »

PeterStuer wrote: post #518

Most places I've seen could cut 50-80% of people and maintain or even grow output. Will they cut the right 50-80%? Chances are close to nill. And the article is right that layoffs curb morale. Then again, what hurts morale even more, especialy for your true performers, is not laying of the incompetent, the 0 net contribution carreer ladder climbers or the pfiepdom pyramid seat fillers and the bloated 'management supp…

What hurts morale the most is when layoffs affect teams and people who are clearly not "underperforming". I've seen some star devs getting swiped up into mass layoffs, and that is incredibly demoralizing because it hammers home the point that it doesn't actually matter how good you are at your job, how much esteem you have with colleagues etc. Not even your manager will be able to help you if the entire team gets canned.

When your choice is basically having someone incompetent on the team vs not having the guys who carry it the most, I think most people will take the former. Incompetence can be managed to minimize damage, but there's no substitute for lack of competent people.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#546

Post by lumost »

WalterBright wrote: post #188
lumost wrote: post #167

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…

Aye - I don’t tend to have a problem honestly with “classic” lc tests. I tend to take issue with uncommon/nuanced Dynamic Programming questions and clever uses of binary search. Both of these categories tend to rely on the engineer knowing the “trick” of the particular question.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I suspect that hiring based on a candidates ability to produce optimal solutions to LC Hards will bias strongly towards candidates who can't code, but are very good at interviewing.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#547

Post by jorts »

int_19h wrote: post #517
giantg2 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. The subliminal message I'm getting from my current managers is that I should just be a good little disabled person and work as a Walmart greeter. It's turning into harassment at this point. Just all sorts of BS. Like telling me they are doing so much for me, when my ADA accommodation is weekly 1-on-1s with the manager and my tech lead. Is that really a lot? There are people without disabilities getting weekly 1-…

A weekly or bi-weekly 1:1 with your manager has been the standard arrangement in my last two jobs.

Yea I do weekly 1:1s with all my directs and have done so for the past ~13 years. Pretty standard.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#548

Post by Aeolun »

lr4444lr wrote: post #254
lumost wrote: post #167

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 agree, but I look at it like trying out for an athletic team. Once you're on the team, you are mostly practicing plays, doing clinics, and simulating competition, but to get on the team in the first place you have to prove your general fitness by running, say, a 6 minute mile. You may not be able to do that again easily right away once you've been on the team for a while because you don't practice running for pure…

Unlike, you know, proving that by the fact my previous employer was happy to retain me for 10 plus years?

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#549

Post by steveBK123 »

hommelix wrote: post #468
steveBK123 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be more true of management did not play BS with the numbers constantly. I worked at a firm that for 2-3 years straight would report great Q1,Q2,Q3 numbers.. tell employees it's looking like a good year. And then Q4 report a total wipeout loss that negated the quarterly earnings and swung the company to flat or a loss. Whoops, sorry, no raises, cutting bonuses.. and need to do some layoffs. Behavior like th…

Similarly when goals are linked to earnings and the company reports adjusted earnings... So changing the earnings by disregarding some expenses or some sales out of the calculation. The one in charge of this adjustment can play to allow or dismiss bonus for the year.

I worked at one place that would frequently do "hiring freeze, consultants only!" thing followed by "fire all the consultants, FTEs only!" thing every other year. Clearly some OpEx/CapEx budget arb.

Also would do incredible things like mandate firm wide sending all consultants home for rest of year in early/mid December to save 3-4% lol. Did this at least twice in 5 years.

One year there was a fairly large failed projects with a dozen senior devs and they had nothing to do but also weren't fired because "we don't have budget for severance". This was in July. Guys started showing up to work in sandals and baseball caps.

This was all at a bank with over 100k employees.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#550

Post by suzzer99 »

int_19h wrote: post #517
giantg2 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. The subliminal message I'm getting from my current managers is that I should just be a good little disabled person and work as a Walmart greeter. It's turning into harassment at this point. Just all sorts of BS. Like telling me they are doing so much for me, when my ADA accommodation is weekly 1-on-1s with the manager and my tech lead. Is that really a lot? There are people without disabilities getting weekly 1-…

A weekly or bi-weekly 1:1 with your manager has been the standard arrangement in my last two jobs.

Mine is bi-weekly but my boss cancels it every time.
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