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Layoffs Don't Work

thehustle.co

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Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you feel entitled to something someone else built?

Shareholders don't build anything. Employees do.

I didn’t build my car or house, but I own them.

Working on things owned by others is the basic idea of employment - and is a relationship that has existed forever.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's really cool unless your visa is on the line. At least the US is falling apart fast enough that maybe it's not a bad idea to leave and stay out.

[dead]

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#553
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll decide where I'm going when I get to the next stop light Surprisingly, this type of iteration can actually work; but the caveat is that the people behind the wheel, and reading the maps, need to be very good, and also, experienced enough to make sound decisions. If mediocre (or inexperienced) people try it, it’s a disaster. From what I can see, the entire tech industry has been institutionalizing mediocrity, s…

It doesn’t sound like the type of iteration matters at all. If your leadership is good and competent, they can drive the company any way they feel and have it work. The most productive I’ve been in my career was when my PO put all tasks that needed to be done in a Google sheet and the whole dev team spent a week just picking tasks off the list. It ended with us shipping our app on time. No planning, no grooming, no n…

I've definitely been at shops that screen hard in interviews for people that should be given high trust & ownership, but then is agile product team micromanaged.

Sort of worst of both worlds. Everyone develops learned helplessness, checks out or leaves.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the prospect of layoffs hits a little different when you're in your 50s. I have some non-techie friends in their 50s (sales, project management) who have been looking for a job for years. I've even heard third-hand about some good programmers in their 50s in LA in the same boat, although I don't know them personally. The last time I was looking for a job at age 48, I interviewed at a bunch of startups and only…

If you are in your 50s then your recent years of peak lifetime earning potential overlapped with an industry massively overpaying its workforce. You shouldn't need a job. You should have FIREd.

Having FIRE doesn't mean you're ready to retire and build ships in a bottle or whatever. I like programming, it puts me in flow state and keeps my brain young. I want to go out on my own terms. Also good luck with FIRE if you're putting kids through college. And thirdly, for those of us at normal companies the pay has been nice, but not FAANG mid-six-figures nice.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#555
post #441

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No, just cutting people across the company tends to be bad. Restructuring aka cutting programs and the people working on them has fewer downsides.

[flagged]

Sure the general consensus of experts is just like my opinion man.

Numbers never lie, until they do.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who does these types of interviews on both ends, something like this is why I like to start with an outrageously simple question to break the ice. Surprisingly, I have an 80% fail rate on the first question usually, which is just “find the second largest number in an array of numbers” for a 5 YOE role.

I just saw that this comment was fading from downvotes. I think HN is just overwhelmed with people who somehow got hired into technical jobs but can't do them. Anyone who thinks that 'finding second largest number in an array' or 'finding if a string is a substring of another string' are hard, or that the pressures of an interview are a valid excuse for being unable to do it are simply not intelligent enough to be su…

Elsewhere in this thread there is literally an example of someone who, by their own description, worked at a FAANG company for some years getting good performance reviews, has enough interview experience that even if they couldn't generally code their way out of a paper bag they were surely good at interview-question coding, ... and, under pressure from a pushy interviewer, completely failed to do a straightforward coding task.

I guess they could just by lying "to protect their ego" but in that case why post their comment at all?

It really is the case that some people sometimes completely go to pieces when stressed, and mocking them by saying "muh anxiety" doesn't stop that being true.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty weird and heartless thing to say. Having children is not a vice that deserves to be judged anymore than not having kids is. I could enumerate why fewer kids is bad for our collective future as a whole, but I won't, because the decision to have kids is a personal choice. Also, having kids is generally not the difference between having to work or not—most people have to work for a living regardless of f…

You can view what I wrote whatever way you want, but I stand by it and don't think it was heartless at all. I think not having children is actually more heartful and caring than having children. Look, out of all the people who come into this world, how many people can we say were a net positive for this planet? I see that you are currently at Airbnb. Great. You are lining your pockets, but I'm not sure what the net b…

Anyone who would rather not be alive is free to make that decision. Why are you still alive if you really believe this?

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know I have good health? What an incredibly smug comment meant to silence someone with no basis in fact.

Well, the person you originally replied to mentioned having a disability, and your response was "yeah but you have kids so really you chose this and also I disagree that life is harder for some people." The generous interpretation would be that you have sufficiently good health that you do not have to structure your life around it, and therefore lack understanding of the challenges faced by those who do. The alternat…

So you took the generous route in publicly shaming them.

I think their quibble was with a different item being used as evidence there (i.e., having a family), not necessarily with all that was said.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#559
post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just saw that this comment was fading from downvotes. I think HN is just overwhelmed with people who somehow got hired into technical jobs but can't do them. Anyone who thinks that 'finding second largest number in an array' or 'finding if a string is a substring of another string' are hard, or that the pressures of an interview are a valid excuse for being unable to do it are simply not intelligent enough to be su…

Elsewhere in this thread there is literally an example of someone who, by their own description, worked at a FAANG company for some years getting good performance reviews, has enough interview experience that even if they couldn't generally code their way out of a paper bag they were surely good at interview-question coding, ... and, under pressure from a pushy interviewer, completely failed to do a straightforward c…

I will say that, as the interviewer asking the question, I do recognize that people have anxiety, and I would prefer to nudge them out of a spiral, because a bad interview is generally not pleasant for anybody involved.

To some degree the interview is not about getting the question right but also how you respond to questions about your answers. I would rather have someone who started with a totally incorrect answer and then reason back and forth with them til they got on the right path, than someone who came up with the right answer and then clammed up and refused to explain how they got there. (I once had a candidate tell me, verbatim, "I don't think analyzing performance of an algorithm is part of an engineer's job.")

I would prefer if there were a more humane, less stressful, and scalable way to do an interview. The problem is that as a profession we lack the continued examination/licensing of other fields like engineering or medicine, so we don't have a good barometer of skills otherwise. And I often have to sift through massive numbers of people clearly overshooting their shot to get a good position.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#560
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a company is bleeding revenue, it cannot sustain the overhead of employees. They have to go. No, they don't. During the dotcom bubble my company gave us 2 choices, layoffs or 20% pay cut. We took the latter. Everyone stayed and we had our pay back to previous levels in a couple years and the company remained profitable. You can, in fact, treat people as people and still run a company. > Employees feelings don't…

Surely there are some situations where a pay cut is insufficient because you would like to reorganize the company, for example to wind down an unprofitable initiative or division and there's not a reasonable way to maintain the same headcount?

My grandparent used consider global bubbles as the norm, likely because his own parents never told him that local, company-limited bubble are actually the norm. Fortunately my own parents are more agreeable with how I manage my finances, and my whole family – including the 380-minutes old grand-grandparents – is still alive & well. We still see each other, despite the occasional confusion my use of the English plurals causes us (not to mention everyone's own ups & downs, and the weird reproductive mechanisms of our larger genus within the world).
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