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Layoffs Don't Work

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Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#571

Post by sys_64738 »

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…

Maybe in your early years when stability doesn't matter to you. When you have a mortgage, a family, and obligations then you care about your job. Putting food on the table and paying bills becomes your highest priority. As to tech industry as an outlier, it's not so much that as it's not yet been reigned in yet. Technical jobs are just another tool to execute a business mission and once utility is gotten from AI to effectively reduce costs then costs will be reduced. That means bye bye to big salaries and hello to new reality. So enjoy the gig while it pays.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#572

Post by sys_64738 »

al_borland wrote: post #419
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…

I’ve been at my company working in tech for 19 years and I hate the pushing of job hopping as a norm. Job hoppers have no skin in the game. They don’t need support what they build, they don’t get to see where it fell short… they really can’t learn from their experiences and mistakes. What they do isn’t in the best interest of the company, it’s just enough (an MVP if you will) to add to the resume so they can leverage…

I think if you're at a company for more than a year then the chances are you need to support what you build. Also, how do you know you work with a "job hopper" until they leave? You always have to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they're committed to the cause. It feels like you got burned at some point in the past but I could be wrong.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#573

Post by lurking_swe »

grandempire wrote: post #414
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…

Different groups of people. Some confidently job hop, others live in fear of losing a comfortable job. There are deep differences in expectations and attitudes in these areas, driven by family, culture, and upbringing.

i agree with this. However…

It’s worth mentioning (as a public FYI) that it’s not smart to _expect_ to stay with a company for 10+ years, from a risk mitigation perspective. At least not in 2025.

It’s kind of like picking a stock. Purposely picking just 1 stock for your portfolio carries great risk. Likewise, picking 1 job and/or 1 tech stack and hoping for the best is also high risk. It’s smart to at least dabble in new trendy technology for 1-2 days a month. Maybe review basic leet code questions once a year. Maybe every 2-3 years, apply somewhere else and go through the interview process strictly for practice. Who knows, maybe you’ll get a great offer? Just examples of what one can do to reduce the risk when a layoff occurs.

Regardless of what your culture taught you, try to reduce your risk. It might be outside your comfort zone, but better to be uncomfortable than unemployed. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket (one company, one tech stack). Keep your interview skills a _little_ sharp so that you don’t panic if a layoff occurs. It’s just common sense.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#574

Post by lubujackson »

geoka9 wrote: post #472
hibikir wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is really crazy about this though is that sometimes it really is the interview setting, as people unused to interviews can, at times, emotionally collapse. I have seen people who are actually good programmers get wrecked by simple questions because of their inability to handle stress, and how the lack of interview practice turns a simple exercise into a hellscape. It's not as if testing for performance under str…

Not to imply that you're wrong, but I've always been bad at LC interviews, but surprisingly (for myself) passable when called upon to troubleshoot and code up a hot fix in the middle of the night. Maybe those are not entirely similar types of pressures.

There is a big difference between solving a critical bug, which is your job, vs. passing an arbitrary leetcode test from a disinterested 22 year old where you might lose your house if you get it wrong. You have 15 minutes.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#575

Post by ltbarcly3 »

gjm11 wrote: post #556
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #510

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…

The solution to the problem in question is about 9 lines of very simple code. In a 45 minute interview, that is 5 minutes per line available. It's about 1 character every 40 seconds. I think anyone can get flustered and mess up. It's possible for someone, on a bad day, lack of sleep, hung over, experiencing an anxiety attack to mess this up, but it's really really a stretch. This is a VERY EASY task, and if someone has done it before there's nothing sneaky or hard to do here. The version where you match different kinds of braces is very slightly more complicated but actually less lines of code.

Yes maybe someone can't come up with this in an interview. My point is 99.99% of the time when someone fails this they are lying about their work history or they are so stupid they can't hope to do the job. 00.01% of the time they could do this easily and the stars aligned to give them a rare bad day. The best way to deal with that is to just assume everyone who fails this can't do the work, and the 00.01% person just interviews somewhere else and doesn't have another bad day. I don't even know what the alternative to that is, just hire everyone who claims to be qualified and hope for the best? Give everyone who demonstrates very very strong incompetence signals 2 or 3 more tries?

  def matched(str):
      count = 0

      for c in str:
          if c == "(":
              count += 1
          elif c == ")":
              count -= 1

          if count

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#576

Post by bb88 »

tocs3 wrote: post #520
giantg2 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds good, so long as there is similar employment at the end of it. As a sabbatical it sounds great. As a layoff, the uncertainty sounds crushing. It could take months to find a new position, especially with the disadvantages I have, I would likely need to start looking immediately and wouldn't be able to enjoy it.

Just to be clear, I mean time off and returning to the same job. Shouldn't we be aiming for a future where we do not have to work like dogs to earn enough to struggle at home?

How do you do this? Taxes? Increase worker salaries? Government funded health care?

Access to cheap labor is what really drives economies. Market forces are what drive labor salaries. More people cheaper labor.

It used to be in the 60s, 70s, and to some extent the 80's a single wage earner was enough in a family. By the end of the 80's it became clear that 2 wage earners was how people got ahead in life.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#577

Post by al_borland »

suzzer99 wrote: post #492
geoka9 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another extreme, too: people who can code up an app in a matter of days, but can never learn to navigate and successfully maintain a legacy code base (even their own!).

And there's no easy objective way to screen for this in a job interview. So they pretend it doesn't exist and never ask questions like: "Suppose you're designing a green-field app that you think will grow over time like X, Y, and Z. How would you design and organize your code so that the app stays maintainable and flexible over time?" I could talk for hours on this subject with concrete examples if anyone ever asked.…

I think this is why people job hop. They never have to support their unmaintainable greenfield app. Without the pain of those mistakes, they never learn to make the next one better either.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#578

Post by al_borland »

bbqfog wrote: post #481
al_borland wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This mentality is why people don’t get promoted internally, which leads to the job hoping in the first place. Fix this and a lot of the job hoping problem goes away.

Job hopping is not a problem, it's how you get ahead quickly.

You just described the symptom of a problem.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#579

Post by acheron »

milesrout wrote: post #533
suzzer99 wrote: post #480

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.

This is not a real thing outside of a tiny number of people.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#580

Post by pclmulqdq »

llm_nerd wrote: post #122
pclmulqdq wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you look at companies like Citadel, which routinely fire the bottom 10% as part of the job description, it attracts a certain set of people who actually do feel "safe" in that environment. The trouble comes when you break your norms about layoffs. Also, Google's median tenure of <1 year was due to hiring, not employees leaving. In other words, that number included people who hadn't left yet. I think if you…

>Also, Google's median tenure of Google would have to be growing at >300% per year for this math to make sense. But even if it's 3 years ({X} doubt), that's still cartoonishly low for a hiring process that drags on for months and months. >I think if you look at companies like Citadel, which routinely fire the bottom 10% as part of the job description Almost all tech companies target firing/pushing out a considerable…

Just to do the math for you, a 1 year average tenure would be a doubling of company size per year without any attrition, not a 300% increase. Google "exponential distribution." With attrition, you get there pretty fast. Also, the statistic you quoted comes from ~2012 IIRC, which was a period of explosive growth at Google.

> Almost all tech companies target firing/pushing out a considerable percentage of employees per year.

Not firing, but managing out. It's very different culturally.

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