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Layoffs Don't Work

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Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#581

Post by WalterBright »

acdha wrote: post #361
WalterBright wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

P.S. I was once asked to review the code of a famous programmer I won't name. I was shocked to discover that the large codebase had 3 different implementations of bubblesort in it. I replaced them all with a call to qsort(). He asked me how I managed to speed it up :-/ We all have our blind spots. I do, too.

My favorite blind spot is how our definitions of quality change over time. I knew someone who had a mature codebase which a new developer made substantially faster by removing his old optimizations. He’d measured very real improvements back when he made that hand-rolled assembly code on early Pentium generations but by the time we revisited it less than a decade later the combination of compiler and processor improve…

My compilers support inline assembler, but these days there doesn't seem to be much of any point to them. The compilers have simply gotten too good.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#582

Post by jamesfinlayson »

al_borland wrote: post #422
nine_k wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen people leaving great jobs for a 10% raise. It's always something else: a much bigger benefit, or a significant downside of the current job, which are not widely publicized. Instead, I've seen people going to a lower -paying position for a more interesting job, a chance to learn new hot thing hands-on, a different set of responsibilities, etc.

I worked with a guy who left for more money, found out the grass wasn’t greener, and came crawling back. Then did it again. For some reason they hired him back a second time. When he quit the 3rd time I think that was the final bridge burned. I asked him about it and he said money was his singular metric for choosing a job, he was always looking, and would never stop.

I remember a guy at a previous job doing something similar - left for a React job (despite being a PHP developer), then came back like 6 months later because he couldn't get his head around React, then left again like 6 months later. Pretty sure it was about money because the PHP job was pretty relaxed and had some good perks.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#583

Post by WalterBright »

throwaway3572 wrote: post #494
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’m an electrical engineer who does circuit design. I’ve interviewed many electrical engineers over the years and the situation of applicants having “years” of experience while simultaneously not knowing how to design a single circuit is real. In our field it’s usually because although the person’s title is engineer, in practice, they don’t do any engineering. There’s just a ton of peripheral work (basically paperwor…

If they carry a wallet card that has on it:

    V = I * R
    I = V / R
    R = V / I
they are not real EEs.

And yeah, I've been trashed multiple times for this opinion, but I'm not backing down!

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#584

Post by jamesfinlayson »

nine_k wrote: post #259
andrewlgood wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this different than the manager who has spent years developing an employee - making sure they are getting the experiences they need to build a better career, hiring the right people to complement the team, fighting for bonuses and pay raises - only to have them quit to join the next company for a 10% raise. It is difficult to build a long-term culture when society seems to expect job hopping to rapidly advance…

I've never seen people leaving great jobs for a 10% raise. It's always something else: a much bigger benefit, or a significant downside of the current job, which are not widely publicized. Instead, I've seen people going to a lower -paying position for a more interesting job, a chance to learn new hot thing hands-on, a different set of responsibilities, etc.

Yeah I was offered a job with 12% better pay recently - from a friend too so I knew the job couldn't be too bad. But I feel like I'm onto a good thing where I am and the perks are okay (plus I'd probably be burning some bridges just by leaving).

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#585

Post by al_borland »

sys_64738 wrote: post #572
al_borland wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LinkedIn can show a trend pretty well. Sometimes they stop at some point, so I can be proven wrong. In other cases the person left, came back, and left again.

The last one was the chief architect on a project I was assigned. She turned the org upside down, left the day after her bonus hit, came back 6 months later, turned the org upside down again, and again left the day after her bonus hit. If she comes back a 3rd time I won’t be engaging.

I’ve been burned by these people a lot. They have absolutely obliterated the culture and the stability of our infrastructure, and in a few short years destroyed what I spent a decade helping to build. They replaced it with fragile systems without any kind of support model, which now get full re-writes every year… just because.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#586

Post by WalterBright »

geoka9 wrote: post #470
al_borland wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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!).

> successfully maintain a legacy code base (even their own!).

Haha I hate all the code I wrote more than 5 years ago.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#587

Post by WalterBright »

suzzer99 wrote: post #503
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…

Welcome to the wonderful world of coding under pressure, which almost never occurs in the real world. It's a non-issue when you're young and don't feel the pressure. But when you have grey hairs in your beard and know you're already walking in with two strikes, all of a sudden the fog of war kicks in.

> you're young and don't feel the pressure

Wat? Feeling the pressure is even worse when you're young!

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#588

Post by throwaway151883 »

darkwater wrote: post #526
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…

So you were rejected at a Metà interview after you previously worked at Facebook for 4 years? Or were you interviewing for some other FAANG?

Yeah, rejected after previously working there. Was also going for a different role than I previously had. To their credit, I respect that they don't just hand out free passes back in.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#589

Post by WalterBright »

lubujackson wrote: post #574
geoka9 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The cure for such fears is to:

1. study the leetcode books in advance

2. do lots of interviews

In the military, there's a saying: train hard => fight easy

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#590

Post by akdor1154 »

yallpendantools wrote: post #561
akdor1154 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like it requires knowing them to an order of magnitude or so... Which honestly sounds like a pretty good bar to have your team above?

Honestly, after ~13y in this, I only know a handful of items from the famous latency table, notably those I've used a lot (mutexes cost 25ns, is only 1/4th of main memory reference tho, then disk seek is x100K of that). I'm "DevOps" (and titular variants thereof) in most of my resume. That said, I'm not above your bar as each cloud provider have their own pricing model. I'm not even above your bar for AWS---which I'v…

You'd probably be able to tell me if using Lambda for my backend is gonna be closest to, $2, $20, or $200 / month, right?
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