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Layoffs Don't Work

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Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#591

Post by WalterBright »

giantg2 wrote: post #307
momocowcow wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are still not testing if they can code. But whether under the scrutiny of another person, they can code. Maybe this is important to you, maybe peer programming is important to you for example. I remember a young dev who couldn’t pass such tests, as he would get too nervous, yet he had written the core tech for many shipped products. The type of guy you would just stick in dark room. With age this type of stuff se…

I agree with both you and the parent to some degree. I have experienced interviews that went badly because they were in an IDE I wasn't familiar with, or in Leetcode (never used it). So I'm distracted by how to use the tool rather than how to code the solution. But I can also see how stuff like finding a substring is easy - most languages have a function for it. But at that point, you're testing different things - pr…

> rote memorization of a provided function.

I never mesmerized strstr(). But using it frequently makes it stick in my mind.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#592

Post by jamesfinlayson »

jjav wrote: post #331
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done probably 500 to 1000 tech screens for big tech companies (as the interviewer) and this is completely true. I have interviewed many people employed in tech as programmers for their entire career and they can't code. I don't meen leetcode, I mean they get confused trying to write brute force substring search. The nested for loop seems to be too complex for them to keep in their head all at once. I have had…

> 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 thought that too until we had a guy start two years ago that interviewed well and answered questions like he knew what he was talking about but then when he started, one of his first questions was how to figure what endpoint was being called by a website (as obvious as looking at your browser's Network tab, or browsing the website's source to find the endpoint). Not long after that he had to clear a couple more values as part of a cache invalidation procedure and was utterly bamboozled by the if (!cached) { clearCache(); } else { cache(data); } logic. That was an exceptionally draining few months until he was sacked.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#593

Post by jamesfinlayson »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #447
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…

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…

Too right. I had an idiot manager who hired the next person with a pulse - we got some money-motivated guy that complained about everything and didn't listen to what he actually needed to do, and my manager nearly destroyed the team by pretending that he was fine.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#594

Post by tetromino_ »

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.

> your recent years of peak lifetime earning potential overlapped with an industry massively overpaying its workforce

Only if the following conditions are true:

1. You spent your entire career in the US, ideally on the West Coast

2. You entered the industry early, ideally right after (or in!) university

3. You did not spend significant time in low-paying segments of the industry, such as in academia, hardware, games, idealistic open source, or the public sector

4. You did not need a significant career break, such as for major medical issues, being a SAHP, or caring for sick family members

Even if all of the above applied, certain wealth-destroying events such as an expensive illness, legal trouble, or bad divorce, might have made FIRE infeasible.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#595

Post by acdha »

WalterBright wrote: post #581
acdha wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it’s funny how support has never been better or less necessary.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#596

Post by tocs3 »

bb88 wrote: post #576
tocs3 wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know and it is a good question. Maybe we need three or four wage earners per household. Maybe 60-70 hour work weeks. I would like to hear some ideas that does not include more grinding down workers for GDP. Maybe another measure for a health society. Growth certainly help lots of people but when an economy is mature maybe more is not necessarily better, at least for the average worker.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#597

Post by jamesfinlayson »

clusterhacks wrote: post #161
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 that perception that people chronically job hop is not true? I would welcome a data source that shows chronic job hopping is the norm. Anecdotally speaking, I spent 6+ish years at my first "old tech" company. My org in this (very large) company was constantly simmering with resource actions (mostly small scale layoffs). There was lots of negative energy there. I left to take a programming/data analytics gig in…

Hard to say - at my current company many people seem to be there for the long haul (it is a good place to work) and I'd say many departures have been due to restructures (some people lost jobs, but I think in a few cases existing managers haven't seen eye to eye with new leadership so have left, but also taken people with them).

At my last job people came and went, but I'd say that the job hoppers would be more inclined to say for 3-4 years rather than 1-2 years.

As a further insight, I'd say that my current job is at a big company, and in my town there are probably only four or five other companies of comparable size, while my previous job was medium sized and there were probably a lot of companies of that size that you could move to.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#598

Post by saghm »

carlob wrote: post #462
saghm wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are two reasons: choosing to change jobs on your own gives you ability to pick a time when it's minimally disruptive to yourself and your actual family, and then the pretend "family" vibe you cite is pushed by the employer in the first place. Companies insising on a game of make-believe where the relationship between employer and employee isn't transactional makes it hard not to be bothered by the hypoc…

> I go out of my way to tip much larger than 20% when I use Uber because I'd rather risk getting ripped off than a driver not getting paid a fair wage for the work they do for me, even if it's at my own expense Honest question, as a European who doesn't fully understand tipping culture: don't you think that this might be perpetuating a culture of exploitation? Wouldn't you rather spend your money on taxis that at lea…

In the macro sense? Possibly, if everyone is doing what I'm doing. In my experience though, the opposite is more common; I've heard of people absolutely refusing to tip out of "principle", and then workers making sub-minimum wage don't actually get paid what they're legally "mandated".

In the micro sense, I find it pretty unlikely that I'm single-handedly making much difference personally in the New York economy. While as software engineer in tech I'm undoubtedly better off than average, I'm certainly not anywhere close to wealthy enough that even spending my entire net worth on tips would affect anything at all.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#600

Post by giantg2 »

WalterBright wrote: post #591
giantg2 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with both you and the parent to some degree. I have experienced interviews that went badly because they were in an IDE I wasn't familiar with, or in Leetcode (never used it). So I'm distracted by how to use the tool rather than how to code the solution. But I can also see how stuff like finding a substring is easy - most languages have a function for it. But at that point, you're testing different things - pr…

> rote memorization of a provided function. I never mesmerized strstr(). But using it frequently makes it stick in my mind.

Not everyone uses it (or their language equivalent) frequently depending on the needs of their project. If I'm really using it frequently, then I would probably be looking at higher accuracy/resiliency options like parsing the input and comparing to a map, or regexes.
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