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Layoffs Don't Work

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Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#681

Post by genewitch »

genewitch wrote: post #663
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

((What happens) if you are missing a close paren?

the formatting was funky when i first looked at this, i can see it's returning a boolean now, that covers the case of count > 0

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#682

Post by genewitch »

milesrout wrote: post #672
genewitch wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimum wage, fairly, should have been around $32 in 2019 or so. I haven't run numbers lately because it's depressing, but I bet it's worse now. You can't go off mcdonalds sandwiches, and you can't use the economic indicators that ignore food and fuel. I've heard wild numbers from "the dollar is worth 50¢ compared to 20 years ago" to "the dollar has lost 98% of its value in the last N years." I'm not an economist, bu…

There is no such thing as what minimum wage should be "fairly". What is the minimum amount you should be able to pay someone an hour? Surely it is the amount where if you didn't, someone else would pay them more. There are many people who do jobs worth much less than $32/hour. That min wage would just make them illegal to employ. >You can't go off mcdonalds sandwiches, and you can't use the economic indicators that i…

> What is the minimum amount you should be able to pay someone an hour? Surely it is the amount where if you didn't, someone else would pay them more.

A livable wage in the geographic jurisdiction they are in. Including stuff like transportation, healthcare, food, heat, housing, and insurance.

Glad you asked.

oh, the company can't compete without exploiting workers?

oh well.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#683

Post by toss1 »

milesrout wrote: post #671
musicale wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> massively overpaying its workforce As I understand it, tech employees are typically paid a small fraction of the revenue that they bring into the company. Outside of tech, employees are underpaid, and wages haven't tracked productivity growth since the 1970s. Profit growth has greatly exceeded wage growth since the early 2000s, with the exception of the 2008 recession.

The labour theory of value that you allude to here makes no sense. People are paid at the market price based on supply and demand, just like other goods and services. Tech employees don't "bring in" the company's revenue. That makes the mistake of attributing the products and services of a business to its workers. >wages haven't tracked productivity growth since the 1970s. Propaganda. Productivity growth literally is…

>>Productivity growth is literally just wage growth, by definition.

No, it is the opposite, whether you are measuring Units Per Worker Hour or especially Units Per Worker Dollar.

You have a dozen $25/hr workers in a factory producing 50 widgets/hour, and you now introduce new tools, techniques, and/or materials and they now produce 80 widgets per hour, productivity per hour and per dollar has risen, but worker pay is exactly the same.

If you instead cut their pay to $22/hr their productivity in Units/WorkerHour is unchanged but productivity in Units/Labor$ has risen.

It is ONLY in the limited case where you are paying 100% by piecework that productivity tracks wages, e.g., if those workers are paid $6/Widget produced and they manage to make 50%more widgets/hr, then their pay rises with productivity. But that is uncommon and labor cost is rarely the only input.

Edit: typos

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#684

Post by toss1 »

milesrout wrote: post #672
genewitch wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimum wage, fairly, should have been around $32 in 2019 or so. I haven't run numbers lately because it's depressing, but I bet it's worse now. You can't go off mcdonalds sandwiches, and you can't use the economic indicators that ignore food and fuel. I've heard wild numbers from "the dollar is worth 50¢ compared to 20 years ago" to "the dollar has lost 98% of its value in the last N years." I'm not an economist, bu…

There is no such thing as what minimum wage should be "fairly". What is the minimum amount you should be able to pay someone an hour? Surely it is the amount where if you didn't, someone else would pay them more. There are many people who do jobs worth much less than $32/hour. That min wage would just make them illegal to employ. >You can't go off mcdonalds sandwiches, and you can't use the economic indicators that i…

>>There is no such thing as what minimum wage should be "fairly"

Nonsense.

There most definitely IS a definition of a fair minimum wage -- it is the definition used when it was originally introduced into law:

The wage necessary for a full-time (40hr/week) worker head-of-household to support a family of four above the poverty line -- spouse & kids in a house/apartment, food, medical, education, etc..

We have Walmart workers collecting $6 Billion in benefits per year to stay above the poverty line while the Waltons sit on a $250Billion fortune, it is clear we are subsidizing the rich by failing to set an above-poverty minimum wage.

EDIT: typos, add referenced line

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#685

Post by carlob »

saghm wrote: post #598
carlob wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Whi…

I didn't say don't tip, I said don't use Uber and use a taxi instead (and keep tipping if you want). I don't know what the situation is in NYC, but the last time I visited the US in Illinois, my taxi driver told me he also used Uber when he finished the hours he could legally drive a taxi for. To me that's scary on so many levels: both from the point of view of exploitation, but also personal safety.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#686

Post by modo_mario »

screye wrote: post #207
filoleg wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot speak for layoffs in all industries ever, but I agree with your assessment of layoffs in big tech from personal experiences. I have way too many “lifer” friends in big tech who are deadly scared of layoffs and job hopping. They are also the ones who rarely got promoted and havent had a significant pay bump pretty much ever. On another hand, half my team at a big tech company got laid off back at the start of…

Has to do with H1b visas. Post layoff, a person on H1B has 2 months to sign a new job offer or they must leave the country. Majority of Indian and Chinese H1bs do not have green cards, and are the main group that suffers. Some of these folks are well into their 30s, with kids and houses in the US.

I'm kind of curious how they have houses in the US. I'm from Europe but I would have kind of assumed that banks aren't willing to lend to someone without residency pinned down or would only do so at extortionate rates. I also kind of assume most wouldn't be able to pay for a house outright.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#687

Post by gwbas1c »

stogot wrote: post #275
gwbas1c wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stayed in the same job for nearly a decade, it got really interesting in the second half; in a way that it never would have gotten if I had job hopped every 3 to 5 years. That being said, once I got bored in the job, I sniffed out that the parent company wanted to lay a few people off, and hinted that I was open to it. It worked out well for me. I was just too busy in my personal life to look for a job on the side,…

How do you bring up that you want to be laid off?

Situation: My boss was given a month notice about getting laid off. He told me that he believed the department head was told to cut costs dramatically.

Situation, part 2: All tech products have a life cycle. At some point they go into maintenance mode where there's no active development of new features.

Situation, part 3: Although we were a market leader in our niche, we just couldn't compete with what was coming from Microsoft.

Thus, I had a 1-1 with the department head. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I probably alluded to wondering what I was going to do when the feature I was working on was complete, and hinting that, after working on this product for a decade, I was getting kind of bored.

The package was confidential, but given that my last day of work was February 29, 2020, I made out rather well. :)

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#688

Post by [deleted] »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #580
llm_nerd wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

[deleted]

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#689

Post by hapara2024 »

no_wizard wrote: post #185
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…

The tech industry also doesn’t reward loyalty, even at big tech. There’s a reason for the low tenure at most firms and it’s primarily due to the lack of rewarding experience and depth of field knowledge at most companies. When you have to get a new job just to get a salary increase that keeps up with inflation you are going to see a lot of job hopping when the skills of the workforce are generally in demand. How ofte…

>Where the fuck is the company showing any loyalty to its workforce?

I mean by that definition, they wouldn't be hiring much, so you don't see them o. n the radar.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#690

Post by swat535 »

bloomingkales wrote: post #424
yodsanklai wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, maybe that's how people in their 30s living in NYC or bay area feel about layoffs. But when you're older, have a family, and live in an area with a less dynamic job market, you may see things differently.

Why does it have to be an age thing? Some men and women are players and the game is the game to them. Those who are naturally monogamous would be stressed in a game like that. Constantly uprooting is a stressful lifestyle and can truly be torture (as evidenced by constant anxiety, no way to be). I can promise you people who are job hopping are hopping around other things in life (friends, family, relationships, proje…

It's an age-related issue because ageism is deeply ingrained in the tech industry making it difficult for older engineers to find opportunities.

They are are more likely to set strong boundaries, demand fair compensation, and expect strong leadership. They are less willing to work nights and weekends, accept subpar pay, or tolerate workplace abuse, unlike younger, less experienced employees who may be more naive or eager to conform.

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