The premise that CEOs are stewards of companies is flawed. Their pay exploded over the period covered in this analysis. Hurting companies doesn't matter to them.
Layoffs Don't Work
751–760 of 801 posts
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#752Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have you even looked at their GitHub? Lol, considering most big projects are not on github, you're just showing your own lack of clue.
Great, I'll continue my "lack of a clue" and keep hiring the best engineers in the world.
If your definition for "best engineer in the world" is "hired by you"… sure. I'm just not sure anyone else in the world would agree with this definition :)
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#753Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In the US, it's common for folks to sell a house with a partially paid loan. Makes real-estate a liquid asset and that reduces risk. Further, it's low risk for the bank because they can always repossess the house if something goes wrong. A resident who falls on hard times can missa lot of payments before repossession can be forced. An H1b on hard times has 2 months to leave the country. This means at worst, they'll m…
>H1b Indians are on 30-50 yr queues for green card.
What do you mean by this? Surely they don't have to stay and work 30-40yrs before they can expect permanent residency?
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#754Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you read the thread. They did have those jobs, and presumably they were on teams that did vaguely what is on their resume. No HR doesn't investigate candidates or do background checks before you interview them, that would be very expensive and silly. I feel like you kind of vaguely are aware of these topics but have never actually had a job or something because you seem completely unfamiliar with the ba…
Quite the opposite (and sadly, still. American). I'm just so frustrated how I'm 10 years into this career and the interview process feels more random than ever. I can apply to 100 job and interview for 10 that all fall through. Then I can just go to a bar and trip into an opportunity I wasn't fully expecting. What does that say about the interview process? >No HR doesn't investigate candidates or do background checks…
> An HR screen isn't a background check. It's "can you talk about your roles and provlems solved like you actually did it. A good HR screen should make sure they aren't blatantly lying
Correct. While not perfect, if you have good HR hiring team they will do a decent job at feeling out the people before they get to you.
> I can apply to 100 job and interview for 10 that all fall through.
Part of the difficulty is that (despite any myths around engineering shortage) there are so many qualified people for every role that it is overwhelming.
I just opened a new job req last week, I have over 1100 resumes in the queue already. And this is a pretty specialized technical role in a specialized department, not a generic "javascript software engineer" role, either.
Obviously I can't read all of them, which makes me sad because someone took the time to send their resume and I feel like I should give them the respect of reading it, but there are simply not enough hours in a week. While HR does the screening, I also go and do a random sampling of the resumes and everyone who has applied seems at least moderately qualified. But of course I can only talk to about 1% of them at best.
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#755Earlier 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…
> You hire the best candidate overall
How, exactly, would you do that?
Say you open a new position and you get 100 resumes a day, every day, until you shut down the role and pick someone.
How are you hiring the best candidate overall?
How long are you waiting for "the best"?
How many resumes are you really evaluating per day? With 100 coming in, how do you know you didn't miss "the best" one?
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#756Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such a subliminal message might be "constructive dismissal" and against disability legislation. With a good lawyer you might get a decent result if they ever did fire you? On the plus side, the fact they haven't fired you means either (a) they do actually value you performance even if they're claiming otherwise (perhaps to avoid paying more) or (b) they'd quite like to fire you but fear being sued big time if they di…
Off and on they've been threatening me with a PIP for the past year, but haven't actually triggered one. I did talk to a lawyer. They said there's not much I can do until they terminate me, or risk losing the job. They could help me respond to a PIP when they PIP me. But even if the company terminates me, the lawyer said they are inclined to negotiate higher severance than going to court because it's tricky to prove…
Ah well I wish you all the best with it. Sounds like a form of bullying to me :( Might not hurt to set your phone to record mode during some of those meetings. ;) I know what you're saying about making a legal case. Legal stuff is always a pain, not somewhere you wanna go if you can help it. Its bluffing right? They need to think you might consider sue-ing and could win, even if you know you wouldn't. Personally, if I was in your position, I'd be looking at what skills were in demand locally, and ruthlessly up-skilling in that stuff, during work time, ideally by working on stuff they need anyway. But, again, easier said than done...
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#757Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not saying just leave everyone to their own devices, but some individuals should be able to have ownership and make decisions without layers and layers of process. Ofc decisions can have consequences, but that’s what the high pay should be for. It’s not a black and white issue and I don’t think you need to present it like one.
A more risky job should be compensated more ? It'd be the opposite, if it's risky then the variance of the income should be greater (success = more income) I don't want to present the problem as black and white but merely express a simple idea : developers DO want to be managed to simplify their lives and focus their time on more important things for them
> A more risky job should be compensated more?
Yea, duh.
The more your decisions affect the company, the more you’re compensated.
It’s why C-suite commands the biggest salaries.
It’s another reason why orgs are so low trust.
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#758Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you correct for it? As someone who works with ten year olds, they would ask you what causation and correlation is.
One big problem is layoffs cluster around events like the dot com bubble, the financial crisis, or covid, so there are weird things happening. You might be able to look at companies' quarterly profits to identify healthy companies that remained healthy, but still did layoffs.
Yeah, I don't think you could meaningfully prove the hypothesis.
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#759Earlier 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…
>just to do the math for you, a 1 year average tenure would be
The guy I replied to did say median tenure (where I was talking about mean or average tenure), so relative to a median tenure sure, doubling the staff would do that.
But you said average, in which case no that isn't true. Google is a 26 year old company. If you randomly distributed tenures across a hypothetical employee base (1-26 years), it would take something like 1200% growth to get the average tenure under 2 years. And of course Google's actual employee count growth rate over the past decade and a half is more in the range of 12%, so a couple of factors off for that.
Even when people say the average tenure is 3 -- doubtful -- that still requires an insane level of turnover for a company growing so slowly, relatively, and being so old.
Re: Layoffs Don't Work
#760Earlier 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?
There are some situations where layoffs are unavoidable. That's fine.
What's infuriating is a business culture that includes layoffs for outrageously profitable companies. I work at Google, which made 100 billion dollars in profit last year. More than $500,000 in profit per employee. Google is still conducting layoffs.
Layoffs are used as a tool of capital against labor. Amongst other things, it generates unemployment and people who are willing to accept lower pay due to the precarity of their situation (everybody needs to pay rent and eat), pushing down pay for the entire industry.