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Layoffs Don't Work

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Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#781

Post by dartos »

ttoinou wrote: post #763
dartos wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Risk = variance = you should make less or make more depending on outcome. You want the cake (freedom, more impact) and eat it too (guaranteed higher salary)

You have it all wrong.

People are not equations.

Let’s define risk in this discussion.

Risk is the relative impact your decisions have on the org at large. If you make the wrong choice as the CEO, you can tank the company.

If someone’s job involves risk, and you pay them peanuts, they’ll either go to a job that doesn’t involve that much risk or make decisions that are always maximally safe, regardless of potential upside, usually at the cost of company growth.

You want your staff to feel comfortable taking risks so that the company can grow, because a stagnant company will die. So you pay your positions more when they have more risk.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#783

Post by consteval »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #42
bell-cot wrote: post #26

Layoff are like hammers: When needed, in the hands of someone skilled, they work perfectly well. But such situations are sadly rare, compared to frustrated idiots grabbing hammers to get their quick "Hulk Smash!" dopamine hits.

When it is your money making payroll, than the perspectives rapidly shift. If your Labor doesn't tangibly produce quantifiable profit, than you must furlough staff to stay in business. Assigning fault in such situations is a fools errand, as everyone suffers losses in the end ($18k to $45k in lost training resources per person etc.) Best of luck, =3

In Tech, most layoffs seem completely unrelated to company performance, profit, or revenue.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#784

Post by ausbah »

munificent wrote: post #177
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…

A few months of skiing sounds nice, but not as nice as the profound pleasure of working on a team of people I've know and cared about for over a decade. You're going to spend half your waking life at work. For me, that's too much time to not want to do so at a place where I have real relationships with my coworkers.

>You're going to spend half your waking life at work.

not if you’re gonna FIRE asap

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#785

Post by Joel_Mckay »

consteval wrote: post #783
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it is your money making payroll, than the perspectives rapidly shift. If your Labor doesn't tangibly produce quantifiable profit, than you must furlough staff to stay in business. Assigning fault in such situations is a fools errand, as everyone suffers losses in the end ($18k to $45k in lost training resources per person etc.) Best of luck, =3

In Tech, most layoffs seem completely unrelated to company performance, profit, or revenue.

Tip: if a publicly traded firm hires in May, than expect layoffs at the end of the year. It is kind of a ritualistic sacrifice to investors.

The trick is being profitable to have around, and knowing when to leave on your own terms for something better. =3

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#786

Post by genewitch »

me-vs-cat wrote: post #761
toss1 wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 w…

Despite agreeing with the rest, should the kid who graduated high school 2 months ago (1) earn as a grocery cashier to support a family of four, including medical and education, (2) should they not work / not be employable, or (3) is there room for a minimum lower than this definition?

If a high school graduate comes in and offers the same value as the other cashiers making the same amount of money, then, yes, they should get paid the same. If the other cashiers are more valuable, then they should be paid more.

this isn't really as difficult as everyone makes it. "Minimum wage is a company's way of telling you that if it was legal to pay you less, they would."

If a company can't afford to pay cashiers at different rates based on their tenure and skill, then i guess the company will have to deploy self-checkout, and some people don't like that, so they'll take their business elsewhere. If that means that all grocery stores go "self checkout" then i suppose farmer's markets will become a lot bigger.

This is all about grocery cashiers, please do not try to extrapolate my words to anything else, i am speaking to this very narrow thing.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#787

Post by me-vs-cat »

genewitch wrote: post #786
me-vs-cat wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite agreeing with the rest, should the kid who graduated high school 2 months ago (1) earn as a grocery cashier to support a family of four, including medical and education, (2) should they not work / not be employable, or (3) is there room for a minimum lower than this definition?

If a high school graduate comes in and offers the same value as the other cashiers making the same amount of money, then, yes, they should get paid the same. If the other cashiers are more valuable, then they should be paid more. this isn't really as difficult as everyone makes it. "Minimum wage is a company's way of telling you that if it was legal to pay you less, they would." If a company can't afford to pay cashi…

Sure, we can approach from that angle, instead of the just-graduated-high-school angle.

I did not talk about paying cashiers at different rates. I addressed the single minimum rate from the earlier comment, where a household's single income can "support a family of four above the poverty line -- spouse & kids in a house/apartment, food, medical, education, etc [without relying on assistance programs]". According to the back of this envelope, that would be $70,000/yr = $33/hr. In some areas or with other decisions, maybe only $50,000/yr = $24/hr.

A grocery store would be rare indeed that could afford to pay their lowest-skilled, lowest-tenured cashier at $24/hr. Surely society can come up with a better answer than telling so many grocery stores that self-checkout is the only practical way to stay in business.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#788

Post by genewitch »

me-vs-cat wrote: post #787
genewitch wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a high school graduate comes in and offers the same value as the other cashiers making the same amount of money, then, yes, they should get paid the same. If the other cashiers are more valuable, then they should be paid more. this isn't really as difficult as everyone makes it. "Minimum wage is a company's way of telling you that if it was legal to pay you less, they would." If a company can't afford to pay cashi…

Sure, we can approach from that angle, instead of the just-graduated-high-school angle. I did not talk about paying cashiers at different rates. I addressed the single minimum rate from the earlier comment, where a household's single income can "support a family of four above the poverty line -- spouse & kids in a house/apartment, food, medical, education, etc [without relying on assistance programs]". According to t…

if you search HN for genewitch, you will find many times have said that exact dollar amount should be minimum wage, so this isn't a gotcha.

for years^, i've been saying this, since 2018 or 2019. $33 an hour. So if you re-read what i actually said, i explain that i don't really care if a supermarket can't afford to pay cashiers at a livable wage. they can suffer from lack of staff, or go full self checkout and robots, or go out of business. I don't care, like, at all. "But genewitch, what about the families of the shareholders and CEO and board?" uh huh, luckily they can go get a job and make a livable wage somewhere else.

^i've only been posting on HN since 2020, but my point stands

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#789

Post by ltbarcly3 »

jjav wrote: post #755
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you ever get tired of arguing in bad faith?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem literally tells you exactly what to do in your situation. I'm sure someone, probably a professor or fun video on social media has told you about this a dozen times in your life, but if you didn't pay attention you can always Google it or ask ChatGPT https://chatgpt.com/share/67d3a121-13e4-8006-9ae3-625838875e...

2. While I said the goal was to hire the best candidate, this was as compared to someone who is just barely better than not filling the position. Hiring a top 5 candidate is also very good. The argument in GP was (paraphrasing) "I know people that aren't good programmers but they can manage to do little changes to existing code therefore you shouldn't give interview problems these dummies can't solve."

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#790

Post by ltbarcly3 »

Tainnor wrote: post #764
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…

> 'finding if a string is a substring of another string' Unless you mean using a "substring" function or regexes... coming up with the naïve O(n^2) algorithm is indeed easy, but finding a fast algorithm like KMP is, I would say, non-trivial? For the "second-largest number in array" it's rather easy to come up with an O(n) algorithm, so I would consider the two cases to be different.

I mean N^2!
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