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Layoffs Don't Work

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Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#791

Post by ltbarcly3 »

gjm11 wrote: post #769
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…

I completely agree that this is a very simple problem; I'm not at all arguing that it isn't. What I am arguing is that this doesn't make it super-unlikely that an otherwise competent person screws it up . If it's really a 1-in-10,000 event, isn't it rather surprising that we've got someone right here in this thread to whom it happened? Someone, moreover, not just barely competent but able to do well with a demanding…

That's fine. Lets say 5% of the time a world class programmer would get this wrong, but 100% of people who can't program get this wrong.

Lets say we interview 100 (N) people for a role. (100 is a lot but pick a number yourself and follow along)

The probability that a random interviewee is a top programmer is lets say 1/50 (T). So in our pool of 100 we have on average 2. Give everyone this problem, and if they get it right they move to round 2 which is 4 more interviews. Lets say 20 (P) people pass to round #2.

We are paying for a total of 100 + 80 = 180 interviews (N + 4P). To give everyone who failed the first round another try would require another 80 (N - P) interviews. So for almost 50% more cost (N-P)/(N + 4P) we gain (T * N * 5%) = 0.1 additional top programmer making it to round 2 on average. Just interviewing another 80 people (same cost) would get us (T * 80 * 95%) == 1.52 additional top programmers to round #2 on average. There's basically no reasonable % you can pick for how often people screw up where it makes sense to do anything but just ignore the possibility.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#792

Post by ttoinou »

dartos wrote: post #781
ttoinou wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 up…

I never use numbers and exact equations to think about business, economics and politics. You have the wrong guy. You want more money in a predictable way, go incentivize the employees the correct way. In the meantime, workers are also responsible for the layers of “useless” managements

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#793

Post by me-vs-cat »

genewitch wrote: post #788
me-vs-cat wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

You having said so previously has no impact on this belief:

> 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.

I'll take you at your word that you don't care to come up with a better answer, and that means I'll gain nothing further from discussing this with you. I'll bow out. Take care!

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#794

Post by me-vs-cat »

toss1 wrote: post #775
me-vs-cat wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Doctor, I need you to declare me disabled or else I'll lose my job when I turn 21. I need this job, and I don't know if I can find another one at the 21yo minimum wage." I really want to like what you're saying, but I see too many problems. I don't have answers.

>>Of course there would need to be provisions that it not be abused ... And the rules against abuse need to be solid, ... Exactly that sort of scenario is why I included those phrases. ANY large system will have imperfections, inadvertent waste, and openings for abuse. Of course these should be minimized, but that shouldn't stop us from making a system. Better a few people benefit undeservedly than many who deserve a…

The need for a system doesn't imply that your proposal is better than the status quo.

> Better a few people benefit undeservedly than many who deserve and need the benefits go hungry.

Agreed. Now consider that regulations exclude people, not include them, overall, by far. (I say this with a job that sees that daily, and where a frequent criticism is that implementing those regulations is government waste.)

What I'm taking away from this is, contrasting with an option I generally dislike, that option actually looks much better than I have previously thought, and it looks definitely better than raising the minimum wage. That is raising the corporate tax rate, which is at historic lows from what I understand, and increasing public benefits. You mentioned Walmart's profits being subsidized by benefit programs, but that valid and important complaint seems to be taken care of this way. This also starts to sound a lot like UBI, which I may have never really understood and have never supported. Maybe I should support it.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#795

Post by bigfatkitten »

palata wrote: post #538
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…

Have you ever seen a tech company where the workers actually stay? Where you can find employees who have been there for up to 30 years? I have. You know what striking difference I found with BigTech and their layoffs? These companies don't do layoffs. They are stable, employees feel secure and can evolve in their career without leaving. You know what employees say about their company? "It doesn't give the highest sal…

> Have you ever seen a tech company where the workers actually stay? Where you can find employees who have been there for up to 30 years?

Old tech. Places like Motorola and, at least until recently, IBM.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#796

Post by goodrubyist »

andrenotgiant wrote: post #44

> After the early-2000s dotcom bust, Bain researchers found that stock prices for S&P 500 companies that had no layoffs or laid off less than 3% of their workforce increased an average of 9% in the next year. Meanwhile, stock prices were flat in companies that laid off between 3%-10% of their workers, and prices plummeted 38% for companies that laid off more than 10%. Failing companies go through layoffs. Companies l…

yes, it's the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#797

Post by eastbound »

lumost wrote: post #521
eastbound wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, a recruiter I know will ask a tech candidate "what is 20% of 20,000?" A significant percentage cannot answer the question. Some even cry. It's shocking. During our interview, we ask candidates to design a history system. The key is to realize that our database is only 8Gb, and storing a year of updates is only 160Gb, so $2pm in AWS. Once there, a simple DB table suits, no need to set up Amazon S3. So w…

Out of curiosity what do you find wrong in the s3 solution? This is a data volume that rdbms can manage, but are you looking specifically for the engineer to say something like “I’ll maintain a Write Ahead Log in the database”

It’s just that it’s easier to pull if it’s in the same db as everything else. The S3 solution is perfectly ok and 10x cheaper (.20$ pm instead of 2$), but the difficulty is, now you need to do a REST call to S3, and if you want the history per user or per day or per object, then you need to design all sorts of metadata to be able to fetch the right objects.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#798

Post by hackburg »

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?

[dead]

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#799

Post by gjm11 »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #791
gjm11 wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree that this is a very simple problem; I'm not at all arguing that it isn't. What I am arguing is that this doesn't make it super-unlikely that an otherwise competent person screws it up . If it's really a 1-in-10,000 event, isn't it rather surprising that we've got someone right here in this thread to whom it happened? Someone, moreover, not just barely competent but able to do well with a demanding…

That's fine. Lets say 5% of the time a world class programmer would get this wrong, but 100% of people who can't program get this wrong. Lets say we interview 100 (N) people for a role. (100 is a lot but pick a number yourself and follow along) The probability that a random interviewee is a top programmer is lets say 1/50 (T). So in our pool of 100 we have on average 2. Give everyone this problem, and if they get it…

Sure, but now you're making a different claim from the one you made before.

Before, you were saying: anyone who says "muh anxiety" is just trying to cover for the fact that they're incompetent.

I suggested that we've got pretty good evidence that interview stress really truly can, and not only-vanishingly-occasionally, make competent people fail to do simple interview-type coding tasks.

So now you're advancing a different claim: even if some competent people appear incompetent in some interviews because of the stress of interviewing, you should make interview decisions as if those people are just plain incompetent, because most people who fail to do simple interview-type coding tasks really are incompetent and identifying the few who were just stressed out is difficult.

That could very well be true! But it's not what I was arguing against before.

... But I'll argue against it just a bit, even though I mean it when I say it could well be true.

1. There may be much less inefficient ways of catching the competent-but-stressed candidates than "just interview everyone twice"; completely incompetent people probably don't interview exactly the same as competent-but-stressed ones. (I don't know for sure because, of course, when you interview someone and they don't perform well you don't generally get to tell which category they were in. But I bet it would be possible to find out.)

2. If the situation is that some people are particularly susceptible to interview stress (but that this doesn't make them bad at actual programming jobs unless they're in an extra-stressful environment), the "eh, just reject them" strategy might be good for companies that are hiring but punishingly bad for the people affected who just can't get a job because they are bad at interviews. If there were a good way to identify people who are good but fall apart readily under interview-stress, that might be a big deal for those people. (Which someone on the hiring side might not care about, of course; but it's sad when some group of people gets systematically screwed over.)

I repeat, as I have said before, that I don't have a solution to this problem nor even good reason to believe that there is one. I'm just pushing back against the blithe assertion that there isn't a real problem here.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#800

Post by genewitch »

toss1 wrote: post #766
milesrout wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.. Food of what quality? That available in the 1930s? Medical of what quality? 1930s medical care? Education to primary level as most had in the 1930s or more than that? You don't have a natural right to receive the fruits of th…

>...of what quality? There are standards for virtually everything. Meet the current basic standards. For food, a basket of FDA/USDA-approved for distribution food to make a basic but nutritious diet for the family of 4. For housing, you could go with minimums for HUD housing. For education, through public high school. These are not hard to figure out (but may be a bit tedious). These are also minimums required to mai…

I enjoyed your comment, but this part stands on its own:

> If an employer cannot pay their workers a living wage they do NOT have a business model.

> They have an exploitation model.

as i replied to someone else who asked "what does livable wage mean [to you]?":

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.

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