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Ask HN: Who is firing?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#211

Post by user5994461 »

tzs wrote: post #101
desdiv wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a double-take when I saw Twitter posting[0] in the Who's Hiring thread. What's the rationale here? Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851502

According to the link given by Keverw most of the fired employees were in marketing and sales. The "Who's Hiring" post is asking for software engineers to work on server infrastructure.

That's a tough position to recruit for currently. Let's all be positive and suppose that they always had real vacancies in there :D

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#212

Post by tluyben2 »

gspetr wrote: post #206
danieltillett wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to see someone follow sci-hub.cc lead and put the server and public face in Russia.

As luck would have it I'm Russian. Do you think it would take off if I would do it for real? Should we poll the community in an "Ask HN" thread to see if people want this?

I would like it and wouldn't mind hosting it, but yeah FuckedCompany does have a better ring to it than the other names I see here. That might be nostalgia though.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#213

Post by zelos »

tehwalrus wrote: post #187
dfraser992 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot about being 'sent to Coventry' - i.e. the company doesn't want to pay you redundancy, and can't fire you for incompetence, so you get ignored, not given any work, get put in a useless role, etc until you wise up and quit/find another job. British passive aggressiveness at its finest! Being American. I would have had no problem with being fired aka 'you're now surplus' and it would have been far more helpfu…

I've heard that that practise (what a name!) Is relatively common in Japan: I've never heard of it in the UK before. I have heard of "gardening leave" though: where you're left on full salary but kept out of the building for your notice period, to stop you passing up to date market info to your new company. (It's the only legal way I know of in the UK to implement a non-compete clause.)

I love the fact that no one seems to know why we say "sent to Coventry" as well.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#214

Post by NicoJuicy »

Animats wrote: post #32
chrissnell wrote: post #8

Back in the first dotcom bubble, we had FuckedCompany.com. It tracked these sorts of things on a daily basis.

I had Downside's Deathwatch, a simple automated cash flow analysis.[1] It's still up, frozen in time. All those "Chart is not available for this symbol" entries are dead. In the first dot-com boom, many companies went public before profitability. So anyone could see how much cash they had and how fast they were burning through it. I just calculated how much time they had left until cash went to zero. That's the "deat…

This is awesome ( i mean, there is beauty in the simplicity of it)

Any thoughts to share the code which you used to analyse edgar? :)

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#215

Post by user5994461 »

hocuspocus wrote: post #152
Raed667 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

34k € is a bad salary in Germany? Because I think it is an average 1st salary in France (or the companies I've been talking to are also planning to get me paid abysmally )

Social contributions are a much bigger part of your gross salary in Germany. 34k would be ~28k in France. My company hires new grads around 50k and I guess decent startups who make people relocate across continents should pay at least 45k.

Damn. That's more than I got when I started in London. Should have picked Berlin instead.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#216

Post by js_what_ »

theow wrote: post #109
anon12369 wrote: post #67

Shopstyle in SF just laid off 20 staffers between dev and product.

I heard that was directly due to development team deciding to rewrite their site in "the angular" because it was quote: "like Haskell but better" Blew a huge hole in their search engine rankings.

Well, it does have really poor load times and isn't SEO friendly in the least. Where I work, we are going through the same pain but with a different -- more in style -- set of front end practices.

It's a real shame what poor management, idealism, over-engineering and developers desperately putting their own goals ahead of the company will do to a product.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#217

Post by kefka »

intoverflow2 wrote: post #184
jknoepfler wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool. 1. Hiring is a noisy process. You can tune your hiring test to lean more towards false negatives or more towards false positives, but you cannot (at this juncture in history) eliminate a large amount of bias (error) from evaluations of candidates. 2. Regression to the mean ensures that any hiring process that sets a "hig…

Knew the HN SV crowd would find a way to spin this as "This is good for "

Its not a spin. Its the actual business process and thought behind it.

The solution to that is challenge it with clout equal to the business. And that means unions. Only when 2 powers butt heads, will there be any fairness out of that.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#218

Post by mountaineer22 »

throw1988_9121 wrote: post #107
hinkley wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much my experience. Once one useful person gets laid off, everyone can't help but think they're the next useful person to get laid off. And in small groups it feels personal. So now you're playing CYA instead of taking the good kinds of risks with big payoffs.

In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds? I've only seen the later happen, and personally I think I'd prefer the first one. If you know that after that large layoff round the rest of the company is safe, I'd venture that might be better for the morale of the remaining employees.

I worked at a place, where I was not laid off, but my friend was, on his birthday.

For me, this was a real eye-opener.

It would not have been a big deal for HR to wait another day, and then lay him off.

Another employee, also laid off, 2 days after moving out of his aunt's house and had put a deposit down on an apartment and DSL connection.

I think I left a month later right before the company imploded.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#219

Post by user5994461 »

Raed667 wrote: post #98
1474295912 wrote: post #96

VisualMeta GmbH in Berlin. They're a 'start-up' backed by Axel Springer, Berlin. They fired about 60-70 people recently, some of them on their first day of work. Most of their devs come from non-existent countries (China/Eritrea/Pakistan etc) and they're paid abysmally (€32-34k). It's a surprise that this news wasn't covered at all in Berlin start-up press.

34k € is a bad salary in Germany? Because I think it is an average 1st salary in France (or the companies I've been talking to are also planning to get me paid abysmally )

34kE for a new master's graduate is rather low in Paris. It's rather high for the rest of the country.

See here for discussion about French salaries.

http://www.developpez.net/forums/f597/emploi-etudes-informat...

That's the main french forum for professional developers tips & tricks & career advice & salaries.

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