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Ask HN: Who is firing?

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51–60 of 454 posts

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#51
Ah yes, the "startup you work at".

Well, I'm probably full for the moment, but a startup that I know is bleeding some in my neck of the woods is MasteryConnect. Chop chop chop. Domo is not looking good, but they probably have money to survive for a bit.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#52
post #36

The DNC. At least once the election is over so it doesn't look terrible for all concerned.

I imagine that will be the RNC as well. Kind of a tradition in an election year ^_^

The head of the DNC was already fired from CNN for directly colluding with Hillary Clinton (she gave HRC questions for the democratic debates ahead of time).

I have no idea how Bernie still supports her. She literally cheated against him to get the nomination.

This is not speculation. It's direct evidence of corruption in the DNC (and it revolves around guess who---Hillary Clinton).

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/donna-brazile-...

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#53
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? Because downsizing via attrition is a death sentence. The worst people are the most likely to stay and then new hires will be unlikely to stick around and deal with the code from the worst people. Once the spiral starts it's hard to get out of.

I always found if funny companies touting "We're hiring only the best" and then "We firing the worst".

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 "high bar" will result in pool of developers who are on average below that bar.

3. as an employee remains at a company, the bias in your evaluation process should decrease dramatically. One can, and probably should try to weed out false positives, especially if one is trying to reduce payroll.

Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#56
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? Because downsizing via attrition is a death sentence. The worst people are the most likely to stay and then new hires will be unlikely to stick around and deal with the code from the worst people. Once the spiral starts it's hard to get out of.

I always found if funny companies touting "We're hiring only the best" and then "We firing the worst".

It is really funny in a way and necessary in another.

Funny because companies necessarily say they aspire to have a representative workforce, one which reflects the community (local/national workforce, users, the founders?) but then when it comes down to it, they only want to keep the ones who will provide some value (which is obvious) but then remember the community is made up of all kinds of people with different abilities --so we realize we are all in it for ourselves --there is no "community" where we look after each other. It's me or them, really.

It's necessary because, well, we live in a competitive world where your competitor isn't going to say, well, let's take it easy on them, they are keeping on a bunch of underachievers, and keeping underachivers employed is good for community, so we should give them a break.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#57

The DNC. At least once the election is over so it doesn't look terrible for all concerned.

Are the national committees not fairly seasonal? What does a flack do in February?

The head of the DNC was just fired from CNN for directly colluding with Hillary Clinton (giving her debate questions ahead of time).

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/donna-brazile-...

http://www.snopes.com/donna-brazile-leaves-cnn/

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/31/media/donna-brazile-cnn-resi...

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#58
post #5

Twitter is firing the people who worked on Vine. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/10/27/twitter-strong-q3... Really love how you are doing the opposite for this thread. I guess It helps people get prospective on both sides :)

Twitter is a known tire fire. When I was out in San Francisco everyone who worked at Twitter had a shell-shocked look and talked about the experience the same way they would if they'd just gone to use the restroom and found a dead body.

Honestly that seems like par for the course for the area of town the Twitter HQ is in

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#59
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as they say: "This time it's different!"

This time is different. Back in the dot com days the companies were public and so the day of reckoning came quickly. Today everyone is running on VC/PE/SWF money and so problems can be hidden for a long time. Having said this until US interest rates rise or unless a white swan event occurs (I am Australian so all swans are black here) the music will keep playing and the everyone will keep dancing.

No doubt part of it is how these companies are funded. There's so much private money, and nobody knows what to do with it so it gets tossed at these hobby projects, and by some miracle one of them turns into a unicorn.

But there are other differences now too. You can't simply ridicule anything anymore. Back in 2000 we could point to a company trying to sell designer kitty litter on the Internet and laugh at how stupid it was and how greedy and full of hubris the founders were. Now, everyone's trying to "change the world" and empower everyone and "enable the sharing economy" and, well you can't criticize that without sounding like a big meanie. There are a lot of web sites out there that are simply never going to be businesses. They have their runway to burn through, and once it's done, they'll be blogging about Their Amazing Journey as they get acqui-hired. But when you point this out, you're just being negative--you're a jealous wantrepreneur.

Maybe this is an old-timer's "get off my lawn" rant, but I preferred it when it was OK to poke fun at things that you knew were ridiculous.

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