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Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

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Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#701

Post by hnfong »

username_my1 wrote: post #661
strix_varius wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developers ship code Developers ship solutions to problems, which often involves some code. A developer who solves the problem in a fast, cheap, maintainable way with an off-the-shelf package is superior to a developer who solves the same problem in a slow, expensive way with many thousands of lines of unmaintainable code. > but in general productivity measured in code changes frequency / volume Oh my. I don't even…

it's funny that you felt the need to point out the first part of my argument and forgot about the second one. impact (feature $value * users using it) / change rate (frequency * volume) is a full enough overview of an engineer's output in a crude manner. if you implement a feature that makes 10$s per user for 100M users in 2 lines of code you're the best developer out there..... if you write 10000 lines of code to sh…

I don't see how the change rate matters.

If one line of code produces $1M of impact, should it be considered inferior or superior to a developer who produced a 100k line codebase with a couple thousand commits?

But measuring direct impact to the bottom line for a developer is just confusing the roles of the business development team / sales team and the devs. As a manager, do you choose who works on which feature? If so, doesn't that make your subjective choice (on who gets to make the $$$ feature) the only metric that matters?

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#702

Post by hnfong »

twawaaay wrote: post #624
eschneider wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the big value-adds for a senior engineer is being able to recognize tasks that just don't need to be done, ever, because they just won't contribute much value relative to other things. Remember, it's not how much you get done. It's how much of the right stuff you get done.

Yeah, exactly. Now explain to somebody they need to come up with a measurements for all the things I have very efficiently declined to do... saving everybody time, effort and helping the really important task get the bandwidth it needed.

Easy, I'll just ask my colleague to come up with impractical, expensive ideas and I'll reject them all for great profit!

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#703

Post by hnfong »

saagarjha wrote: post #538
adam_arthur wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't. That being said there are some intangibles, like morale etc. It's possible there are people that benefit the team while having low personal productivity. But anyway, no need to approach in th…

I’m going to respond to the second half of your comment because the first part is trivially false and the others have already spoken to that: do you think Google should cut all teams but those involved in advertising? Because the rest aren’t making money. Why keep them around?

Ironically that might not be such a bad idea. If the assumption is that Google is unlikely to make further gains beyond online advertising, shareholders would gain more profit in the long run by cutting the teams, and talented people might move to companies that are better at making money in the other areas.

The problem is that upper management don't want to be the one declaring that they're giving up on growing the company. Especially that they have billions of dollars to spend/waste every year.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#704

Post by kingcoleman »

adam_arthur wrote: post #429
strix_varius wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truth is that a majority of tech companies don't need 50%+ of their employees. Totally agree. The problem is, nobody knows how to tell which ones. On the ground it's obvious. I'm sure everyone here knows who on their team is crucial to their current production stack, and also knows others who would have no impact (or even positive impact!) if they left. One level up - the direct EM - has most of that context to…

No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't. That being said there are some intangibles, like morale etc. It's possible there are people that benefit the team while having low personal productivity. But anyway, no need to approach in th…

> No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... ... large amounts of quality code? How many lines of code a week constitutes a large contribution?

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#705

Post by kingcoleman »

twawaaay wrote: post #550
adam_arthur wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't. That being said there are some intangibles, like morale etc. It's possible there are people that benefit the team while having low personal productivity. But anyway, no need to approach in th…

> No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't. If you are factory line worker, yes. If you are a developer or a manager (a "knowledge worker") -- what you could be observed to be doing has usually little correlation with result for the…

I didn't read your entire comment and realized you suggested the same link. What's old is new again.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#706

Post by LambdaComplex »

twblalock wrote: post #676
nemo44x wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest part of this to me to deal with is that it’s the truth. For decades, the conservative line was if you give people money they’ll just blow it on gambling and booze. Turns out it’s true.

The same realization applies to UBI. What we had, in effect, was the closest thing we will ever get to a nationwide short-term UBI experiment and it was a complete disaster . The worst fears about UBI were realized with just a few payments: people gambling with the money, creating stock bubbles with meme stocks, and contributing to a rapid rise in inflation. People will say that wasn't really UBI -- but it's the clos…

> People will say that wasn't really UBI

Which makes sense, because it wasn't. A key point of UBI is its consistency: you know you are getting that money every month, indefinitely, and therefore can plan/budget accordingly.

A one-time payment? Okay, sure, I can use that to cover my rent this month, but then it's not doing me any good. So why pay my rent with it when I can go gamble with it and maybe luck out?

> and with "real" UBI people would have been given even more free money.

tldr: the point isn't the amount of money, it's the consistency.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#707

Post by geekasm »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #575
Foobar8568 wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever worked with an Indian company? I am just laughing each time I hear huge talent pool. So maybe your top 1% is incredible but they already left the country.

You’re not wrong but there has been a big shift in the Indian tech education scene the last couple of years. All these startups raised an insane amount of money and are suddenly hungry for product-focused talent. The average Indian engineer used to aspire for consulting jobs (think TCS, Infosys) since product-focused jobs were so few. Now their goal is to get a job at a startup. Consequently, the tech stack and skill…

No post body was provided.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#708

Post by mikeyouse »

zomglings wrote: post #697
mikeyouse wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re actually curious about the EMH, you should really read something deeper than non-finance people paraphrasing it poorly.

Can you please cite some of these references?

It's a really approachable theory and contrary to what you'll read in tech message boards - doesn't remotely boil down to "the market can't be wrong". Burton Malkiel (economist most famous for writing "A Random Walk Down Wall St" and being a longtime advisor of Vanguard) has a paper talking about the early 2000's pushback.

It gives a good summation / spells out some critiques / offers his reasons for disagreeing:

https://www.princeton.edu/~ceps/workingpapers/91malkiel.pdf

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#709

Post by twblalock »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #706
twblalock wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same realization applies to UBI. What we had, in effect, was the closest thing we will ever get to a nationwide short-term UBI experiment and it was a complete disaster . The worst fears about UBI were realized with just a few payments: people gambling with the money, creating stock bubbles with meme stocks, and contributing to a rapid rise in inflation. People will say that wasn't really UBI -- but it's the clos…

> People will say that wasn't really UBI Which makes sense, because it wasn't. A key point of UBI is its consistency: you know you are getting that money every month, indefinitely, and therefore can plan/budget accordingly. A one-time payment? Okay, sure, I can use that to cover my rent this month, but then it's not doing me any good. So why pay my rent with it when I can go gamble with it and maybe luck out? > and w…

There were multiple rounds of stimulus payments.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#710

Post by adam_arthur »

kingcoleman wrote: post #704
adam_arthur wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't. That being said there are some intangibles, like morale etc. It's possible there are people that benefit the team while having low personal productivity. But anyway, no need to approach in th…

> No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... ... large amounts of quality code? How many lines of code a week constitutes a large contribution?

The most prolific people at my startup were doing 20k/month. The worst performers were doing 500/month. No, the people doing 500/month didn't compensate for it in other ways.

Of course this was a company that needed to build a product and enhance it to survive, not a pseudo-monopoly daycare.

Even up to a few hundred developers, its quite obvious who's a strong contributor and who isn't. The people who produce the most code are almost uniformly also the most theoretically strong/capable. Though there was a case where somebody was quite prolific but produced pretty poor/buggy code. It's obvious from how smooth the features they developed go when shipped to production.

In most workplaces you'll find that 80% of the results are produced by the top 20% of contributors

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