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Layoffs Don't Work

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Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#761

Post by me-vs-cat »

toss1 wrote: post #684
milesrout wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as what minimum wage should be "fairly". What is the minimum amount you should be able to pay someone an hour? Surely it is the amount where if you didn't, someone else would pay them more. There are many people who do jobs worth much less than $32/hour. That min wage would just make them illegal to employ. >You can't go off mcdonalds sandwiches, and you can't use the economic indicators that i…

>>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?

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#762

Post by bbqfog »

guappa wrote: post #752
bbqfog wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, I'll continue my "lack of a clue" and keep hiring the best engineers in the world.

If your definition for "best engineer in the world" is "hired by you"… sure. I'm just not sure anyone else in the world would agree with this definition :)

My definition of "best engineers in the world" are people that have wildly successful GitHub accounts. I'm very glad I'm in an industry with losers that don't know how to compete. It's like playing on easy mode!

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#763

Post by ttoinou »

dartos wrote: post #757
ttoinou wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more risky job should be compensated more ? It'd be the opposite, if it's risky then the variance of the income should be greater (success = more income) I don't want to present the problem as black and white but merely express a simple idea : developers DO want to be managed to simplify their lives and focus their time on more important things for them

> 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)

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#764

Post by Tainnor »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #510
bobthepanda wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who does these types of interviews on both ends, something like this is why I like to start with an outrageously simple question to break the ice. Surprisingly, I have an 80% fail rate on the first question usually, which is just “find the second largest number in an array of numbers” for a 5 YOE role.

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.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#765

Post by toss1 »

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?

I would say yes, it is reasonable to have an exception for lower wages for teenage part-time entry-level workers, and maybe some partially-disabled workers.

Of course there would need to be provisions that it not be abused and just used for all positions. E.g., it cannot be used for workers 21 years old or older, etc. And the rules against abuse need to be solid, as we can guarantee that whatever rules are made, employers will work hard to abuse and game the system to their advantage and at the employee's cost.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#766

Post by toss1 »

milesrout wrote: post #746
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…

>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 maintain a functional workforce in a modern society.

>>You don't have a natural right to receive the fruits of the labour of others.

>>Then stop giving benefits to people that have jobs.

Right. So what you want is a Dickensian crabs-in-a-bucket labor market where the wage level is set by the most desperate person, who will work for hours to get a crust of bread for his/her next meal. A market where employers can abuse workers at will because there really are 500 others outside the gate who will take his job if he isn't willing to take the beating?

We are no longer living in a frontier society where 97%+ of the workers are producing food.

That insanely over-simplistic model has been tried, and it is a resounding failure, both for every society, every country, and every individual living in it. Those societies inevitably collapse or grow out of it with minimum standards for everyone. And while it is obviously awful for the workers, it is no day at the beach for the oligarchs either, who must live in secured closed-off areas, always frightened of everyone in the public as well as their rivals in power. Unproductive misery for everyone is what you want?

So, NO, the solution is not to just make the people at the bottom more poor, more hungry, and more desperate.

The solution is to stop giving benefits by ensuring that their employer pays the workers sufficiently that they do NOT NEED benefits to survive.

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

They have an exploitation model.

The exploitation model specifically violates your above principle saying that the employers have a natural right to the fruits of the workers' labor to whatever degree they can exploit the worker by their desperation.

You aren't saying the no one has a right to the fruits of anyone else's labor, you are only saying that no other worker has such a right, but the employers do.

You are saying that if someone has power or deception, whatever they can take is their right.

I say, NO, that is the most dishonorable and amoral of societies.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#767

Post by bobthepanda »

genewitch wrote: post #663
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…

((What happens) if you are missing a close paren?

As an interviewer, my company allows the person to pick the language of their choice. At that point, you could just write it in psuedocode if it came down to it, and if you actually knew what you were talking about it doesn’t matter all that much. It’s not like I know the in and outs of every single language people have answered the question in.

In an era where linters and autocomplete and IDEs have existed for decades it’s silly to fail an interview based on tiny error checks.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#768

Post by ltbarcly3 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #732
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you read the thread. They did have those jobs, and presumably they were on teams that did vaguely what is on their resume. No HR doesn't investigate candidates or do background checks before you interview them, that would be very expensive and silly. I feel like you kind of vaguely are aware of these topics but have never actually had a job or something because you seem completely unfamiliar with the ba…

Quite the opposite (and sadly, still. American). I'm just so frustrated how I'm 10 years into this career and the interview process feels more random than ever. I can apply to 100 job and interview for 10 that all fall through. Then I can just go to a bar and trip into an opportunity I wasn't fully expecting. What does that say about the interview process? >No HR doesn't investigate candidates or do background checks…

You keep saying 'we'. The companies I have worked for have on average had very streamlined interview processes, with the exception of very large (>2000 engineer) companies. I don't know how to fix hiring for companies that big. I'm sure you have a lot of 'ideas' that are really just pointing out the problems. We all see the problems, but fixing them means either empowering individual managers (many of which would just hire their cronies instantly if allowed to) or inventing new ways to do HR which is obviously nontrivial, especially with incumbent HR morons fighting you.

An HR screen will sometimes remove frauds (not usually because they can't really tell, it removes uncharasmatic frauds only), but it also has a very high probability of removing anyone on the autism spectrum - no matter how qualified. I really don't want people on the autism spectrum removed from my hiring funnel for software engineer. If you ever looked over the shoulder of a recruiter or HR when they do a first pass on resumes you will be horrified at how many of the best candidates they pass over because they have no idea what they are reading, and how many very poor candidates they pass along for very stupid reasons like having 'Yale' for their college (despite it being for History and despite it being the extension school, true story, and this person ended up getting hired despite negative interview feedback and then fired for incompetence a few months later).

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#769

Post by gjm11 »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #575
gjm11 wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elsewhere in this thread there is literally an example of someone who, by their own description, worked at a FAANG company for some years getting good performance reviews, has enough interview experience that even if they couldn't generally code their way out of a paper bag they were surely good at interview-question coding, ... and, under pressure from a pushy interviewer, completely failed to do a straightforward c…

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 employer, and who has a lot of exposure to this sort of interview question?

I think this is good evidence that, in fact, it's not vanishingly unlikely that someone genuinely competent flubs what should be an embarrassingly straightforward coding task in an interview.

That doesn't, unfortunately, mean I have a good suggestion for a better way of telling who is and who isn't capable of writing code. Maybe this is the best we can do. If it really is just a matter of "sometimes, at random, people have bad days"[1] then provided it's fairly rare this issue doesn't matter too much. I'm more worried about the possibility that it's more "a smallish fraction of otherwise-good people often have this sort of bad day", because then that smallish fraction of people may be getting completely overlooked, which is bad for them because it may take them ages to get a job and bad for employers because it effectively reduces the pool of good people to hire.

[1] In this particular case, the "bad day" seems to have included an obnoxious interviewer, which it's reasonable to hope wouldn't be repeated at another company's interview.

But, again, pointing out a problem unfortunately doesn't guarantee having a good answer. But, equally, not having a good answer doesn't mean the problem isn't real. It would be very nice to believe that all the people failing interviews because they fail to solve an easy coding problem are undeserving incompetents who should be bombing out of the interviews, but it looks to me like that ain't so.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#770

Post by me-vs-cat »

toss1 wrote: post #765
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?

I would say yes, it is reasonable to have an exception for lower wages for teenage part-time entry-level workers, and maybe some partially-disabled workers. Of course there would need to be provisions that it not be abused and just used for all positions. E.g., it cannot be used for workers 21 years old or older, etc. And the rules against abuse need to be solid, as we can guarantee that whatever rules are made, empl…

"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.

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