921–930 of 1001 posts
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Back in the late 90s a senior Microsoft exec explained this to me, they had acquired staff and continued to operate entire divisions which he described as "ballast". In the future, once the stock price increases slowed, they would be heaved over the edge of the balloon basket so that it could continue to rise. I often think about that.
old sysadmin trick: create large file on a disk and in a dire situation when DB runs out of space delete it.
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This has a name, and also a poster boy. Amazon's well known "hire-to-fire" [1] https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to...
Amazon followed that model heavily until they basically ran out of top talent wanting to work for them. That bit really hard when AI hit and all the top engineers wouldn’t even consider working at Amazon.
Why is Matthew Prince not fired? They missed EPS and AI could write (or perhaps did write) this entirely meaningless announcement. What they'll do instead is double down and start another 100 useless AI initiatives that no one wants.
Someone who knows the product deeply and has grown it into what it is today will always stay valuable. AI can replace people at a low level because they are seen as a cost. While people at the top are better connected. CEOs travel a lot, probably subscribing to 100 mastermind groups where CEOs of other companies also hang out, playing dozens of mind games and strategising all the time. Such people are hard to replace…
Low level employees are always taking far bigger risks in relative terms, the worse position a CEO will be in if all of his "risk" hits him is that they'll have to become a regular low level employee.
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> AI tools make great team members even better This is the predominant (public) talking point. And it’s true. But along with that: when you have effective people becoming even more effective with AI, it becomes glaringly obvious who the INeffective people are. At which point it becomes hard to justify keeping those people around. (That often includes people who are otherwise effective but aren’t utilizing agents and…
Before AI, it was impossible to measure productivity. Some tried with misguided metrics like lines of code added but that just incentivized writing obtuse code. What has changed?
THEN I’ll be happy when management has rendered itself obsolete and becomes unemployed. Because the AI prompts used to replace the CEO and COO are trivial.
So let’s hope for the day after tomorrow.
THEN I’ll be happy when management has rendered itself obsolete and becomes unemployed. Because the AI prompts used to replace the CEO and COO are trivial.
So let’s hope for the day after tomorrow!
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why exactly do we want to damp flamewars by comment count? as long as an individual comment fits the rules why do we punish comments in aggregate
Because it's a global optimization problem and HN gets less optimal* when there are flamewars on the frontpage. Do you have a different approach in mind that we could do instead? * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
maybe to put it in a way where your values are aligned, i'm a curious person, and i learn a lot from the discussions that happen right on HN rather that only going to the source.. indiscriminate comment count damping takes away/lowers visibility of the most interesting comments that would provoke my curiosity.
one could instead do any sort of basic classifier system ranging from bag of words to running a ModernBERT to rate flamewarness and differentially apply the downrank based on "flamewar score" rather than "really poor proxy to flamewar score"
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I’ve seen managers hiring people with an intent to lay them off when winds change to protect themselves and their close circle. I can only imagine they’ve had great KPIs in both cases: first for scaling the team, and then for cutting costs.
This is completely acceptable. When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage? A lot of people here and in the industry in general seem to optimise for compensation package and put blinkers on themselves for other factors that are definitely relevant. Companies aren't penalised by candidates for such practices. I'm not saying it's good bu…
When you have a mortgage to pay and a family and a COBRA package running out (in the best case), your willingness to "penalize" a company that is actually willing to pay you decent money gets progressively lower as time passes. Not everybody has FU money and can refuse all offers until an ideal employer shows up on the horizon.
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> Employees can and do choose these companies completely of their own volition. Except for the part where, some of the time, it's "this company, or I can't buy food or pay my rent".
I think you have to squint pretty hard to think that's the case in software engineering. LA Times suggests there are 6.9 million job openings (1). I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that anyone who wants a job in tech should get one otherwise its a humanitarian crisis. In fact, I'd say it's beyond unreasonable to suggest that. Still, I do feel bad for younger folks trying to break into the industry - but "work…
Yeah sure. I've seen literally dozens of job openings in certain companies that match my resume pretty much perfectly. None of them ever bothered to respond when I applied beyond "nah, better luck next time" (even that is not guaranteed, some just ignore you). I have no idea what those millions of job openings are, really, but the fact is, when you're out of a job, you don't feel like you have millions of employers lined up to invite you. Especially after you spend a couple of months submitting resumes and getting no interviews.
> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026
This is pretty generous, usually a couple of months is all you get, sometimes people don't get even that. With that kind of approach, working for Cloudflare becomes even more decent option, comparatively.