Comment by scott01
4 hours ago
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 but it's astounding to me the number of people who for example optimise entirely for salary and then are shocked when the working conditions are very poor.
People game companies and companies will game people in return. Murray Gell Man amnesia will kick in and next week there will be thread about how CloudFlare is a great place to work for software devs because you can earn 20% more than other comparable companies with no reference to how things like job security or working conditions are measured.
> When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?
- “Are you hiring people just to fire them a year later to protect yourselves?”
- “Yes we do”
It’s a bit naive to think they’d just own up to it.
>- “Are you hiring people just to fire them a year later to protect yourselves?”
You think the naive part is the response and not that question?
My point is that you'll simply have to read between the lines on responses with leading questions not that they're going to be upfront about these things.
Also the interview isn't the only way to gauge these things, You can Google for layoff numbers as well and make determinations that way. There are some websites that are dedicated trackers of layoff announcements, both the loud and quiet ones e.g. Spotify I think were letting 29 people go per month for a while. I think the law in Europe was if was 30 people you had to announce it. I can't remember the exact detail but plenty of companies expose these loopholes.
How exactly would you ask this in an interview setting? I'm baffled by the idea.
> How exactly would you ask this in an interview setting?
You now know which companies do this.
Every company laying off now has to wear a Scarlett Letter: "we're a layoffs company".
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"Why is this role open"?
Either they will answer directly with something solid like "We're growing the team" or they will evade it which is still a meaningful answer for you. You could probe further with questions like:
"How has the team's headcount changed over the last 18-24 months?"
Basically you're alluding to 'employee turnover' without saying it.
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> People game companies and companies will game people in return.
You have cause and effect entirely reversed.
There have literally been movies and tv shows made about employees showing missplaced loyalty to their companies and what the companies do in spite of that loyalty, and now that the pendulum has swung to around a bit, you have the temerity to suggest it's the employees who started this trend and the poor employers are just forced to play the game? Fuck right off.
> 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?
To put it another way: she shouldn't have been dressed like that, it's her fault for being raped.
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.
Company internal GDP equivalent increase of a funeral.
It's the natural result of "fire the bottom 10% every year".
If that's the rule in your organization, and you have a core group of people that actually know the systems and get the work done, you better make sure you have 10% padding every year, lest you layoff someone important and their friends all quit in disgust. And since competence and institutional knowledge is built over time, that implies a revolving door of new folks coming in and most of it not making it.
If both sides know it, working as a "churney" can be pretty chill. Like being put on the roof from the getgo.
Maybe 1/10 of the new hires replace 1/90 of the existing old timers. You need some creative destruction.
Workers as cattle. This is utterly disgusting and the way it’s normalized is even more revolting
In management terms a human and a printer are the same. Both resources that need to be managed. I hate it.
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Using human resources as moat to protect themselves when the barbarians come. Seems to Management 101
It feels like it was the most beneficial implementing better decision making mechanics by replacing manager with AI, not lowly folks doing actual value creation.
LLM models have better reasoning abilities than these folks....
They are not as good at building an old boys/girls network though who help each other into positions of power and wealth. Companies within companies...
300% accurate