Comment by s_dev
2 months ago
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.
This reads to me almost like saying “Why are pigs not avoiding the most problematic slaughterhouses?”
A. We have to work somewhere, and in 2026 honestly it’s actually the employer’s market which is kinda new to me, as someone who always just passively waited until an interesting job offer fell in my lap.
B. They all pretty much work the same. Everywhere is “like a family” and “cares about sustainability” and all, until either your VC money starts to run low and you sell to PE or liquidate, or, for your big techs, layoff season comes around and you need to show that you’re willing to cut costs with the best of them, so you pick a random 4-5 digit number to lay off for the investors.
I thought post Netflix the model had switched to “we’re a team, not a family” — like in MLB?
https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/netflix-company-cultur...
>This reads to me almost like saying “Why are pigs not avoiding the most problematic slaughterhouses?”
I don't think that's a fair comparison. Pigs are literally reared for slaughter and have no autonomy. Employees can and do choose these companies completely of their own volition.
> 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".
12 replies →
> Employees can and do choose
What criteria would you use? Companies that don't do mass layoffs excludes all big-tech. What makes you think that "seriously inquiring about such practices in interviews or at the application stage" will get an honest answer?
1 reply →
> 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.
Do they need to own up to it directly? Interviews are always about both sides of the table putting their best self forwards. If it's a big enough company to implement stack ranking and the resulting games played then GlassDoor, LinkedIn, Reddit, even HN all serve this purpose quite effectively.
You can also just ask indirect questions: "how often do you hire new team members?", wait a bit and then, "how is the company measuring growth?" and then at a later opportunity "what's the tenure of those on the team I'd be working with?". If nobody with 1 -2 years is on the team but they admitted to hiring frequently and that growth is meager or stagnant (or they can't answer the question), you have your answer.
You could also just ask directly. I think it's a totally fair question. I don't think you'd be penalized for asking about a company's layoff history. Especially if you say something like "I'm looking for my next home, somewhere I can be for the next 5 plus years".
I might not ask in the first 10 minutes of the first interview, but once you're a few rounds of interview deep, you can pretty safely ask questions like this.
>- “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.
You said "seriously enquire", now you're saying "read between the lines".
As if the L4 SDE phone screener has any idea how to answer that from their scripts
the deal you are signing is that if you show top percentile performance, it wont be you who will be laid off
Hunger Games basically
> When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?
There’s some kind of reverse-survivorship bias here. I’d never apply at Meta because their management does the “hire a bunch of excess people in the good times, so when Zuck‘s next inevitable efficiency-drive happens, the team is able to layoff lots of people while still staying operational” approach.
So I’d never make it into the Meta interview to ask that question in the first instance, and neither would anyone else who thinks of Meta in that way.
And now it seems they may be recording your screen all day long. What a wonderful environment.
In my experience Meta is more selective and in interviews software people Meta pushes them to their limits.
Selection bias
How exactly would you ask this in an interview setting? I'm baffled by the idea.
"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.
Agree with the sentiment and this is a good idea regardless of skepticism about layoffs, but I think "we're growing the team" is not a solid answer.
This is a company that's potentially going to be giving you a lot of money. You should want to understand what they're hoping to get out of that investment. e.g. what are their short/mid/long-term goals and how does hiring you fit into that? Ideally it's clear to you that they have a lot of work they want to accomplish that seems reasonably aligned to what the business owners would want, and it sounds like something you want to get yourself into.
A great answer would be like "we've been acquiring a lot of customers lately and have been starting to run into performance issues, but we don't have the capacity to both handle that and also work on the feature requests we're receiving." Or "we're looking to expand into a new market which carries some new baseline requirements (e.g. FedRAMP) and need help building that."
Software is an industry where most people stay 2 years at a job. The reason they have the position open is because the previous person quit.
In fact "we're growing the team" in a large company is the one that is a red flag.
S tier interview strategy (I'm not being sarcastic here).
They open the interview by asking why you want this position, at the end in your questions time, you ask why the position is open.
There is no case in which they wouldn't say they're growing the team. It would also be true in all cases
You know that people just lie regardless of the real intent behind hiring right?
That's not how that works... Please stop being delusional
3 replies →
> How has the team's headcount changed over the last 18-24 months?"
“It didn’t change” and it would not be telling much. They are just hiring and firing X amount of people every year.
2 replies →
Naive to think such a question would get anything other than a plausibly ambiguous lie.
> 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".
There are two kinds of tech company.
Companies which have done a layoff
And companies which haven’t done a layoff yet.
Good luck working in tech for a company that's never done a layoff.
Just Apple (and even there only "mostly") among big tech?
1 reply →
> 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?
Well, this is not something you can safely ask in most interviews. Also, while there's some sort of HN/hackerdom fiction that the job seeker holds some power during the interview, for most job seekers the interview is strongly imbalanced towards the interviewer. So asking clever questions during the interview is risky if you're desperate for a job.
While you can't really ask "will I be layed off next year," it's pretty common to ask some version of "why is the role open," usually split among a few questions (that you'd tailor based on the role):
- "Which of my skills do you think are most valuable for this role?"
- "How would you measure success in this role?"
- "Can you tell me a little more about the product lines we'll be developing / supporting?"
- "How is the current team planning to grow?"
These are the kinds of questions that let you feel out what the manager envisions for the role. If the answers seem vague, that tells you something about the role / manager / org. If it's not clear how you impact the product and they can't clarify, that also tells you something.
I hear you, but the answers to these questions in my experience are always of the kind "we're looking to hire capable people with skills X, Y, Z for projects A & B".
These don't give you any idea about the health of the company or how precarious your new job will be.
agree - every time you ask a "clever" question you're increasing the risk it will be mis-interpreted, and also giving the interviewers a chance to pass. You may think you're being intelligent, honest or candid but it can easily come across as cocky, confrontational and (for lack of a better term) "off". I've passed on candidates for all of these reasons.
> Companies aren't penalised by candidates for such practices.
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.
At least personally, I optimize for "any job that I can get in this horrible job market". When job seekers are despirate I don't think you can realistically say that their taking the job implies consent. They've effectively been given the offer "take this job or become homeless".
> 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.
This strategy basically puts you in the top 5% earners though.
I cannot imagine a company or managee that engages in these practices being honest about them
> 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.
I see it all the time companies keeping people out of loyalty despite employee being grossly incompetent. But it would be hard of hear about it because what kind of news that'd be.
Hiring is event, firing is event. Not hiring or firing are not the event to cover.
> This is completely acceptable.
I dunno, treating people with cattle kind of feels like the less good option here. These people who get hired have their own life, with plans and outlooks and what not, and basically hiring someone just to have someone to fire later, feels really shitty and flat out ignoring that they're human too.
>This is completely acceptable.
No, it's psychopathic. Please, let's not pretend multi-billion dollar companies and your average worker are on anywhere near even footing. Companies always make a big song and dance about being great places to work. Nobody tells candidates 'you'll be expected to work 60h weeks to keep up with the workload here'. Candidates don't ask pointed questions about this because they'd be immediately disqualified. I know, I've been there.
The only company I know of that's open about their practices is netflix, and they comp appropriately for the risk. All other companies? It's basically word of mouth.
> This is completely acceptable.
Is it?
Or we need labor unions
[dead]
It's the other way around. Why do employees try to game the companies in the first place? Because most, or at least a very large portion, don't give a shit about their employees.
It's not just cloudflare. Amazon had been doing this shit forever (probably decades at this point), to cite an egregious example. As a mere mortal employee, its not like you have a lot of choices.
> 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.