Comment by s_dev
3 hours 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.
> 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.
As if the L4 SDE phone screener has any idea how to answer that from their scripts
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".
Good luck working in tech for a company that's never done a layoff.
Just Apple (and even there only "mostly") among big tech?
"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."
> 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.
1 reply →
You know that people just lie regardless of the real intent behind hiring right?
That's not how that works... Please stop being delusional
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Naive to think such a question would get anything other than a plausibly ambiguous lie.
> 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?
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.
> 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.