6 ms·

I did a double-take when I saw Twitter posting[0] in the Who's Hiring thread. What's the rationale here? Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? [0]

by desdiv 10y ago

I did a double-take when I saw Twitter posting[0] in the Who's Hiring thread. What's the rationale here? Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851502

krrishd 10y ago
I might be wrong but it makes sense to spend more hiring dollars where they'll increase the bottom line (which is why they're still hiring) while reducing spending in places that are negatively contributing?
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Yet, you can just get your current employees on a room, and tell them to stop doing those actions that won't increase the bottom line, and start doing those ones that do. Obviously, people have different talents, and can't do equally well any task you ask them. But I really doubt Twitter even tried. No company tries. More likely they froze their employees tasks beforehand so they could be better evaluated.
flukus 10y ago
> Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? Because downsizing via attrition is a death sentence. The worst people are the most likely to stay and then new hires will be unlikely to stick around and deal with the code from the worst people. Once the spiral starts it's hard to get out of.
- _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  I always found if funny companies touting "We're hiring only the best" and then "We firing the worst".
  - jknoepfler 10y ago
    Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool. 1. Hiring is a noisy process. You can tune your hiring test to lean more towards false negatives or more towards false positives, but you cannot (at this juncture in history) eliminate a large amount of bias (error) from evaluations of candidates. 2. Regression to the mean ensures that any hiring process that sets a "high bar" will result in pool of developers who are on average below that bar. 3. as an employee remains at a company, the bias in your evaluation process should decrease dramatically. One can, and probably should try to weed out false positives, especially if one is trying to reduce payroll. Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool.
    - intoverflow2 10y ago
      Knew the HN SV crowd would find a way to spin this as "This is good for <company>"
      - kefka 10y ago
        Its not a spin. Its the actual business process and thought behind it. The solution to that is challenge it with clout equal to the business. And that means unions. Only when 2 powers butt heads, will there be any fairness out of that.
        jknoepfler 10y ago
        > Its the actual business process and thought behind it. Exactly. Even if one disagrees with a thought process (actually, especially if one disagrees with a thought process), one should still seek to understand it inasmuch as possible. Otherwise one is doomed to repeat it.
      - jknoepfler 10y ago
        For the record, I am neither employed in or near Silicon Valley (not that it should matter), nor do I have any strong beliefs about whether or not actively weeding out developers is a good tactic for a business (five years ago I would have said it wasn't, now I'm agnostic). Whatever my beliefs or situation though, it's not hard for anyone to understand how a medium-to-large scale organization with a high hiring bar could make a rational decision to "hire the best" while still making an effort to release the least valuable developers in the company. An alternative strategy is Google's. Google tunes their hiring process to produce almost exclusively false negatives rather than false positives (they very deliberately reject qualified candidates far more often than they hire under-qualified candidates). With this hiring strategy in place, it wouldn't make as much sense for Google to "weed out" developers. And for the record I think 20th-century impersonal, statistical business thinking is toxic, but that doesn't mean I don't see its use or that I know of a better way to do things.
  - mc32 10y ago
    It is really funny in a way and necessary in another. Funny because companies necessarily say they aspire to have a representative workforce, one which reflects the community (local/national workforce, users, the founders?) but then when it comes down to it, they only want to keep the ones who will provide some value (which is obvious) but then remember the community is made up of all kinds of people with different abilities --so we realize we are all in it for ourselves --there is no "community" where we look after each other. It's me or them, really. It's necessary because, well, we live in a competitive world where your competitor isn't going to say, well, let's take it easy on them, they are keeping on a bunch of underachievers, and keeping underachivers employed is good for community, so we should give them a break.
  - dmichulke 10y ago
    'Best' here refers to the population of job seekers, 'worst' refers to the population of the employees. There are still some elements in the 'best of all job seekers' (= employees) who qualify as worse than the rest. You don't even need to change the trait(s) 'best' and 'worst' refer to.
dredmorbius 10y ago
"Pivot"
chipperyman573 10y ago
I doubt people being fired from Vine are prevented from applying to Twitter, this just gives them an eas/y/ier way to vet the good ones.
kokon 10y ago
Because having a mass layoff is an easy way to reduce non productive people. Otherwise you have to go through a complicated process for each individual, with a higher risk to be sued.
- Kurtz79 10y ago
  That's maybe the theory, maybe. In practice, in my personal experience, mass layoffs are a nightmare for everybody, and end up affecting also those not directly involved (especially since in most cases they don't know if they are until the layoffs are done). So: - Many of the "productive" people will leave on their own accord for better pastures, even before the layoffs are carried out. - The rest will find themselves with an increased workload (and the nagging feeling they should have followed the lead of the previous group).
- walshemj 10y ago
  How come in a right to work regimen like the states how is it hard? you can just say "we have decided to cut back marketing head count by 20%"
  - CapitalistCartr 10y ago
    Exactly. That's a layoff, not firing.
    - analog31 10y ago
      There are some nuances to the terminology. Companies avoid the term "layoff" because it implies that people might be re-hired once the slowdown is over. Growing up near Detroit, I remember layoffs where the status of the laid off workers was specified in the union contract. I have not heard of this kind of layoff in recent times, outside of unionized companies. Laypeople like me usually reserve "firing" for people who are fired "with cause." When companies fire people "at will," they often use words like "reduction in force." Perhaps a better way of thinking about it is the consequences of being fired. If you are fired "at will," then you are entitled to things like unemployment compensation, COBRA benefits, etc. If you are fired "with cause," then you lose those benefits. If an employee is a klunker, they will often wait for business to slow down, fire them "at will," and pay the benefits, to avoid potentially getting sued for false termination.
orange_county 10y ago
I believe the hiring is a facade. They have been sending out hackerrank tests to every new grad but never planning to follow up. As a matter of fact, they stated that they will "follow up" in December. Any serious company in the Bay Area wouldn't be this slow with hiring if they were not in trouble.
- rconti 10y ago
  I don't disagree with your conclusion about Twitter specifically, but it always blows my mind how slow tech companies are to deal with candidates in a hot job market.
  - huac 10y ago
    It's just Twitter. The new grad hiring at pretty much everywhere else is full throttle (or more accurately, pretty much done now).
tzs 10y ago
According to the link given by Keverw most of the fired employees were in marketing and sales. The "Who's Hiring" post is asking for software engineers to work on server infrastructure.
- user5994461 10y ago
  That's a tough position to recruit for currently. Let's all be positive and suppose that they always had real vacancies in there :D
ewjordan 10y ago
Firing gets rid of the worst. Hiring, at least in theory, pulls in the best. Healthy companies at scale and size equilibrium should be doing both at roughly the same rate, averaged over time.
- rootlocus 10y ago
  > Hiring, at least in theory, pulls in the best. If you're firing "the worst", that means at some point, you hired them. Not to mention "the best" is a very vague term. How do you quantify quality? What pool of people are you selecting "the best" from? How many of them are "the best"? The first two? The first ten?
  - pvaldes 10y ago
    > If you're firing "the worst", that means at some point, you hired them ... or that working in your company causes a serious damage and suck out all the talent of the people before to let it go totally burnt.
- hga 10y ago
  Firing gets rid of the worst at playing the internal political game. Fixed it for you. Something I've seen at at least a couple of companies where it resulted in killing the company, and one of those was the storied Lucent (forced to sell out to Alcatel, which itself didn't fare well, evidently most of it was sold to Nokia in January this year). The managers even made a point of telling us how their firing a particular key guy showed no one was safe. Well, the same was true of the project, which was de jure and de facto necessary for Lucent's continued existence as an independent entity, it was a media gateway, which along with a media gateway controller such as their very well received Softswitch replaces a unitary switch like their 5ESS. (It was a very interesting project, BTW, we were working with 5ESS types in Cincinnati, and like that storied system it was a true 5 9's system, no faking it for scheduled maintenance, people expect their telecom systems to be available 24x7 absent acts of God.)

by desdiv 10y ago

krrishd 10y ago

I might be wrong but it makes sense to spend more hiring dollars where they'll increase the bottom line (which is why they're still hiring) while reducing spending in places that are negatively contributing?

marcosdumay 10y ago
Yet, you can just get your current employees on a room, and tell them to stop doing those actions that won't increase the bottom line, and start doing those ones that do. Obviously, people have different talents, and can't do equally well any task you ask them. But I really doubt Twitter even tried. No company tries. More likely they froze their employees tasks beforehand so they could be better evaluated.

flukus 10y ago

> Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? Because downsizing via attrition is a death sentence. The worst people are the most likely to stay and then new hires will be unlikely to stick around and deal with the code from the worst people. Once the spiral starts it's hard to get out of.

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
I always found if funny companies touting "We're hiring only the best" and then "We firing the worst".
- jknoepfler 10y ago
  Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool. 1. Hiring is a noisy process. You can tune your hiring test to lean more towards false negatives or more towards false positives, but you cannot (at this juncture in history) eliminate a large amount of bias (error) from evaluations of candidates. 2. Regression to the mean ensures that any hiring process that sets a "high bar" will result in pool of developers who are on average below that bar. 3. as an employee remains at a company, the bias in your evaluation process should decrease dramatically. One can, and probably should try to weed out false positives, especially if one is trying to reduce payroll. Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool.
  - intoverflow2 10y ago
    Knew the HN SV crowd would find a way to spin this as "This is good for <company>"
    - kefka 10y ago
      Its not a spin. Its the actual business process and thought behind it. The solution to that is challenge it with clout equal to the business. And that means unions. Only when 2 powers butt heads, will there be any fairness out of that.
      - jknoepfler 10y ago
        > Its the actual business process and thought behind it. Exactly. Even if one disagrees with a thought process (actually, especially if one disagrees with a thought process), one should still seek to understand it inasmuch as possible. Otherwise one is doomed to repeat it.
    - jknoepfler 10y ago
      For the record, I am neither employed in or near Silicon Valley (not that it should matter), nor do I have any strong beliefs about whether or not actively weeding out developers is a good tactic for a business (five years ago I would have said it wasn't, now I'm agnostic). Whatever my beliefs or situation though, it's not hard for anyone to understand how a medium-to-large scale organization with a high hiring bar could make a rational decision to "hire the best" while still making an effort to release the least valuable developers in the company. An alternative strategy is Google's. Google tunes their hiring process to produce almost exclusively false negatives rather than false positives (they very deliberately reject qualified candidates far more often than they hire under-qualified candidates). With this hiring strategy in place, it wouldn't make as much sense for Google to "weed out" developers. And for the record I think 20th-century impersonal, statistical business thinking is toxic, but that doesn't mean I don't see its use or that I know of a better way to do things.
- mc32 10y ago
  It is really funny in a way and necessary in another. Funny because companies necessarily say they aspire to have a representative workforce, one which reflects the community (local/national workforce, users, the founders?) but then when it comes down to it, they only want to keep the ones who will provide some value (which is obvious) but then remember the community is made up of all kinds of people with different abilities --so we realize we are all in it for ourselves --there is no "community" where we look after each other. It's me or them, really. It's necessary because, well, we live in a competitive world where your competitor isn't going to say, well, let's take it easy on them, they are keeping on a bunch of underachievers, and keeping underachivers employed is good for community, so we should give them a break.
- dmichulke 10y ago
  'Best' here refers to the population of job seekers, 'worst' refers to the population of the employees. There are still some elements in the 'best of all job seekers' (= employees) who qualify as worse than the rest. You don't even need to change the trait(s) 'best' and 'worst' refer to.

dredmorbius 10y ago

"Pivot"

chipperyman573 10y ago

I doubt people being fired from Vine are prevented from applying to Twitter, this just gives them an eas/y/ier way to vet the good ones.

kokon 10y ago

Because having a mass layoff is an easy way to reduce non productive people. Otherwise you have to go through a complicated process for each individual, with a higher risk to be sued.

Kurtz79 10y ago
That's maybe the theory, maybe. In practice, in my personal experience, mass layoffs are a nightmare for everybody, and end up affecting also those not directly involved (especially since in most cases they don't know if they are until the layoffs are done). So: - Many of the "productive" people will leave on their own accord for better pastures, even before the layoffs are carried out. - The rest will find themselves with an increased workload (and the nagging feeling they should have followed the lead of the previous group).
walshemj 10y ago
How come in a right to work regimen like the states how is it hard? you can just say "we have decided to cut back marketing head count by 20%"
- CapitalistCartr 10y ago
  Exactly. That's a layoff, not firing.
  - analog31 10y ago
    There are some nuances to the terminology. Companies avoid the term "layoff" because it implies that people might be re-hired once the slowdown is over. Growing up near Detroit, I remember layoffs where the status of the laid off workers was specified in the union contract. I have not heard of this kind of layoff in recent times, outside of unionized companies. Laypeople like me usually reserve "firing" for people who are fired "with cause." When companies fire people "at will," they often use words like "reduction in force." Perhaps a better way of thinking about it is the consequences of being fired. If you are fired "at will," then you are entitled to things like unemployment compensation, COBRA benefits, etc. If you are fired "with cause," then you lose those benefits. If an employee is a klunker, they will often wait for business to slow down, fire them "at will," and pay the benefits, to avoid potentially getting sued for false termination.

orange_county 10y ago

I believe the hiring is a facade. They have been sending out hackerrank tests to every new grad but never planning to follow up. As a matter of fact, they stated that they will "follow up" in December. Any serious company in the Bay Area wouldn't be this slow with hiring if they were not in trouble.

rconti 10y ago
I don't disagree with your conclusion about Twitter specifically, but it always blows my mind how slow tech companies are to deal with candidates in a hot job market.
- huac 10y ago
  It's just Twitter. The new grad hiring at pretty much everywhere else is full throttle (or more accurately, pretty much done now).

tzs 10y ago

According to the link given by Keverw most of the fired employees were in marketing and sales. The "Who's Hiring" post is asking for software engineers to work on server infrastructure.

user5994461 10y ago
That's a tough position to recruit for currently. Let's all be positive and suppose that they always had real vacancies in there :D

ewjordan 10y ago

Firing gets rid of the worst. Hiring, at least in theory, pulls in the best. Healthy companies at scale and size equilibrium should be doing both at roughly the same rate, averaged over time.

rootlocus 10y ago
> Hiring, at least in theory, pulls in the best. If you're firing "the worst", that means at some point, you hired them. Not to mention "the best" is a very vague term. How do you quantify quality? What pool of people are you selecting "the best" from? How many of them are "the best"? The first two? The first ten?
- pvaldes 10y ago
  > If you're firing "the worst", that means at some point, you hired them ... or that working in your company causes a serious damage and suck out all the talent of the people before to let it go totally burnt.
hga 10y ago
Firing gets rid of the worst at playing the internal political game. Fixed it for you. Something I've seen at at least a couple of companies where it resulted in killing the company, and one of those was the storied Lucent (forced to sell out to Alcatel, which itself didn't fare well, evidently most of it was sold to Nokia in January this year). The managers even made a point of telling us how their firing a particular key guy showed no one was safe. Well, the same was true of the project, which was de jure and de facto necessary for Lucent's continued existence as an independent entity, it was a media gateway, which along with a media gateway controller such as their very well received Softswitch replaces a unitary switch like their 5ESS. (It was a very interesting project, BTW, we were working with 5ESS types in Cincinnati, and like that storied system it was a true 5 9's system, no faking it for scheduled maintenance, people expect their telecom systems to be available 24x7 absent acts of God.)