7 ms·

Ask HN: Who's firing?

166 points by patmcguire 10y ago

I feel that the previous iteration of this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851987) was interesting. A group of people looking together might also be very appealing to some companies.

spyspy 10y ago
That URL does not work. Here's the working link --> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851987
- patmcguire 10y ago
  Thanks, I fixed it
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
spyspy 10y ago
I'd be curious to hear from those who posted in the last thread. Are you still working for a failing company? What happened in between then and now?
- debunn 10y ago
  I posted about the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in the last "Who's Firing" thread - which was my employer. All of the 100+ of us affected by the outsourcing have been let go as of January 31st, with some already having lined up full time employment, others taking some time off, or some like myself who are actively exploring potential jobs. If you're curious about the company, it won't fail - having $170B in investment assets means you can pay people to fix whatever is broken - but the Tata Consultancy folks who were hired to replace us are definitely having some problems taking over all of the responsibilities we have left behind. I forsee a great deal of pain in their near future, but I'm sure they'll be fine in a few years - and I honestly wish them well. As for me - if anyone out there is looking for a remote (or Toronto based) 17+ year IT veteran, with a sys admin / web development / DevOps skillset - feel free to send me an e-mail at debunn at yahoo dot com.
  - ashconnor 10y ago
    The current rumour is that there's going to be another round of outsourcing toward the end of the year. Also as expected the transition from ETS to TCS is not going well. Everyone I've spoken to that has direct contact with them is not pleased. Our union (OPSEU) is meeting regularly to find out how to prevent this type of action in the future.
ejcx 10y ago
Apparently Rackspace is firing today: http://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/sources-confirm-layoffs-at-rackspace http://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/sources-confirm-layoff...
- neom 10y ago
  Quite the researched article by the weekend meteorologist.
  - DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
    There's actually a solid weather angle on this... - It's a massive sh-tstorm. - It's raining pink-slips. - AWS, Google, and Microsoft are about to get a flood of resumes. (I'm sure there's more to this, but I'm about to drag myself off stage.)
  - logicallee 10y ago
    sorry to be dense, could you be explicit about why you call them the "weekend meteorologist". (I read the article and their about page - http://news4sanantonio.com/station/contact http://news4sanantonio.com/station/contact and Googled for "weekend meteorologist" in case it's some idiom - apparently it's a normal job title? http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Weekend_Meteorologist/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Weekend_Meteorologis... - anyway I'm more confused than before I Googled that phrase. Why are you calling them that, or what's the joke I missed?)
    - richardking 10y ago
      click on his profile in the twitter link
    - neom 10y ago
      Weekend meteorologist reporting the news about a cloud provider. Seemed amusing to me. However, I won't pretend I have a particularly good sense of humor.
    - rory096 10y ago
jcoffland 10y ago
Both Mozilla and Pandora are firing in early 2017.
- zerr 10y ago
  But why are they hiring at the same time?
  - JumpingWombat 10y ago
    they're refocusing what areas to target, so they're laying off + hiring -- some of those people will be asked if they want to move to their new teams else they'll get some severance + job placement help
  - cdr 10y ago
    Once there is more than a single product being produced by an organization, hiring and firing is not generally correlated.
- homerguy 10y ago
  I thought Mozilla was more so they are stopping Firefox OS and employees may move to another team?
- bsvalley 10y ago
  Is Pandora still alive in 2017?
TheSwordsman 10y ago
I think it'd be interesting to do this on the 15th of every month. Have the 1st of the month be the "Who's Hiring", and the 15th the "Who's Firing".
- pvg 10y ago
  The problem is, "Who's firing?" is not some useful dual of "Who's hiring". While not 'gratifying intellectual curiosity', the who's hiring threads are a useful monthly exception since people do actually look for hires and for jobs. "Who's firing" would just be a way to have a monthly rumors and gossip thread. There are already sites upon sites for that.
  - patmcguire 10y ago
    What would be a useful dual? "Who's shutting down"? I want to know: 1) A high-level overview of companies I've kind of heard about that didn't work out for whatever reason, or are have hit big roadblocks. That's useful information. 2) Where to find people to actively reach out to, if there's a big group of people leaving there are good people looking for jobs. A lot of teams get formed from the ashes of other teams.
    - pvg 10y ago
      For 1, postmortems of various kinds are linked here regularly. So that's covered As to 2, I don't think that's what the site is really for. Who's hiring is already a sanctioned exception (there's also one for YC company job posts). Either way, though, such threads are much more likely to generate rumors and gossip than actionable information and you're likely to keep seeing it flagged off the front page. Might be worth emailing the mods if you feel it's that important but I'd be surprised if you can talk them into it.
      - patmcguire 10y ago
        For the first, the occasional postmortem isn't that useful. I hoped to know when things go away as easily as I can find out when they're coming out. There's a massive push on creation that takes care of the first one, but after only occasional breathless praise slowly turning into dead silence for almost everyone. Maybe 1/100 writes a postmortem and that goes too deep too narrowly. Or they are silently successful. "Gets to front page of HN" is not a great filter. Second would have to be "Who's Looking" or something, I guess it's done the other way around so candidates don't get hammered with 10k recruiter emails. There haven't been great responses on this Ask HN, and looking back on the previous one it was also worse than I remembered. I've accepted that this isn't going to work out in practice.
strig 10y ago
Rubicon project just laid off a bunch of staff and closed the Toronto office.
- DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
  That sucks. I wonder if someone crossed them. If they can just hold out until March 15... (ducks)
neximo64 10y ago
This is vindictive and silly. Keep in mind some of us here are aware the employee can be as involved in the firing as the company laying off staff.
- popey456963 10y ago
  I think you're missing the point. A significant proportion of the mentions in here and the last one were about major laying offs. When you have to lose >10% of your staff, you probably shouldn't blame the employees. This is just an interesting counter-post to the "Who's Hiring", allowing people to see both sides of the coin.
- throwawayy881 10y ago
  Meh, most of us have been on the receiving end of this at some point... and many (including myself) have been on the 'doing' side. It is nothing personal, none of us can expect a job for life anymore. Seeing where organisations are contracting is both interesting for a view of technology in general, but also where to concentrate our hiring (or sales) efforts.
jzl 10y ago
If this was the first dot com cycle we could just go to fuckedcompany.com to keep instant tabs on this. It was extremely useful when everything started going south.
- jmcgough 10y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckedcompany/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckedcompany/ exists, though it's not updated as regularly
- NpappaG 10y ago
  Similar idea, CB Insights has a tracker for companies doing downrounds: https://www.cbinsights.com/research-downround-tracker https://www.cbinsights.com/research-downround-tracker
Kalium 10y ago
Rackspace just laid off a bunch of people at their HQ in San Antonio.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
throwawayy881 10y ago
Canonical / Ubuntu recently let go a few of their Juju team.
- throwaway4949 10y ago
  Any more details from Canonical on this or which part of the team?
  - throwawayy881 10y ago
    IIUC Juju networking and a couple of managers.
- epynonymous 10y ago
  long time ubuntu user, but have never used juju, isnt this ubuntu's app store?
simplyinfinity 10y ago
Telerik/Progress fired ~110 people from their Sofia offices not long ago
JumpingWombat 10y ago
Oracle is laying off a decent chunk of its hardware teams
fiiiiiiredddd 10y ago
dashbid
40acres 10y ago
Rumor has Intel will be letting a few folks from Europe go. They were supposed to be a part of the larger actions taken last year but due to European labor policy had been delayed.
greenyoda 10y ago
In today's news, Zenefits laid off half their staff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13608376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13608376
shivaodin 10y ago
Akamai is laying off a decent chunk of people.

166 points by patmcguire 10y ago

I feel that the previous iteration of this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851987) was interesting. A group of people looking together might also be very appealing to some companies.

spyspy 10y ago

That URL does not work. Here's the working link --> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851987

patmcguire 10y ago
Thanks, I fixed it

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

spyspy 10y ago

I'd be curious to hear from those who posted in the last thread. Are you still working for a failing company? What happened in between then and now?

debunn 10y ago
I posted about the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in the last "Who's Firing" thread - which was my employer. All of the 100+ of us affected by the outsourcing have been let go as of January 31st, with some already having lined up full time employment, others taking some time off, or some like myself who are actively exploring potential jobs. If you're curious about the company, it won't fail - having $170B in investment assets means you can pay people to fix whatever is broken - but the Tata Consultancy folks who were hired to replace us are definitely having some problems taking over all of the responsibilities we have left behind. I forsee a great deal of pain in their near future, but I'm sure they'll be fine in a few years - and I honestly wish them well. As for me - if anyone out there is looking for a remote (or Toronto based) 17+ year IT veteran, with a sys admin / web development / DevOps skillset - feel free to send me an e-mail at debunn at yahoo dot com.
- ashconnor 10y ago
  The current rumour is that there's going to be another round of outsourcing toward the end of the year. Also as expected the transition from ETS to TCS is not going well. Everyone I've spoken to that has direct contact with them is not pleased. Our union (OPSEU) is meeting regularly to find out how to prevent this type of action in the future.

ejcx 10y ago

Apparently Rackspace is firing today: http://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/sources-confirm-layoffs-at-rackspace http://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/sources-confirm-layoff...

neom 10y ago
Quite the researched article by the weekend meteorologist.
- DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
  There's actually a solid weather angle on this... - It's a massive sh-tstorm. - It's raining pink-slips. - AWS, Google, and Microsoft are about to get a flood of resumes. (I'm sure there's more to this, but I'm about to drag myself off stage.)
- logicallee 10y ago
  sorry to be dense, could you be explicit about why you call them the "weekend meteorologist". (I read the article and their about page - http://news4sanantonio.com/station/contact http://news4sanantonio.com/station/contact and Googled for "weekend meteorologist" in case it's some idiom - apparently it's a normal job title? http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Weekend_Meteorologist/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Weekend_Meteorologis... - anyway I'm more confused than before I Googled that phrase. Why are you calling them that, or what's the joke I missed?)
  - richardking 10y ago
    click on his profile in the twitter link
  - neom 10y ago
    Weekend meteorologist reporting the news about a cloud provider. Seemed amusing to me. However, I won't pretend I have a particularly good sense of humor.
  - rory096 10y ago

jcoffland 10y ago

Both Mozilla and Pandora are firing in early 2017.

zerr 10y ago
But why are they hiring at the same time?
- JumpingWombat 10y ago
  they're refocusing what areas to target, so they're laying off + hiring -- some of those people will be asked if they want to move to their new teams else they'll get some severance + job placement help
- cdr 10y ago
  Once there is more than a single product being produced by an organization, hiring and firing is not generally correlated.
homerguy 10y ago
I thought Mozilla was more so they are stopping Firefox OS and employees may move to another team?
bsvalley 10y ago
Is Pandora still alive in 2017?

TheSwordsman 10y ago

I think it'd be interesting to do this on the 15th of every month. Have the 1st of the month be the "Who's Hiring", and the 15th the "Who's Firing".

pvg 10y ago
The problem is, "Who's firing?" is not some useful dual of "Who's hiring". While not 'gratifying intellectual curiosity', the who's hiring threads are a useful monthly exception since people do actually look for hires and for jobs. "Who's firing" would just be a way to have a monthly rumors and gossip thread. There are already sites upon sites for that.
- patmcguire 10y ago
  What would be a useful dual? "Who's shutting down"? I want to know: 1) A high-level overview of companies I've kind of heard about that didn't work out for whatever reason, or are have hit big roadblocks. That's useful information. 2) Where to find people to actively reach out to, if there's a big group of people leaving there are good people looking for jobs. A lot of teams get formed from the ashes of other teams.
  - pvg 10y ago
    For 1, postmortems of various kinds are linked here regularly. So that's covered As to 2, I don't think that's what the site is really for. Who's hiring is already a sanctioned exception (there's also one for YC company job posts). Either way, though, such threads are much more likely to generate rumors and gossip than actionable information and you're likely to keep seeing it flagged off the front page. Might be worth emailing the mods if you feel it's that important but I'd be surprised if you can talk them into it.
    - patmcguire 10y ago
      For the first, the occasional postmortem isn't that useful. I hoped to know when things go away as easily as I can find out when they're coming out. There's a massive push on creation that takes care of the first one, but after only occasional breathless praise slowly turning into dead silence for almost everyone. Maybe 1/100 writes a postmortem and that goes too deep too narrowly. Or they are silently successful. "Gets to front page of HN" is not a great filter. Second would have to be "Who's Looking" or something, I guess it's done the other way around so candidates don't get hammered with 10k recruiter emails. There haven't been great responses on this Ask HN, and looking back on the previous one it was also worse than I remembered. I've accepted that this isn't going to work out in practice.

strig 10y ago

Rubicon project just laid off a bunch of staff and closed the Toronto office.

DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
That sucks. I wonder if someone crossed them. If they can just hold out until March 15... (ducks)

neximo64 10y ago

This is vindictive and silly. Keep in mind some of us here are aware the employee can be as involved in the firing as the company laying off staff.

popey456963 10y ago
I think you're missing the point. A significant proportion of the mentions in here and the last one were about major laying offs. When you have to lose >10% of your staff, you probably shouldn't blame the employees. This is just an interesting counter-post to the "Who's Hiring", allowing people to see both sides of the coin.
throwawayy881 10y ago
Meh, most of us have been on the receiving end of this at some point... and many (including myself) have been on the 'doing' side. It is nothing personal, none of us can expect a job for life anymore. Seeing where organisations are contracting is both interesting for a view of technology in general, but also where to concentrate our hiring (or sales) efforts.

jzl 10y ago

If this was the first dot com cycle we could just go to fuckedcompany.com to keep instant tabs on this. It was extremely useful when everything started going south.

jmcgough 10y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckedcompany/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckedcompany/ exists, though it's not updated as regularly
NpappaG 10y ago
Similar idea, CB Insights has a tracker for companies doing downrounds: https://www.cbinsights.com/research-downround-tracker https://www.cbinsights.com/research-downround-tracker

Kalium 10y ago

Rackspace just laid off a bunch of people at their HQ in San Antonio.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

throwawayy881 10y ago

Canonical / Ubuntu recently let go a few of their Juju team.

throwaway4949 10y ago
Any more details from Canonical on this or which part of the team?
- throwawayy881 10y ago
  IIUC Juju networking and a couple of managers.
epynonymous 10y ago
long time ubuntu user, but have never used juju, isnt this ubuntu's app store?

simplyinfinity 10y ago

Telerik/Progress fired ~110 people from their Sofia offices not long ago

JumpingWombat 10y ago

Oracle is laying off a decent chunk of its hardware teams

fiiiiiiredddd 10y ago

dashbid

40acres 10y ago

Rumor has Intel will be letting a few folks from Europe go. They were supposed to be a part of the larger actions taken last year but due to European labor policy had been delayed.

greenyoda 10y ago

In today's news, Zenefits laid off half their staff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13608376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13608376

shivaodin 10y ago

Akamai is laying off a decent chunk of people.