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Literally last week I got an email from WeWork looking for a Senior Data Engineer with "High Comp". I never understand these companies, aggressively hiring befo

• jrockway 7y ago
  I think it will cause a lot of cognitive dissonance if you treat large companies like you'd treat a single person. Imagine there is one person in charge of everything; it would be super weird if they bring you in for an interview on the day they're firing everyone else. But that's not how these large companies work; one person made the hire someone and some other person that's never met the first person made the decision to lay everyone off. You have to look at it like a distributed eventually-consistent database. In that context, everything should make sense; there was a netsplit and the consensus algorithm produced a different state in each cluster. (There's a reason why we try not to design database like that. Perhaps there is a management lesson in there somewhere.)
  • speby 7y ago
    This ... it is incredibly easy to trap yourself into thinking large companies are even aware of everything they're doing in every little niche and nuance pocket of their operations. In many cases, there can be a growth area that had job requisitions approved for a high-growth investment in a small part of the company while the entire rest of the company experiences a massive layoff. This can occur both with central knowledge of the hiring in that small pocket of the company or without. Either way, the effect is the same and so is the reaction ... it just looks weird.