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Another company carelessly overhiring. OR maybe using opportunity to do some trimming? edit: Where does one check hiring metrics for company before accepting c

• romeros 4y ago
  They were overhiring. I talked to their recruiter last year. They had pretty aggressive hiring goals. Same story with Zillow, Upstart, Facebook and a bunch of companies. All of their stocks tanked by more than 50% since then.
  • ryandrake 4y ago
    Why would a business even have a "hiring goal?" Shouldn't you have business goals, and then look at those business goals and determine if hiring will contribute to them? Having an isolated "hiring goal" seems as pointless as having a "printer buying goal".
    • jjulius 4y ago
      >Why would a business even have a "hiring goal?" Shouldn't you have business goals, and then look at those business goals and determine if hiring will contribute to them? Sure! So, you've got your business goal(s), and within those goals you have sub-goals that achieve the main goals. One of your primary goals requires additional headcount, which then necessitates that one of your sub-goals is... wait for it... a hiring goal.
    • roflyear 4y ago
      Bro, Apple makes like $2m or something per employee. They can hire a ton of developers to do whatever at like $300-400k/yr. It's win-win. They have talent, they keep talent from other people. Apple is at the extreme, but the logic applies. There are massive budgets, so what do you do? You hire. Startups do this, too. Give an engineering team $20m (or $200m....) and they will hire a lot of people. They aren't just going to sit on the money...
      • quickthrower2 4y ago
        Funny. You could kill a company with too much money because they hired people they now need to spend time to manage. Instead if doing the thing.
        • roflyear 4y ago
          I've seen it happen first hand.
    • downrightmike 4y ago
      Hiring people so that your competition can't is a business tactic, not a smart one going into a recession, but worked for decades for FAANG
      • quickthrower2 4y ago
        Surely only works for the biggest companies. You would need to hire millions of people to drain the global pool of developers. Maybe thousands to drain the best ones intersect US working rights.
    • conductr 4y ago
      Goals can change. Especially when your stock price gets cut in half and a recession is imminent. Even in the world of StableCo annual budgets, by the time the budget is approved, I guarantee it reflects a number of goals that have been recently axed. Or, in times of growth, there’s other goals that have come up and claimed some resources that technically were earmarked for something else. Budgets and goals are fluid. Also hiring goals are useful for measuring activities. They have an HR/talent acquisition team and that team needs goals. How would you frame those goals if not hiring? And , unfortunately, printer purchases is a real business goal if your the guy responsible for purchasing printers.
  • bushbaba 4y ago
    Twilio is down 50% from their pre covid price. Ouch
• noirbot 4y ago
  That seems strongly bad-faith as an assumption. I'd assume they hired people for what seemed like good reasons at the time, but things have changed and now they need to have less payroll. Any hiring or new initiative looks "careless" if it didn't work out, but it could have just been a calculated risk that didn't pay off, especially given how chaotic the last few years have been.
• CharlieDigital 4y ago
  > Where does one check hiring metrics for company before accepting contract? LinkedIn company pages have those stats for Premium members. Twilio is showing -- what do you know -- 13% headcount growth over the last 6 months and a median tenure of 1.3 years.
  • bearjaws 4y ago
    Nasdaq shows their employment growth at 290% over the last 30 months. Absolutely wild.
• duxup 4y ago
  What even causes "over hiring"? People just building their resume for things like "managed a department of 200 people" ? Otherwise over hiring sounds like a pain in the ass to deal with.
  • squeaky-clean 4y ago
    I don't know about Twilio specifically but Covid is the biggest reason for most of the current layoff rounds. Kind of the opposite of the beginning of the pandemic, when companies with in-person employees were laying off staff and moving to work-from-home and online companies like Zoom, Shopify, Teledoc, Twilio began booming. But now many of those brand new customers are returning to their old ways. These internet companies "over hired" in the sense that they got a massive unexpected influx new demand they needed to scale out for, and no clue how long this would last. Will it fade out next month or be a decade long pandemic? Many companies also expected higher customer retention after covid than they're actually keeping. If you look at trendlines for online shopping, work from home, etc related industries covid caused an instant jump in their growth equivalent to about 5 years on the trend line. Rather than staying "in the future", demand is declining back towards a trend line that otherwise ignores covid.
  • naravara 4y ago
    Investors in high-growth companies like to see rapidly expanding headcounts. And when you're growing fast there's a real impetus to fill seats FAST and there's not much discipline around making sure you're hiring well. So you end up having to collect more people than you need because not all of them are well suited to their roles and you've got a lot of new projects that everyone isn't fully spun up on so there's always a surprising proportion of people who are being spun up or wound down on random projects all the time without directly committing any code. Companies that grow like this tend to end up with a lot of dead weight and bad business processes that spontaneously appear to shift that dead weight around to where they don't drag things down.