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Premise: not referring directly to Hashicorp employees, as I'm sure they're leagues above my average colleagues. As a SWE who's been in a couple of companies o

by 0xCAP 3y ago

Premise: not referring directly to Hashicorp employees, as I'm sure they're leagues above my average colleagues. As a SWE who's been in a couple of companies of small-to-medium size, and now in a relatively successful fintech scale-up that's running a (very long) hiring freeze, I can say that I've seen this layoffs season coming from a thousand kilometers. Now matter how successful your company is, you can't start hiring bonobos with no clue about how a computer works just because your investors asked for an X% increase in head count and then be like "sorry, we didn't plan to fire you as soon as things got serious" with clueless employees. And people have been gifted tech jobs for years now. It's not people's fault if they're not good at their job yet they get hired for senior positions, just to realize something's not working as soon as the job market needs qualified professionals in tough times. Now we're all in a bad predicament: we have to waste countless hours interviewing "senior" engs with basically no skills to speak of, and they are getting depressed because nobody's gifting titles anymore, but have no clue on how the whole process actually works. Now somebody has to tell Jessica that posting screenshots of code on Twitter is not devrel, and Guillermo that not knowing React 18 is not totally ok for a tech lead of a React shop. And I totally don't want to be that guy.

sokoloff 3y ago
[flagged]
- 0xCAP 3y ago
  Sorry, but what's the anti-diversity part of my comment, counting out the way you read it?
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    If you'd chosen "Alice" and "Bob" as the metasyntactic names, I'd have thought nothing of it. "Jessica" and "Guillermo" I read quite differently.
    - maaanu 3y ago
      For all we know, these are the most popular names in OPs county.
      - george_w_kush 3y ago
        Of course, OP is obviously in one of the many countries where Anglo-Jewish women and Hispanic men make up the majority of the population, especially of tech workers.
      - bigbillheck 3y ago
        0xCAP appears to be in the EU (or at least at one point talked about something being priced in Euros). A quick glance at https://www.first-name.net/jessica https://www.first-name.net/jessica and https://www.first-name.net/guillermo https://www.first-name.net/guillermo doesn't immediately turn up any country in which both 'Jessica' and 'Guillermo' seem reasonably common.
    - thebigwinning 3y ago
      The irony here is incredible. Diversity initiatives often replace traditional European or male names to suggest more kinds of people being involved. But you could tell that OP was being unrealistic.
    - brickteacup 3y ago
      > use "Alice" and "Bob" why are you using stereotypically white names? this is exclusionary! > use "Jessica" and "Guillermo" why are you using stereotypically nonwhite names? this is racist! it's just impossible to win with you people isn't it?
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        Using stereotypically non-white names in an example of unqualified employees isn't exactly the pinnacle of inclusiveness.
  - baq 3y ago
    Jessica isn’t James and Guillermo isn’t James either. I guess…?
- gitfan86 3y ago
  It seems obvious that efforts to hire specific types of people could result in lazy hiring managers looking to check off a box as fast as possible which leads to someone being hired because they are named Jessica not because they are especially good a React.
3nd0rph1n 3y ago
Yep. These are basically the people that never bring any value during incident response or when any crunching time needs to be put in. The problem with title inflation is that on a surface level they’re indistinguishable from actual professionals, so there’s no way to skip the interviewing part.
gitfan86 3y ago
I ran into the opposite situation. The people they hired were pretty good, but like you said the VCs gave the CEO a headcount target to hit in engineering and he did it because I guess the VCs are the ones calling the shots. Instead of just being honest and saying "oops, we need to cut spending, they created bullshit KPIs and useless metrics to start marking people as underperformers" So I suspect a lot of the VC funded companies have had 10%+ stealth layoffs.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  > I guess the VCs are the ones calling the shots. "He who pays the piper calls the tune" is a saying that's over 400 years old. If your company is depending on VC funding for ongoing survival, the VCs are calling the shots. If your company is generating its own sustainable cashflow, the CEO is in a much stronger position to call the shots.
- 0xCAP 3y ago
  KPIs are also killers of quality. I just planned a tech migration that the whole tech team agreed on, and that would bring countless advantages to the company, that got ultimately rejected by higher-ups just because "it doesn't fit into your (mine) semestral KPIs". KPIs are a good way to make sure nobody overperforms or shows signs of cross-functionality. The moment KPIs take over a company, people get turned into bots.
ac26 3y ago
I understand the frustrating experience you have had but I tend to consider the underlying problem to be leadership recruiting/hiring in the situation you described. Like it's not your fault your leaders are unwilling to correct their hiring mistake and needs wait for a company wide layoff as an excuse to put their foot down. That is just terrible leadership all the way down.

by 0xCAP 3y ago

sokoloff 3y ago

[flagged]

0xCAP 3y ago
Sorry, but what's the anti-diversity part of my comment, counting out the way you read it?
- sokoloff 3y ago
  If you'd chosen "Alice" and "Bob" as the metasyntactic names, I'd have thought nothing of it. "Jessica" and "Guillermo" I read quite differently.
  - maaanu 3y ago
    For all we know, these are the most popular names in OPs county.
    - george_w_kush 3y ago
      Of course, OP is obviously in one of the many countries where Anglo-Jewish women and Hispanic men make up the majority of the population, especially of tech workers.
    - bigbillheck 3y ago
      0xCAP appears to be in the EU (or at least at one point talked about something being priced in Euros). A quick glance at https://www.first-name.net/jessica https://www.first-name.net/jessica and https://www.first-name.net/guillermo https://www.first-name.net/guillermo doesn't immediately turn up any country in which both 'Jessica' and 'Guillermo' seem reasonably common.
  - thebigwinning 3y ago
    The irony here is incredible. Diversity initiatives often replace traditional European or male names to suggest more kinds of people being involved. But you could tell that OP was being unrealistic.
  - brickteacup 3y ago
    > use "Alice" and "Bob" why are you using stereotypically white names? this is exclusionary! > use "Jessica" and "Guillermo" why are you using stereotypically nonwhite names? this is racist! it's just impossible to win with you people isn't it?
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Using stereotypically non-white names in an example of unqualified employees isn't exactly the pinnacle of inclusiveness.
- baq 3y ago
  Jessica isn’t James and Guillermo isn’t James either. I guess…?
gitfan86 3y ago
It seems obvious that efforts to hire specific types of people could result in lazy hiring managers looking to check off a box as fast as possible which leads to someone being hired because they are named Jessica not because they are especially good a React.

3nd0rph1n 3y ago

Yep. These are basically the people that never bring any value during incident response or when any crunching time needs to be put in. The problem with title inflation is that on a surface level they’re indistinguishable from actual professionals, so there’s no way to skip the interviewing part.

gitfan86 3y ago

I ran into the opposite situation. The people they hired were pretty good, but like you said the VCs gave the CEO a headcount target to hit in engineering and he did it because I guess the VCs are the ones calling the shots. Instead of just being honest and saying "oops, we need to cut spending, they created bullshit KPIs and useless metrics to start marking people as underperformers" So I suspect a lot of the VC funded companies have had 10%+ stealth layoffs.

sokoloff 3y ago
> I guess the VCs are the ones calling the shots. "He who pays the piper calls the tune" is a saying that's over 400 years old. If your company is depending on VC funding for ongoing survival, the VCs are calling the shots. If your company is generating its own sustainable cashflow, the CEO is in a much stronger position to call the shots.
0xCAP 3y ago
KPIs are also killers of quality. I just planned a tech migration that the whole tech team agreed on, and that would bring countless advantages to the company, that got ultimately rejected by higher-ups just because "it doesn't fit into your (mine) semestral KPIs". KPIs are a good way to make sure nobody overperforms or shows signs of cross-functionality. The moment KPIs take over a company, people get turned into bots.

ac26 3y ago

I understand the frustrating experience you have had but I tend to consider the underlying problem to be leadership recruiting/hiring in the situation you described. Like it's not your fault your leaders are unwilling to correct their hiring mistake and needs wait for a company wide layoff as an excuse to put their foot down. That is just terrible leadership all the way down.