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I’ve seen managers hiring people with an intent to lay them off when winds change to protect themselves and their close circle. I can only imagine they’ve had g
by scott01 5mo ago
I’ve seen managers hiring people with an intent to lay them off when winds change to protect themselves and their close circle. I can only imagine they’ve had great KPIs in both cases: first for scaling the team, and then for cutting costs.
- nostrademons 5mo agoIt's the natural result of "fire the bottom 10% every year". If that's the rule in your organization, and you have a core group of people that actually know the systems and get the work done, you better make sure you have 10% padding every year, lest you layoff someone important and their friends all quit in disgust. And since competence and institutional knowledge is built over time, that implies a revolving door of new folks coming in and most of it not making it.
- camillomiller 5mo agoWorkers as cattle. This is utterly disgusting and the way it’s normalized is even more revolting
- BadBadJellyBean 5mo agoIn management terms a human and a printer are the same. Both resources that need to be managed. I hate it.
- StilesCrisis 5mo agoAbsolutely not--the printer is capex, so it's preferable to the humans who are opex.
- jameshart 5mo agoNo no, this quarter we’re trying to shift from capex to opex. Try to keep up.
- magnetometer 5mo agoUsually, companies value opex more than capex - opex is much more flexible. That's one of the reasons why printers, coffee machines, companies cars and other things are typically leased.
- jordanb 5mo agoNot really that simple. Opex gets better tax treatment (you can deduct it in full every year) but people aren't always Opex depending on what they're doing (research tends to be Capex) Also tax treatment isn't the only consideration for financial engineering: It's easier for a company with a huge capital spend to argue that they're investing in the future and CapEx doesn't hurt EBITDA. On the other hand, some companies get worried about reporting a high "capital ratio" (ratio of capital assets to income). In reality you can't say categorically that companies prefer Opex to Capex.
- StilesCrisis 5mo agoConcretely speaking, the FAANG companies are all wildly slashing opex (us) for capex (data centers, TPUs) even as the capex costs skyrocket due to demand outstripping supply.
- jordanb 5mo agoProgrammers are usually capex to be honest, with current tax treatment. When companies switched from data center to cloud they ended up shifting a lot of their compute from capex (buying servers) to opex (paying a hyperscaler for compute by the hour). Of course if you're in one of the five tech companies building datacenters rather than renting (MSFT, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle) then things are different.
- sethops1 5mo agoWe don't send 10% of our printers to the landfill every year just to motivate the other printers.
- hnlmorg 5mo agoI take it you haven’t seen the printer demolition scene from Office Space? /s
- jeffrallen 5mo agoDamn, it feels good to be a gangsta.
- zajio1am 5mo agoYou pretty much do that with wireless devices as a wISP.
- Ray20 5mo ago> This is utterly disgusting This is effective. Therefore, normalization of this plays into the workers' hands, gives them information, and gives economic advantage to honest agents. I mean, you could compare it to any non-capitalist society, where such treatment of workers is declared unacceptable. But what does this translate into in reality? Such strategies are still effective and provide an advantage to those actors who adhere to them. But since firing workers for their relative effectiveness contradicts the proclaimed ideology, such workers are simply accused of random crimes against the country and executed.
- davidjfelix 5mo agoso you're saying its not the evil that's the problem its the hypocrisy?
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoIf both sides know it, working as a "churney" can be pretty chill. Like being put on the roof from the getgo.
- muragekibicho 5mo agoLol. Isn't this like being a contractor?
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoYes, but your performance review is way more dramatic. Being a PIP-boy for life is not funny, but when they know and you know, it gets something of a comedic element.
- naveen99 5mo agoMaybe 1/10 of the new hires replace 1/90 of the existing old timers. You need some creative destruction.
- jordanb 5mo agoYou may knock this system but it's what made General Electric the company it is today!
- jiveturkey 5mo agoWhich is a F500 company.
- magicalist 5mo ago> Which is a F500 company. And used to be an F5 company.
- idontwantthis 5mo agoThe easiest way to become a F500 company is to start as an F5 company, then financialize your whole business, stop innovating, fire anyone effective, and give the executives huge bonuses.
- marcosdumay 5mo agoWell, if you also put barriers to integration and hire more executives you can turn it into 3 or 4 F5000 companies instead.
- altmanaltman 5mo agoUsing human resources as moat to protect themselves when the barbarians come. Seems to Management 101
- kandros 5mo ago300% accurate
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoCompany internal GDP equivalent increase of a funeral.
- s_dev 5mo agoThis is completely acceptable. When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage? A lot of people here and in the industry in general seem to optimise for compensation package and put blinkers on themselves for other factors that are definitely relevant. Companies aren't penalised by candidates for such practices. I'm not saying it's good but it's astounding to me the number of people who for example optimise entirely for salary and then are shocked when the working conditions are very poor. People game companies and companies will game people in return. Murray Gell Man amnesia will kick in and next week there will be thread about how CloudFlare is a great place to work for software devs because you can earn 20% more than other comparable companies with no reference to how things like job security or working conditions are measured.
- StilesCrisis 5mo agoHow exactly would you ask this in an interview setting? I'm baffled by the idea.
- s_dev 5mo ago"Why is this role open"? Either they will answer directly with something solid like "We're growing the team" or they will evade it which is still a meaningful answer for you. You could probe further with questions like: "How has the team's headcount changed over the last 18-24 months?" Basically you're alluding to 'employee turnover' without saying it.
- lkvoid 5mo agoYou know that people just lie regardless of the real intent behind hiring right? That's not how that works... Please stop being delusional
- threetonesun 5mo agoThis is a bizarre take, I've always asked questions like this when interviewing, and if a manager doesn't have a good answer I ask for follow up conversations with the team before taking a job. Has it worked out? No, but usually they were all being lied to by upper management. Can't do much about that.
- mihaaly 5mo agoIt feels like it was the most beneficial implementing better decision making mechanics by replacing manager with AI, not lowly folks doing actual value creation. LLM models have better reasoning abilities than these folks....
- usrusr 5mo agoThey are not as good at building an old boys/girls network though who help each other into positions of power and wealth. Companies within companies...
- throw-the-towel 5mo agoThey actually are! LLM ATSes give better scores to resumes written by the same LLM.
- nickdothutton 5mo agoBack in the late 90s a senior Microsoft exec explained this to me, they had acquired staff and continued to operate entire divisions which he described as "ballast". In the future, once the stock price increases slowed, they would be heaved over the edge of the balloon basket so that it could continue to rise. I often think about that.
- nopurpose 5mo agoold sysadmin trick: create large file on a disk and in a dire situation when DB runs out of space delete it.
- geerlingguy 5mo agoOr on Amazon elastic filesystems... create giant files just to ensure you're in the right performance class for the files you do need (that was the official way of doing it for a while!).
- jameshart 5mo agoGenuine kubernetes scaling strategy: add a do-nothing container that runs with a lower priority than your real workloads, that requests half a machine’s worth of mcpu. When you deploy a new container, and all your nodes are fully allocated, that low priority container will get evicted, and your container will immediately get scheduled in its place. Then k8s will try to find somewhere to put that half-machine container. If it finds somewhere it fits, it’ll schedule it. If not, it’ll trigger your cluster auto scale to add a new node where that task can run, making sure the next container you want to deploy has some readily available capacity to drop on to. Basically the same sysadmin strategy, automated.
- noisy_boy 5mo agoold defence against unreasonably demanding manager: add deliberate pockets of slow processing as insurance so that when things get too hot about performance, you unclog a few of those to acquiesce management.
- jfountain2015 5mo ago
- fzeindl 5mo agoThe term for this is „buffer hiring“.
- delfinom 5mo agoI know a medium sized defense contractor that ultimately had to sell itself a few years because they did this. They would come recruiting in bulk at our school only to fire the majority within a year to satisfy their stack ranking nonsense. 10 years later, the engineers they were protecting retired and they couldnt find anyone willing to work for them, even people still in school knew the reputation.
- jelsisi 5mo agoPeople are so desperate for work nowadays I don't think a negative reputation would deter applicants
- Spooky23 5mo agoTotally. In companies that routinely layoff people for lulz, executives collect business units for layoff fodder to protect their key players. It’s the proving ground for the sociopaths who rise up.
- dboreham 5mo agoSee: "The B-Ark".
- IG_Semmelweiss 5mo agoThis has a name, and also a poster boy. Amazon's well known "hire-to-fire" [1] https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to-fire-practice-reveals-a-brutal-truth-about-management.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to...
- cmiles8 5mo agoAmazon followed that model heavily until they basically ran out of top talent wanting to work for them. That bit really hard when AI hit and all the top engineers wouldn’t even consider working at Amazon.
- Muromec 5mo agoWhen I hear about Amazon, the first thing that comes to kind is "PIP[0] culture" even zo I don't know anyone who worked for them. [0] Performance Improvement Plan aka the chapter where manger together with HR build up the convincing paper trail to fire a person.
- bartread 5mo agoI know 4 people who’ve worked for them, two on the same team, one who’s moved around various offices over a long period of time, and one who used to work for me but left to go there (and with the offer they were made I absolutely don’t blame them - we’d been hit hard by COVID and were in the midst of a salary freeze). The first three of those people seem to have got on well there and mostly enjoyed it. The fourth had a miserable 8 months. Their manager was based in a different office with a 5+ hour time difference and was a complete nightmare, and they left of their own accord to another job on about the same money but without all the extra hours, stress, and terrible management. I’m guessing Amazon is like other big companies: the quality of your experience will depend to a very large extent on your manager.
- badc0ffee 5mo agoI feel like Amazon isn't a FAANG anymore. (What's the new A? Anthropic?)
- Melatonic 5mo agoOr it was a combined strategy - hire interns who will hopefully be able to replace some higher paid employees at lower cost once they learn the ropes. Then reduce headcount further replacing with AI. Surely nothing will go wrong with this strategy !