HN Explorer

Ask HN: Who is firing?

1087 points by wellworld ↗ HN
The startup I work at will soon be undergoing an exodus of staff due to a failure in leadership and management by the founders. Really painful, sad, situation for all involved.

So, I figure if we're allowed to talk about who is hiring, why not the other way around? At the very least, we can get a pulse on those companies which smells like roses on the outside, and reek of something more earthy on the inside.

451 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] thread
pathompong
Thomson Reuters is. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-01/thomson-re...
dredmorbius
The newspaper / print media industry generally is doing abysmally poorly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/business/media/buyouts-wal...

Submitted yesterday, didn't go anywhere: https://news.ycombinator.co/item?id=12834583

I've been picking up newspapers and magazines and been quietly horrified at how thin they are. I'm no fan of advertising, but I know it's how they pay the bills, and there are no ads there.

The Chicago Tribune is trying to keep their "news hole" at no more than 50%, and AFAICT, are failing. Even with the Cubs at the World Series (and the Trib pimping that for all its worth), the sports section has virtually no advertising. Most noticeable is the lack of classic retail: beer, wine, alcohol, automobiles, consumer electronics (a periodic Fry's ad excepted), clothing (with a few exceptions), etc. Some home services (windows, siding, etc.), and occasional furniture. But overall, terrifically thin.

Time Magazine as of September was similarly famished-looking.

Reminds me of running into a friend you'd not seen for a while, with a fatal disease. It's a visual shock.

Animats
The Chicago Tribune renamed its holding company "Tronc" a few months back. It didn't help. Gannett just declined to buy them a few hours ago. Tribune Tower is being converted to condos.
dredmorbius
I hadn't heard of Gannett's withdrawal. That's going to sting.

I'm aware of the Trib Tower sale. Its progress dominated the Trib's business pages for about six months.

eghad
Sorry to dump on your aside, but the media arm isn't affected. The Finance/Risk news (for financial clients) division is the one being downsized, and they were profitable.

The parent mentions it, but here's the brief from their outlet: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-thomsonreuters-results-idU...

dredmorbius
Hey, accurate info is good info, I appreciate that.

Which does though raise the question of how it is newswires (Reuters, UPI, AP) are succeeding where direct media outlets aren't. Or is it just that the pain is there but less than (in T/R's case) the finance/risk arm?

garysieling
The two big TR business units are legal and financial, and both industries pay for access to information when it helps their businesses.

I worked on some of the legal products, and customers were much more sensitive to completeness and accuracy of information they could obtain than the average person with a newspaper. Even with "free" news products people would also pay for alerts.

majewsky
I had a similar thing with games magazines a while back. I was subscribed to GameStar (then one of Germany's largest computer game periodicals) in my teenage years, and it always weighed in at about 200-250 pages. I unsubscribed in 2006 as I was too occupied with studying, but picked up an issue in 2011 from the newspaper stand out of nostalgia. I was shocked that it had shrunk down to some 100 pages, and most of the tests were about free-2-play junk. Whole sections were gone, too (e.g. hardware tests IIRC). It's like one of those childhood memories that look really bad in retrospect.
driverdan
> The newspaper / print media industry generally is doing abysmally poorly.

They're not doing well but I wouldn't use the term abysmal. Print media is still declining but a lot of publishers are offsetting much of that loss with online revenue.

dredmorbius
I'd love to see your sources on that, because everything I've seen says otherwise.

From 2013, but I'm not finding anything more recent:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/this-is-...

"In 2012, newspapers lost $16 in print ads for every $1 earned in digital ads." A trend that's getting worse -- it had been 10:1 in 2011, according to Pew Research.

Similarly, also 2013:

http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2013/newspapers-stabilizing-b...

And 2014: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/04/28/decline_of_ne...

The latter shows a plot of ads revenues from 1950 forward, showing it falling of a cliff in 2005. Online hasn't made a whit of a difference.

jbob2000
Huh. Strange. They just opened an office in Toronto and posted all these dev job ads... I applied but got rejected, guess it was for the better.
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Keverw
Twitter is firing the people who worked on Vine. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/10/27/twitter-strong-q3...

Really love how you are doing the opposite for this thread. I guess It helps people get prospective on both sides :)

wellworld
Thanks! I'm really tempted to post about the suffering, near-fraud and deceit in my company, but I figure it'll be all over the news soon.
a3n
Careful. It doesn't matter enough to risk your wellbeing.
yarou
The truth always matters. I'd rather be a truthful mendicant than a lavishly rich liar.
a3n
To the point of winning a lawsuit but losing everything else?

It doesn't matter in the sense that most of these disrupters are just going to disappear from lack of need anyway. They're so much spaghetti, thrown on the wall by VC to see what sticks. The lie is that most of it matters.

xyzzy123
Mm how about a polite, forgiving person who is decently well off?

I would say that it pays to be forthright, but understanding. Granted there are exceptions.

Bear in mind that one person's "unvarnished truth" might come from a lack of experience or high expectations that are difficult to meet at scale and in a commercial environment.

There are generally a lot of tradeoffs being made in companies. A "tire fire" of php might be compensated for by testing and deployment practices or hell it might just be a fun place to work if you can live with the mess.

On the other hand, you might have "architect driven design" where everything is a diamond on paper but the implementation is 8 kinds of design pattern wrong.

Or you might have a great technical team and codebase but no actual value proposition (the funny part is that success itself invites people and pressures that unsuccessful products don't have - some of the best places I've worked had unsuccessful products but great management and teams... once success and revenue kick in, suddenly there are a lot more suits and stakeholders)...

Or you could have some kind of situation where not only is the work pointless, the organisation is so utterly dysfunctional that... you'd definitely leave if it didn't pay so damn well.

One person's "super messed up" is another person's "this is exactly where I want to work". Some people function well in less structured environments and some in more... so what is truth versus just a perspective?

(agree there are exceptions where the truth must be told. I draw the line at not getting paid...)

yarou
Epistemologically, I agree with you. What I was getting at is that if your employer is knowingly doing something unethical (again, relative, but let's hand waive that for a moment), I feel like it is your duty to report it and publicize it.
anon400232
You could share thoughts on Glassdoor, right?

I would like to find (or create) a service where we can talk about the real dirt at companies. Encouraging honest accounts without disparagment is a hard balance. Building an identity and reputation system where reviews are trustworthy is hard, especially if you also want anonymity.

Like many people, I've worked at places with big problems. In cases where friends apply, I strive to give an honest account of my experience. Different people can tolerate different levels and kinds of crazy. In most cases, I still know people at such companies. I want to offer constructive criticism in a public setting, because I think this could help companies and people can change for the better. I want them to find a way to succeed.

a3n
> I would like to find (or create) a service where we can talk about the real dirt at companies.

I'd be waiting for the wikileaks dumps of that service, followed by firings. Data wants to be naked and exposed.

pennaMan
Why would such a service hold leak worthy data?
a3n
Actually wikileaks was an unthought player. More likely (if at all) someone who sells data or just likes to watch things burn. It was a bit knee jerk on my part, as I've become much more reluctant to spread my data footprint. If the data isn't there, it can't be stolen.
phamilton
Blind was pretty awesome when I was at Yahoo during layoffs. It's died down a bit since though.
flukus
> because I think this could help companies and people can change for the better.

The first lesson you'd learn is that these companies would rather shoot the messenger, which would be you in this case.

intoverflow2
>I would like to find (or create) a service where we can talk about the real dirt at companies

It exists, it's posting anonymous timestamped proof on 4chan's /g/ then saying whatever you want to get off your chest.

cmdrfred
I'm working on an encrypted chat system in JS, I'd lend my code and skills to such an effort.
blobbers
Its already hit the news, friend. Unfortunately Wells Fargo continues to trudge on.
[dead] rednet
Nothing to do with taxis is it? Sounds a bit like a formerly popular search engine?
desdiv
I did a double-take when I saw Twitter posting[0] in the Who's Hiring thread.

What's the rationale here? Why are they firing and hiring at the same time?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851502

krrishd
I might be wrong but it makes sense to spend more hiring dollars where they'll increase the bottom line (which is why they're still hiring) while reducing spending in places that are negatively contributing?
marcosdumay
Yet, you can just get your current employees on a room, and tell them to stop doing those actions that won't increase the bottom line, and start doing those ones that do.

Obviously, people have different talents, and can't do equally well any task you ask them. But I really doubt Twitter even tried. No company tries. More likely they froze their employees tasks beforehand so they could be better evaluated.

flukus
> Why are they firing and hiring at the same time?

Because downsizing via attrition is a death sentence. The worst people are the most likely to stay and then new hires will be unlikely to stick around and deal with the code from the worst people.

Once the spiral starts it's hard to get out of.

_Codemonkeyism
I always found if funny companies touting "We're hiring only the best" and then "We firing the worst".
jknoepfler
Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool.

1. Hiring is a noisy process. You can tune your hiring test to lean more towards false negatives or more towards false positives, but you cannot (at this juncture in history) eliminate a large amount of bias (error) from evaluations of candidates.

2. Regression to the mean ensures that any hiring process that sets a "high bar" will result in pool of developers who are on average below that bar.

3. as an employee remains at a company, the bias in your evaluation process should decrease dramatically. One can, and probably should try to weed out false positives, especially if one is trying to reduce payroll.

Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool.

intoverflow2
Knew the HN SV crowd would find a way to spin this as "This is good for <company>"
kefka
Its not a spin. Its the actual business process and thought behind it.

The solution to that is challenge it with clout equal to the business. And that means unions. Only when 2 powers butt heads, will there be any fairness out of that.

jknoepfler
> Its the actual business process and thought behind it.

Exactly. Even if one disagrees with a thought process (actually, especially if one disagrees with a thought process), one should still seek to understand it inasmuch as possible. Otherwise one is doomed to repeat it.

jknoepfler
For the record, I am neither employed in or near Silicon Valley (not that it should matter), nor do I have any strong beliefs about whether or not actively weeding out developers is a good tactic for a business (five years ago I would have said it wasn't, now I'm agnostic).

Whatever my beliefs or situation though, it's not hard for anyone to understand how a medium-to-large scale organization with a high hiring bar could make a rational decision to "hire the best" while still making an effort to release the least valuable developers in the company.

An alternative strategy is Google's. Google tunes their hiring process to produce almost exclusively false negatives rather than false positives (they very deliberately reject qualified candidates far more often than they hire under-qualified candidates). With this hiring strategy in place, it wouldn't make as much sense for Google to "weed out" developers.

And for the record I think 20th-century impersonal, statistical business thinking is toxic, but that doesn't mean I don't see its use or that I know of a better way to do things.

abraae
If I had a dollar for every time someone said "why don't we hire like Google does"?

Answer: Google can do what they do because of their scale, culture, systems, access to pots of money etc.

Google are Google. The rest of us are not and can't calibrate our hiring process to turn up only false negatives. We'd never hire anyone.

jknoepfler
I agree, it's not a feasible strategy for most companies. It's not even that innovative, it's just repeating a test with a high error rate repeatedly. This doesn't reduce error, but it does change the type of errors they make. I think that's pretty interesting. (From speaking with co-workers, it also damages Google's image considerably and reduces the probability that people will spend time and energy applying there; the their applicant pool seems large enough anyway).
mc32
It is really funny in a way and necessary in another.

Funny because companies necessarily say they aspire to have a representative workforce, one which reflects the community (local/national workforce, users, the founders?) but then when it comes down to it, they only want to keep the ones who will provide some value (which is obvious) but then remember the community is made up of all kinds of people with different abilities --so we realize we are all in it for ourselves --there is no "community" where we look after each other. It's me or them, really.

It's necessary because, well, we live in a competitive world where your competitor isn't going to say, well, let's take it easy on them, they are keeping on a bunch of underachievers, and keeping underachivers employed is good for community, so we should give them a break.

dmichulke
'Best' here refers to the population of job seekers, 'worst' refers to the population of the employees.

There are still some elements in the 'best of all job seekers' (= employees) who qualify as worse than the rest. You don't even need to change the trait(s) 'best' and 'worst' refer to.

chipperyman573
I doubt people being fired from Vine are prevented from applying to Twitter, this just gives them an eas/y/ier way to vet the good ones.
kokon
Because having a mass layoff is an easy way to reduce non productive people. Otherwise you have to go through a complicated process for each individual, with a higher risk to be sued.
Kurtz79
That's maybe the theory, maybe.

In practice, in my personal experience, mass layoffs are a nightmare for everybody, and end up affecting also those not directly involved (especially since in most cases they don't know if they are until the layoffs are done).

So:

- Many of the "productive" people will leave on their own accord for better pastures, even before the layoffs are carried out.

- The rest will find themselves with an increased workload (and the nagging feeling they should have followed the lead of the previous group).

walshemj
How come in a right to work regimen like the states how is it hard? you can just say "we have decided to cut back marketing head count by 20%"
CapitalistCartr
Exactly. That's a layoff, not firing.
analog31
There are some nuances to the terminology. Companies avoid the term "layoff" because it implies that people might be re-hired once the slowdown is over. Growing up near Detroit, I remember layoffs where the status of the laid off workers was specified in the union contract. I have not heard of this kind of layoff in recent times, outside of unionized companies.

Laypeople like me usually reserve "firing" for people who are fired "with cause." When companies fire people "at will," they often use words like "reduction in force."

Perhaps a better way of thinking about it is the consequences of being fired. If you are fired "at will," then you are entitled to things like unemployment compensation, COBRA benefits, etc. If you are fired "with cause," then you lose those benefits.

If an employee is a klunker, they will often wait for business to slow down, fire them "at will," and pay the benefits, to avoid potentially getting sued for false termination.

amyjess
Right-to-work states still distinguish between firing for cause and a layoff for unemployment purposes. If you just get rid of somebody because you don't like them or whatever, that's legally considered a layoff because they did nothing wrong and thus can still collect unemployment.

If you let somebody go just because you didn't like them but you lied and said it was for performance reasons, they'll have to fight to get unemployment, and they may very well sue you for their troubles. On a similar note, if you do want to fire someone for performance reasons, you better have that lack of performance well documented.

Because of this, a lot of companies don't bother claiming cause: they classify all firings as layoffs and don't contest anyone's unemployment. I worked for a company like that once.

gorbachev
Mass layoffs in companies that answer to shareholders/investors is almost always a way to reduce costs and to increase ROI on investment.

It has absolutely nothing to do with productivity of the people getting laid off, it's more to do with a failure of some kind in management.

orange_county
I believe the hiring is a facade. They have been sending out hackerrank tests to every new grad but never planning to follow up. As a matter of fact, they stated that they will "follow up" in December. Any serious company in the Bay Area wouldn't be this slow with hiring if they were not in trouble.
rconti
I don't disagree with your conclusion about Twitter specifically, but it always blows my mind how slow tech companies are to deal with candidates in a hot job market.
huac
It's just Twitter. The new grad hiring at pretty much everywhere else is full throttle (or more accurately, pretty much done now).
tzs
According to the link given by Keverw most of the fired employees were in marketing and sales. The "Who's Hiring" post is asking for software engineers to work on server infrastructure.
user5994461
That's a tough position to recruit for currently. Let's all be positive and suppose that they always had real vacancies in there :D
ewjordan
Firing gets rid of the worst. Hiring, at least in theory, pulls in the best.

Healthy companies at scale and size equilibrium should be doing both at roughly the same rate, averaged over time.

rootlocus 

  > Hiring, at least in theory, pulls in the best.
If you're firing "the worst", that means at some point, you hired them. Not to mention "the best" is a very vague term. How do you quantify quality? What pool of people are you selecting "the best" from? How many of them are "the best"? The first two? The first ten?
pvaldes
> If you're firing "the worst", that means at some point, you hired them

... or that working in your company causes a serious damage and suck out all the talent of the people before to let it go totally burnt.

hga
Firing gets rid of the worst at playing the internal political game.

Fixed it for you.

Something I've seen at at least a couple of companies where it resulted in killing the company, and one of those was the storied Lucent (forced to sell out to Alcatel, which itself didn't fare well, evidently most of it was sold to Nokia in January this year).

The managers even made a point of telling us how their firing a particular key guy showed no one was safe. Well, the same was true of the project, which was de jure and de facto necessary for Lucent's continued existence as an independent entity, it was a media gateway, which along with a media gateway controller such as their very well received Softswitch replaces a unitary switch like their 5ESS.

(It was a very interesting project, BTW, we were working with 5ESS types in Cincinnati, and like that storied system it was a true 5 9's system, no faking it for scheduled maintenance, people expect their telecom systems to be available 24x7 absent acts of God.)

patmcguire
Twitter is a known tire fire. When I was out in San Francisco everyone who worked at Twitter had a shell-shocked look and talked about the experience the same way they would if they'd just gone to use the restroom and found a dead body.
dmerrick
Honestly that seems like par for the course for the area of town the Twitter HQ is in
ryhamz
"the same way they would if they'd just gone to use the restroom and found a dead body."

If that restroom had been basically showing for weeks that it was going to have a dead body in it any time now. Would still be surprising, but I'd be somewhat braced for it.

d23
Can anyone actually give any details here or is everyone just gonna do the "nudge nudge wink wink" thing?
lizavp
Vine was warned by their power users and Vine ignored them.
patmcguire
I don't know any specifics of Vine. I didn't get a whole lot of details of the internals of Twitter, it seemed to be the usual complaints about companies — "things get done for the wrong reasons", "sudden changes in direction", "bizarre politics", "only care about the money now" — but compressed into a much shorter time frame.
ZenoArrow
RE 'prospective', did you mean 'perspective'?
chrissnell
Back in the first dotcom bubble, we had FuckedCompany.com. It tracked these sorts of things on a daily basis.
prawn
The creator of said site posts on HN from time to time, under pud. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud
rnugent
Pud is Phil Kaplan. He made a few bucks on AdBright, got married and still hacks up wild ideas that mostly whiff. Plays the drums.
prawn
Can only assume this is sarcasm or some definition of "whiff" I don't know. He's had FC, AdBright, TinyLetter and DistroKid - wish I had a track record that strong with my projects!
malbs
Ahh FuckedCompany.com

I remember when I sat in an interview for a position at marchFIRST in Melbourne, Australia. And when it came time in the interview for them to ask "Have you got any questions for us?"

"Yeah, look this is kind of awkward, but I've seen marchFIRST mentioned quite a number of times on this website called fuckedcompany.com... Is that indicative of any issues I should be aware about?"

"Oh, don't worry about that, thats just our american parent company"

"Oh great"

So I accepted the offer, worked off-site for 3 months, and then marchFIRST went chapter 11.

Should have paid more attention to that damned website.

0xmohit
marchFIRST -- it even has a Wikipedia entry [0]!

  marchFIRST was a Nasdaq traded public company whose peak stock
  price reached $52. By the time the company filed for
  bankruptcy, it traded for pennies ($0.16 on March 28, 2001).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarchFirst
nwenzel
I worked at marchFirst back in the day. Even had the chance to meet Bob Bernard. That experience shaped how I run the company I co-founded 3 years ago. M1's number one problem was a culture of spending money without any thought of a return. Which was probably really odd for folks on the Whitman Hart side of the merger. It really was a merger of two opposite cultures.
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feverishaaron
This extended back to USWeb/CKS. I might still have a shirt bragging about a $300M quarter (Though if you looked at the financials,we had something like a $50M loss).

It was like the Tres Comma club, but tackier.

bbcbasic
> "Oh, don't worry about that, thats just our american parent company"

Translation: "don't worry about that, that's just the company you are applying for"

malbs
I was young and really wanted the job! It was easy to overlook the obvious
bbcbasic
I'm making fun of their gall more than anything else. I'd probably have overlooked that too when I was young.
willismichael
It's possible that you made the right decision - you were young, you got the job, you got experience on your resume.
ryandrake
One of my favorite sites back in the day! I remember checking it daily to make sure my employer wasn't there. Fun times! We seem to be missing that edge--that deep cynicism and unashamed negativity--this time around.
jdale27
Well, as they say: "This time it's different!"
danieltillett
This time is different. Back in the dot com days the companies were public and so the day of reckoning came quickly. Today everyone is running on VC/PE/SWF money and so problems can be hidden for a long time.

Having said this until US interest rates rise or unless a white swan event occurs (I am Australian so all swans are black here) the music will keep playing and the everyone will keep dancing.

ryandrake
No doubt part of it is how these companies are funded. There's so much private money, and nobody knows what to do with it so it gets tossed at these hobby projects, and by some miracle one of them turns into a unicorn.

But there are other differences now too. You can't simply ridicule anything anymore. Back in 2000 we could point to a company trying to sell designer kitty litter on the Internet and laugh at how stupid it was and how greedy and full of hubris the founders were. Now, everyone's trying to "change the world" and empower everyone and "enable the sharing economy" and, well you can't criticize that without sounding like a big meanie. There are a lot of web sites out there that are simply never going to be businesses. They have their runway to burn through, and once it's done, they'll be blogging about Their Amazing Journey as they get acqui-hired. But when you point this out, you're just being negative--you're a jealous wantrepreneur.

Maybe this is an old-timer's "get off my lawn" rant, but I preferred it when it was OK to poke fun at things that you knew were ridiculous.

flukus
> Maybe this is an old-timer's "get off my lawn" rant, but I preferred it when it was OK to poke fun at things that you knew were ridiculous.

It came off as an old timers rant, but I still enjoyed it :)

Maybe we strayed a bit too far from the "greed is good" 80's. There's nothing wrong with starting a business to make money.

It's more pervasive than just dotcoms though. I see the same things we stuff like solar roadways or hyper loop is criticized.

soVeryTired
Too many people mistake skepticism for cynicism.
more_corn
Isn't the quote "This time... will be different!!!" And then when the corn kills him again and: "That's not different at all now, is it Steve?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TMOMTtAMBI

We are all Steve and this time will not be different.

jdale27
Uh, I wasn't familiar with that little tidbit of culture...

Rather, it was a reference to the fact that in the last few years, any time someone suggests that we might be in another tech bubble, there's always someone waiting to point out how "this time it's different", because now the web is mature and all the stupid startups are not really as stupid as they seem (not like in the first dot-com bubble).

Actually, it's a bit of a double entendre in that sense -- even the first dot-com bubble was rife with statements about how everything is different now, and we're in a "new economy" and all those "old economy" concepts like revenue and profit are totally obsolete. Plus ça change...

gspetr
I wonder why there isn't a new incarnation of it. Are people afraid of lawsuits?
eropple
I registered unicorngrill.com on a lark for exactly this, but I'm allergic to lawyers.
danieltillett
We need to see someone follow sci-hub.cc lead and put the server and public face in Russia.
gspetr
As luck would have it I'm Russian.

Do you think it would take off if I would do it for real?

Should we poll the community in an "Ask HN" thread to see if people want this?

tluyben2
I would like it and wouldn't mind hosting it, but yeah FuckedCompany does have a better ring to it than the other names I see here. That might be nostalgia though.
danieltillett
I suspect there would be quite a lot of interest especially if you did not worry about upsetting lawyers.
Animats
I had Downside's Deathwatch, a simple automated cash flow analysis.[1] It's still up, frozen in time. All those "Chart is not available for this symbol" entries are dead.

In the first dot-com boom, many companies went public before profitability. So anyone could see how much cash they had and how fast they were burning through it. I just calculated how much time they had left until cash went to zero. That's the "death date" listed. It was embarrassingly accurate.

[1] http://www.downside.com/deathwatch.html

NicoJuicy
This is awesome ( i mean, there is beauty in the simplicity of it)

Any thoughts to share the code which you used to analyse edgar? :)

Animats
It's no longer useful. The SEC used to require an EX-27 schedule in SGML with useful data. They discontinued that around 2001. Years later, they started requiring that data in XBRL format, which is more detailed. You could do this today with XBRL tools, which are available.

Downside was written in Perl, in 1999. There's a system in there to parse financial statements written in HTML for humans, but it's for HTML 3.1 and was never updated.

I used to get hate mail from CFOs over this.

NicoJuicy
Well, if you have the code and an example file it would still be usefull ( as reference ). Thanks for the information!
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MichaelMoser123
> Back in the first dotcom bubble, we had FuckedCompany.com

today there is https://www.thelayoff.com/ ; well, it is similar but not quite the same...

is useful if you are working for a company with a rich history of layoffs, it allows to check for recent rumors on the subject.

FuNe
There is also glassdoor.com but it's not specially geared towards layoffs. But you can get a decent idea of how well a company does.
imglorp
I love glassdoor. Sometime you see high level management on there giving frank plus and minus assessments of the business, often critical of higher levels. It's not just disgruntled departures but often current employees.
johnschrom
Glassdoor can be (and is) easily tainted by submitting fake positive reviews. They have a policy of not letting employers remove negative reviews, but that doesn't stop the company from flooding with "it's a fast-paced work environment, so some people clearly can't handle the heat in the kitchen" style "positive reviews" to reframe the legitimate negative ones.

So, it can sometimes be difficult to get a proper read on signal. However, it seems to be among the best data source out there.

thrwwy315341
I've seen this happen. Some of my colleagues had written bad reviews for a company I had worked at. My employer found out eventually. They ended up flooding glassdoor with fake positive reviews, down to changing tone and typing style between posts to throw people off.

I would take glassdoor with a grain of salt.

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driverdan
You have to appropriately weight the reviews. Some types of reviews tend to be heavy on negative, some positive. Glassdoor is the type of site you have to focus more on the negative reviews than the positive.
ud0
is there a second bubble?
innodb1
cognizant is firing people in US, top level cleanup
douche
Nice, we're working on trying to sell them some software. I wonder if that is why we haven't a whole lot the last couple weeks...
pknerd
This should be a monthly thread.
atom_enger
Yeah seems like something we should track along with hiring. Great thing to know about if you're on the market.
stephengillie
What about the number of throwaway accounts that might necessitate? It would be better to have a more anonymous means to announce that your employer is firing.
jacalata
Well, hopefully the site is written well enough to scale the users database if necessary.
boulos
Besides, this would only be X00 per month at best (it's rare that any post, get much more than a few hundred comments) and quite likely tens on average. There are certainly more than 100 new HN accounts per month. I second the motion ;).
monkeyshelli
I agree. Get the other side of the coin as well if you don't have option to talk with some of the people "over beverages".
workerIbe
I'm the 3rd Architect to be lucky to work with our VP of Product in the last 6 months, the other 2 no longer work here, he seems to end up pissed off Everytime we meet, we'll see...
maverick_iceman
Which company?
hactually
I wouldn't recommend he answer that. VP's are a lot easier to identify than a TL or similar
ronilan
Seems like a lot of bay area companies are "firing on all cylinders" but Tesla is clearly not.
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jbyers
rimshot I can't tell if that's an electric car joke or a condemnation of Tesla or both.
kainolophobia
Does this mean Tesla is hiring or firing?
jrockway
They prefer the terms "charging" and "discharging".
bbcbasic
Are they hiring on all cylinders?
huhtenberg
It was a pun. Tesla cars have no cylinders.
[dead] alasdair_
The DNC. At least once the election is over so it doesn't look terrible for all concerned.
dgc
I imagine that will be the RNC as well. Kind of a tradition in an election year ^_^
[dead] greglindahl
A few of the DNC staff did not pass the "newspaper test" of ethics.
[dead] gragas
The head of the DNC was already fired from CNN for directly colluding with Hillary Clinton (she gave HRC questions for the democratic debates ahead of time).

I have no idea how Bernie still supports her. She literally cheated against him to get the nomination.

This is not speculation. It's direct evidence of corruption in the DNC (and it revolves around guess who---Hillary Clinton).

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/donna-brazile-...

[dead] myf01d
>I have no idea how Bernie still supports her. She literally cheated against him to get the nomination.

Everyone has a price.

rconti
It's not cheating if that's how the game is played.
[dead] 64212
Very horrible people in that committee...
patmcguire
Are the national committees not fairly seasonal? What does a flack do in February?
dabernathy89
They are pretty seasonal. Particularly at the one I was at (NRCC), which was focused on House races and therefore strongly centered around the 2-year cycle.
jimjimjim
please, no politics. it's every-fucking-where. stop it.
Animats
Is it time to start holding Pink Slip Parties [1] again?

[1] http://sfgirl.com/index_last.html

patmcguire
Finance had some crazy times in NYC right after the housing bubble burst... friends would go to parties with color-coded wristbands for if you were hiring or looking to be hired.
CalChris
I went to one of those. It was hilarious.
walshemj
Back in the day I went to first Tuesday and those with badges for VC/Investors got swamped.

I managed to nervously pitched to one guy and thought "he looks familiar" looked down and saw his name badge was a single word "rothschild" :-)

He looked like Nathan Rothschild (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Mayer_Rothschild) who was the UK's banker during the Napoleonic wars

frogstomp19
Not technically "firing" I suppose but all of the dev org in Atlanta and SF, including myself, were laid off at athenahealth last week. Something like 120 people. Sucks.
tbrooks
What about the Austin office?
dabernathy89
I've been seeing job listings for the Austin office repeatedly for the last few weeks, so it'd surprise me if they were cutting staff there.
frogstomp19
Still alive! They consolidated to Watertown (Boston), Austin, and India.
withdavidli
The entire org?? Why? I recruited for a company that started a few innovation centers around the country. Part me now wonders why they needed all those devs. This was around 3 new centers that hired about 70-100+ each in mostly non tech hubs. The way tech advanced in the last 3 years I'm sure most of their work is or fastly becoming obselete.
debacle
Probably using a new platform and/or being bought.
kristianp
What's the difference between being fired and laid off?
Dobbs
Being fired generally means you did something wrong wrong. Laid off means the company is getting rid of people to reduce costs or due to removing the position, for example due to change of strategy.

One generally implies personal fault, the other implies side-effect of business.

rezashirazian
You are laid off when the company is downsizing, has no need for your services or cannot pay your wages.

You get fired when you fail to perform adequately at your job.

joatmon-snoo
Technically none, but "fired" tends to refer specifically to when there was some specific employee conduct, e.g. failure to fulfill responsibilities, which forced the company to let the employee go. "Laid off" is a broader term that doesn't carry the same negative connotation and is more appropriate when, say, a company is strapped for cash and lets go of someone to free up money in the budget.
tehwalrus
In the UK, "getting fired" or "getting the sack" means you were incompetent (or commited misconduct) and are sent home. For incompentance, they can only do this after a "performance review" (they have to give you 3 months to improve, I think).

"Laid off" is called being "made redundant". The company can do this much more easily to a bunch of people, but it generally has to pay them ~6 months salary and can't hire new people at the same time, for the same job(s).

Any employer being more aggressive than this will probably be taken to an employment tribunal.

In the States, I've heard you guys use the terms synonymously, but it always sounded a little weird. Your employment law is awful for employees though, by comparison.

kelnos
No, we use the terms the same way in the US, just the protections behind them are weaker (and personally, as an employee, I'm fine with it that way).

You might be thinking of the phrase "was let go", which is just a nicer way of saying "got fired".

"Laid off" here means the same as in the UK: you were sent home because your job function isn't needed anymore, or because the company is downsizing.

vertex-four
> and personally, as an employee, I'm fine with it that way

You mean as a reasonably well-off employee who was lucky enough to have picked a growing field when you went to uni. On the other hand, if that field ever stops growing for any reason... you might see why people enjoy stability and the ability to plan ahead in their work life.

philh
Some people think that pro-employee laws are not in fact good for employees.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with them, it's super uncharitable to dismiss them in this way.

vertex-four
Pro-employee laws are not good for employees in the success case - that you're a top 10% worker in a field that is growing and has lots of demand. The thing is, if you think about the failure case - you're a disposable cog in a field that's stagnating - there's issues which need to be solved, unless you're a staunch libertarian with a belief that people who are unable to find work should die. Nobody wants to pay for a 40yo person with a family to spend years retraining when they lose their job and can't find another, so what is there to do?
tbrownaw
The alternative to making it impossible to fire people, is to make getting fired less of a big deal. Instead of adding friction to the employment market, implement a decent social safety net that includes provisions for voc ed / retraining.

Instead of focusing solely on prevention, work on mitigation. To much prevention can make everything grind to a halt.

vertex-four
> Instead of adding friction to the employment market, implement a decent social safety net that includes provisions for voc ed / retraining.

Sure, except that nobody wants to do that for some abstract reason of "fairness", so the problem needs to be mitigated another way.

tbrownaw
Really? I thought it was that it smells a bit too much like communism.

Which seems to be gradually becoming less of a problem over time, even here in the USA.

toomuchtodo
Socialism, not communism.

And systematiclly dismantling the middle class through public policy and economic upheaval does that to a country.

Full speed ahead on stronger safety nets, even if it means higher taxes.

vertex-four
Well, "why should I pay for my neighbour's re-education when they should've just picked right in the first place?" - if you are lucky enough to pick a field which grows for the rest of your life, and you're a reasonably good worker, you're never going to take advantage of that and so your neighbour gets more than you from the Government. Not fair! /s
kelnos
Is that actually a prevalent attitude, though? I mean, it's stupid... someone else retraining is easily still having it harder than someone who "picked right". And in the end, I'd much rather help pay for someone's education than have to walk past them on the street, begging for money.
philh
> there's issues which need to be solved

Yes, and some people think that pro-employee laws make these issues worse.

Again, you don't need to agree with them, but you don't get to dismiss them as simply not caring.

kelnos
> Nobody wants to pay for a 40yo person with a family to spend years retraining when they lose their job and can't find another, so what is there to do?

That's the thing I don't get. In the grand scheme of things, it is much less costly to an economy to pay to retrain someone than it is to pay them to do a redundant job. It's even less costly than doing nothing and kicking them to the curb.

kelnos
That's rather undeservedly flippant.

Actually I picked a dying field at uni. Well, not a dying one, but it's become very difficult over the past 10-15 years to find a job doing digital hardware design. Fortunately I gave up on that quickly and switched to software (something I was lucky enough to start picking up well before uni).

But I think that misses the point. We shouldn't halt progress in the name of job security. I'm fine with slowing progress a little; hell, even in the US it's customary (even though not required by law) to pay a decent severance package during layoffs. But I just don't get this whole idea that you're entitled to a job (and job security) just because you trained for it.

I also don't get the resistance toward retraining, aside from the obvious issue that retraining takes time and money, and in the meantime you have to feed and shelter yourself (but this sort of thing can and should be solved via social safety nets). Sure it would be easy to be able to have a single job for the rest of your life, but that's just not how life works, or should work. Things get obsoleted all the time, and that doesn't mean we should legally require private enterprises to keep paying someone to do useless work.

I do very much object to how difficult it can be to vanilla fire someone in many places in Europe. They've gone way too far with that one. Extra protections for layoffs are fine, but if someone is consistently underperforming, it should be possible to get rid of them immediately and without any sort of severance. I've been at a couple very small companies in the US where the lack of ability to do that sort of thing could have killed the company.

dfraser992
You forgot about being 'sent to Coventry' - i.e. the company doesn't want to pay you redundancy, and can't fire you for incompetence, so you get ignored, not given any work, get put in a useless role, etc until you wise up and quit/find another job. British passive aggressiveness at its finest!

Being American. I would have had no problem with being fired aka 'you're now surplus' and it would have been far more helpful (i.e. get it over with) vs. letting me twist in the wind for a few months... or even have a hard talk with me to see if I might be useful elsewhere in the company because I was bored etc.

But the procedure they used to downsize the workforce earlier that year before that was cruel - straight out of the Victorian era...

willthames
Sent to Coventry appears to be Constructive Dismissal under UK law

https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/unfair-and-constructive-dismiss...

Of course it might not be worth the lawsuit.

mattmanser
It's almost always worth the lawsuit, it's cheaper for a company to pay an employee off than fight them in court.

The actual numbers of people who take abusive companies to court is low, just look up the statistics of companies who constructively dismiss women after pregnancies, compared to the number who actually get sued.

xyzzy123
It's a thing to do carefully; especially in a small industry. Unless the situation is pretty messed up it's generally better to take a small hit than become known as someone who litigates against their employer.

On the other hand, full respect to anyone who stands up for themselves when the situation warrants it.

tehwalrus
I've heard that that practise (what a name!) Is relatively common in Japan: I've never heard of it in the UK before.

I have heard of "gardening leave" though: where you're left on full salary but kept out of the building for your notice period, to stop you passing up to date market info to your new company. (It's the only legal way I know of in the UK to implement a non-compete clause.)

zelos
I love the fact that no one seems to know why we say "sent to Coventry" as well.
cwilkes
Probably related to Coventry being "ignored" in WWII by British officials so that German wouldn't catch on that the enigma machine was broken.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11486219

7Z7
The phrase is much older than that..

>Grose's The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue - 1811:

>>To send one to Coventry; a punishment inflicted by officers of the army on such of their brethren as are testy, or have been guilty of improper behaviour, not worthy the cognizance of a court martial. The person sent to Coventry is considered as absent; no one must speak to or answer any question he asks, except relative to duty, under penalty of being also sent to the same place. On a proper submission, the penitent is recalled, and welcomed by the mess, as just returned from a journey to Coventry.[0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_to_Coventry

roninb
Wow, I wonder how effective time-out was on infantrymen of the early 19th century and how often it was enforced. It seems like an analog to solitary confinement while still forcing you to be a contributing member of your armed forces.
walshemj
Really not going find a new job easily if you say you have been fired vs redundancy as that implies you did something wrong.
kchoudhu
This is actually fine by me: if you want to pay me to do nothing, that's fine -- I'll just look at it as conditional severance. As an employer, you should know that I'll be using the time to look for other jobs on my phone though.
timv
In Australia that's generally called "special projects".
mattmanser
You don't get 6 months salary, that's never been a thing. Unless there's something different in your contract, it's a week per year worked. A normal contract clause in the UK is that it's a month or 6 weeks notice both ways after a probationary period of 3 or 6 months, so that's usually a minimum.

https://www.gov.uk/redundant-your-rights/redundancy-pay

tehwalrus
Thanks for correcting me, clearly I've only ever heard about it from people who had been working somewhere for a long time!
walshemj
You may be thinking of voluntary redundancy terms which can be very lucrative
walshemj
And a in IR/HR terms a lay off is not exactly the same as a redundancy.

With redundancy the job is 100% gone, with a layoff the job may come back ie a factory may lay off the night shift - with expectation that if things pick up the nightshift will be re hired.

jomamaxx
Fired - you did something wrong, incompetent (or pissed someone off) and they are doing it specifically to you.

Laid off - your group is redundant or discontinued, they have no need for you or your team/product, they're closing an overseas business unit, or culling 10% of their staff. You're in the wrong boat at the wrong time.

It has different connotations.

wcummings
If you're laid off, you can collect unemployment more easily.
nannal
immediately vs 3 months waiting period as far as I recall
ToPutItBluntly
For California, that is wrong. You can claim right away if you are fired. The employer can dispute it however they have to prove they tried to rectify the situation. The way the system works, the former employee has to dispute the unemployment rejection if the employer wants to try to claim it was a valid firing. So if you do get fired and there was not a pattern of behavior or something that you were warned about, then you simply appeal, state your case and the judge will almost certainly reject the employers false claim.

Unfortunately, I know this by experience. I was fired for some fishy business and it was obvious at the hearing. So always file for unemployment unless you are certain it will not be granted. Unemployment also qualifies you for health insurance through Covered California.

nikhil417
Wow. I interned at athenahealth Summer 2015 in SF. Hope things work out for you. Did you work on Epocrates?
frogstomp19
I was working on pop health, which is based out of Austin, but I'm in Atlanta. Job market is pretty good though and they're still employing the Atlanta people through December 30th, so I should be good. I'll just likely have to walk from the (pretty meh) severance... Nobody is hiring in late December.
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daveloyall
Do you know anybody who might be interested in wiring Apache Camel up to be a Rhapsody replacement?

The NEDSS Base System has an expensive dependency on Rhapsody, but all it does is grab incoming HL7, do some transformations, and dump the result into a NBS table.

(For the uninitiated: State Health Departments are generally the users of NEDSS Base System... Rhapsody is a graphical ETL tool.)

karmajunkie
Just out of curiosity, any reason you're using Camel for that instead of Mirth? I've been out of the healthcare sector for a few years but at one time was doing essentially that same thing to build out the state biosurveillance network in TX. Mirth was a great fit for it at the time, I'd imagine it still is.
daveloyall
I haven't started yet. Just putting feelers out.

I haven't evaluated Mirth. It seems like a consumer oriented product. The marketing around it is so deep that I can't find a list of it what it's not good at...

Camel appears to be basically a library. As a programmer, I find that appealing.

karmajunkie
I'd take a closer look at mirth. It's highly capable, and I never had any major issues with it. You have a number of options for integrating with it, and I imagine those have expanded since last I looked at it. Email is in my profile, feel free to drop me a line, I kind of miss my public health work :)
pjungwir
I could do this. I'm not from Atlanta, but two other developers and myself have a small company, Columbia Ops, that has done a lot of HL7 work. Usually we use Mirth, but we could do it in Camel instead if you prefer something lighter. My email is in my profile.
daveloyall
Second plug in this thread for Mirth. Noted. And...
farmdawgnation
Whoa what?! They were recruiting me pretty hard at one point. Feeling glad that I didn't bite. :/ Sorry to hear that.
warcher
Ah yes, the "startup you work at".

Well, I'm probably full for the moment, but a startup that I know is bleeding some in my neck of the woods is MasteryConnect. Chop chop chop. Domo is not looking good, but they probably have money to survive for a bit.

josep2
I interviewed at MasteryConnect 2 years ago and their business model seemed doomed.
warcher
Yeah, I don't really get it either. Know a couple people laid off from there. They'd hired a bunch of kids from a coding bootcamp, and there was a serious bloodbath amongst them. An interesting case study-- seems like it shook out that there were definitely bootcamp grads that could hack it, but without the four year college filter they needed to do a big cull. Some of the campers are in and will stay in, most will wash out in a downturn. Same as it ever was, I suppose.
jennisNo
Acorns is not firing people, but has already lost ~15 top performers due to poor executive leadership
voltagex_
Damn, they were making waves here due to screenscraping Commbank and then writing a letter to the Prime Minister about it.
brongondwana
That didn't used to be particularly hard - I didn't even have to use any fancy libraries when I last cared enough for real-time feeds of my data to do it. Now I just pay Xero to get real-time feeds for me.
anon2020
The same is happening to Funding Circle in the UK. The company is still profitable, but a lot of devs are leaving because of certain decisions.
dig1
Funny, four days ago I've read they are looking for backend devs...
iLemming
Do you mean decision of becoming Clojure-centric? That was probably the best thing that could happen. Can't say about UK but in the US office we are interviewing for engineering positions almost every day.
anon12369
Shopstyle in SF just laid off 20 staffers between dev and product.
theow
I heard that was directly due to development team deciding to rewrite their site in "the angular" because it was quote: "like Haskell but better"

Blew a huge hole in their search engine rankings.

celticninja
How did rewriting the site in another language affect their ranking?
thomas88
Angular is a javascript framework rendered on the client and javascript is not yet 100% supported by the crawlers at search engines (but it's getting better).
js_what_
Well, it does have really poor load times and isn't SEO friendly in the least. Where I work, we are going through the same pain but with a different -- more in style -- set of front end practices.

It's a real shame what poor management, idealism, over-engineering and developers desperately putting their own goals ahead of the company will do to a product.

throw1988_9121
The company where I work has been going through problems and for the past few months people keep being let go. After 4 months of watching an average of 2 people loose their jobs per month, I had the idea to register dayssincelastlayoff.com. My idea was to have a 'X Days Since Last Injury' kind of image on the site that would just show this stat for various companies. My thinking was that knowing how frequently a company was letting go of it's employees might be a good metric to figure out if the management knows what they are doing. And my experience (written below) leads me to believe that a company laying off a small number of employees but doing it frequently is worse than a company that just does one huge round of layoffs.

This is the first time I've been part of a company that's going through a round of layoffs, and I understand that there are business decisions that lead to this. But the way I've seen it happen here is that instead of one massive round of layoffs (which they had as well. Fired around 8 people at the same time when the down sizing started) the management here kept firing 1 or 2 people at a time every month. From a morale perspective, this felt worse than loosing a bunch of people at once. Because this way, everybody keeps thinking if they are next. Has anyone else seen this happen, and did the company survive after this? Because what's happening at my work is that now, everybody has started looking for new jobs, because of the uncertainty.

The layoffs have stopped since the last month, so I lost interest in the idea. But just to throw it out there, could something like this ever be useful? If yes I might do something useful with the domain.

hinkley
Pretty much my experience. Once one useful person gets laid off, everyone can't help but think they're the next useful person to get laid off.

And in small groups it feels personal. So now you're playing CYA instead of taking the good kinds of risks with big payoffs.

throw1988_9121
In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds?

I've only seen the later happen, and personally I think I'd prefer the first one. If you know that after that large layoff round the rest of the company is safe, I'd venture that might be better for the morale of the remaining employees.

mixedCase
It requires a certain kind of attitude that only a small minority of all people have to keep morale high in a situation where you can be fired any second without warning instead of going through the office looking like a kid who just shat his diapers.
buro9
> In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds?

Both hurt morale.

I've seen many rounds of redundancy and layoffs in UK companies and both the huge layoff rounds and the slowly trimming back everywhere.

With the big rounds, the "We'll only do this once so we'll do it big and won't do it again" is never true. The whole company knows it's just time but at least you can prepare.

The axe is on a pendulum and if you give it a lot of momentum and swing from a great height it will swing back in good time and take off another chunk of the company.

With the small rounds of denying there is an issue and trimming a person from each team, it feels like you are being hunted and it's easy to walk around and see that the company isn't doing enough to address whatever the issues are, it's too cautious.

The axe is on a pendulum and if you only swing it a little the cadence is much higher and it will swing often and constantly slice of a little.

The axe is on a pendulum, once it starts swinging it will swing again. It never swings just once.

throw1988_9121
If I'm understanding this correctly, does this mean no company can recover from a situation where they had to let go of people?
CapitalistCartr
Companies are too cautious, too much in denial. The first cut is like a surgeon trainee making his first incision: too little, too late. Then comes the bigger cut, but its still not enough. Of course its not enough; by now the executives (who don't know what to do, who caused the mess and should be the first to go) have latched on to layoffs as the panacea to bring back the good times, the fruits of which they enjoyed but never understood. Layoffs can be necessary in a company, but they only work in conjunction with other actions, carefully managed together by leadership with vision and courage. I've watched executives argue over laying off a man that was costing them $5.00 per hour (and cleaning their bathrooms), but ignore everyone around the management meeting table.
buro9
The companies may survive, departments may survive. They'll need time to recover, rebuild, find new confidence and morale.

But... in the short-term, once cuts start they don't stop.

It's always too little too late. The big cuts are indicative of how bad things already are, the small cuts are indicative of how bag things are yet to get (but it is coming down the line and aimed at you).

Once the axe starts swinging, be in control of your situation and look elsewhere. Don't wait to let the situation dictate to you.

swish_bob
That's not _necessarily_ true. I've worked at a company that expanded far too fast, and laid off a sizeable number of people. They then got some serious focus on the areas that they could do well, made good money and grew more sustainably. By the time I left they were substantially bigger than they had been, sustainably profitable and had been acquired.

On the other hand, I've also been places where the cuts just kept on coming.

Naritai
The small layoffs are not usually done for morale reasons; they're done to avoid having to give a WARN notice [1].

Even in cases where a WARN notice is not legally required, it is a PR problem to be admitting that you're laying staff off. People gossip, they think your products must not be good, new candidates have second thoughts, etc. But if you're just firing 1-2 people a week, then (you hope) nobody notices and you can keep putting on a happy public face.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

mountaineer22
I worked at a place, where I was not laid off, but my friend was, on his birthday.

For me, this was a real eye-opener.

It would not have been a big deal for HR to wait another day, and then lay him off.

Another employee, also laid off, 2 days after moving out of his aunt's house and had put a deposit down on an apartment and DSL connection.

I think I left a month later right before the company imploded.

nannal
>but my friend was, on his birthday.

I've had this happen

good 20th.

rpazyaquian
I've had it happen too. Granted, it was kind of a bullshit zeroth job where it happened and the company folded a month later, but it still sucked. I almost brought in cupcakes to share with the company...
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redboxcandy
Happened to a friend of mine while he was on his honeymoon. Through a slip by management people knew it was coming. He wanted to know before he left, but they wouldn't tell him. So he ended up checking his voicemail everyday while he was on his final vacation.
timv
Happened to a colleague of mine while he was on leave after the birth of his first child.

He was allowed to come into the office one weekend (escorted by security) to collect his things.

Welcome to fatherhood.

kchoudhu
At banks I worked at, they did it once a year, HARD. Lots of loss of morale for two weeks after that...after which things stabilized again.

During crises, it hit in waves. That was another kind of drawn out hell: people wondering "am I next?" aren't terribly productive.

scaryclam
"Cut deep and cut once". Multiple rounds of layoffs is going to seed paranoia as well as hurt morale, so it's often better to over-do-it a little than end up with some of your best employees quitting because they're tired of wondering if they're next.

I've seen both in action, and while the large layoff is really nasty, the company can immediately start to look forwards into rebuilding rather than sitting in the "was it enough, who's next?" purgatory.

candiodari
As an ex-cisco employee I can say with absolute certainty that I will view any large company which "cuts deep and cuts once" with deep suspicion and paranoia, and with bad memories.
gorbachev
I went through this once. It sucks.

The company used to lay off groups of people every other Friday or so. A friend lost a job every time. Everyone knew the company was going to shut down and we were just waiting it out. It was during the dot.com bubble burst, so it wasn't like there were millions of new jobs to jump to. I finally got my Friday meeting after something like 6 rounds.

epynonymous
this is often times done on purpose, for companies listed on the nasdaq or nyse, i believe they have to announce publicly if they're laying off x% (i think it's like 7 or 9%). if they're less than x% then they can totally disregard public notification which helps with morale.
msbot
This happened at my prior job which ambush fired me back in February. I noticed that their main investors had started to back out of tech investments in general, and then heard about several rounds of layoffs since then. Friends told me about a morale drop, but they are also friends, and might have been trying to soften the blow.

Anyhow, I like your idea for dayssincelastlayoff.com.

keyle
This is less useful than the hiring one but more entertaining and gives us a chance to boost morale of the people actually hurt. Good thread imho.
shashwat986
It can be useful if companies are doing it in a backhanded manner, and trying to hide the state of affairs from its own employees. Kinda why fuckedcompany became so popular
mkteer
My friend's company Iron.io laid off ~20 employees in SF (almost the entire company). Apparently their series A round brought in 12 million just a year ago.
giis
Any specific reason you got from your friend? I checked their webpage it has few job openings!
threeseed
It's a shame because Iron.io has truly fantastic offerings.

Better than anything from any of the major cloud providers. The only problem is that it's hard to beat having your entire platform in the one place. Especially for billing, security etc.

patstar
We had some pretty bad issues with them earlier this year. Queues would randomly change from push to pull, service outages, etc. Seems to have stabilized for the most part, but we aren't using them much now.
carimura
Hi All,

This is Chad, CEO of Iron.io. It's true that we had to make some hard decisions and say goodbye to some friends. That said, a majority of the team is still here and dedicated to operating and growing the company. IronWorker fires up millions of containers per day for our 300+ customers, and we are fully committed to both expanding the service as well as releasing a new, open source sync service, next week... stay tuned.

Feel free to reach out to me to discuss any of this, or if you simply want to talk serverless computing.

email: chad [at] iron.io twitter: @chadarimura

Chad

cyberferret
When I read this, all I could picture was the scene in HBO's 'Silicon Valley' where Gavin Belson sacks his entire Nucleus team, then later inadvertently hires them all back again when he acquires EndFrame, and doesn't realise that he is talking to the same people in the same room about the same product.
jnsaff2
argh, spoilers :(
cyberferret
Oh, drat - I'm sorry. I had assumed most HN readers would have seen the series already - it was on a while back, wasn't it? (We only just saw it in Australia, which is usually an indication that is has been on in the US about a year ago?!?)
lxmorj
You did start with "the scene in HBO's 'Silicon Valley' where"

Not the BEST warning but not nothing...

intruder
You could edit it.
cyberferret
Must be out of time to edit :( don't see the option any longer (perhaps I don't have enough karma?)
pbadenski
You can always mail hacker news admins and ask to edit.
kj01a
Your spoiler is from the newest season. So, not quite a year, and if they're anything like me, they've been putting off watching the new stuff until they can binge watch the whole thing.
StavrosK
I wish I had done that, waiting is frustrating. However, I agree, that doesn't really spoil anything, it's not like there's suspense there.
diamondo25
The company I worked (Treatwell) for has lost a lot of good developers since the acquirement from the london based company Wahanda. 2 months ago they basically fired eveyone tech related in the Amsterdam office. Its a shame, I guess thats normal when you acquire a company for $38M[0] and figuring out everything is double.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/05/european-salon-booking-sit...

1474295912
VisualMeta GmbH in Berlin. They're a 'start-up' backed by Axel Springer, Berlin.

They fired about 60-70 people recently, some of them on their first day of work. Most of their devs come from non-existent countries (China/Eritrea/Pakistan etc) and they're paid abysmally (€32-34k).

It's a surprise that this news wasn't covered at all in Berlin start-up press.

Raed667
34k € is a bad salary in Germany? Because I think it is an average 1st salary in France (or the companies I've been talking to are also planning to get me paid abysmally)
1474295912
34k ain't bad, but average salaries for Experienced Java devs with 5+ years of experience are in the range of 50-55k.

Also by paying less than blue card limit, the devs are basically tied to VisualMeta. Most of the devs don't know German system well and thus are being taken advantage of.

b4xt3em4n
34k will be very good salary for an experienced java dev in Italy..
slau
Depends on where you live. If you're near a larger city or not. There's a huge discrepancy in salaries Due to geography (and also massively depends on your skill set, obviously).

To give you a frame of reference, I was pretty well paid in Perpignan after a few years in a company (a bit north of 40k€). The junior devs I hired got south of 24k€.

kriro
For a developer I'd say yes. For comparison the yearly salary for an entry level academic (masters->university) is about 44k € gross/year (which more or less automatically goes up to about 49k after one year). I'd expect a decent entry level developer to make at least that.
hocuspocus
Social contributions are a much bigger part of your gross salary in Germany. 34k would be ~28k in France.

My company hires new grads around 50k and I guess decent startups who make people relocate across continents should pay at least 45k.

user5994461
Damn. That's more than I got when I started in London. Should have picked Berlin instead.
throwawayReply
When it comes to software development, London (and the UK) certainly seem to have a low pay culture.
user5994461
Can you make 6 figures in Berlin? (In London, it's doable)

I hope you're not saying "low pay" because you compare to the USA. The Europe and the USA are not in the same league, they shouldnt be compared.

hocuspocus
100k+ is definitely possible in Germany but hard in Berlin itself, even for a principal engineer.

I'd say you need be be at least Manager/Director/VP of engineering, depending on the size of the company.

throwaway1892
As another said, it is heavily dependent on location.

For a dev job around Paris, it is very low.

user5994461
34kE for a new master's graduate is rather low in Paris. It's rather high for the rest of the country.

See here for discussion about French salaries.

http://www.developpez.net/forums/f597/emploi-etudes-informat...

That's the main french forum for professional developers tips & tricks & career advice & salaries.

Raed667
Thanks, and do you have an idea about Nice / Sophia Antipolis ?
user5994461
I am not familiar with the area.

Feel free to open a topic in the aforementioned forum, they'll know better .

jakub_g
Fresh graduate salaries in Sophia are ~€33k-€40k. Negotiate hard, as getting a raise later is tough.
expertentipp
> Berlin... 'start-up'

> backed by Axel Springer

These are already two red flags, enough for a person familiar with the Germany's job and tech markets to stay away.

elcct
Care to elaborate?
expertentipp
Berlin startups are infamous for hiring foreigners from countries with low salaries, ideally from outside of EU (so no free movement of workers with Germany) and paying them below the market salary. Low pay + dealing with German bureaucracy + sky rocketing prices of everything in Berlin = person has a problem.

As for Axel Springer - their understanding of internet innovation is quite... "skewed". e.g. as some kind of manifest they blocked their tabloid's website (bild.de) for web browsers with enabled ad blockers or they are notorious for suing developers of ad blockers:

http://www.reuters.com/article/germany-advertising-adblockin...

Their philosophy seems to be "the internet is a platform to deliver advertisements" - quite toxic in my opinion.

elcct
Makes sense, thank you
elcapitan
They also think it's a good idea to get your content removed from Google, if they don't pay a fee for linking to you.
issaria
Chinese developer working in a Berlin startup here. I agree the Berlin startups do hire a lot of foreingers (there is a report stating that 49% of employees are foreigners), and it drives the salary down, but I can say my salary is the same level as others developers, as developers has such a huge demand here that you can change jobs freely, unlike American H1B visa.

Also because the EU bluecard has a salary requirement, so they usually pays you the lower limit at least in order to get you here. That's the situation of my Mexican friend, he changed job as soon as he worked in the company for a year and get better paid.

mlent
Second this (as another non-EU citizen working in Berlin) -- you have to make at least 38k euros per year to work in Germany as a foreigner, which is enough to live comfortably in Berlin IMO. However, as you said, there are definitely plenty of companies that are paying more than this. Changing jobs is a non-issue when you're on the ground.
muyuu
Yeah but the requirements of the EU bluecard are in line with the EU average - low for Germany.
neokya
Not really for Berlin. It's more than average pay, see http://www.nuberlin.com/2016/01/average-salary-in-berlin/

Also note, 38K is for person with science/engineering background. Otherwise, lower limit for EU Bluecard is around 48K

muyuu
That seems a bit low. Here in London it's a waiter's salary.
issaria
Well, giving that the GBP against EUR rate is like 1:1.1 at the moment, even if you have 70k anual salary Berlin, it's much less than who paid 70K in Berin, considering the living cost. And 70K is very reasonable now with Senior title, not to mention manage positions.
neokya
> dealing with German bureaucracy

This is too much exaggeration. If you can find another job, dealing with bureaucracy is piece of cake. You just go to Foreign Registration Office and change company name.

1474295912
Edit: I meant "Non-EU" countries, not non-existent.
rshaban
A helpful clarification :)
sdoering
Here in Germany. Jimdo (something like SquareSpace) is laying of (I believe) up to 25% of it's staff.
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nyccentralpark2
Marvell Semiconductors will be shutting down quite a few businesses. Quite a lot of top level management replaced already