Ask HN: Who's firing?

166 points by patmcguire ↗ HN
I feel that the previous iteration of this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851987) was interesting. A group of people looking together might also be very appealing to some companies.

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I'd be curious to hear from those who posted in the last thread. Are you still working for a failing company? What happened in between then and now?
I posted about the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in the last "Who's Firing" thread - which was my employer. All of the 100+ of us affected by the outsourcing have been let go as of January 31st, with some already having lined up full time employment, others taking some time off, or some like myself who are actively exploring potential jobs.

If you're curious about the company, it won't fail - having $170B in investment assets means you can pay people to fix whatever is broken - but the Tata Consultancy folks who were hired to replace us are definitely having some problems taking over all of the responsibilities we have left behind. I forsee a great deal of pain in their near future, but I'm sure they'll be fine in a few years - and I honestly wish them well.

As for me - if anyone out there is looking for a remote (or Toronto based) 17+ year IT veteran, with a sys admin / web development / DevOps skillset - feel free to send me an e-mail at debunn at yahoo dot com.

The current rumour is that there's going to be another round of outsourcing toward the end of the year.

Also as expected the transition from ETS to TCS is not going well. Everyone I've spoken to that has direct contact with them is not pleased.

Our union (OPSEU) is meeting regularly to find out how to prevent this type of action in the future.

Quite the researched article by the weekend meteorologist.
There's actually a solid weather angle on this...

- It's a massive sh-tstorm.

- It's raining pink-slips.

- AWS, Google, and Microsoft are about to get a flood of resumes.

(I'm sure there's more to this, but I'm about to drag myself off stage.)

sorry to be dense, could you be explicit about why you call them the "weekend meteorologist". (I read the article and their about page - http://news4sanantonio.com/station/contact and Googled for "weekend meteorologist" in case it's some idiom - apparently it's a normal job title? http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Weekend_Meteorologis... - anyway I'm more confused than before I Googled that phrase. Why are you calling them that, or what's the joke I missed?)
click on his profile in the twitter link
Weekend meteorologist reporting the news about a cloud provider. Seemed amusing to me. However, I won't pretend I have a particularly good sense of humor.
Both Mozilla and Pandora are firing in early 2017.
But why are they hiring at the same time?
they're refocusing what areas to target, so they're laying off + hiring -- some of those people will be asked if they want to move to their new teams else they'll get some severance + job placement help
Once there is more than a single product being produced by an organization, hiring and firing is not generally correlated.
I thought Mozilla was more so they are stopping Firefox OS and employees may move to another team?
Is Pandora still alive in 2017?
I think it'd be interesting to do this on the 15th of every month. Have the 1st of the month be the "Who's Hiring", and the 15th the "Who's Firing".
The problem is, "Who's firing?" is not some useful dual of "Who's hiring". While not 'gratifying intellectual curiosity', the who's hiring threads are a useful monthly exception since people do actually look for hires and for jobs.

"Who's firing" would just be a way to have a monthly rumors and gossip thread. There are already sites upon sites for that.

What would be a useful dual? "Who's shutting down"? I want to know:

1) A high-level overview of companies I've kind of heard about that didn't work out for whatever reason, or are have hit big roadblocks. That's useful information.

2) Where to find people to actively reach out to, if there's a big group of people leaving there are good people looking for jobs. A lot of teams get formed from the ashes of other teams.

For 1, postmortems of various kinds are linked here regularly. So that's covered

As to 2, I don't think that's what the site is really for. Who's hiring is already a sanctioned exception (there's also one for YC company job posts). Either way, though, such threads are much more likely to generate rumors and gossip than actionable information and you're likely to keep seeing it flagged off the front page. Might be worth emailing the mods if you feel it's that important but I'd be surprised if you can talk them into it.

For the first, the occasional postmortem isn't that useful. I hoped to know when things go away as easily as I can find out when they're coming out. There's a massive push on creation that takes care of the first one, but after only occasional breathless praise slowly turning into dead silence for almost everyone. Maybe 1/100 writes a postmortem and that goes too deep too narrowly. Or they are silently successful. "Gets to front page of HN" is not a great filter.

Second would have to be "Who's Looking" or something, I guess it's done the other way around so candidates don't get hammered with 10k recruiter emails.

There haven't been great responses on this Ask HN, and looking back on the previous one it was also worse than I remembered. I've accepted that this isn't going to work out in practice.

"Who's looking" variants already exist. The postmortem thing, I suppose if you want more of them you're probably better off finding some like-minded people and setting up a forum of some sort - fb page, twitter tag, subreddit, whatever. That way you don't have to rely on the broader topic range and limited frontpage space of HN.
The entire purpose of the voting system is to determine if its useful or not. Might as well just do it: if its desired it'll be voted up, if not it'll fade into irrelevance.
The site is actively moderated and there are also rules. This is not 'Nam. If it was just the voting it would have imploded long ago. Notice this thing had plenty of votes.
+1 - but may have legal ramifications :-(

How about instead, "Who's Looking?"

Edit: or a "recommend me an FTE candidate who can do X" - make X very specific, only accept answers from people vi PM, or some system such that you can validate your cress for the recommendation/their skills without revealing who is looking...

Rubicon project just laid off a bunch of staff and closed the Toronto office.
That sucks. I wonder if someone crossed them.

If they can just hold out until March 15...

(ducks)

This is vindictive and silly. Keep in mind some of us here are aware the employee can be as involved in the firing as the company laying off staff.
I think you're missing the point. A significant proportion of the mentions in here and the last one were about major laying offs. When you have to lose >10% of your staff, you probably shouldn't blame the employees.

This is just an interesting counter-post to the "Who's Hiring", allowing people to see both sides of the coin.

Meh, most of us have been on the receiving end of this at some point... and many (including myself) have been on the 'doing' side. It is nothing personal, none of us can expect a job for life anymore.

Seeing where organisations are contracting is both interesting for a view of technology in general, but also where to concentrate our hiring (or sales) efforts.

Rackspace just laid off a bunch of people at their HQ in San Antonio.
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Canonical / Ubuntu recently let go a few of their Juju team.
Any more details from Canonical on this or which part of the team?
long time ubuntu user, but have never used juju, isnt this ubuntu's app store?
Telerik/Progress fired ~110 people from their Sofia offices not long ago
Oracle is laying off a decent chunk of its hardware teams
Rumor has Intel will be letting a few folks from Europe go. They were supposed to be a part of the larger actions taken last year but due to European labor policy had been delayed.
Akamai is laying off a decent chunk of people.