[underratedbug]

You are presupposing that boom and bust hiring is bad, and worse than a more steady state approach. If one assumes perfection is impossible, it seems you suggest erring on the side of perpetually under-hiring as opposed to ever over-hiring. Why is that better?

[Tade0]

People often have to uproot their lives to get into a new role. It's only ultimately worth it if it's a long-term commitment on both sides.

Also later in life having to suddenly switch jobs is neither easy nor desirable.

[iepathos]

This is more true in non-tech fields pre-pandemic. These days remote positions are more prevalent than ones that require relocation in tech and some other fields.

[bilvar]

Cry me a river, the same people who demand a long-term commitment from their employer will jump ship in an instant for 10k more after 6 months of employment. Companies are full of them.

[newswasboring]

When a person moves to another company, the company doesn't have to move to another state and restart its social life from scratch. The person with more power, needs to take more responsibility. Holy batman, sometimes I feel like people don't even have a heart anymore.

[scarface74]

Isn’t it your responsibility to weigh the pros and cons and risk for uprooting your family for more compensation?

It’s business. It’s purely transactional. Why would you expect a company to “have a heart”?

[newswasboring]

Because I thought in America businesses were people. And I have been fortunate enough to work with businesses which seem like they have a heart. Consequently, I've rejected several offers to come work in America for extra pay. I think a system which is purely transactional is inferior, boring and at times immoral due to power imbalance. Society is not a computer program, businesses exist in society and they should behave like that.

[scarface74]

And for that tradeoff, tech companies pay a lot more in America.

A returning intern I mentored at $BigTech got an offer coming straight out of college that was twice the median wage in America and it’s a remote job.

They save a crap ton of money every month in case things go wrong.

[LunaSea]

Cry me a river. Will the company have to uproot its family to find a new worker?

[bilvar]

I don't understand how the convenience of the worker makes it fairer to demand loyalty but not reciprocate. Sounds entitled and self-serving.

[tombert]

I don't understand how you don't understand that. It's a power differential that frustrates people. You can be fired from an employer without it affecting their bottom line, but having it drastically affect your bottom line.

Also, what the hell are you talking about about them "not demanding loyalty"? Big companies demand loyalty all the time. When I worked at an Apple, I had to sign a whole bunch of non-compete forms. Talk about "demanding loyalty"; I technically wasn't even allowed to open a Github issue on an open source project without permission. The only leverage you have as an employee is quitting.

[bilvar]

The same way a company can find another employee, the employee can find another job. Also claiming that leaving a company doesn't affect a company's bottom line reflects more about the quality of the work the employee does, rather than the economic reality of the company. If your work doesn't affect the bottom line maybe you shouldn't have the job, that's why you are getting paid to have an impact on the bottom line, not to drink latte, have yoga sessions and raising your children while you are 'working' from home.

Where did I actually say that companies do not ask for loyalty?

[Eisenstein]

The reason no one shows loyalty is exactly because it is not reciprocated. Why should the employee have to be loyal when they are just a number to an HR department and the CEO will strike off their job without a second thought? You have things backwards. People used to be loyal, back when you could work at a place, grow your career, and retire with a pension. It wasn't the laborers who broke the loyalty deal.

[bilvar]

The first part of your response is just equivocation. The latter is just an assertion lacking substantial evidence.

[vsareto]

If you want loyalty, hire contractors. You can't expect people (especially individuals) to act like they're in a contract without the upsides.

[bilvar]

The same goes for the employee. It’s a two-way street.

[machinawhite]

Are you serious right now? You can talk to your therapist about it, noone on this earth cares about some corpos losing money or workers.

[mensetmanusman]

This started after the Welch acolytes in corporate America broke the employee/employer contract.

[scarface74]

Anyone who thought that any job was long term was naive. Did they not read the whole “at will” work thing that I have signed before accepting any job.

I have never in my 25+ years in tech thought that any job was going to be “long term”.

I also sacrificed more compensation for the stability of my family until my youngest graduated and then I took a job at BigTech.

It didn’t require me to relocate. But it could have required extensive travel.

[rcme]

A boom/bust cycle is over-hiring to the point that you need to lay people off. You can over-hire or under-hire in moderation.

[aeternum]

>You can over-hire or under-hire in moderation.

It's unclear whether that would be better. In control theory, underdamped systems are generally preferred as it allows you to reach the desired value rapidly even though you often overshoot.

Overdamped systems (IE hire in moderation) can be very slow to respond and often spend the majority of their time in the un-desired regime.

It's quite possible that tech over-hiring when people were forced to work from home yielded a net good for society even though many of those hires were let go a couple years later.

[reaperman]

He's advocating that the powers-that-be should consider targeting a slightly underdamped hiring system. Where they over-hire, and as they're overshooting the goal then reduce the rate of hiring, allowing the normal low rate of attrition to bring the PV back down to the SP.

e.g. a one-half critically-damped system. something following a standard first-order ODE like:

  \frac{dh}{dt} = K_p (h^\* - h) - K_i \int (h^\* - h) dt - f(h)

where h is the instantaneous number of employees, h* is the desired number of employees, f(h) is your attrition rate as a function of current number of employees, and Kp and Ki are "rate of hiring" coefficients which will be your proportional and integral terms of a PID controller to control your rate of hiring. The point is, the "rate of layoffs" here is zero and doesn't appear as a term.

Is this a proper model for a human organization? Who the fuck knows but it's the model you're advocating for and I'm just re-explaining what the other guy you replied to was suggesting in the first place, but this time using your framing. Yes, he also mentioned they should consider a slightly over damped system but he 100% did advocate for considering an underdamped system.

[aeternum]

Right, I was advocating for underdamped. Yes you overshoot, but you generally spend more time near your setpoint (optimal value).

[reaperman]

Ehhhh, your argument was more that "severely underdamped" could be the best, even if it requires an additional forcing factor (firing/layoffs) to bring it back down to the setpoint.

The person you replied to was arguing that perhaps something a bit more mildly underdamped could get rid of the requirement for that extra complication (firing / layoffs).

[aeternum]

Yeah, and I disagree. Goal should be to get to the setpoint as quickly as possible even if you overshoot as human nature is to keep the status-quo which generally means talented people wasting their time at obsolete companies.

[jabradoodle]

Control theory in sociology proposes no such thing. Your using an engineering term used to describe machines which is largely the point; human capital being as disposable as a cog in a machine.

[lazyasciiart]

Tech companies over-hire to excess and then under-hire to excess. It's like people trying to follow a 1000-calories/day diet who then give up and eat 4000 calories a day. They are never going to hit a healthy weight. Neither is my jackass company, who has laid off more people in 2023 than we hired in 2022, and is still on a hiring freeze.

[scott_w]

Honestly, I think this is a wicked problem, in that it's impossible for us to know in advance what the right decision would have been. Was it foreseeable that the economy would be volatile post-pandemic? Yes. Was it guaranteed that it would mean layoffs? No.

In addition, what about the boom itself? What if you're cautious but, during that boom period, you get outcompeted in key areas as a result? This might put you in a worse situation during the bust phase than if you'd over-hired.

Hindsight is 20/20, so I prefer to avoid being judgemental over these types of decisions, while still holding people accountable to doing the right thing, even in tough times.

[ghaff]

Or lots of individuals just don't get hired and you'd have had lots of people railing against headlines like "Despite surging demand, companies keep hiring choked off."

[marcosdumay]

To use an even more reasonable framing, absent some small numbers effect or some really high-impact shock, it's incredibly stupid to almost double the size of a company in one year.

That's how you lose your culture and throw the dice again on market fitness. (Well, that and randomly firing people.) Knowledge work just can't scale that fast, and nowadays every work is knowledge work.

What those companies did is bad from every possible point of view.

[LapsangGuzzler]

> Why is that better?

Because it doesn't create unnecessary suffering for the unfortunate people who find themselves out of a job because some executive over-allocated for a particular role or department. Fundamentally, we want people to still participate in the capitalist system and not reject it because they're constantly treated like cattle.

[scarface_74]

So who suffered from getting a job at Google for three or four years or any other large tech company?

[cbsmith]

> Because it doesn't create unnecessary suffering for the unfortunate people who find themselves out of a job because some executive over-allocated for a particular role or department.

Unnecessary suffering is going to happen either way. Keep in mind, at the time of hiring, there is real demand, and while "forever" is more than a bit ridiculous (and no doubt a misrepresentation of the executives' thinking), the truth is nobody knows exactly how long it will last, so you're getting it wrong no matter what you do.

> Fundamentally, we want people to still participate in the capitalist system and not reject it because they're constantly treated like cattle.

That some people don't always have a job is part of the capitalist system. What happens to them when they're not employed, that's not about capitalism.

[lazyasciiart]

> Keep in mind, at the time of hiring, there is real demand,

That seems like a big claim for which I haven't seen any evidence.

[cbsmith]

> That seems like a big claim for which I haven't seen any evidence.

Umm... the entire basis for the article was that there was a belief that market conditions at the time would remain true "forever". That's a very different delusion from thinking there isn't something there.

...and there's plenty of evidence that there was real demand. Real revenue grew significantly during that time. Streaming services saw significant increases in subscriptions. Computer sales were up. In tech in general, sales were up across the board. If you haven't seen any evidence of increases in demand during that time period, I don't think you'll ever see evidence of increases in demand.

[lazyasciiart]

Sounds like you're equating 'demand for more engineers' with 'available cash' for any given company. I think you're mistaking demand for ability to purchase.

[cbsmith]

No.

You can have dramatic gains in revenue, increased sales, increased subscribers, etc., and less 'available cash'. What you do have is more demand.

[cbsmith]

Sorry, that should read "That's a very different delusion from thinking there is something there that isn't."

[Kinrany]

If a boom-bust cycle creates an economic surplus, then people suffering is an issue of negative externalities and unfair distribution of resources. The solution is to pay people who got laid off, not under-hire.

[TylerE]

How about just not firing them and telling them to go volunteer part time and spend the rest learning new skills?