[rdtsc]

> When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?

- “Are you hiring people just to fire them a year later to protect yourselves?”

- “Yes we do”

It’s a bit naive to think they’d just own up to it.

[evilduck]

Do they need to own up to it directly? Interviews are always about both sides of the table putting their best self forwards. If it's a big enough company to implement stack ranking and the resulting games played then GlassDoor, LinkedIn, Reddit, even HN all serve this purpose quite effectively.

You can also just ask indirect questions: "how often do you hire new team members?", wait a bit and then, "how is the company measuring growth?" and then at a later opportunity "what's the tenure of those on the team I'd be working with?". If nobody with 1 -2 years is on the team but they admitted to hiring frequently and that growth is meager or stagnant (or they can't answer the question), you have your answer.

[cj]

You could also just ask directly. I think it's a totally fair question. I don't think you'd be penalized for asking about a company's layoff history. Especially if you say something like "I'm looking for my next home, somewhere I can be for the next 5 plus years".

I might not ask in the first 10 minutes of the first interview, but once you're a few rounds of interview deep, you can pretty safely ask questions like this.

[s_dev]

>- “Are you hiring people just to fire them a year later to protect yourselves?”

You think the naive part is the response and not that question?

My point is that you'll simply have to read between the lines on responses with leading questions not that they're going to be upfront about these things.

Also the interview isn't the only way to gauge these things, You can Google for layoff numbers as well and make determinations that way. There are some websites that are dedicated trackers of layoff announcements, both the loud and quiet ones e.g. Spotify I think were letting 29 people go per month for a while. I think the law in Europe was if was 30 people you had to announce it. I can't remember the exact detail but plenty of companies expose these loopholes.

[ambicapter]

You said "seriously enquire", now you're saying "read between the lines".

[stogot]

As if the L4 SDE phone screener has any idea how to answer that from their scripts

[bijowo1676]

the deal you are signing is that if you show top percentile performance, it wont be you who will be laid off

Hunger Games basically