Real talk here, and I'm sorry for being "that guy"

Why do tech workers get so wrapped around the axle of layoffs when most people are in a chronic state of tech job hopping? I know multiple people who have worked their entire career thus far without ever staying at a place for more than 3 or 4 years. Some no more than two. Tech job culture is practically a mono culture with "hop jobs" being a hallmark.

From an employers perspective it's not laying off a bunch of family members (Southwest has an average tenure of 11.5 years), it's laying off a bunch of people who were gonna dip in 6 months to a year anyway.

I know this is controversial take, but recognize that the tech industry is an outlier industry, with outlier amounts of money and outlier amounts of volatility.

I cannot speak for layoffs in all industries ever, but I agree with your assessment of layoffs in big tech from personal experiences.

I have way too many “lifer” friends in big tech who are deadly scared of layoffs and job hopping. They are also the ones who rarely got promoted and havent had a significant pay bump pretty much ever.

On another hand, half my team at a big tech company got laid off back at the start of 2023. 4 months later, I caught up with them over drinks, and the results were rather interesting. They all got around 4-6mo worth of severance pay, spent 2-3 months just skiing/traveling/hiking/vacationing, then 1 month or so interviewing, and then starting their new jobs shortly after. All seemed rather happy, both with their new positions/pay (which had a significant paybump) and, essentially, paid vacation break they took right before.

It seems like the heavity majority of those stressed about layoffs in big tech are lifers and those who are chronically averse to and dread the interview process.

Yeah, I make the same adjusted for inflation that I did when I got my last/only promotion 10 years ago. I have grey hair, a disability, and a family that relies on the health insurance. Switching or being laid off is a risky proposition for me. It sounds like all your examples are young, childless people (who else could take a month off to go vacationing?). Life is much harder for some of us.

Yeah, the prospect of layoffs hits a little different when you're in your 50s. I have some non-techie friends in their 50s (sales, project management) who have been looking for a job for years. I've even heard third-hand about some good programmers in their 50s in LA in the same boat, although I don't know them personally.

The last time I was looking for a job at age 48, I interviewed at a bunch of startups and only got a second interview from one. It was clear that most of them were never going with someone my age unless I'd written a book or had patents or something (or was ex-FAANG), even if they didn't consciously realize that.

Yep. The subliminal message I'm getting from my current managers is that I should just be a good little disabled person and work as a Walmart greeter. It's turning into harassment at this point. Just all sorts of BS. Like telling me they are doing so much for me, when my ADA accommodation is weekly 1-on-1s with the manager and my tech lead. Is that really a lot? There are people without disabilities getting weekly 1-on-1s with their managers. Maybe the weekly tech lead meeting is more than others get, but it doesn't seem that hard. I got told my productivity looked bad. I asked if he ran the numbers - he didn't. He didn't even look at my productivity before telling me it looked bad. I ran the numbers and I was in line with my peers. I would think that's the definition of bias... nobody gives a fuck. I didn't get my accommodation for 6 months last year and then they gave me a bad rating based on opinon and not metrics. They said me not getting the accommodations wasn't a factor in my performance (how?).

A weekly or bi-weekly 1:1 with your manager has been the standard arrangement in my last two jobs.

Mine is bi-weekly but my boss cancels it every time.

Yea I do weekly 1:1s with all my directs and have done so for the past ~13 years. Pretty standard.

It's supposed to be bi-weekly here. But according to HR "that's not policy, just recommended". I had about 5-6 months were I only got 2 1-on-1s, and the feedback then was good. They completely dropped the ball and blamed it on the disabled guy.

> your recent years of peak lifetime earning potential overlapped with an industry massively overpaying its workforce

Only if the following conditions are true:

1. You spent your entire career in the US, ideally on the West Coast

2. You entered the industry early, ideally right after (or in!) university

3. You did not spend significant time in low-paying segments of the industry, such as in academia, hardware, games, idealistic open source, or the public sector

4. You did not need a significant career break, such as for major medical issues, being a SAHP, or caring for sick family members

Even if all of the above applied, certain wealth-destroying events such as an expensive illness, legal trouble, or bad divorce, might have made FIRE infeasible.

> massively overpaying its workforce

As I understand it, tech employees are typically paid a small fraction of the revenue that they bring into the company.

Outside of tech, employees are underpaid, and wages haven't tracked productivity growth since the 1970s. Profit growth has greatly exceeded wage growth since the early 2000s, with the exception of the 2008 recession.

When I get to 50, I will still need some sort of job. Maybe I can get a lower paying or low stress job. That's me being in the industry for my entire career, good credentials, etc. I will have been making somewhat less than the national developer median (about $130k is median). I live in a moderately high cost area. Even the people that live in high cost areas making 2x my salary have significant tax and real estate burdens. Not everyone can FIRE, especially if you're below the median.

This is not a real thing outside of a tiny number of people.

Having FIRE doesn't mean you're ready to retire and build ships in a bottle or whatever. I like programming, it puts me in flow state and keeps my brain young. I want to go out on my own terms. Also good luck with FIRE if you're putting kids through college. And thirdly, for those of us at normal companies the pay has been nice, but not FAANG mid-six-figures nice.

That sounds good, so long as there is similar employment at the end of it. As a sabbatical it sounds great. As a layoff, the uncertainty sounds crushing. It could take months to find a new position, especially with the disadvantages I have, I would likely need to start looking immediately and wouldn't be able to enjoy it.

Yeah, it's the same problem I have when the 20 somethings use the term "funemployment".

If you're single and have no responsibilities, sure. The second you have a mortgage, medical conditions that need health insurance, or need money because you had a family emergency and had to dip into savings, it's not "funemployment" at all.

Just to be clear, I mean time off and returning to the same job. Shouldn't we be aiming for a future where we do not have to work like dogs to earn enough to struggle at home?

How do you do this? Taxes? Increase worker salaries? Government funded health care?

Access to cheap labor is what really drives economies. Market forces are what drive labor salaries. More people cheaper labor.

It used to be in the 60s, 70s, and to some extent the 80's a single wage earner was enough in a family. By the end of the 80's it became clear that 2 wage earners was how people got ahead in life.

I don't know and it is a good question. Maybe we need three or four wage earners per household. Maybe 60-70 hour work weeks. I would like to hear some ideas that does not include more grinding down workers for GDP. Maybe another measure for a health society. Growth certainly help lots of people but when an economy is mature maybe more is not necessarily better, at least for the average worker.

The main thing is that the share of GDP per worker has gone down, meaning the distribution is skewed. But I agree that there isn't a good option that I've heard to change this without other negative side effects.

Then I suppose increasing wages is a good option as well as adding workers are both options and more paid leave).

We don't let the billionaires suck of 90% of the revenue, that's how. Them making 10% of their current salaries stock would still have them well well into retirement.

Oh, and not doing 2 trillion in tax cuts for the rich would help.

Another benefit of the EU. Yearly month of vacation with very little fear of termination

If a layoff were actually a real layoff, you could get your job back once business conditions improve.

Tech "layoffs" are something of a euphemism for terminating (rather than pausing) employment for business reasons.

Haha you must be young. It's entirely possible young people will make the same choices and face the same realities I currently do. They just havent gotten to that stage yet. Even comparing my life now to my life 10 years ago would show the younger me had an easier life. However, having a disability is not a choice, and in general makes life harder than those without a disability. Don't get me wrong - I believe life is hard for almost everyone at at least one point or another in unique ways and to varying degrees.

Actually, I am not young. I just retired and have been thinking about my life, career, etc. I do not have a disability (my wife may disagree) and I agree it makes life more challenging (wouldn’t be called a disability otherwise). I also agree with you that life can be hard, children are born with health challenges, children make poor decisions with terrible consequences, spouse dies, you get cancer, etc. We all need to get through these. That does not change the fact that we all have decisions to make everyday about our careers, our families, our health, our financial situation, and so on. When we look at those who made different decisions, it does not necessarily mean they made better or worse decisions, just different decisions.

I have been thinking about this a lot recently. A former boss and good friend who is incredibly smart and effective in the work place asked why the two of us had never gone the PE route and been more successful. While he is very successful by most standards, he sees people flying private jets all the time who do not appear more skillful, yet have been more successful. As I think on this, I feel I simply was never willing to go all in on the risk required to achieve that level of financial success. I tried co-founding a company once when I was 28 while engaged and importantly, before children. I felt I could take the risk and if I failed, could bounce back. I did fail - company did ok but my I ended up disliking working with my senior partner - and I did bounce back, ending up at GE.

After that, I did not feel comfortable taking that level of risk until my children were off to college and no longer dependent on me an I had enough money saved that my wife and I would be ok for a long time. The people I know who have been jet-money financially successful took huge risks. They were all in on their venture(s). Frequently this cost them their marriage and/or relationships with the children. This was their choice. Their cost/benefit analysis to optimize their success criteria. Some regret the decisions - they underestimated the effort and impact on those they cared about. However, most have not. They are happy with how things have turned out.

Different strokes for different folks.

The other factor you are missing in your analysis of PE route is the number of musical chairs are limited. There can only be 1 taylor swift not millions. So the choice is not for everyone. Even if everyone made that choice, a million taylor swifts will not happen. Surviorship bias is real.

Great point

Your good health is an invisible crown that can only be seen by those who do not wear it.

What a great saying. I feel this in my very core.

Dealing with poverty in my youth, homeless at 16, no parents to help me, debilitating ADHD, tourettic OCD, bipolar type II, CPTSD from 10 years of intense childhood physical/emotional abuse, my full-ride college scholarships illegally stolen from me by a high school who knew I was homeless and had no recourse and allowed a teacher to illegally modify my grades out of pure spite, malnourished, intense, crippling sciatica, fused lumbar discs, possible fibromyalgia, and then developing excruciating daily pains and physical disability which greatly impacted my life and sometimes made me suicidal, which turned out to be an autoimmune disorder that took 10 years for doctors to figure out... an extremely intense case of gout developing since my teens...

I just keep pushing on but every day I see people who take so much for granted, and who are so ready to pass judgement without appreciating the basic privilege of good health.

I've had to deal with so much struggle that the average person wouldn't even want to take the time to hear all of it much less believe it, once someone momentarily realizes that they'd have it comparatively easy compared to others, they often get defensive as they begin to realize that their life doesn't have nearly as many barriers as they've convinced themselves, and they have to come to terms with not applying themselves harder. It's easier for them to be dismissive and tell me, "all your problems would go away if you worked out more" or tell me to get on a keto diet, or whatever have you, as if I haven't tried every single thing I can think of.

And the insane thing is I am still quite privileged compared to some people in war-torn countries, even if they are able to move around without swallowing a truckload of ibuprofen. Reminding myself of that is a source of strength and determination to keep moving forward.

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

Wisdom speaks. Hidden gem of this thread.

How do you know I have good health? What an incredibly smug comment meant to silence someone with no basis in fact.

Well, the person you originally replied to mentioned having a disability, and your response was "yeah but you have kids so really you chose this and also I disagree that life is harder for some people."

The generous interpretation would be that you have sufficiently good health that you do not have to structure your life around it, and therefore lack understanding of the challenges faced by those who do.

The alternate interpretation, that you do understand and choose to ignore and dismiss, would be rather less generous to you.

I actually agreed with them that a disability makes life harder. I then pointed out other things that an individual did not choose can make life harder as well.

As for bringing up children, I did make the leap that that is generally a big difference between younger employees and older employees.

> I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.”

It sounds like what you think you wrote, is not in fact the words of yours that everybody has been reading.

So you took the generous route in publicly shaming them.

I think their quibble was with a different item being used as evidence there (i.e., having a family), not necessarily with all that was said.

I didn't publicly shame anyone. I pointed out their clear position of privilege to help them learn to apply empathy.

I think helping one another to build empathy is a good thing, and even if the person I replied to is unable to do so, it's possible that observing them tell a disabled person that they don't think their life is any harder will help other third parties such as yourself build that empathy.

I did not flag their original comment, but it's not for no reason it was flagged to death.

Text is a fairly imprecise form of communication. It's pretty common for multiple people to get triggered by misreading a post the same way if such a misread is possible.

In other cases downvoted posts are often the most interesting precisely because they trigger people with points they don't want to consider. I certainly wouldn't cite it as proof of any position.

your argument sounds like "some people choose to do the dishes, some of us choose to let other people do the dishes".

Some of the "free choices" you claim people can make, will only be possible if some other people don't make those same choices.

People don't chose the abilities or disabilities they're born with, nor those they receive at the hands of others.

Many also don't have the choice to start a family, no matter how badly they want it.

I never said people choose disabilities. I tried to point out there are other life changing issues that can affect a person that they also did not choose.

As for starting a family, I agree not all can. My mistake was jumping from their assertion that I must be young to mean I did not have the responsibilities of an older worker such as taking care of a family. The less generous interpretation of that accusation is what? I am stupid? Ignorant of life? Not suffering from the impact of issues that I did not choose?

Sure, maybe that's how people in their 30s living in NYC or bay area feel about layoffs. But when you're older, have a family, and live in an area with a less dynamic job market, you may see things differently.

Why does it have to be an age thing? Some men and women are players and the game is the game to them. Those who are naturally monogamous would be stressed in a game like that. Constantly uprooting is a stressful lifestyle and can truly be torture (as evidenced by constant anxiety, no way to be). I can promise you people who are job hopping are hopping around other things in life (friends, family, relationships, projects, interests, roles, identities). It's a whole way of being.

Edit: This is not a judgement, but if you felt like it was, I very much want to hear about it.

Doesn't have to be an age thing, but it often is an age thing. Because lots of us were carefree before dependents and a mortgage as well.

Unexpected or deliberate change was an opportunity, a challenge, a stimulant! Job hopping (or hopping around relationships) when young can be about exploring the world, finding yourself and your values and isn't inherently bad.

Then you discover what you are good at doing and that you like doing and dedicating time to (or perhaps another person with whom you want to spend all your time) and your priorities change.

Then you might have kids and the work becomes more about financial security for the family then about your personal growth. And so you aren't looking at layoffs and unexpected change as opportunity because you are happy with what you've got.

It just often is an age or 'stage of life' thing for many people.

> Why does it have to be an age thing? Some men and women are players and the game is the game to them.

Yes, buuut many will be players from 25 to 35 (with some degree of flexibility), that's why it's still an age thing. Yes, there are persons that are players for life, sure. But IME they are a minority.

Or maybe I'm just projecting, who knows?

A few months of skiing sounds nice, but not as nice as the profound pleasure of working on a team of people I've know and cared about for over a decade.

You're going to spend half your waking life at work. For me, that's too much time to not want to do so at a place where I have real relationships with my coworkers.

This is ultimately what some of the risk comes down to: you invest time(a decade is a long time!) into creating meaningful relationships at work and one day you come in to have your key card de-activated and some corporate speak as to why. There are certainly people working on truly meaningful projects out there, with teams they trust and adore...but for most of the workforce, even in tech, its just work and any fun had at work is a great cherry on top.

How is this different than the manager who has spent years developing an employee - making sure they are getting the experiences they need to build a better career, hiring the right people to complement the team, fighting for bonuses and pay raises - only to have them quit to join the next company for a 10% raise. It is difficult to build a long-term culture when society seems to expect job hopping to rapidly advance a career.

On a related note, it is odd that HN comments rarely seem to include a manager’s perspective.

I've never seen people leaving great jobs for a 10% raise. It's always something else: a much bigger benefit, or a significant downside of the current job, which are not widely publicized. Instead, I've seen people going to a lower-paying position for a more interesting job, a chance to learn new hot thing hands-on, a different set of responsibilities, etc.

I worked with a guy who left for more money, found out the grass wasn’t greener, and came crawling back. Then did it again. For some reason they hired him back a second time. When he quit the 3rd time I think that was the final bridge burned. I asked him about it and he said money was his singular metric for choosing a job, he was always looking, and would never stop.

I remember a guy at a previous job doing something similar - left for a React job (despite being a PHP developer), then came back like 6 months later because he couldn't get his head around React, then left again like 6 months later. Pretty sure it was about money because the PHP job was pretty relaxed and had some good perks.

Clearly money wasn't the only factor if he crawled back. Was he terminated or something?

I once left for a 50% raise, and once for a large chunk of equity in a promising startup (and being able to do early-stage formative work). But 10%?..

Yeah I was offered a job with 12% better pay recently - from a friend too so I knew the job couldn't be too bad. But I feel like I'm onto a good thing where I am and the perks are okay (plus I'd probably be burning some bridges just by leaving).

Oh totally! I don't have that perspective from the manager as I am very much an IC, and I have 0 experience job hopping as well as I have basically been with the same company for most of my career. I would say, naively, that part of that difference comes down to job description. If its in a manager's job description to: "make sure they are getting the experiences they need to build a better career, hire the right people to complement the team, fight for bonuses and pay raises", then they should be doing those things. If not, they are going above and beyond and I would certainly consider them a great manager...but the truth is that there are not that many managers out there doing this.

A company can definitely afford a 10% raise, and they instead choose a 20% raise from someone they headhunt.

An employee doesn't have much control of suddenly being locked out of their workspace.

>it is odd that HN comments rarely seem to include a manager’s perspective.

Managers can be screwed by the company too, yes. I understand such decisions aren't always their call.

An experienced manager would know that is how the game is played and act accordingly. Don't get emotionally attached to any work relationships. It's transactional, keep that in mind.

I think there is always going to be a middle ground. We are not robots and if the people I work with are a pleasure to be around and work with, there is a natural connection there that can be labeled "emotional" I guess, but it is very much in the moment for me. I want my manager to be somewhat invested in my success, and I somewhat reciprocate that. Additionally, while the business is transactional, it is almost always the case that the employer has more information than you, making it an uphill battle in the first place.

This mentality is why people don’t get promoted internally, which leads to the job hoping in the first place.

Fix this and a lot of the job hoping problem goes away.

Job hopping is not a problem, it's how you get ahead quickly.

Monetarily, sure. But that's because companies are so hesitant to give raises but love to hire new people.

You just described the symptom of a problem.

Well yeah, the problem is capitalism. The least you can do is try to tilt the scale in your favor as much as possible. That’s absolutely what capital is doing all the time.

Agreed. Shouldn’t employees behave/feel the same way?

Absolutely.

It's really cool unless your visa is on the line. At least the US is falling apart fast enough that maybe it's not a bad idea to leave and stay out.

You need to find better ski spots!

Just joking :) I firmly respect your opinion on the matter, and understand different people value different things in life.

Wow, I couldn't disagree more. My personal life is what I enjoy, the random people I work with to make money and will be gone as soon as I quit or get laid off, well... I just don't want them to be toxic. I already have a ton of friends, I don't need to convert work people into my social life. Skiing for a few months sounds super amazing though!

Big tech interviews tend to be daunting. Many long term employees lose the skill, and fear the impact of work interruption on their resume as well as their ability to get in again.

Anecdotally, the LC bar for many firms has risen to the point that passing requires at least one through of the question before. If you Time bound your practice per question to 20 minutes, this means that you can solve most LC problems at least once in around 8 weeks of 40 hour weeks. Or 6 weeks at 60 hours.

Not a pleasant way to spend two months - but not impractical. I'm unclear what employers are deriving from this exercise at this point.

> I'm unclear what employers are deriving from this exercise at this point

It filters out the complete frauds.

Yes, there are people who know all the right things to say in a job interview, but cannot code at all. If you hire one of them, it takes a bit to find out they cannot code, and a bit longer to fire them, so you're out $$$$ paying their salaries for nothing.

For example, a recruiter I know will ask a tech candidate "what is 20% of 20,000?" A significant percentage cannot answer the question. Some even cry. It's shocking.

A friend of mine was looking at getting a FAANG job. He was worried about the leetcode tests. I suggested he spend a month going through the leetcode books studying them - that the return on his time investment doing that will be one of the best ROIs he's ever done. He did, and got the job. (Although the LC was just a first gate one had to go through to get to the real job interview.)

Personally, I have no idea how I'd do on an LC test without prep. But I don't have a problem with studying it to get a top job.

> it takes a bit to find out they cannot code, and a bit longer to fire them, so you're out $$$$ paying their salaries for nothing

Not just that. They block the hiring process. Maybe there was just that one open position on your team, and that bad 3 month hire postponed a good hire by 6 months. It's also very incomfortable to fire and start again.

My interviews contain questions that are basic, and any new team mate should know. I keep asking them because 90% of the candidates actually can't answer them well. You should know what a "dot product" is if you want to work as a ML engineer, that kind of stuff. Or be able to open a text file and count word frequencies.

I'm still surprised how were 3 years into this horrible market and we still have people that just go "yeah bad employees just grind leetcode".

It's not about skills at this point, companies just want to pretend to hire while not admitting we're now heading towards a recession.

True words. It's not 'imposter syndrome' if one comes across as an imposter (though it might have been just be a bad day).

I can appreciate the gating process because it's a real drag to get hired and then spend more time than necessary not doing my work but trying to help coworkers catch up on very basic and fundamental skills in order to be able to collaborate with them.

Aye - I don’t tend to have a problem honestly with “classic” lc tests. I tend to take issue with uncommon/nuanced Dynamic Programming questions and clever uses of binary search. Both of these categories tend to rely on the engineer knowing the “trick” of the particular question.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I suspect that hiring based on a candidates ability to produce optimal solutions to LC Hards will bias strongly towards candidates who can't code, but are very good at interviewing.

I get that perhaps you were using the proverbial "I" in your last sentence as an example of something everyone should be willing to do in/for their career, but does someone of your stature even need a real interview, much less a LC test, to obtain a top job? It's kind of funny imagining a young tech bro interviewing you, tbh.

It's an interesting question. I'll try to answer.

I generally do not use clever algorithms in my code. I just use straightforward ones. Rarely, I might need a better one and go looking for it (like a better hash algorithm). I rarely use a data structure more complicated than an array, list, binary tree, hash, or single inheritance.

What I have, though, is decades of experience with what works and what doesn't work. (My favorite whipping boy is macros. Macros look like they are great productivity boosters. It takes about 10 years to realize that macros are a never-ending source of confusion, they just confuse and obfuscate every code base that uses them. I could go on about this! ...)

I have become pretty good at writing modules that minimize dependencies, and pretty good at the user interface design of a language.

But still, if the job wanted a leetcode test, I'd take it, no problem. I'd study up first, though.

If a young tech bro was interviewing me, I'd suggest he show me his best code, and I'd do a review of it :-) The point of that would not be to humilate him, but to demonstrate the value I can bring to improving code quality.

If I was being interviewed for a job writing a faster divide routine (the ones I wrote were shift-subtract, slower but bulletproof), a better random number generator, a cryptographically secure hash function, a tighter compression algorithm, a faster sort, I'm not the right guy for that.

P.S. I was once asked to review the code of a famous programmer I won't name. I was shocked to discover that the large codebase had 3 different implementations of bubblesort in it. I replaced them all with a call to qsort(). He asked me how I managed to speed it up :-/

We all have our blind spots. I do, too.

My favorite blind spot is how our definitions of quality change over time. I knew someone who had a mature codebase which a new developer made substantially faster by removing his old optimizations. He’d measured very real improvements back when he made that hand-rolled assembly code on early Pentium generations but by the time we revisited it less than a decade later the combination of compiler and processor improvements meant that the C reference implementation was always faster. (I was assisting with the port to PowerPC and at first we thought that it was just XLC being especially good there, but then we tested it on x86 with GCC and found the same result)

Beyond the obvious lesson about experience and sunk costs it was also a great lesson about how much time you assume you have for maintenance: when he’d first written that code as a grad student he’d been obsessed with performance since that was a bottleneck for getting his papers out but as his career progressed he spent time on other things, and since it wasn’t broken he hadn’t really revisited it because he “knew” where it was slow. Over time the computer costs eventually outweighed that original savings.

My compilers support inline assembler, but these days there doesn't seem to be much of any point to them. The compilers have simply gotten too good.

Yes, it’s funny how support has never been better or less necessary.

Thanks for that very interesting and insightful feedback!

> For example, a recruiter I know will ask a tech candidate "what is 20% of 20,000?" A significant percentage cannot answer the question. Some even cry. It's shocking.

During our interview, we ask candidates to design a history system. The key is to realize that our database is only 8Gb, and storing a year of updates is only 160Gb, so $2pm in AWS. Once there, a simple DB table suits, no need to set up Amazon S3.

So we ask them for the multiplication. First we give them the data, and if they don’t do the calculation, we nudge them, then we ask them, then we write the multipliers for them, then we take the calculator out and write the result for them.

Those are Masters degrees. They can’t even do calculations, let alone getting it right, because 500MB x 200 days a year = a few petabytes apparently. And after that, they’re exhausted, it’s impossible to ask them the rest of the questions like “So is it worth worrying about a Rube Goldberg machine when you’re in for $2 of AWS costs?”.

Does your interview process require knowing cloud costs off the top of your head? Because that's hard to track tbh

Sounds like it requires knowing them to an order of magnitude or so... Which honestly sounds like a pretty good bar to have your team above?

Honestly, after ~13y in this, I only know a handful of items from the famous latency table, notably those I've used a lot (mutexes cost 25ns, is only 1/4th of main memory reference tho, then disk seek is x100K of that). I'm "DevOps" (and titular variants thereof) in most of my resume.

That said, I'm not above your bar as each cloud provider have their own pricing model. I'm not even above your bar for AWS---which I've used the past six years---just for the sheer diversity of their offerings, not to mention regional variations. I know how EC2 servers are priced relative to each other but when we include ECS, DynamoDB, Lambda, etc., I'm gonna need a cheat sheet.

Out of curiosity what do you find wrong in the s3 solution? This is a data volume that rdbms can manage, but are you looking specifically for the engineer to say something like “I’ll maintain a Write Ahead Log in the database”

> I have interviewed many people employed in tech as programmers for their entire career and they can't code.

Think about this contradictory statement for a while. Can it actually be true? Or is there something else going on?

If the interviewee has nothing but sub-1yr stints on their resume, perpetually getting fired before vesting at any company, then yes, it's very possible they actually can't code and just fake it at every interview.

But everyone else... if they have spent years at tech companies writing production code then obviously they know how to code. They might be great or maybe mediocre, but guaranteed they at least know how to code.

So, if your interviewing technique is concluding something that is obviously impossible, then start by considering how to improve the interview technique.

I’m an electrical engineer who does circuit design. I’ve interviewed many electrical engineers over the years and the situation of applicants having “years” of experience while simultaneously not knowing how to design a single circuit is real. In our field it’s usually because although the person’s title is engineer, in practice, they don’t do any engineering. There’s just a ton of peripheral work (basically paperwork related to operations and compliance), which is very important, but is not design.

My guess is computer science has a similar issue.

Lots of people with programming in thier job title but they don’t actually program. And based on ltbarcly3’s empirical measurement, “lots” is above 10%. ;)

If they carry a wallet card that has on it:

    V = I * R
    I = V / R
    R = V / I

they are not real EEs.

And yeah, I've been trashed multiple times for this opinion, but I'm not backing down!

10% of applicants that make it to a phone screen. I estimate that the number is much lower than 10% overall because incompetent people with good looking resumes tend to do a lot more interviews than good candidates.

Sounds like the resume screening is either non-existent or insufficient then.

Nope, they have solid resumes. Top companies and relevant experience on paper. They claim skills with the right tools. They are just idiots.

"claim" kills? Isn't part of the HR screening about some litmus test to make sure they aren't very obviously lying?

And yes, this is part of why the obsession with FAANG on resume is very overrated. Very few companies require the skillsete FAANG needs. Some of thst FAANG culture is orthogonal to what medium/small sized companies require.

I know a lot of people who can tweak code that already exists. However, if they are sitting in front of an empty text editor and given a goal, they don’t know how to break the problem down and build a solution with the tools the language gives them.

In a large environment, someone may rarely need to start from nothing, so the interview format throws them.

That said, I think being able to break down a problem to solve it with code is a really important skill. Without it, the person will always have to lean on others to fill that skill gap.

> I know a lot of people who can tweak code that already exists. However, if they are sitting in front of an empty text editor and given a goal, they don’t know how to break the problem down and build a solution with the tools the language gives them.

But being able to break things down and come up with a solution is not necessarily something that needs to be done quickly, in the time you have for an interview. Quite often I've been faced with a new problem and done absolutely nothing visible for ages. Literally just reading around the problem, asking questions, and sketching in my mind without writing a single line of code.

This is often faster and better than starting immediately.

There's another extreme, too: people who can code up an app in a matter of days, but can never learn to navigate and successfully maintain a legacy code base (even their own!).

And there's no easy objective way to screen for this in a job interview. So they pretend it doesn't exist and never ask questions like: "Suppose you're designing a green-field app that you think will grow over time like X, Y, and Z. How would you design and organize your code so that the app stays maintainable and flexible over time?"

I could talk for hours on this subject with concrete examples if anyone ever asked.

I think another problem is that there are so few engineers/architects who really "get it" on this subject. I can only think of a few ex-coworkers with whom I could have the kind of in-depth conversation about app design and organization that I'm picturing.

I've never worked in big tech, always for startups or non-tech corps with a few rock star devs and a lot of decent devs. So maybe it's different at a FAANG. But in my head I'm picturing a bunch of algo-geniuses whose code turns into a big mess over time when requirements take a right-turn and break all their beautiful abstractions. I've worked on a few apps like that and it's not fun.

Nothing on interviews is objective to begin with, so we can discount that.

Your template sounds like a fine way to ask such a question. I think the issue is managers or someone above simply don't want to invest in proper interview questions and instead just do that FAANG does. Even though very few companies need such core algorithmic knowledge but need people who can properly navigate legacy code. FAANGs will actually make sure new hires learn the code base, unlike many companies thst want you to "hit the ground running".

I think this is why people job hop. They never have to support their unmaintainable greenfield app. Without the pain of those mistakes, they never learn to make the next one better either.

> successfully maintain a legacy code base (even their own!).

Haha I hate all the code I wrote more than 5 years ago.

The goal when hiring isn't to find someone who is barely skilled enough to just slightly come out as better to have on staff than not. In fact these are often the worst hires as they slow everything down and create work for you to find tasks they are capable of, but it seems unfair to fire them because they aren't totally useless all the time. You hire the best candidate overall, and you are very far from describing that.

Too right. I had an idiot manager who hired the next person with a pulse - we got some money-motivated guy that complained about everything and didn't listen to what he actually needed to do, and my manager nearly destroyed the team by pretending that he was fine.

I thought that too until we had a guy start two years ago that interviewed well and answered questions like he knew what he was talking about but then when he started, one of his first questions was how to figure what endpoint was being called by a website (as obvious as looking at your browser's Network tab, or browsing the website's source to find the endpoint). Not long after that he had to clear a couple more values as part of a cache invalidation procedure and was utterly bamboozled by the if (!cached) { clearCache(); } else { cache(data); } logic. That was an exceptionally draining few months until he was sacked.

> check if text has mismatched parens

I always try to give everyone I’ve interviewed the benefit of the doubt. You never know what’s going on in their lives, and even if they fail a trivial question it doesn’t mean they are faking the ability to code.

I joined Facebook back in 2018. Didn’t study at all for the interview and passed somehow. Then I probably conducted 200-300 interviews in my time there, so I became quite familiar with the questions. My performance ratings were all exceeds or greatly exceeds. I voluntarily left on my own after four years to join a unicorn startup. I didn’t prep for that interview either but passed it too. Well, the startup failed and many people went back to Meta. So I actually prepared quite a bit this time and scheduled a mock interview with them. The mock interviewer said I did great and not to change a thing. When it came time for the real screening interview... I failed the matching parentheses question.

I generally try not to make excuses. Almost every interview I’ve failed has clearly been my own fault. But in this particular one the interviewer kept interrupting me every two seconds and I absolutely could not think. I had done matching parentheses many times before in practice, but the constant interrupting rattled me to the point where I totally lost focus and bombed it. Not a great experience.

So yeah, I’d just recommend giving people the benefit of the doubt. Everyone has difficult moments occasionally, but it doesn’t mean they’re stupid or can’t code.

I run coding interviews at BIGCO. Half of the candidate success relies on the skills of the interviewer. A bad interviewer can bomb the best candidates.

Something I have changed my stance on a bit is automated coding interviews. I used to be adamantly against a company giving candidates automated code tests, but I see now that it takes the interviewer out of the equation.

Pre-screening, depending on how it’s done, could eliminate good candidates.

There have been times I’ve received answers in interview that weren’t the written answers, but I looked it up afterward and tested it out… and they were right. I learned something news and tweaked the answer reference as a result. If those questions were in the pre-screening instead of asked directly by me, it would have filtered out good people.

I remember fighting to get access to the pre-screen data to see what the answers were and find if there were any other cases like this, where the non-technical pre-screener was filtering out potentially good candidates, because we couldn’t give them exhaustive answers to questions being asked.

>but I see now that it takes the interviewer out of the equation.

Well yes, that's why I'm against it. A one way "interview" is an audition, not an interview. There's nothing worse than wasting 2, 5, 10+ hours on something that ends up with a template rejection letter.

That's great for the interviewer, but devastating for the interviewee. They can't even get feedback on how to improve.

Nobody is going to give an interviewee feedback, even if they are interviewed by a human. There is too much legal risk to open the company up to discrimination lawsuits.

There is also nothing worse than wasting 2, 5, 10+ hours on an in person interview to just have the interviewer flunk you our be unfair to you.

I still believe that personal interviews are important, I'm just raising the fact that a large portion of an interviewee's success is based upon their interviewer.

Yes, and actions have consequences I'm not going to audition if I have not at least talked to a human first. The game industry in particular does this to abuse Artists and Designers with spec work, so I feel especially strong about the power dynamic here.

>There is also nothing worse than wasting 2, 5, 10+ hours on an in person interview to just have the interviewer flunk you our be unfair to you

The interview stage inflation is definitely a problem, but speaking with actual people still has benefits. You get an idea of their culture and you can still network even in such a situation. It's not guaranteed but you get a much higher chance to get advice and feedback on or off the record if you're polite. People are flexible, some standardized exam may never even reach a human.

>'m just raising the fact that a large portion of an interviewee's success is based upon their interviewer.

Indeed. I'm just stating a viewpoint where an interview needs to be personal. An audition in this software space is about as impersonal as you can get.

As an interviewer at Google, we arent given an exact list of questions to ask or what to evaluate (there are broad categories).

It is really entirely up to each interviewer how the interview goes and they are usually scheduled between 2 other meetings so often the interviewer is distracted.

Very strange system imo, lots of randomness

So you were rejected at a Metà interview after you previously worked at Facebook for 4 years? Or were you interviewing for some other FAANG?

Yeah, rejected after previously working there. Was also going for a different role than I previously had. To their credit, I respect that they don't just hand out free passes back in.

Welcome to the wonderful world of coding under pressure, which almost never occurs in the real world. It's a non-issue when you're young and don't feel the pressure. But when you have grey hairs in your beard and know you're already walking in with two strikes, all of a sudden the fog of war kicks in.

> you're young and don't feel the pressure

Wat? Feeling the pressure is even worse when you're young!

It wasn't for me. I guess I was too dumb to know I was supposed to feel pressure.

What is really crazy about this though is that sometimes it really is the interview setting, as people unused to interviews can, at times, emotionally collapse. I have seen people who are actually good programmers get wrecked by simple questions because of their inability to handle stress, and how the lack of interview practice turns a simple exercise into a hellscape.

It's not as if testing for performance under stress is useless: Tough on call rotations happen, and you might need someone that does well under pressure at 3 am in the morning. But the picture you get on a screening isn't as clear as it appears.

Not to imply that you're wrong, but I've always been bad at LC interviews, but surprisingly (for myself) passable when called upon to troubleshoot and code up a hot fix in the middle of the night. Maybe those are not entirely similar types of pressures.

There is a big difference between solving a critical bug, which is your job, vs. passing an arbitrary leetcode test from a disinterested 22 year old where you might lose your house if you get it wrong. You have 15 minutes.

The cure for such fears is to:

1. study the leetcode books in advance

2. do lots of interviews

In the military, there's a saying: train hard => fight easy

It’s also not the same kind of stress. I’ve interviewed many a candidate who were sweating and/or shaking at some point of the interview (with heavy reassurance and me trying to to steer the conversation towards and area where they feel stronger), but they can often end up being calm and reliable alert responders nonetheless. So far I’ve seen very little if any correlation between being able to handle interview stress and on-call stress.

> Tough on call rotations happen, and you might need someone that does well under pressure at 3 am in the morning.

On a stop-the-world production incident at 3am I know that codebase like the back of my hand, and my job very likely doesn’t depend on whether I solve it in the next 30m. There’s barely anything stressful about it.

On an interview, with my future on the line, and presented with an unfamiliar problem?

Leetcode performance isn’t going to be representative of 3am incident response though. If that matters, you’re probably better off asking a classic “tell me about a time you responded to a page in the middle of the night” type question.

You are still not testing if they can code. But whether under the scrutiny of another person, they can code. Maybe this is important to you, maybe peer programming is important to you for example. I remember a young dev who couldn’t pass such tests, as he would get too nervous, yet he had written the core tech for many shipped products. The type of guy you would just stick in dark room. With age this type of stuff settles down.

“Scrutiny of another” who’s a peer or even a client is super different from an interview.

The latter has more in common with an open mic night, the prospect of which the vast majority of people are terrified and would break down if they attempted it.

My first attempts at public speaking were a frozen horror. But I kept doing it, and it kept getting easier and easier.

I recommend that when there's an opportunity to get up in front of a mike, take it, and get comfortable with it. It's a skill that will serve you well.

I agree with both you and the parent to some degree. I have experienced interviews that went badly because they were in an IDE I wasn't familiar with, or in Leetcode (never used it). So I'm distracted by how to use the tool rather than how to code the solution. But I can also see how stuff like finding a substring is easy - most languages have a function for it. But at that point, you're testing different things - problem-solving vs rote memorization of a provided function.

I feel like a good middle is to allow Google for documentation searches, not solution searches. Without searching (or IDE with radix completion), I'd probably fail the test for not knowing the syntax off the top of my head.

> rote memorization of a provided function.

I never mesmerized strstr(). But using it frequently makes it stick in my mind.

Not everyone uses it (or their language equivalent) frequently depending on the needs of their project. If I'm really using it frequently, then I would probably be looking at higher accuracy/resiliency options like parsing the input and comparing to a map, or regexes.

At that point I have to ask if your screening is really working. There's hundreds, thousands of potential SWEs that can be productive, but you keep picking people who struggle with CS101 problems?

You sure it's not nepotism, or an inability to make sure the resume fits the person? Or any other number of non-merit based criteria from HR?

It's rather funny, but I wonder if you've ever been a Game Master? One of the most common problems running a game, is making the puzzles simple enough. You have to use kindergarten or back of the cereal box level puzzles or the players will fail. I played with engineers, it's a game, and there is nothing riding on the outcome and we often failed stupid simple puzzles. Interviews have a lot riding on them and yes stress is terrible. Stress eats working memory for breakfast, NASA learned that the hard way.

Knowing the right answer and knowing the right answer with a gun to your head are two different skills.

Some people are good coders but can’t do it with an adversarial person watching. I’m often one of them.

Might as well put a suitcase with $200k and a copper clock ticking away on the table next to them.

As someone who does these types of interviews on both ends, something like this is why I like to start with an outrageously simple question to break the ice.

Surprisingly, I have an 80% fail rate on the first question usually, which is just “find the second largest number in an array of numbers” for a 5 YOE role.

I just saw that this comment was fading from downvotes.

I think HN is just overwhelmed with people who somehow got hired into technical jobs but can't do them. Anyone who thinks that 'finding second largest number in an array' or 'finding if a string is a substring of another string' are hard, or that the pressures of an interview are a valid excuse for being unable to do it are simply not intelligent enough to be successful in this field and they are casting about for some excuse to protect their ego. These are problems that a bright 12 year old with no programming experience could do for fun, and these folks are purporting to be educated, experienced, professional programmers.

As much as people like to say 'muh anxiety', I've yet to meet someone who can't do very basic coding in an interview but also they are capable of basic coding in any other context. I would suggest that this sort of person is so rare that you will probably never meet one over the course of a normal career.

Elsewhere in this thread there is literally an example of someone who, by their own description, worked at a FAANG company for some years getting good performance reviews, has enough interview experience that even if they couldn't generally code their way out of a paper bag they were surely good at interview-question coding, ... and, under pressure from a pushy interviewer, completely failed to do a straightforward coding task.

I guess they could just by lying "to protect their ego" but in that case why post their comment at all?

It really is the case that some people sometimes completely go to pieces when stressed, and mocking them by saying "muh anxiety" doesn't stop that being true.

I will say that, as the interviewer asking the question, I do recognize that people have anxiety, and I would prefer to nudge them out of a spiral, because a bad interview is generally not pleasant for anybody involved.

To some degree the interview is not about getting the question right but also how you respond to questions about your answers. I would rather have someone who started with a totally incorrect answer and then reason back and forth with them til they got on the right path, than someone who came up with the right answer and then clammed up and refused to explain how they got there. (I once had a candidate tell me, verbatim, "I don't think analyzing performance of an algorithm is part of an engineer's job.")

I would prefer if there were a more humane, less stressful, and scalable way to do an interview. The problem is that as a profession we lack the continued examination/licensing of other fields like engineering or medicine, so we don't have a good barometer of skills otherwise. And I often have to sift through massive numbers of people clearly overshooting their shot to get a good position.

The solution to the problem in question is about 9 lines of very simple code. In a 45 minute interview, that is 5 minutes per line available. It's about 1 character every 40 seconds. I think anyone can get flustered and mess up. It's possible for someone, on a bad day, lack of sleep, hung over, experiencing an anxiety attack to mess this up, but it's really really a stretch. This is a VERY EASY task, and if someone has done it before there's nothing sneaky or hard to do here. The version where you match different kinds of braces is very slightly more complicated but actually less lines of code.

Yes maybe someone can't come up with this in an interview. My point is 99.99% of the time when someone fails this they are lying about their work history or they are so stupid they can't hope to do the job. 00.01% of the time they could do this easily and the stars aligned to give them a rare bad day. The best way to deal with that is to just assume everyone who fails this can't do the work, and the 00.01% person just interviews somewhere else and doesn't have another bad day. I don't even know what the alternative to that is, just hire everyone who claims to be qualified and hope for the best? Give everyone who demonstrates very very strong incompetence signals 2 or 3 more tries?

  def matched(str):
      count = 0

      for c in str:
          if c == "(":
              count += 1
          elif c == ")":
              count -= 1

          if count < 0:
              return False

      return count == 0

The other replies to this comment aren't wrong but I feel they fail to take into account that (especially with startups): having someone watch you code during an interview is one of the the least stressful experiences the person will face with the company - once the job begins. Companies can't take on the risk of dealing with a bunch of passive-aggressive bullcrap once the real code reviews begin after the hire. Most tech job reqs contain the words "Excellent written and verbal communication skills" on purpose.

Imagine a person with a pilot's license refusing to fly tandem for an airline interview.

> Imagine a person with a pilot's license refusing to fly tandem for an airline interview.

That’s not a great comparison since a pilot has already passed substantially harder tests to get that license and a flight is exactly what the job is. If you have a candidate with a pilot’s license you can assume at least a baseline level of capability which you can’t assume for a software engineer. That has pros and cons but it definitely means interviewing is a noisier process.

The other problem, however, is deeper: the job of flying a plane is exactly what’s tested to get a pilot’s license but what many places do for developer interviews is wildly unlike the actual job so it’s more like interviewing pilots based on trivia questions about the number of rivets on a B-52 and how well they can solve 3-D puzzles, and then being surprised when there isn’t much correlation with real world performance. For example, only at the most toxic companies will the interview be one of the least stressful parts because the rest of the job is a team effort. What makes the interview challenges stressful is doing it without your normal tools while someone else is looking for reasons to fail you, but in a normal job your coworkers are trying to help you succeed because even if you’re not friends you are all better off when your company succeeds. At a startup, trying to ding someone for trivia challenges is like hitting the iceberg to prove that the navigator made a mistake.

Go on youtube and watch NTSB / FAA investigation reports. If you think that a pilot's license demonstrates that someone is a competent pilot you are very very mistaken, and there are scores of counter examples.

Airlines very strictly test pilots and insist on check rides regardless of what official qualifications pilots show up with. They do this because they are professional organizations with decades of experience and it is necessary for safety. Giving someone the benefit of the doubt because they manage to meet the absolute minimum standard that makes operating an airplane legal is insane.

Yes, that’s what I was referring to with “baseline level of capability”. It doesn’t mean everyone is the same, or that they’re all super pilots, but anyone with a commercial license has at least 250 hours doing the primary job function and that makes it’s reasonable to ask them to do a test flight.

In contrast, we don’t have anything like real certifications for developers and many of the interviewing questions are very unlike the actual job. Hiring would be easier if we did have something closer to what a pilot’s license conveys, but that’d also slow the field down since programming has changed a lot more over the last 50 years than flying.

I agree, but I look at it like trying out for an athletic team.

Once you're on the team, you are mostly practicing plays, doing clinics, and simulating competition, but to get on the team in the first place you have to prove your general fitness by running, say, a 6 minute mile.

You may not be able to do that again easily right away once you've been on the team for a while because you don't practice running for pure time at that distance, but it's a level of fitness you should be easily able to obtain again if you had to, and it's a very useful benchmark to a scout.

When you're laid off, it's time to start doing that "roadwork" again. It will be a bit hard at first in practice, but if you've been a solid contributor, you should be able to get fit enough again to prove that.

In my experience, coding interviews are more like checking that you can stand up and walk, maybe a short light jog.

They're not testing your limits, they're testing for basic competency.

Unlike, you know, proving that by the fact my previous employer was happy to retain me for 10 plus years?

You've never worked at a place where someone was an incompetent hanger-on who was an expert at self promotion and stealing credit? Or hired someone like that accidentally?

Notwithstanding, I have long argued that a non-profit credentialing body for SWEs offering cerification exams (which also required regular updates) akin to passing the bar or USMLE could go a long way to solving this problem. It would come with other drawbacks, perhaps not worth it, but we have to accept that constant tech interviews is the price we pay for refusal to standardize and professionalize.

I definitely feel that first part. I landed in a nice company in SF about 8 years ago and am still here. The culture has changed a lot but I often find myself doubting whether I could repeat the whole thing or if I got lucky. (The work is fine, and the company is one of the good ones I feel, so no real qualms there).

Just do what everyone is doing today and use those AI tools for cheating. There’s a whole industry of invisible and hard to detect leetcode AI cheating tools.

Glad they exist and I fully support all candidates using them aggressively.

Has to do with H1b visas.

Post layoff, a person on H1B has 2 months to sign a new job offer or they must leave the country.

Majority of Indian and Chinese H1bs do not have green cards, and are the main group that suffers. Some of these folks are well into their 30s, with kids and houses in the US.

I’m familiar with H1b visas. Yes it’s an irritating situation for an immigrant to be in but it’s not as bad as you make it out to be.

If you have good life savings, you can convert to tourist visa, and stay in the country for an additional 6 months and a higher hassle when restarting your career.

You can leave the country, and get back as long as your H1b is still valid.

If your spouse is working, you can be convert to being a dependent on them with H4 visas.

At the end of the day I think the government should not let people end up in such a situation. After the 6 year H1b deadline, I would prefer if the government just sends a notice to those that it thinks can immigrate long term and send the rest back. At least then we won’t have the ridiculous situation of upending families and children who have started schooling just because their parents lost a job.

I have pretty severe social anxiety and this industry was a refuge for me.

The added social and political mental load that has crept in over the past decade or so has effectively pushed me to burnout.

And I was a happy "lifer" making subpar salary writing government software. I got to work in a large dark office with other nerds and joked about esoteric things.

But once software development became formalized, homogenized, and micromanaged, I couldn't conform.

I stayed in the same job for nearly a decade, it got really interesting in the second half; in a way that it never would have gotten if I had job hopped every 3 to 5 years.

That being said, once I got bored in the job, I sniffed out that the parent company wanted to lay a few people off, and hinted that I was open to it. It worked out well for me.

I was just too busy in my personal life to look for a job on the side, and honestly I didn't want to walk away halfway through a project.

How do you bring up that you want to be laid off?

Those "lifer" friends may just be later in their career, though. Your ability to significantly advance your compensation depends on how early in your career you are. You will plateau at some point, but early on it makes a lot of sense to job hop. My first job hop was for +66% comp increase. My next was for about +25%, next for +15% or so. Eventually you hit a ceiling. After 30 years in the industry, my last job change was probably about +0.05%. I expect if I have to interview again, it's a toss up whether I'd get a higher or lower offer.

Yeah, that was the situation until 2023. This market is absolutely brutal and there's no guarantee of an offer in 6+ months, even for roles you'd get in a month.

I wanted to be a "lifer" (you don't build expertise jumping jobs every 2 years) but I more or less knew going into games that that was never going to truly be the case. But this bad market only amplifies the issues.

I don't get how people get jobs so easily. It took me like 8 months and it was extremely stressful.

Interviewing is a skill of its own. Some people are really good at it.

They have connections from previous jobs who will vouch for them.

How does this work, though? Every company I've worked for has an HR system, and resumes flow through it, and there's a set process. If I have worked with a candidate in the past and highly recommend them, all I can do is submit their resume into the great void and check a box "Recommend". I don't have any other power. There is no "Skip the interview, I vouch for him!" button that I can push.

It's probably related to the size of the company. Most of the companies I've worked for in the past have been between 50-200 employees across the entire org. The dev teams were usually around a 10-20 people and the director of R&D often encouraged us (the devs) to recommend new hires. They still had to pass through HR but it was more of a formality and the director had the proverbial majority vote.

Smaller teams are also more tight-knit so recommending a new potential dev wasn't a matter of process - it was literally head down a few doors and have a chat with the director.

I'm sure it's significantly different for huge enterprises where even the teams within the R&D department are heavily siloed.

> How does this work, though? Every company I've worked for has an HR system, and resumes flow through it, and there's a set process. If I have worked with a candidate in the past and highly recommend them, all I can do is submit their resume into the great void and check a box "Recommend

I haven't worked for any massive companies with thousands of employees where there might be a lot of bureaucracy, but the few I've worked for ranged from ~100-700 and it was pretty easy to get interviews for referrals. One of my employers encouraged referrals and offered bonuses if it led to a hire.

That's how it works in my company too. The recruitment teams barely work with the engineering teams themselves. You may know a very good fit for the team, possibly even a previous member/intern of that team, and you won't be sure you can put the person into the recruitment loop. And then they'll need to pass the interviews...

And at the end of the day the HR work for your VP. And your VP needs people to do things, and if he hears you are a good person and you are available it will happen. HR is just a layer of process. Make them happy in regards to the things they care about.

If you are regarded very highly, if you suggest to your manager there's another person out there like you they will work the system to get that person lined up for an interview ASAP. If you aren't very highly regarded, your suggestions will be put into the HR system and never looked at.

If your manager is inexperienced or not very good then there's nothing you can do about that.

This story is changing. There is now an oversaturation of us ex-BigCo people in the market. I quit Google before the layoffs, after being there for 10 years and sick of it. The first year was serious ego boost, having Google on the resume opened doors all over the place. Then my ex-coworkers started getting laid off and things began to shift.

Now I know people I used to work with who have been without work for many months and having a hard time getting interviews.

Granted, I'm not in the Bay Area, so. But the market is saturated.

> The first year was serious ego boost, having Google on the resume opened doors all over the place.

Before I worked in FAANG, My subjective view of big tech SWEs was they were very skilled, in a different league.

My current view is that it "just" takes very good preparation and a decent resume to get in. And they've hired so many people that it's not so special anymore to be an "ex-Google". There are just a lot of them.

That being said, I think someone who gets hired in such a company, and manage to stay for many years has to be quite productive and competent. Especially if they reached higher levels.

Competent, yes. Intelligent, yes.

Productive, not necessarily.

Google is not a "produce a lot of code" place. It's a careful and deliberate and systematic type of place.

One thing I think ex-Google does bring especially to the table is a disdane for over-complicated and overly trend-driven solutions.

For one Google's internal review culture is (or at least was when I was there) very stringent. Pointless complexity and showboating is usually spanked.

For two, because Google basically rolls its own everything in regards to frameworks and the like, developers who come out of there have been mainly cured of "flavour of the month" and "my ego wants us to use this new shiny new-coloured tech".

Yep, a sabbatical is taken to mean laid off and low performer. Have to sign an offer before leaving the old one.

Its not that the market is saturated, its that a lot of incompetent ex googlers are interviewing now. People usually have a pretty good idea they can't do their job. They find a niche where a manager is not paying attention, or they can obfuscate and take credit for others work, etc. These people don't usually job hop, the interviews are way too hard and then they are very unlikely to find another long term safe niche to hide in. So previously seeing google on a resume correlated highly with strong competence. A lot of people laid off from google are complete incompetents. A lot were hard working geniuses too, but it doesn't take many interviews where a exgoogler is completely useless to spoil the brand.

The reputation for googlers on the market right now is very bad, and it will keep getting worse as the group of ex googlers who are basically unemployable keep interviewing over and over and over.

There's also the "we can only pay a third of what Google paid you..." and given two candidates that interview equally well, one is former Google and appeared to be making $300k and another is from somewhere where they were making $70k before...

I'd argue for the $70k person. They are less likely to have experienced lifestyle inflation and looking at this position as a "slumming it until they can get a job making $300k+ again."

It further complicates the issue that most companies don't have Google scale problems and don't have the engineering culture for a Google scale solution.

There are several factors working against even not incompetent former Google employees - especially if their experience is entirely within Big Tech.

A bit ago a former Tesla person was in the set of interviews and it became clear that they wanted to make the organization that was considering hiring them into a copy of how Tesla works... and that wasn't something that was going to be doable. The post interview discussion was "this person is going to try to make us into a copy of Tesla for six months, and then leave shortly after they realize that we weren't a place that could become another Tesla."

Big Tech experience may be a positive signal for getting hired at other Big Tech companies... but it can be a negative signal at a company that isn't trying hiring for an organization that can't become a Big Tech company - especially if that is the only thing that is known.

Hiring isn't necessarily picking the "best" person for the role, but rather the least risky. Former Big Tech employees are often riskier than other candidates given their lifestyle expectations and the mismatch of the engineering cultures.

In part true, for sure.

Personally when I left Google and interviewed elsewhere I made clear to potential employers two major things:

1. I never expected to be paid "Google level" money again. I was nowhere near high up in the pay tier there, but it was still almost twice what local shops were paying, at times (depending on how RSUs worked out, etc.)

Google can pay what it can because of the ads firehose, and it was actually, more than anything, a strategy used to deprive the competition of talent.

2. I never actually liked the Google internal culture, so although I was there for 10 years I was constantly aware of the things that I didn't like and the things I would not be trying to bring over to future gigs. And I had 10+ years work experience before Google. Which didn't serve me well while I was inside Google, but definitely has afterwards.

Nobody on your team had kids or dependents?

What was the age range of the referred 2023 sample of workers?

> It seems like the heavity majority of those stressed about layoffs in big tech are lifers and those who are chronically averse to and dread the interview process.

Not helped by the fact a lot of interview processes - unless you can rely on word-of-mouth and the corporate structure allows for shortcuts - are byzantine, maddening and/or don't have much relations to the work one will be doing afterwards. No fuck you I'm in for a sysop/cloud position, I won't waste my time doing Fizzbuzz. Give me a laptop with internet and an actual work task if you want to judge my competence.

Maybe that perception that people chronically job hop is not true? I would welcome a data source that shows chronic job hopping is the norm.

Anecdotally speaking, I spent 6+ish years at my first "old tech" company. My org in this (very large) company was constantly simmering with resource actions (mostly small scale layoffs). There was lots of negative energy there. I left to take a programming/data analytics gig in a large, privately held financial company that had never had a layoff. This was unfortunately timed, 2 years later the financial crisis of 2008 kicked off and I (and my entire team) were all laid off. I have been with my current employer for approaching two decades and several of my peers have been on our team for that much time.

I have had a SINGLE manager in that time window. I can't even name all the managers I had in my first job due to near-constant re-orgs and layoffs.

Hard to say - at my current company many people seem to be there for the long haul (it is a good place to work) and I'd say many departures have been due to restructures (some people lost jobs, but I think in a few cases existing managers haven't seen eye to eye with new leadership so have left, but also taken people with them).

At my last job people came and went, but I'd say that the job hoppers would be more inclined to say for 3-4 years rather than 1-2 years.

As a further insight, I'd say that my current job is at a big company, and in my town there are probably only four or five other companies of comparable size, while my previous job was medium sized and there were probably a lot of companies of that size that you could move to.

Another anecdote from my part. I graduated in roughly 2015. I've had 5 software eng jobs since then. Each one I've had at least 2 different managers in the average 2 years I spent in each. My latest role, however, I was at for 2.5 years and had 6(!) managers. I had originally intended to stay at that role longer term but it was obvious the constant managerial turnover was a negative for my career growth - so I hopped again.

I've not experienced a layoff, but I also think its extremely abnormal to be in a position for so long and only have one manager.

I worked at Microsoft 2009-2024 and I've seen it a lot. It's rather telling when your own manager tells you that if you want fast promos and raises, the best way to do so is to switch companies every few years. And I've had more than one manager say that. I know many people who did several rounds of Microsoft -> Google -> Amazon -> Microsoft or the like.

That said, I don't think one can blame the devs for it, since it is the companies themselves that have created the environment where the above holds true. I never understood why - intuitively, it doesn't make sense for the company to underpay its devs to the point where they leave for a competitor, and then come back and get rehired at a much higher salary anyway. But it is what it is, and the workforce has caught on.

> I never understood why - intuitively, it doesn't make sense for the company to underpay its devs to the point where they leave for a competitor, and then come back and get rehired at a much higher salary anyway. But it is what it is, and the workforce has caught on.

It's because they are unable to tell who is worth what. So they outsource it to the market. If you managed to pass the interviews and get hired at the other big tech company, that's proof of value.

It's also self-reinforcing. If you don't leave, it's a signal that you don't trust your own market value to be higher.

For every dev that is able to make the "Microsoft -> Google -> Amazon -> Microsoft" circuit, you have n others who look hardly distinguishable to management who can't do that if they tried quitting. In other words, quitting is risky, in game theoretic terms it's a costly signal of competence.

I also wouldn't be surprised if it had some internal politics reasons that there are certain rules/power games around salary raises that don't apply when someone is hired from scratch.

> It's rather telling when your own manager tells you that if you want fast promos and raises, the best way to do so is to switch companies every few years.

This is different than what GP asked, it excludes anyone who might prefer stability over fast raises. Are the job-hoppers the majority, or are they just more visible because they're always interviewing?

I contracted/consulted around London for decades, and though I was with some clients for many years in total, others were much shorter, and short entries on a CV were not seen as a red flag AFAIK.

(Well, there was one hiring manager idiot who could not conceive of anything other than linear non-concurrent contracts as being honest - that interview did not go well, but I dodged a bullet!)

It seems impossible to think that it's not true given how fundamental it is to (new) tech culture.

I think it's possible that the majority of tech workers aren't hoppers, but the majority of applicants are. This just stands to reason, since hoppers aren't doing much applying and interviewing. This would tend to make interviewers think that this is a dominant strategy even if it isn't really.

It's also the case that the "everything is transactional, fuck your coworkers, leave your job the minute you can plausibly say you learned something and move on, chase impact at any cost because you only have one career" live-to-work contingent is just much louder online, especially here. After all, these are people that are investing a lot in their career, while IME most of my coworkers, even managers (though I don't personally know very many VP-and-up managers) are work-to-live people, mostly interested in their families and hobbies, and seem to rarely post on forums like this.

In any case, I'm fairly certain that there are (or were until recently) Labor Department researchers who have figured this all out empirically and could give us an answer if we knew where to look.

> Why do tech workers get so wrapped around the axle of layoffs when most people are in a chronic state of tech job hopping?

I know lots of people hop jobs to get promoted. It's understandable too: promotion has become a prestige. It hurts to see coworkers get promoted yet oneself stays at the same place, let alone promotion is the only way to get a larger package. Personally, I think the promotion culture, especially the one popularized by Meta, is pretty ruinous to the tech companies, as many people exclusively focused on getting promoted. That means first write less code but draw more boxes, then draw fewer boxes and write more docs, and then write fewer docs but go to more meetings. Soon it's hard to distinguish a high-level engineer from a technical PM, from a director (except that the IC does not have direct report), or even from a program manager. The end result is that the company gets more bloated, slows down every day, and produces bullshit systems. When those ICs go out to interview, all they can do is throwing around a few terms and fail miserably on even the most basic questions.

Job hopping is done to maximize your salary in the least amount of time - but everyone knows that there's a ceiling. You can't just keep job hopping for the rest of your career, and magically end up making 25% more every time you hop to the next gig.

Sooner or later you'll start to reach a ceiling, and have to defend your salary more. The idea is that if you can end up hitting that ceiling in 10 years by job hopping, that's better than spending 25 years at one place to hit the same figure. The earlier you have maximized your salary, the more you can invest and hopefully retire earlier.

Now, once you hit that ceiling - it kind of sucks to be in a constant state of job hopping. You actually don't get rewarded, and it is more stress than anything. And the older you get, the more stability you'll value - after all, you probably have a mortgage, kids, and all that to account for.

I think there are two reasons: choosing to change jobs on your own gives you ability to pick a time when it's minimally disruptive to yourself and your actual family, and then the pretend "family" vibe you cite is pushed by the employer in the first place. Companies insising on a game of make-believe where the relationship between employer and employee isn't transactional makes it hard not to be bothered by the hypocrisy. I agree that on average, the tech industry isn't as bad as other industries often are, but I don't see why that's a compelling argument not to care about the fact that it still could be better. There's nothing stopping me from wanting fewer tech layoffs and better conditions for workers in other industries as well (and in some circumstances even advocate for that even knowing that it might require changes to my own quality of life to achieve that; as a trivial example, I go out of my way to tip much larger than 20% when I use Uber because I'd rather risk getting ripped off than a driver not getting paid a fair wage for the work they do for me, even if it's at my own expense).

At the end of the day, everything is a balancing act, and the amount of change most of us can make as individuals is a drop in the bucket compared to the unfairness that people have to deal with every day. We all have to make judgement calls on where to take a stand and where to play it safe to avoid making things harder for ourselves without actually making a difference that ends up helping anyone, and if people are acting in good faith when trying to make those choices, I don't see any value in criticizing what they end up deciding. If anything, most of us in tech are probably in far more of a comfortable position to be able to speak out against employers (either or own or those in industries where workers are treated even worse), so I think there's a reasonable argument that it's more important for us to because of that. It's not a zero-sum game though; pointing out tech employer hypocrisy doesn't inherently take anything away from pointing out even worse things that other employers do.

> I go out of my way to tip much larger than 20% when I use Uber because I'd rather risk getting ripped off than a driver not getting paid a fair wage for the work they do for me, even if it's at my own expense

Honest question, as a European who doesn't fully understand tipping culture: don't you think that this might be perpetuating a culture of exploitation? Wouldn't you rather spend your money on taxis that at least have some regulations if you are afraid the drivers are getting the wrong end of the deal?

In the macro sense? Possibly, if everyone is doing what I'm doing. In my experience though, the opposite is more common; I've heard of people absolutely refusing to tip out of "principle", and then workers making sub-minimum wage don't actually get paid what they're legally "mandated".

In the micro sense, I find it pretty unlikely that I'm single-handedly making much difference personally in the New York economy. While as software engineer in tech I'm undoubtedly better off than average, I'm certainly not anywhere close to wealthy enough that even spending my entire net worth on tips would affect anything at all.

I think the other side of it is:

- Detail-oriented nerds with a rich mental framework around things like optimization, making decisions based on data, perhaps statistical approaches to uncertainty get frustrated when they see their organization making big, irreversible choices without the benefit of all available information. From the IC or line-manager level there may be a bunch of information which you can tell was not taken into consideration.

- Process-oriented people who have put a bunch of effort into planning, goal-setting and measurement based on seemingly reasonable assumptions like "this team that provides service X will continue to exist for the duration of project Y which depends on X" get frustrated when execs throw everything into disarray ... and then 3 weeks later want to know why Y is off track.

As the article describes, often lay-offs end up being bad for the company, not just the employees who get terminated. Even if you're not let go, or even if you just care about the value of your vested equity, it can be quite frustrating to see this happen. And often, because layoffs are generally planned in secret, leadership explicitly precludes the possibility of getting input from the experts in their organization.

While perhaps some layoffs ultimately turn out ok, I think generally the people who go through them can tick off a list of parts of it that were ill-considered and needlessly disruptive, in part b/c of this lack of trust and communication.

The thing is, the tech industry is also an outlier in a sense that the quality of the job you find varies massively depending on (1) the timing, sometimes literally by a few weeks and (2) whether you already have a job or not.

And so, layoffs are not "just another bump" in people's career. They represent a major net negative for people who would otherwise have much more control over the trajectory.

The tech industry also doesn’t reward loyalty, even at big tech.

There’s a reason for the low tenure at most firms and it’s primarily due to the lack of rewarding experience and depth of field knowledge at most companies. When you have to get a new job just to get a salary increase that keeps up with inflation you are going to see a lot of job hopping when the skills of the workforce are generally in demand.

How often is it that someone leaves because they can get paid better elsewhere? Why do we think this wouldn’t drive the primary cause of people leaving companies?

Where the fuck is the company showing any loyalty to its workforce?

> Where the fuck is the company showing any loyalty to its workforce?

They have been and are out there. But all it takes is a change on C level and cost cutting suddenly is everything, loyalty a thing of the past. That is, you cannot count on loyalty anymore, even if the company you are working for is currently showing it (or seems to).

Yeah I don't see the big mystery here. People leave to keep up with cost of living or get away from toxic elements in their current workplace that are otherwise difficult - if not impossible - to change by staying. It's not something we want to do, it's something we have to do for one good reason or another. If we had better rights and meaningful raises to improve or even sustain our quality of life, the job hopping would surely decrease. The layoffs and the reason for job hopping are both attributed to actions on the employer's side.

For almost every job I've had, I would have been more than happy to stay there if it provided the career growth that job hopping provides. Companies seem to deliberately make internal promotion far more difficult than just job hopping to L+1.

> The tech industry also doesn’t reward loyalty

Anecdotally, I’ve heard of many cases of “up or out” in FAANGs, which in other terms is a negative preference for loyalty.

(This, in fact, is one of the reasons people working in those companies perpetually seem to be practicing interview questions and Leetcode every day.)

Big tech employees are a fraction of all tech employers and employees. There’s problem so systematically pervasive that you see this across the board. Companies do not value long term retainment of employees up and down the size spectrum and it’s very clear in how they behave.

They don’t award experience and depth of knowledge in any way that is indicative of fostering retention

Big tech employees have been doing that because they see new hires (who have themselves switched from another big tech company!) get a lot more comp than their meager raise. Don't blame the workers from reacting to the signals that company is sending through its own deliberate actions.

It's a chicken and egg problem. If people feel they could have a meaningful career in a given place, they would stay longer. When you see your teammates getting laid off one after the other - including people with 5-10 years of seniority and history of good performance, you start to wonder whether you should have any sense of loyalty to the company.

I joined my company with the naive hope there would be some sentiment of family/community and that I'd do a big chunk of my career there. But after seeing how they treat employees, I'm looking for the way out.

I've worked over 12 years at the same company. Finding a new job would be difficult as remote pays lower and isn't the best fit for me, my area isn't known for tech job, my spouse doesn't want to relocate, I work for one of the biggest employers in my area (fewer choices outside the company), and we are seeing the highest sector unemployment since the dot com bubble. Oh, and my disability makes it all worse. My job has been an absolute hell hole for the past 2 years, but internal and external job opportunities have been extremely limited.

I guess there are a broad range of perspectives and how loud people are is going to depend on their perspectives. Some reasons to dislike layoffs:

- visas may be dependent on employment, and can make changing jobs harder. In the United States, lots of visa rules are at the discretion of the government (eg how long one may live in the United States on an employer-sponsored visa while unemployed)

- the recent (and dot-com era) tech layoffs have been cyclical: many companies are in layoff-mode or hiring-spree mode at the same time. The time when many companies are not hiring is the worst time to be thrust into the job market

- people may have other job security worries – big tech companies tend to always be growing so it is worrying if they are laying people off instead of moving them from a failing business line to a new one

- in general some people may have a lot of anxiety about changes to income. If you are applying for new jobs while currently holding another, there is much less pressure than if you’re unemployed and need to find a new job (and possibly at a pay cut requiring outgoings to be reduced) before you run out of savings, especially if you don’t have much in savings compared to outgoings, which may be the case for some tech workers (some people spend a lot, or have much of their wealth tied up in property or have a family which requires spending more on eg housing or school fees). The much-worse consequences of failing to get a new job may increase the pressure/stress/discomfort

- this reveals an obvious truth about where the power lies in ‘engineering-focused’ companies and people don’t like it

- people can see a layoff as being like a firing and therefore be unhappy due to hurt pride (or worries about being less desirable in the job market)

- the lack of agency in a layoff is unpleasant. It is quite different from choosing to apply to other jobs.

Because a lot of tech workers today aren't actually job hopping and instead get very cozy in a job and a team and a career trajectory, which feels unfairly ripped away during layoffs for reasons that don't feel connected to their personal performance.

Many of the stereotypes you mention are for startup founder / early employee types.

That's not everyone, it's just who's on HN.

Most employees of these companies are just regular people wanting regular jobs.