Most big non-tech companies just have periodic layoffs to clean out the deadwood - since firing is such an arduous process with HR. I've seen one guy actually fired for bad performance - and he was determined to milk the system until his last day. However I've seen dozens laid off. I don't really care what mechanism is used.

I'd say tell people your status for timeline purposes but I wouldn't give names unless it's two mega-corps who think of themselves as competitors. Smaller places like to think they are special and giving names ruins that myth for them.

I think this iversonian's below is pretty good summary, although smaller places often like the idea of "you're working for less for them AND they are getting people to turn down offers at Google etc.".

and this was another point that I was thinking. its very possible that netflix has some super competitive, get promoted or get fired (up or out) policy in some departments or at some levels. like, once you get to VP, you better outperform the others by some whatever metric or bam.

but those policies dont apply to like, senior software engineers and devs. I dunno. the article is long on horror stories from super well compensated upper level ex employees and very short on actual data and even opinions from the large mass of lower level employees.

its a really bad article when you break it down and the comments make the readers of the wsj look even worse, tho they are certainly reason such an article was created as they eat that crap up.

I was at a company and the culture was great and fun and productive, but then they started layoffs and the morale went to hell. I don't think these policies that foster a cutthroat environment can be good for anything other than maybe high pressure salespeople.

(The people laid off were in no way responsible for the company performance that led to their layoffs.)

Micro, no one here will really go out of their way to make you feel stupid. Maybe one exception, but not really.

I think this is totally true. A guy we just hired worked at oracle for a few years - a company i actually respect a lot and would love to work for - and he said one guy on his team just decided to stop working for 6 months because he wanted to be let go. Eventually he just got bored and quit. That kind of **** is mind boggling to me.

In my company I see stuff like that, but we’re a small disorganized start up.

I don’t think it’s paradoxical at all that companies that have a hard time hiring quality engineers have a culture of firing people. It makes complete sense.

If you’re having problems hiring, why wouldn’t you take some chances and then fire the chances that don’t work out?

Most people that get fired aren’t just because they’re not up to standard. It’s almost always that they’re not up to standard and aren’t showing much potential for improving.

And, there’s the very real fact that if you want to have a high quality engineering team you have to be willing to fire people that don’t work out. Otherwise you’ll end up paying for it in lower retention rates and a reputation that makes it harder to hire.

It’s also likely that the companies growing and recruiting fast are going to fire people more often because they have many more opportunities to make a hiring mistake than companies that are a static size.

I might have a different background than many of you but I’ve always worked at places that fire people. It’s not a crazy Netflix like situation but people that aren’t working out generally don’t stick around all that long.

Netflix are a bunch of weirdos. They are primarily testing for culture fit in their interview process (i.e. have you read and internalized their idiotic 80 page powerpoint about their culture). They also pay more than anyone else in the industry so it's easy to attract good talent.

I've probably hired around 100 people over the last 10 years or so and fired 2 for low performance.

One guy was always showing up late and missing deadlines. We told him to be at the office every day by 9 or he was going to get fired and he made it about 3 days. We were really worried about what firing him was going to do for morale, as it turns out it was the best thing we could have done. Most of the comments after the firing were some variation of "Why the hell didn't you do it sooner?"

The other guy was worthless. He interviewed great. Answered all questions quickly and confidently, knew more about angular than anyone we interviewed. Then he started coding. And he was terrible. Things that shouldn't take 2 hours took 2 days. He was actually a net negative for our production as he slowed the whole project down. I fired him in about 2 weeks.

Defiantly taught me a lesson about hiring. From that point on we'd make every potential employee do some coding and perform some sql in front of us, and we were 100% after that.

Firing deadwood does usually improve morale. It's when they get into quota territory and start losing live wood that things seem to go bad. Although I've never worked in one of those environments so I'm not sure.

I've been on the employer side as a solar contractor where I didn't have enough work for people and it's not pretty.

Please satisfy my curiousity as to what “perform some sql” means

Do the needful obv

Show him some tables and ask him to write a few queries that get specific things

fyp

can I google it?

SELECT * FROM whatever with (nolock)

thats about the extent of my sql.

If the job I'm hiring you for requires SQL then I want you to know it, otherwise I guess I don't care. But if I don't care I'm not going to ask.

put the person in front of a putty session that's signed into mysql

show them a couple of tables

ask them to show me the rows from table 1 that column x is 5

show me the rows from table 1 that have an entry in table 2 where the id in table 1 matches the table1_id in table 2

The reason we did this is several the person we fired that interviewed so well could not do these things. It didn't occur to me that someone who has been coding for 10 years wouldn't be able to do that. It was pretty vital for the job. The test did eliminate at least 1 other candidate before we interviewed.

Interesting study: Learning that managers made more than employees thought made them work harder; learning that peers at the same level made more than they thought made them work less hard

Fascinating. So I guess this is a justification for paying managers absurd salaries?

In my current refactor quest i think i found a potential winner of most wtf line of bash:

dir=‘echo $PWD’

The apostrophes are supposed to be backticks - couldnt figure out how to do them on my phone. Oh man

Update: recruiter responded today (said it went to the wrong folder) to my mid-day Friday email about the scheduling thing and asked how I felt my interviews went. That gave me an opportunity to let him know what happened, but I decided against going with the full "could you take this into account when judging my interview" thing.

Basically, I figure - while the recruiter might be sympathetic to the circumstances, this is a big company, they have their hiring process, and their process isn't likely to give a **** about me having to do 45 minutes more of interviews than I should have. And like the Larry theorem suggests, I don't necessarily want to give them a reason to focus more on one subpar interview out of five than they otherwise would have.

So, we'll see what happens.

That's pretty bananas. I can't think of any cases where that will return something other than plain $PWD. I wonder if there IS some weird case and changing it will break something.

I checked to see if
echo $X
will return an error code if X doesn't exist, because I thought that might be a potential reason for it, but no, it doesn't.

(A bad reason, mind you, since bash already has ways to check the existence of variables)

Lol no it’s just a classic “pointless use of backticks” submission