I’ve seen managers hiring people with an intent to lay them off when winds change to protect themselves and their close circle. I can only imagine they’ve had great KPIs in both cases: first for scaling the team, and then for cutting costs.
I know 4 people who’ve worked for them, two on the same team, one who’s moved around various offices over a long period of time, and one who used to work for me but left to go there (and with the offer they were made I absolutely don’t blame them - we’d been hit hard by COVID and were in the midst of a salary freeze).
The first three of those people seem to have got on well there and mostly enjoyed it. The fourth had a miserable 8 months. Their manager was based in a different office with a 5+ hour time difference and was a complete nightmare, and they left of their own accord to another job on about the same money but without all the extra hours, stress, and terrible management.
I’m guessing Amazon is like other big companies: the quality of your experience will depend to a very large extent on your manager.
I've worked with some Amazon fanboys who'd rave about being "bar raisers" and other assorted nonsense, trying to impress Amazon-derived "leadership principles" upon much smaller organizations. It left a very bad taste in my mouth.
Well FAANG is now MANGO and yes Amazon dropped out of the top tier of tech companies on the market per these acronyms. Theres a few others other there gaining popularity which also now exclude Amazon as a top tier tech company.
Amazon is successful on the boring utility stuff (logistics, building data centers) but is broadly seen as unable to execute on higher value add things, which keeps it out of the top tier. The AI misses really highlighted that.
Isn’t AWS a massive value add operation on top of what is otherwise just rental servers?
It isn’t sexy, but they are selling their proprietary technology to just about everyone. That and their market cap puts them in league with the rest of the big boys.
This is so ethically and morally odious I struggle to find the words to describe it.
I’ve managed people out. I’m sure I’ll have to do it again. I’ve even let people go during probation but, on the rare occasions that’s happened, I’ve seen it as a failure of the hiring process.
People have families, they have mortgages, bills to pay, and a powerful need to eat (Mal, Serenity?). The last thing I want is for someone to give up a stable job that allows them to do that to come and work for me only so I can fire them and leave them up the creek a few weeks or months down the line.
Our employees are after all people, human beings.
As I result I skew picky during the hiring process: if there’s any doubt there’s no doubt kind of thing.
On the opposite direction (but compatible overall view): if I think a candidate is marginal/on the bubble of passing, I’m much more likely to move forward with them if they’re unemployed.
Someone unemployed might be a little rusty (and thus get estimated slightly worse in the interview) but, more importantly, if they come in and flame out, they’re not worse off for the experience or at least not as much as if they gave up a stable job.
> People have families, they have mortgages, bills to pay, and a powerful need to eat (Mal, Serenity?). The last thing I want is for someone to give up a stable job that allows them to do that to come and work for me only so I can fire them and leave them up the creek a few weeks or months down the line.
Literally none of that is the employer’s responsibility. It’s just a business transaction. Having sufficient savings is the responsibility of every adult, never their employer. It is not the employer’s job to manage the employee’s cash flow.
Everyone, but ESPECIALLY those making six figures in tech, should have a six months of expenses savings account in cash SPECIFICALLY for this exact scenario. There are a million ways you might be without work for 2-4 months. It’s not an employer’s fault (or responsibility) that their employee is financially irresponsible.
A LOT of people don't make enough money to put away 6 months of savings. You can be the most financially responsible person in existence, but if you don't have the money, you don't have the money.
Yeah, employers should not hire people that can’t afford to put away 6 months of livings expenses, because that puts the employer in a questionable ethical position.
Or maybe a living wage with savings should be the legal minimum wage? Oh wait, nope, can’t have that lol.
Just wait for a few months, that 40 isn’t going to stretch nearly as far. We are entering a period of food scarcity, and if things continue on the road they are on, a high likelihood of global conventional conflicts. The powers that be seem to have converged on the need for depopulation and consolidation of power.
Its a business transaction with a MASSIVE power differential and as Spiderman taught us, with great power comes great responsibility.
An employer has a responsibility to treat an employee with respect, not exploit them, and give them a fair part in the rewards when the company succeeds.
Then COVID happened and employers didn't have 2-4 months of savings built up, and ended up shuttering due to lack of money immediately.
Also, since post COVID, we've had hyper inflation and a locked up housing market. $150 townhomes that a $50 family salary could afford are now going for $300. And rent has gone up to match.
I don't think the numbers not matching is because of anyone's personal financial responsibility. It's more from the Fed's and Congress's horrible actions over the past 2 decades and their financial irresponsibility.
Granted, grumbling about the powers that be doesn't solve the problem, which is why I fear civil turmoil will be here very soon.
Only if they are being honest. Offer this as a 12 month temp contract with possibility of continuation. Offering a role as permanent but with unvoiced intent to let go, that's dishonest. Being honest is always a responsibility.
In my country employers have a duty of care towards their employees: "hire to fire" very clearly violates that duty of care.
Even ignoring that - let's say that duty of care didn't exist - are you telling me that you, as a human being, will not simply choose to do the right thing unless you are legislatively forced to do so? Pretty scummy when you think about it like that, isn't it? Your talk of "business transactions" is fine in the abstract but I bet you won't be so chipper about it when it happens to you.
Moreover, nobody materialises in this world with 6 months of expenses for themselves and their families magically in their bank account. Most people have to work and save for that, and that's if they're fortunate enough to have a job that pays them well enough to save after expenses. Many people don't.
Perhaps you should climb down off that high horse of yours, travel a little, learn what the world is really like, and understand the very real struggles that many people face.
I think that such a duty of care does not exist ethically or morally, and that legislating it into existence is foolish.
Both parties can walk away from a deal they don’t like. It’s just a business transaction. There are other employers; the balance of power is not as one-sided as everyone pretends it is.
This is good advice. Moving the responsibility onto the employer is a BLAME game, and when people haven't prepared, it's easier if they attack the messenger instead of being critical of their own bad decisions for whom to work.
Clearly some are triggered by the idea that employers should be held accountable for those that don't plan so well. The fact is, the employers are only accountable to the stakeholders and their continued corporate existence.
Yes I suppose this is the bare minimum, but isn’t that just a nasty way to go about things? What about responsibility and decency, do we just not do that anymore?
I took one of those seasonal hire to fire Amazon roles, having thrived in Apple engineering for many years, and not needing to work really at all.
It was laughable that the manager thought he could brainwash me (who used to report one level away from Steve Jobs) into learning how to write code, etc. He was from country X and would protect another wildly inappropriate employee also from country X despite her being a geography graduate in an SWE role, I'd have to teach her, then she'd report to him she taught me what i know.
Unbelievably corrupt org, but amusing i had to admit. it wouldn't be amusing if i had been dependent on working there.
Just want to point out that relational nepotism is human nature.
It basically needs to be brainwashed out of people in childhood to avoid having it happen, regardless of where they are from.
There is nothing wrong with relational nepotism in a vacuum, and also nothing wrong with brainwashing it away. Whether or not to brainwash it away is a cultural choice with tradeoffs in both directions.
That being said, IMO having a host culture brainwash it away in its own people while simultaneously welcoming outsiders from cultures without such brainwashing is very, very, very foolish. We either need to let everyone do it, or forcibly make everyone stop doing it. The current situation is ridiculous.
Back in the late 90s a senior Microsoft exec explained this to me, they had acquired staff and continued to operate entire divisions which he described as "ballast". In the future, once the stock price increases slowed, they would be heaved over the edge of the balloon basket so that it could continue to rise. I often think about that.
Genuine kubernetes scaling strategy: add a do-nothing container that runs with a lower priority than your real workloads, that requests half a machine’s worth of mcpu.
When you deploy a new container, and all your nodes are fully allocated, that low priority container will get evicted, and your container will immediately get scheduled in its place. Then k8s will try to find somewhere to put that half-machine container. If it finds somewhere it fits, it’ll schedule it. If not, it’ll trigger your cluster auto scale to add a new node where that task can run, making sure the next container you want to deploy has some readily available capacity to drop on to.
Or on Amazon elastic filesystems... create giant files just to ensure you're in the right performance class for the files you do need (that was the official way of doing it for a while!).
old defence against unreasonably demanding manager: add deliberate pockets of slow processing as insurance so that when things get too hot about performance, you unclog a few of those to acquiesce management.
This is completely acceptable. When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?
A lot of people here and in the industry in general seem to optimise for compensation package and put blinkers on themselves for other factors that are definitely relevant.
Companies aren't penalised by candidates for such practices. I'm not saying it's good but it's astounding to me the number of people who for example optimise entirely for salary and then are shocked when the working conditions are very poor.
People game companies and companies will game people in return. Murray Gell Man amnesia will kick in and next week there will be thread about how CloudFlare is a great place to work for software devs because you can earn 20% more than other comparable companies with no reference to how things like job security or working conditions are measured.
This reads to me almost like saying “Why are pigs not avoiding the most problematic slaughterhouses?”
A. We have to work somewhere, and in 2026 honestly it’s actually the employer’s market which is kinda new to me, as someone who always just passively waited until an interesting job offer fell in my lap.
B. They all pretty much work the same. Everywhere is “like a family” and “cares about sustainability” and all, until either your VC money starts to run low and you sell to PE or liquidate, or, for your big techs, layoff season comes around and you need to show that you’re willing to cut costs with the best of them, so you pick a random 4-5 digit number to lay off for the investors.
>This reads to me almost like saying “Why are pigs not avoiding the most problematic slaughterhouses?”
I don't think that's a fair comparison. Pigs are literally reared for slaughter and have no autonomy. Employees can and do choose these companies completely of their own volition.
I think you have to squint pretty hard to think that's the case in software engineering. LA Times suggests there are 6.9 million job openings (1). I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that anyone who wants a job in tech should get one otherwise its a humanitarian crisis. In fact, I'd say it's beyond unreasonable to suggest that.
Still, I do feel bad for younger folks trying to break into the industry - but "work for cloudflare or go hungry" is beyond a stretch.
Edit: Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026, imagining this is a case of people going hungry requires some very serious ideological capture.
> LA Times suggests there are 6.9 million job openings
Yeah sure. I've seen literally dozens of job openings in certain companies that match my resume pretty much perfectly. None of them ever bothered to respond when I applied beyond "nah, better luck next time" (even that is not guaranteed, some just ignore you). I have no idea what those millions of job openings are, really, but the fact is, when you're out of a job, you don't feel like you have millions of employers lined up to invite you. Especially after you spend a couple of months submitting resumes and getting no interviews.
> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026
This is pretty generous, usually a couple of months is all you get, sometimes people don't get even that. With that kind of approach, working for Cloudflare becomes even more decent option, comparatively.
I hope people don’t gaslight you into thinking it’s something wrong with you. That was exactly my experience this year - and that’s completely new compared to 4 years ago. It’s the market that’s changed.
No, I have been in the field long enough and done enough things that I know I maybe not the best ever, but I am pretty good. I appreciate the kind words though. And I am lucky to have a good job too, now. But that's what happens in the field, and it's not only me - I have heard the same you are saying from multiple people over the last years. It's just how it works now. Maybe there is some super-elite level where you can just sit on your Herman-Miller throne and the unicorns come and bow to you and beg you to take a job with them. I know I am, while being pretty good, not at that level. And many, many other people aren't either, while still being pretty good. All those people don't always have a luxury of refusing a well-paying job just because they get a slightly wrong vibe about what could happen with the company years from now.
> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026, imagining this is a case of people going hungry requires some very serious ideological capture
We were talking about the people interviewing and picking jobs in general, not specifically ones that had been laid off from CF.
> I think you have to squint pretty hard to think that's the case in software engineering.
Maybe not right now (though I imagine that varies a lot even now). But I've been there. I've gone from making plenty of money to 100k+ in debt and having less money in the bank than I need to pay the rent + buy food next month. Admittedly, that was after the dotcom bubble; but it left me with a mindset of not assuming everyone has a choice to work at the company they want to. Sometimes you need a job, and being picky about which one you choose isn't always an option.
Huge gulf between "sometimes you need a job" and "employees are pigs to the slaughter".
"I've gone from making plenty of money to 100k+ in debt and having less money in the bank than I need to pay the rent + buy food next month" is pretty intense. I'm sorry you went through that, but if you get ~7 months of paid time to job search and still wind up 100k in debt, there are definitely other problems. I don't think it's at all fair to characterize getting laid off from an extremely highly paid job as a humanitarian crisis.
Should tech companies hire more slowly and carefully? Yes, definitely. Does that actually help employees? I'm not sure, in this case they're getting paid more than they would have had they not been hired at all. Are there plenty of jobs available outside of software? Yes.
Though it’s ridiculous to entertain the thought that one would pivot their career at the drop of a hat. Even just bumping into a tech stack will chain one to it as recruiters stare at yoe in a specific one and completely ignore anything adjacent, imagine doing anything more radical.
One can do it, but it’s a life changing, irreversible and likely damaging event nobody sane would take lightly. Absolute nonsense.
"I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that anyone who wants a job in tech should get one"
I understand your point, but this is the least bad world we're in. If you mandated no-firing or mandated year-long compensation for laid-off workers, you would be crushing the small business economy and destroying more jobs than you were trying to save.
> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026
That's great that they're doing that, but it's absolutely not guaranteed, either in this particular case (prior to this announcement, i.e. when these people were hired) or in general.
But all of this ignores the more general point, which is that--for reasons which may or may not be their fault--some people are not in a good situation financially and for them being laid off is a big deal with very real risks. Just because that's not you doesn't mean it's not a real thing.
Most job openings are fake. Ghost jobs are a real and growing problem as dishonest businesses use it to signal growth without the actual intent to hire.
What criteria would you use? Companies that don't do mass layoffs excludes all big-tech. What makes you think that "seriously inquiring about such practices in interviews or at the application stage" will get an honest answer?
Maybe the answer is that choosing 'big tech' implicitly prioritizes salary over stability. Many people (even on HN) work at places other than FAANG (or whatever counts as big tech these days).
Do they need to own up to it directly? Interviews are always about both sides of the table putting their best self forwards. If it's a big enough company to implement stack ranking and the resulting games played then GlassDoor, LinkedIn, Reddit, even HN all serve this purpose quite effectively.
You can also just ask indirect questions: "how often do you hire new team members?", wait a bit and then, "how is the company measuring growth?" and then at a later opportunity "what's the tenure of those on the team I'd be working with?". If nobody with 1 -2 years is on the team but they admitted to hiring frequently and that growth is meager or stagnant (or they can't answer the question), you have your answer.
You could also just ask directly. I think it's a totally fair question. I don't think you'd be penalized for asking about a company's layoff history. Especially if you say something like "I'm looking for my next home, somewhere I can be for the next 5 plus years".
I might not ask in the first 10 minutes of the first interview, but once you're a few rounds of interview deep, you can pretty safely ask questions like this.
>- “Are you hiring people just to fire them a year later to protect yourselves?”
You think the naive part is the response and not that question?
My point is that you'll simply have to read between the lines on responses with leading questions not that they're going to be upfront about these things.
Also the interview isn't the only way to gauge these things, You can Google for layoff numbers as well and make determinations that way. There are some websites that are dedicated trackers of layoff announcements, both the loud and quiet ones e.g. Spotify I think were letting 29 people go per month for a while. I think the law in Europe was if was 30 people you had to announce it. I can't remember the exact detail but plenty of companies expose these loopholes.
> When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?
There’s some kind of reverse-survivorship bias here. I’d never apply at Meta because their management does the “hire a bunch of excess people in the good times, so when Zuck‘s next inevitable efficiency-drive happens, the team is able to layoff lots of people while still staying operational” approach.
So I’d never make it into the Meta interview to ask that question in the first instance, and neither would anyone else who thinks of Meta in that way.
Either they will answer directly with something solid like "We're growing the team" or they will evade it which is still a meaningful answer for you. You could probe further with questions like:
"How has the team's headcount changed over the last 18-24 months?"
Basically you're alluding to 'employee turnover' without saying it.
Agree with the sentiment and this is a good idea regardless of skepticism about layoffs, but I think "we're growing the team" is not a solid answer.
This is a company that's potentially going to be giving you a lot of money. You should want to understand what they're hoping to get out of that investment. e.g. what are their short/mid/long-term goals and how does hiring you fit into that? Ideally it's clear to you that they have a lot of work they want to accomplish that seems reasonably aligned to what the business owners would want, and it sounds like something you want to get yourself into.
A great answer would be like "we've been acquiring a lot of customers lately and have been starting to run into performance issues, but we don't have the capacity to both handle that and also work on the feature requests we're receiving." Or "we're looking to expand into a new market which carries some new baseline requirements (e.g. FedRAMP) and need help building that."
This is a bizarre take, I've always asked questions like this when interviewing, and if a manager doesn't have a good answer I ask for follow up conversations with the team before taking a job.
Has it worked out? No, but usually they were all being lied to by upper management. Can't do much about that.
I missed a word in there, which was "has it always worked out", but on the other hand I've also dated a lot of people I didn't marry, and even in my original phrasing I think it would be very odd to not ask or try to suss out this information! If nothing else you'll learn later if people are truthful or not, or worth working with again in the future.
I think we're saying the same thing? Just asking about team size won't reveal the answer. So a different set of probing questions might have to be asked.
I thought it was hilarious when they did their layoff a couple years ago just because everyone else was. It was portrayed by their announcement as though it was a business need that they tighten their belts, as though Apple, the company that makes twelve figures of profit every fiscal year were in some kind of tight cash flow situation. Really made it obvious that they saw the atmosphere as “good layoff weather.”
> This is completely acceptable. When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?
Well, this is not something you can safely ask in most interviews. Also, while there's some sort of HN/hackerdom fiction that the job seeker holds some power during the interview, for most job seekers the interview is strongly imbalanced towards the interviewer. So asking clever questions during the interview is risky if you're desperate for a job.
While you can't really ask "will I be layed off next year," it's pretty common to ask some version of "why is the role open," usually split among a few questions (that you'd tailor based on the role):
- "Which of my skills do you think are most valuable for this role?"
- "How would you measure success in this role?"
- "Can you tell me a little more about the product lines we'll be developing / supporting?"
- "How is the current team planning to grow?"
These are the kinds of questions that let you feel out what the manager envisions for the role. If the answers seem vague, that tells you something about the role / manager / org. If it's not clear how you impact the product and they can't clarify, that also tells you something.
I hear you, but the answers to these questions in my experience are always of the kind "we're looking to hire capable people with skills X, Y, Z for projects A & B".
These don't give you any idea about the health of the company or how precarious your new job will be.
agree - every time you ask a "clever" question you're increasing the risk it will be mis-interpreted, and also giving the interviewers a chance to pass. You may think you're being intelligent, honest or candid but it can easily come across as cocky, confrontational and (for lack of a better term) "off". I've passed on candidates for all of these reasons.
> Companies aren't penalised by candidates for such practices.
When you have a mortgage to pay and a family and a COBRA package running out (in the best case), your willingness to "penalize" a company that is actually willing to pay you decent money gets progressively lower as time passes. Not everybody has FU money and can refuse all offers until an ideal employer shows up on the horizon.
At least personally, I optimize for "any job that I can get in this horrible job market". When job seekers are despirate I don't think you can realistically say that their taking the job implies consent. They've effectively been given the offer "take this job or become homeless".
> lot of people here and in the industry in general seem to optimise for compensation package and put blinkers on themselves for other factors that are definitely relevant.
This strategy basically puts you in the top 5% earners though.
> People game companies and companies will game people in return.
You have cause and effect entirely reversed.
There have literally been movies and tv shows made about employees showing missplaced loyalty to their companies and what the companies do in spite of that loyalty, and now that the pendulum has swung to around a bit, you have the temerity to suggest it's the employees who started this trend and the poor employers are just forced to play the game? Fuck right off.
I see it all the time companies keeping people out of loyalty despite employee being grossly incompetent. But it would be hard of hear about it because what kind of news that'd be.
Hiring is event, firing is event. Not hiring or firing are not the event to cover.
I dunno, treating people with cattle kind of feels like the less good option here. These people who get hired have their own life, with plans and outlooks and what not, and basically hiring someone just to have someone to fire later, feels really shitty and flat out ignoring that they're human too.
No, it's psychopathic. Please, let's not pretend multi-billion dollar companies and your average worker are on anywhere near even footing. Companies always make a big song and dance about being great places to work. Nobody tells candidates 'you'll be expected to work 60h weeks to keep up with the workload here'. Candidates don't ask pointed questions about this because they'd be immediately disqualified. I know, I've been there.
The only company I know of that's open about their practices is netflix, and they comp appropriately for the risk. All other companies? It's basically word of mouth.
It's the other way around. Why do employees try to game the companies in the first place? Because most, or at least a very large portion, don't give a shit about their employees.
It's not just cloudflare. Amazon had been doing this shit forever (probably decades at this point), to cite an egregious example. As a mere mortal employee, its not like you have a lot of choices.
> This is completely acceptable. When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?
To put it another way: she shouldn't have been dressed like that, it's her fault for being raped.
It's the natural result of "fire the bottom 10% every year".
If that's the rule in your organization, and you have a core group of people that actually know the systems and get the work done, you better make sure you have 10% padding every year, lest you layoff someone important and their friends all quit in disgust. And since competence and institutional knowledge is built over time, that implies a revolving door of new folks coming in and most of it not making it.
Yes, but your performance review is way more dramatic. Being a PIP-boy for life is not funny, but when they know and you know, it gets something of a comedic element.
The easiest way to become a F500 company is to start as an F5 company, then financialize your whole business, stop innovating, fire anyone effective, and give the executives huge bonuses.
This is effective. Therefore, normalization of this plays into the workers' hands, gives them information, and gives economic advantage to honest agents.
I mean, you could compare it to any non-capitalist society, where such treatment of workers is declared unacceptable. But what does this translate into in reality? Such strategies are still effective and provide an advantage to those actors who adhere to them. But since firing workers for their relative effectiveness contradicts the proclaimed ideology, such workers are simply accused of random crimes against the country and executed.
Usually, companies value opex more than capex - opex is much more flexible. That's one of the reasons why printers, coffee machines, companies cars and other things are typically leased.
Not really that simple. Opex gets better tax treatment (you can deduct it in full every year) but people aren't always Opex depending on what they're doing (research tends to be Capex)
Also tax treatment isn't the only consideration for financial engineering: It's easier for a company with a huge capital spend to argue that they're investing in the future and CapEx doesn't hurt EBITDA. On the other hand, some companies get worried about reporting a high "capital ratio" (ratio of capital assets to income).
In reality you can't say categorically that companies prefer Opex to Capex.
Concretely speaking, the FAANG companies are all wildly slashing opex (us) for capex (data centers, TPUs) even as the capex costs skyrocket due to demand outstripping supply.
Programmers are usually capex to be honest, with current tax treatment. When companies switched from data center to cloud they ended up shifting a lot of their compute from capex (buying servers) to opex (paying a hyperscaler for compute by the hour).
Of course if you're in one of the five tech companies building datacenters rather than renting (MSFT, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle) then things are different.
I know a medium sized defense contractor that ultimately had to sell itself a few years because they did this.
They would come recruiting in bulk at our school only to fire the majority within a year to satisfy their stack ranking nonsense.
10 years later, the engineers they were protecting retired and they couldnt find anyone willing to work for them, even people still in school knew the reputation.
Or it was a combined strategy - hire interns who will hopefully be able to replace some higher paid employees at lower cost once they learn the ropes. Then reduce headcount further replacing with AI.
It feels like it was the most beneficial implementing better decision making mechanics by replacing manager with AI, not lowly folks doing actual value creation.
LLM models have better reasoning abilities than these folks....
They are not as good at building an old boys/girls network though who help each other into positions of power and wealth. Companies within companies...
