
Ask HN: Who's firing? - patmcguire
I feel that the previous iteration of this (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12851987) was interesting. A group of people looking together might also be very appealing to some companies.
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TheSwordsman
I think it'd be interesting to do this on the 15th of every month. Have the
1st of the month be the "Who's Hiring", and the 15th the "Who's Firing".

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pvg
The problem is, "Who's firing?" is not some useful dual of "Who's hiring".
While not 'gratifying intellectual curiosity', the who's hiring threads are a
useful monthly exception since people do actually look for hires and for jobs.

"Who's firing" would just be a way to have a monthly rumors and gossip thread.
There are already sites upon sites for that.

~~~
patmcguire
What would be a useful dual? "Who's shutting down"? I want to know:

1) A high-level overview of companies I've kind of heard about that didn't
work out for whatever reason, or are have hit big roadblocks. That's useful
information.

2) Where to find people to actively reach out to, if there's a big group of
people leaving there are good people looking for jobs. A lot of teams get
formed from the ashes of other teams.

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pvg
For 1, postmortems of various kinds are linked here regularly. So that's
covered

As to 2, I don't think that's what the site is really for. Who's hiring is
already a sanctioned exception (there's also one for YC company job posts).
Either way, though, such threads are much more likely to generate rumors and
gossip than actionable information and you're likely to keep seeing it flagged
off the front page. Might be worth emailing the mods if you feel it's that
important but I'd be surprised if you can talk them into it.

~~~
patmcguire
For the first, the occasional postmortem isn't that useful. I hoped to know
when things go away as easily as I can find out when they're coming out.
There's a massive push on creation that takes care of the first one, but after
only occasional breathless praise slowly turning into dead silence for almost
everyone. Maybe 1/100 writes a postmortem and that goes too deep too narrowly.
Or they are silently successful. "Gets to front page of HN" is not a great
filter.

Second would have to be "Who's Looking" or something, I guess it's done the
other way around so candidates don't get hammered with 10k recruiter emails.

There haven't been great responses on this Ask HN, and looking back on the
previous one it was also worse than I remembered. I've accepted that this
isn't going to work out in practice.

~~~
pvg
"Who's looking" variants already exist. The postmortem thing, I suppose if you
want more of them you're probably better off finding some like-minded people
and setting up a forum of some sort - fb page, twitter tag, subreddit,
whatever. That way you don't have to rely on the broader topic range and
limited frontpage space of HN.

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ejcx
Apparently Rackspace is firing today:

[http://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/sources-confirm-
layoff...](http://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/sources-confirm-layoffs-at-
rackspace)

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neom
Quite the researched article by the weekend meteorologist.

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logicallee
sorry to be dense, could you be explicit about why you call them the "weekend
meteorologist". (I read the article and their about page -
[http://news4sanantonio.com/station/contact](http://news4sanantonio.com/station/contact)
and Googled for "weekend meteorologist" in case it's some idiom - apparently
it's a normal job title?
[http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Weekend_Meteorologis...](http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Weekend_Meteorologist/Salary)
\- anyway I'm more confused than before I Googled that phrase. Why are you
calling them that, or what's the joke I missed?)

~~~
neom
Weekend meteorologist reporting the news about a cloud provider. Seemed
amusing to me. However, I won't pretend I have a particularly good sense of
humor.

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spyspy
I'd be curious to hear from those who posted in the last thread. Are you still
working for a failing company? What happened in between then and now?

~~~
debunn
I posted about the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
in the last "Who's Firing" thread - which was my employer. All of the 100+ of
us affected by the outsourcing have been let go as of January 31st, with some
already having lined up full time employment, others taking some time off, or
some like myself who are actively exploring potential jobs.

If you're curious about the company, it won't fail - having $170B in
investment assets means you can pay people to fix whatever is broken - but the
Tata Consultancy folks who were hired to replace us are definitely having some
problems taking over all of the responsibilities we have left behind. I forsee
a great deal of pain in their near future, but I'm sure they'll be fine in a
few years - and I honestly wish them well.

As for me - if anyone out there is looking for a remote (or Toronto based) 17+
year IT veteran, with a sys admin / web development / DevOps skillset - feel
free to send me an e-mail at debunn at yahoo dot com.

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ashconnor
The current rumour is that there's going to be another round of outsourcing
toward the end of the year.

Also as expected the transition from ETS to TCS is not going well. Everyone
I've spoken to that has direct contact with them is not pleased.

Our union (OPSEU) is meeting regularly to find out how to prevent this type of
action in the future.

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spyspy
That URL does not work. Here's the working link -->
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851987](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851987)

~~~
patmcguire
Thanks, I fixed it

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strig
Rubicon project just laid off a bunch of staff and closed the Toronto office.

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DoofusOfDeath
That sucks. I wonder if someone crossed them.

If they can just hold out until March 15...

(ducks)

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jzl
If this was the first dot com cycle we could just go to fuckedcompany.com to
keep instant tabs on this. It was extremely useful when everything started
going south.

~~~
NpappaG
Similar idea, CB Insights has a tracker for companies doing downrounds:
[https://www.cbinsights.com/research-downround-
tracker](https://www.cbinsights.com/research-downround-tracker)

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jcoffland
Both Mozilla and Pandora are firing in early 2017.

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zerr
But why are they hiring at the same time?

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cdr
Once there is more than a single product being produced by an organization,
hiring and firing is not generally correlated.

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throwawayy881
Canonical / Ubuntu recently let go a few of their Juju team.

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throwaway4949
Any more details from Canonical on this or which part of the team?

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throwawayy881
IIUC Juju networking and a couple of managers.

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JumpingWombat
Oracle is laying off a decent chunk of its hardware teams

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40acres
Rumor has Intel will be letting a few folks from Europe go. They were supposed
to be a part of the larger actions taken last year but due to European labor
policy had been delayed.

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greenyoda
In today's news, Zenefits laid off half their staff:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13608376](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13608376)

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simplyinfinity
Telerik/Progress fired ~110 people from their Sofia offices not long ago

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Kalium
Rackspace just laid off a bunch of people at their HQ in San Antonio.

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shivaodin
Akamai is laying off a decent chunk of people.

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fiiiiiiredddd
dashbid

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neximo64
This is vindictive and silly. Keep in mind some of us here are aware the
employee can be as involved in the firing as the company laying off staff.

~~~
popey456963
I think you're missing the point. A significant proportion of the mentions in
here and the last one were about major laying offs. When you have to lose >10%
of your staff, you probably shouldn't blame the employees.

This is just an interesting counter-post to the "Who's Hiring", allowing
people to see both sides of the coin.

