
Who’s Hiring? Who’s Firing? Checking in on Tech Jobs - tytrin
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/whos-hiring-whos-firing-checking-in-on-tech-jobs-starting-with-bad-news-from-volkswagen#.WDS2ANrN63I.hackernews
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rukenshia
(disclaimer: I work at Volkswagen) Volkswagen also announced that 9,000 new
jobs will be opened up with at least 1,000 of them being in the IT department
in Wolfsburg alone. I wouldn't call this bad news.

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Naritai
I don't know why the IEEE is always such a downer about employment, but this
article is stretching it the furthest I've ever seen. VW layoffs, especially
if they come in the form of factory reductions / closures, could hardly be
counted as 'tech industry'. Then, the actual layoffs that they tabulated at
bottom of article are all significantly less than predicted. I assume it's
tied to their anti-H1B lobbying, but it's getting pathetic.

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rukenshia
It's not even layoffs. Just making use of "Altersteilzeit" (early part-time
retirement) and then not filling the retired jobs.

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aswanson
'zeit' must roughly translate into 'time' in German, based on context. Is that
correct?

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jbpetersen
[https://translate.google.com/#de/en/zeit](https://translate.google.com/#de/en/zeit)

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aswanson
danke

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vdnkh
The most surprising thing to me is that Tinder has 200 employees (and plans to
double it).

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user5994461
That sounds perfectly reasonable.

Rules of thumb: If a business has to operate 24/7 worldwide (and maybe even
have office in multiple locations), it's gonna need over 100 employees.

There is no sane way around that. You don't want to be in a business with less
than that many, trust me ;)

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johnloeber
WhatsApp was operating with 650m MAUs, 24/7, and was purchased for $19
billion.

How many employees did it have? 55.

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user5994461
Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's a good idea ;)

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johnloeber
They were acquired for 19 billion dollars, so they were very obviously doing
things right. Your condescending snark seems misplaced.

Maybe the fact that WhatsApp was colossally successful, more so than nearly
any other startup -- this was the largest ever acquisition of a venture-backed
company -- should get you to update your priors on what kind of scaling
practice is a "good idea" and what isn't.

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user5994461
If you don't mind, I'd rather give a different view of WhatsApp and on-call.

It quickly turns out that WhatsApp could have a nice exit, so it made sense
for some employees to sacrifice a bit of work-life balance, instead of looking
for another job.

Your mileage may vary depending on "How many direct phone calls from customers
does your company get when the service is unavailable for 10 minutes? and how
much money is lost?" We don't have this data on WhatsApp.

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johnloeber
Is there data on what the work-life balance at WhatsApp was like, pre-
acquisition?

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user5994461
Not that I know of.

Do you have experience in 50 people startup growing like mad and going
worldwide? I've been there and I've seen how bad it can be for people
responsible for the critical pieces of the tech. WhatsApp is no magic. Lots of
hard work and elbow grease.

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sjg007
This title was stolen from hacker news.

