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Comment by frellus | Hacker News Reader

This is asinine, discriminatory and unfair. I'd even say it's borderline malicious.

Glad they named and shamed. I would't do any business with this company, nor attempt to work for them.

A RIF has nothing to do with a person's performance .. at least officially. One has to assume it was a business decision only, not performance based, although with a large reduction it seems improbable that the people left would be, now or in the past, under-performers. More than likely, the person being laid off was due to their salary being high, and their function being covered by someone else. Nothing more complicated than that.

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For anyone like you (and me) who says being laid off doesn't mean bad performance you have someone else saying it's good that Meta, Twitter, etc. are cleaning house, getting rid of all the slackers. Those are the folks calling it a red flag later.

The thing, is we want to believe that a company makes careful decisions about whom to lay off. We know it doesn't quite work like that but as you said yourself there can be a bunch of reasons. And with that context you're still looking at the reality that the company didn't deem the laid off workers important enough to keep.

I don't agree with what happened to the candidate here and we are all at risk of being laid off after all, but at the same time we cannot just assume the companies didn't have reasons to select one person over the other. And being overpaid itself might be a red flag for some hiring managers.

What I mean is, we cannot have it both ways, saying RIFed doesn't mean anything while at the same time assuming that companies follow a rational decision process and don't just play roulette.

Wanting to believe layoffs are selective is brainworms.

I've been watching the layoffs affect former colleagues, former workplaces, etc lately - and pretty much all of them are pseudorandom.

Got assigned to a project that's being cut? You could be the worlds strongest worker, a 9001x engineer, you are still gone.

I got laid off along with 30% of the company and 1 month later was contacted by my manager to let me know that he had put me on a “single point of failure, do not fire” list, and someone in HR managed to get some spreadsheets mixed up and I instead made it onto the list of people to be laid off. At this point I already had accepted another offer for more money, and obviously had less than stellar feelings towards the company, so I told them I wasn’t coming back.

Everyone wants to believe that the people and organizations holding their careers in their hands are competent, rational, and trustworthy. Unfortunately that is often not the case.

It can both be true that most of the people who were laid off were done for "performance reasons" and also that it's not rational to reject a candidate because of a "red flag" like being laid off, at least if you are doing any evaluation of candidates yourself. After all, the prior company could have been wrong? Or they value different things?

Totally. Getting RIF’d is indiscriminate. Their loss!

On the flip side, we too can ‘red flag’ Databricks and other companies that operate that way and not work there or buy their products.

I agree with you in that you can’t infer whether it was random or performance related but RIFs first start with underperformers from the last review cycle at a lot of companies.

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