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Comment by hashicorporal | Hacker News Reader

We experienced arbitrary layoffs in 2023, followed by an ominous feeling that more layoffs were imminent. However, the announcement of a deal changed the situation.

Now, we are actively hiring for numerous positions.

Personally, I am not planning to stay much longer. I had hoped that our corp structure would be similar to RedHat, but it seems that they intend to fully integrate us into the IBM mothership.

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I really wanted to work at HashiCorp in 2017/2018 and did five interviews in one day only to get ghosted[1]. That experience soured me on HC and its tools but I still admired them from afar.

End of an era.

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[1]: https://blog.webb.page/2018-01-11-why-the-job-search-sucks.t...

What do you expect is the reason this happens? I would suspect your skill assessment after a handful of interviews is sound and most people liked you. Do you think you just run into a person eventually that doesn't vibe?

I read this as the GHOSTING is the thing that bother them. After a full day of interviews, it sounds like. The failure to be hired doesn't sound like it bothers them to me.

If the company gets 30 applicants, 10 of which go to the final round and 7 of those are really good, if they only have 5 openings then 2 really good applicants are not getting offers.

Those two should at least get told they didn't make it.

Oh sure, agreed. That's pretty poor.

Who knows? I wish the hiring team remembered that real-life people are looking for work because they have bills to pay and regular communication is necessary.

Two months ago a founder reached out to me, gave me a coding project, I completed it (and got paid!), spoke with his co-founder, and then...nothing. At least I got paid but man, YOU reached out to ME. I don't get it.

I agree that it doesn't make much sense. You would think if you're even close to being considered they'd want to keep the bridge intact for next time.

I wonder if there is some kind of legal liability involved with sharing feedback with potential candidates? I know this is sometimes the case for referrals/what can and cannot be sad in a reference check, etc.

That sucks and I apologize this happened to you.

It is what it is.

I ended up having to move out of my hometown (Boston) to stay with my wife's friend's family and now we live in CA. I have a delicious loquat tree in my backyard so things worked out, haha!

I used to work at HashiCorp, and was a hiring manager. I know there's reasons why candidates might get given vague answers on why we're not proceeding, but I'd have been horrified to learn someone we interviewed got ghosted. Someone who was so far into the process that they did five interviews?! Inexcusable.

I'm so sorry that happened to you :( I hope you found somewhere else that filled you with excitement.

Thank you.

Personal projects fill the void when $DAYJOB is lacking.

Red Hat has been a very atypical approach. There has been some swapping of teams back and forth but, as far as I can tell (been out of it for a while), Red Hat is still quasi-independent. Still lots of changes (probably most notably because of a lot of growth) but strategic Red Hat areas still seem to be pretty independent.

> Red Hat is still quasi-independent. Still lots of changes (probably most notably because of a lot of growth) but strategic Red Hat areas still seem to be pretty independent.

Still broadly correct.

Broadly independent but filled to the gills with folks who spent a decade or more at IBM before landing at Red Hat. While this has been true of rank and file for years, recently it’s true on the c-suite.

    > filled to the gills with folks who spent a decade or more at IBM before landing at Red Hat

Was this true before the acquisition?

Was probably truer of middleware than other areas. (Which I gather is largely going over to IBM.) Linux had a very significant DEC legacy. OpenShift was essentially greenfield from a startup acquisition (that got totally rewritten for Kubernetes anyway) and I'm not sure I would characterize people in that area as broadly coming from any particular large vendor.

Was HashiCorp ever profitable since its IPO? From here, it says no: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/hcp/financials/

If never profitable (or terrible return on equity), why would you call the layoffs "arbitrary"? It seems pretty reasonable to me.

Why hire people in the first place if you aren't profitable? Seems pretty irresponsible to me. Or have the rules changed?

Yes the rules have changed, seems the idea is to get big fast increasing revenue without regard to profits, and eventually have a great IPO, then one of the following:

1. hope you can sucker someone into buying the company

2. keep the VC $ flowing and continue growing, then loop to # 1

3. worse case, need to start making a profit and hope you can survive until # 1. If #1 does not happen, pray(?).

During this time, the founders are pulling in a great salary.

Following your logic from the other side: Why apply for (and later accept) a job at a company that is consistently unprofitable?

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