An economic investment as well as one of solidarity. People forget that the EU is a peace project that ensures peace via economic cooperation. This nuance seems trivial but is actually massively important. I can see trust degrading in the US but being fortified across the EU.
Look at Hungary recently, they did a 180 not because of Brussels or Berlin saying they should. Hungarians are sceptical of both. However they do trust the Polish people who they see as genuine peers who are very pro-EU.
They did a 180 on their relationship with the EU, which was the context GP was discussing. Maybe not 180 but definitely over 90, let's say, unlocking billions in funds. Funny that you picked the one major issue that didn't see a big adjustment, and completely out of context.
I think the comment was still correct. Very little will change in Hungary with the new government. I think it’s only a matter of time for them to pick a fight with the EU on some different matter given how the EU’s values (considering most of Western Europe) are still far from theirs.
>Very little will change in Hungary with the new government.
Things aren't going to improve magically in the next few years but the backsliding has stopped, improving things takes real effort and focus. At the end of Orban's regime Hungary is now officially the poorest country in the EU, even behind Bulgaria and Romania which is why so many Hungarians are upset with Orban.
I expect their economy to slowly tick upward over the next few years. Magyar has also stated his ambitions to join the Euro which is the opposite of Orban who wanted Hungary to leave the EU.
They didn't do a 180 at all. Tusk basically shares Orban's entire platform, particularly vis-à-vis the EU. Orban just got caught in corruption scandals.
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.
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".
> 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.
> 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.
>I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world
i.e countries with a very high education attainment rate or high ranking in the human development index coupled with a high fertility rate? There was HackerNews discussion a while back that alluded to the fact the more developed a country becomes the lower the fertility rate.
Because its suggested that solutions like affordable housing, more free time, child care may help in a few situations but largely don't bump the fertility rates.
Developed countries are currently getting by on their immigration rates but as the rest of the world becomes more developed this isn't a lasting solution.
It was a good watch but I don't think there is too much detail to put here. BYD has a lot more debt than they're claiming and their growth was subsidized by the Chinese government in order to buy market share.
Not directly related to your comment, but I'm confused why so many people say "BYD is subsidized by the Chinese government" as some kind of gotcha for why they're "bad". The US government subsidizes farmers. Companies like Intel, Ford, and Boeing all get federal or state subsidies. Tesla's growth can in part be attributed to favorable tax credits. Should we qualify statements about how successful they are with an asterisk that they got favorable treatment from the government?
It's common knowledge that the official status pages don't actually reflect downtime due to SLAs and the status page could be weaponised against them. So comparing them is useless.
You rarely see "outages" even if that what happens in reality, in marketing speak it's referred to as 'degraded performance' i.e. the cheque is in the post, your data is in the tubes on it's way, it's just slow! A business oriented lie.
Far more useful are the 'independent status pages' maintained by enthusiasts that are unaffiliated with whomever they are measuring.
>Far more useful are the 'independent status pages' maintained by enthusiasts that are unaffiliated with whomever they are measuring.
unless, like this one, they:
- treat "some copilot chat models are failing" and "teams notifications app down" as a major outage, the same as git operations or actions failing... those are very obviously nowhere near the same operational impact and its dishonest to group them as the same
- aggregate downtime so that there is greater than 1 day of possible downtime in a 24 hour period. if 3 services are down for the same 1pm-2pm time period, that is being counted as 3 hours of downtime despite a developer only being impacted for 1 hour.
it would be cool to have an accurate status page. the only two options seem to be company-owned status pages (incentivized to under-state impact) and karma-hunter/meme status pages (incentivized to make as much red as possible for retweeting or whatever).
All of these financial 'privileges' are based on the US having the world reserve currency and petro dollar. The US in the unique position of being able to 1. Print Money. 2. Externalise inflation. 3. Ensure a base load demand for it's currency based off a worlds need of oil.
These privileges were supported wholeheartedly by all the worlds 'middle' powers e.g. Canada, Australia, Japan, Germany, Spain, Sweden etc. Thus establishing a world order.
The US has seemingly turned on all these middle powers for no reason, decided the world order needed to change when it was already #1. The US will of course still be a superpower but it is going to lose it hegemony.
So many people, including very intelligent and well-informed ones, do not understand this. The US gets truly outsized benefits from having the reserve currency.
I subscribed (and paid) for a year of Pro. They gave me 1 month on the basis that a payment was missed on the second month. They simply stopped providing Pro and continued to take a monthly subscription for the next year (Stripe allows subscriptions to be fixed in the background). I must have changed cards that specific month.
I spoke to customer service who told me any sort of refund or complementary tokens was impossible and that I should have been paying closer attention to how much money I was giving them. So I shut down the subscription and now pay Claude $200 a month and deleted the account.
Genuinely was shocked at poor customer service can be with EU services sometimes compared to US ones. That said I will keep trying and exploring EU options, hopefully a new EU LLM giant emerges in the next few years.
I don’t know whether there’s a US vs. Europe difference on this, but I failed to get my (European) bank to do this a while back when Tesla continued to take money for a subscription after I’d given the car back. (I had to kill that credit card and write the small amount off in the end.)
While chargeback laws are a bit more restrictive in some EU countries, you should always have the option to ask your bank to block future charges, without changing your card.
A couple of years ago i found out netflix account was stolen, email address changed but card continued to be associated with the account. I couldn't login. Called Amex explained the situation and asked to block future payments. They refused on the basis that I agreed (originally) for netflix to take the subscription fee monthly so I had to contact netflix to solve to do this. Amex. The age where consumers have power over who takes money from them is gone
It's parody of French rural hunters, and in this section, it's about the mental gymnastics they have about differencing themselves from the "bad" ones, while the rest of the sketch you see them shooting at any movements, littering the forest, explaining multiple hunting "accidents".
An economic investment as well as one of solidarity. People forget that the EU is a peace project that ensures peace via economic cooperation. This nuance seems trivial but is actually massively important. I can see trust degrading in the US but being fortified across the EU.
Look at Hungary recently, they did a 180 not because of Brussels or Berlin saying they should. Hungarians are sceptical of both. However they do trust the Polish people who they see as genuine peers who are very pro-EU.
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