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A comment on Why Layoffs Don't Work. Parent comment

Re:Why Layoffs Don't Work by ltbarcly3 on Sunday March 09, 2025 @04:16PM (#43313284)
The goal when hiring isn't to find someone who is barely skilled enough to just slightly come out as better to have on staff than not. In fact these are often the worst hires as they slow everything down and create work for you to find tasks they are capable of, but it seems unfair to fire them because they aren't totally useless all the time. You hire the best candidate overall, and you are very far from describing that.
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Re:Why Layoffs Don't Work by jamesfinlayson on Sunday March 09, 2025 @09:37PM (#43316045)
Too right. I had an idiot manager who hired the next person with a pulse - we got some money-motivated guy that complained about everything and didn't listen to what he actually needed to do, and my manager nearly destroyed the team by pretending that he was fine.
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Re:Why Layoffs Don't Work by jjav on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @04:58AM (#43330531)
> You hire the best candidate overall

How, exactly, would you do that?

Say you open a new position and you get 100 resumes a day, every day, until you shut down the role and pick someone.

How are you hiring the best candidate overall?

How long are you waiting for "the best"?

How many resumes are you really evaluating per day? With 100 coming in, how do you know you didn't miss "the best" one?

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Re:Why Layoffs Don't Work by ltbarcly3 on Thursday March 13, 2025 @11:25PM (#43359322)
Do you ever get tired of arguing in bad faith?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem literally tells you exactly what to do in your situation. I'm sure someone, probably a professor or fun video on social media has told you about this a dozen times in your life, but if you didn't pay attention you can always Google it or ask ChatGPT https://chatgpt.com/share/67d3a121-13e4-8006-9ae3-625838875e...

2. While I said the goal was to hire the best candidate, this was as compared to someone who is just barely better than not filling the position. Hiring a top 5 candidate is also very good. The argument in GP was (paraphrasing) "I know people that aren't good programmers but they can manage to do little changes to existing code therefore you shouldn't give interview problems these dummies can't solve."

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