A few times it's been brought up to limit their posts, but HN seems insistent on not making any feature updates here to pause their auto-posting for portfolio companies, which drives down trust/quality amongst product people when a portfolio company doesn't have the best track record of hiring/retention.
That's not how it works - there is no "auto-posting". Companies have to actively add their listing to HN each and every time.
It is possible for a company to conduct layoffs and still be hiring; in fact, I'd say it's more common than not. Companies need to shift personnel (role, location, seniority, etc) all the time as they grow and change.
Is this actually a contradiction? Even if you have too many people, that doesn't necessarily imply that you have every person you need for every project.
For example, the new hotness now is to put "AI-powered" in front of everything, so suppose you decide to pivot your business towards that, so you need to hire some AI/ML scientists. You also have too many software engineers whose only skill is CSS, and you've determined that you don't have enough work for all of them, so you decide to lay half of them. This will lead to the (seemingly) contradictory situation of doing "massive layoffs" while also doing "massive hirings".
Now, this is of course giving a lot more charity than a lot of these companies are entitled to. Companies like Microsoft and Google purposefully overhired in 2021 and 2022 and then laid off tens of thousands of people once interest rates got high again, because apparently their CEOs are so utterly incompetent that they didn't know that economies fluctuate and maybe they shouldn't be put in charge of trillion dollar corporations.
I don't know anything about Flexport, but what I'm trying to say it that it doesn't seem inherently contradictory to me.
After I saw the hiring ad, I searched for this post. But now I'm not sure this was wrong of them. When the layoffs happened, the CEO said they would be cancelling all their 200 job openings "except for a handful of roles" that aligned with the company's short term goals. That seems to be true, there are only 20 job postings on their website and the majority of them are in sales. Lastly the ad said if I remember correctly "Flexport is hiring sales people," it wasn't advertising some general lift of their hiring freeze.
It is interesting that they are hiring a Sales Manager when at least one Sales Manager was part of the layoffs[1], but there are reasonable explanations for this too.
I heard a story from some peers today about management in their company basically chastising the engineers for not speaking up about lack of resources to get the defects board under control.
Well, everything with the defects board was going just fine until the day of the layoffs a few months back.
These managers basically expect their underlings to manage up and tell them what to do. But also, don’t you dare speak up and criticize a layoff.
I think many companies have been doing layoffs simply because their leadership heard that other companies are doing it, a fad trend no different than beanie babies and fidget spinners. Fast forward to a short few months later and all of a sudden they figure out that those employees they sacked did actual work.
I am always amazed when they are layoffs, and the people in charge are like <surprised picachu face> at the fact that important things aren't getting done afterwords.
