(probably an unspoken assumption is that the two actions taught would both start in the same way, so one launches the attack, sees which* line gets closed, and continues in the line which has been opened. Even if you don't have the speed to properly determine the open line for the continuation, it's still possible to successfully run the pair as a mixed strategy and expect to find an opening stochastically)
* the same coach believes the most beautiful action is "feint direct, direct": at first you pretend to straightforwardly touch, but should your opponent fail to defend (because they're expecting a more complex action and are waiting to see where you're really going to attack), you go ahead and turn the "feint" into a real score.
The fact that a champion does rather than holds back or tries to execute complex plans, is the point. They don't overthink - they just go in and give it 100%.
The key is, though, that they do the right thing, and are also willing and able to abort or change plans (again, in the right direction) when the situation changes.
I was in a counter-intelligence unit briefly and there was a mathemtician who spoke to us about the work they were doing to pick targets with the idea that if you can only out one person, who would be the most disruptive. You have all these interconnected but mostly isolated terrorist cells that don't know about each other except through a few people who may not be high up in the command but who are critical for the continuing cohesive existence of that terrorist group of cells and logistics etc.
So the military already was using math to pick targets, this is just the next logical step, albeit, scary as hell step.
She's lucky they didn't execute her. I lived there and had peers pressure me to go to see the Friday executions in Riyadh but these are the type of people they are executing, not rapists and murderers. I can only hope I live long enough to see their oil money run out and watch what happens next. It turns my stomach how they can get these soccer players and golf leagues and all this other sportswashing.
I also lived there and was under the impression that a lot of people slated for execution for crimes against a specific person very often tended to get pardoned / execution stayed by the victim or their surviving family. There was a widespread belief rooted in Islam that pardoning someone sentenced to death was equivalent to saving their life, and this would help assure that the benevolent family members would be accepted into heaven.
I think it's harder to get your execution if your crime is against the state, because there's no one who would benefit in the afterlife from commuting your sentence. (I assume that anyone in power who could has plenty of other subjects to grant leniency to, and don't have any particular religious pressure to take advantage of any individual opportunity to do so.)
He says 33% of hiring managers admit to creating job reqs and advertising them with no intention of filling them so that the existing people on the teams those new hires would go to feel that help is on the way and they don't quit.
But it's a trick to keep people from leaving and to be able to continue to overwork their employees and squeeze out a bit more before burnout.
I'm a witness of that. Both to threaten that you're being replaced once we find someone and to make you think there is someone coming to help. I know for a fact it's the former. Since there was no hiring manager nor HR where that happened, I believe this is a common practice which is being advised to startups at some level. I've seen three or four YC startups do that which makes me wonder if someone is spreading this terrible practice among their network
I thought that's because Corporate wants to show that they are doing good, in fact so good that they look for employees.
Probably Hanlon's Razor applies: «Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.»
In other words, it's a mixture of laziness, some need for employees but not following through, rigid software for job applications, corporate politics and plain stupidity.
I imagine one example how it might happen more or less like this:
- A product owner sees that their team is overworked
- They ask for a job opening or just enter the job description in the software
- They get shot down by someone higher up or they are replaced or fired themselves
- The process starts anyway and nobody is responsible for incoming applications
Yes. About five years ago (so, not new), and for a smaller company. After months of carrying multiple projects myself, including one that deserved at least three more devs on it, I had run out of all the nice ways to plead with management to actually hire someone. So, during a companywide meeting, I loudly and firmly said I'd be out the door in 30 days if they didn't have someone started by then.
They hired someone, I handled the technical interview, I trained him, and then they suggested maybe I should find a new job.
Well, let's see, I had met with my boss, I met with my boss's boss, who was also the CEO, I met with my boss and the CEO, I met with my boss and the CEO and the cofounder. I wrote emails and had hallway chats and met in person. I asked, asked again, more formally outlined the situation, pleaded, asked for an update, and then said they weren't leaving me a lot of options.
Throughout this period they kept promising they were trying to hire but I hadn't seen a single resume or interview.
Most jobs, I'd just bounce and leave 'em hanging at that point. But, I actually liked most of the people I worked with, they just had a terrible CEO that had a bad habit of seeing devs strictly as cost centers. I wanted them to fix it, and this was an appropriate move for that company and the company's culture.
Thanks for your judgement though, wish you'd been there to tell me how to be better.
> Well, let's see, I had met with my boss, I met with my boss's boss, who was also the CEO, I met with my boss and the CEO, I met with my boss and the CEO and the cofounder. I wrote emails and had hallway chats and met in person. I asked, asked again, more formally outlined the situation, pleaded, asked for an update, and then said they weren't leaving me a lot of options.
> Throughout this period they kept promising they were trying to hire but I hadn't seen a single resume or interview.
So, they were clearly lying. Pointing this out publicly like you did probably feels good for the ego and your principles BUT as you experienced, it's not a wise move if you want to actually stay at that company. Nobody likes to be pointed out in public, and unless you are in a position of power, you will be in the receiving end afterwards.
In any case from what you say that company wasn't a good place to be for you, so I hope you found another place.
The case we're discussing is one where they had exactly one developer doing the work of multiple developers, and he was about to quit. He did them a favor by not only staying around to train his replacement, but giving them advance notice of his intent to leave. Considering they hired someone new once he did this, it sounds like he was probably contributing to the bottom line!
Of course you treat devs with total respect and as people who sometimes get sick, or worries or tired- with the presumption that they're contributing to the generation of profit for the business over the long term.
It's not a social club, there's a requirement for devs to do work. Sometimes this work is boring or drudgery and as people we might say we don't want to do this and rather go sit in the sun and chill.
But the social contract is to either submit to both the interesting and unpleasant aspects of the work or go and be some free spirit elsewhere.
I disagree. I worked at a 20 person company where this type of discussion would be acceptable. Granted, the fact that people could bring these topics up without risk, meant things rarely got to that point.
I left for family reasons, but it remains the best place I’ve worked. Its product was leading the field because they actually had open discussions about things and built what people cared about.
Sorry, you didn't say this: were they advertising openings the whole time you were there, but not interviewing?
It seems like the ruse would depend on there being interviews for the role, but interviews are so expensive and disruptive that I don't see someone scheduling them if they're not going to hire
You can often see this even on HN Who's Hiring threads - people post the same exact blobs again and again over the years. I tend to believe that this is a form of masked advertising as well.
EDIT: This is also why candidates should spend as little time as possible when applying for jobs, omitting cover letters and refusing to fill huge forms. The legit job poster companies should understand this and stop requiring cover letters and so on.
I’ve never seen (as far as I know) the whole lying to your own team about hiring intentions, but I’ve been on small teams that aren’t actively hiring but leave stock job descriptions posted from the last time they were.
Yes. Interviewed someone that the team loved. We said definitely hire.
HR said they didn't accept the offer and went elsewhere. What they didn't know is that the person LinkedIn messaged me saying they enjoyed the team, and were disappointed we passed, respectfully asking what I would recommend to work on for their interviewing.
Opinions on whether to reach out after a rejection aside, it highlighted what I already suspected; the job was never going to be filled, and even as the team lead they were lying to me and the team.
When there was yet another round of layoffs months later, the spot remained, unsurprisingly, unfilled.
That is wild. Let me get this straight - the company actively lied to the team in an effort to get their hopes up that help was coming... by actually giving the extra overhead of sourcing a new hire?
Were you guys actively trying to fill the role (screen dozens of candidates, several went through final rounds, etc), or was this just some passive thing where recruiting tried to push someone who looked great?
We ranked candidates out of four, and this candidate was a four across the board. Experience in our tech stack, demonstrated competency, passed the lunch test, etc. The team was eager to get them started because we were desperate for more hands on. The team was at one point 6 and we were short handed, but through people resigning we were down to 4, with me taking the role of senior engineer and team lead.
This was an unequivocal HR lied and kept the mirage of "help is coming don't worry!".
Yes there's overhead of us spending time doing the interviewing, but a few hours here and there once a month is enough to keep the charade going. The applications site would go first to HR, then they'd put resumes in front of me. I always wondered why I couldn't just see everyone that applied and why it had to be filtered first; after this event I understood why. I suspect there was plenty more applicants than I was told of.
At my current job, we had a position that an absolutely stellar candidate supposedly ghosted HR on. Same thing; candidate reached out to me asking about next steps, and I was like, "let me check". Went and asked HR, and was told they'd handle the rest, and not to talk to candidates outside of HR-scheduled interviews. Never heard back again.
That was 3 months ago (and 3 months into the position posting), and the position is still unfilled.
Same question - were you and are you continuing to actively interview candidates?
That's the mystery for me, why put the team through a charade that actively harms their productivity?
The only thing I can think of is the candidate disclosed something that would be a legal red flag and can't really divulge that is an issue without threat of a lawsuit. Or something came up in a background check, but I imagine it didn't get to that point if the candidate reached out to you directly.
The "why" is because people quit environments that are toxic, but hold out if there are signs of improvement. People don't want to quit - it's a large investment of time and investment to job hunt. It's annoying as hell. So if you can string together promises:
- We'll hire more people, it's just so hard to find candidates!
- We're doing bonuses right after evaluations, but we're doing a new evaluation system that's taking a bit longer than we expected this year
- We're just finalizing talking to a customer we'll have them signed next month, we swear
That delays people looking, delays that large investment, and you can extract engineering time with little investment.
If you ran a company that couldn't afford another engineer for a team that desperately needed another engineer, are you going to paint the bleak picture for your team and risk losing those engineers that you have, or lie? If you have morals and say you'd be upfront, great; but that's unfortunately not a universal answer.
Harming productivity only matters for hourly staff (in the minds of bad executives leaders). Salaried folks have to finish the with no matter how long it takes, and it doesn't cost the company more.
No company I ever worked for did this but I have seen this once when looking. A job posting that is basically perpetual for a single role by a relatively large company with a bad hiring reputation. The posting is always up, for this single role, I think for more than a year now, when there's no way you can't find many people that could do that role. I applied and I had to go through some silliness before they told me they have a better candidate. A year later, that job is still posted.
I would guess this practice is pretty rare. There can be stale postings e.g. when a large company pauses hiring but nothing along the lines of what parent is describing.
I've definitely seen evidence of this from a few big name tech employers. Revolving job postings that are regularly re-posted with the exact same details, and it appears that they never actually filled any positions. It's possible that they are hiring a lot of the same job description but these are sort of specialized roles with highly specific job requirements. I have a hard time believing that they are constantly hiring people for a very specific job description and continue to have openings for the same. Seems especially unlikely after they recently had big layoffs.
More likely ghost jobs. I think that they aren't planning to fill unless a highly qualified candidate comes along that happens to be desperate and willing to accept a low offer. When that happens, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they hire them to replace someone who is earning significantly more. Potential for big cost savings at the expense of intangible accumulated institutional knowledge and team cohesion/morale.
I haven't personally seen that. I've seen us open a job and get really bad applicants, or one good applicant who ends up taking another job for whatever reasons, and have it go unfilled for long periods of time. I think we probably could have made the hire with a higher salary or looking in other regions or both, but the company wasn't flexible on those things.
I've also seen my company open applications for a job that is almost definitely going to be an internal promotion rather than a new hire, but for the sake of "fairness" they interview a handful of other people.
Hiring is expensive. It takes a lot of time and energy to do interviews and screens and stuff like that, and usually some higher ups are involved in the process, so wasting their time is probably worse than just not posting the job if you're not going to hire.
As an ML consultant, I’ve seen it happen. It’s hard to find good people and most want to work on impactful things that require big teams, CEOs will tell you to stick around because they plan to hire, soon.
Yes. The tell is when the req has been open for a few weeks yet no one has been interviewed in person (or video) yet. The manager will claim they have, but have they really?
> so that the existing people on the teams those new hires would go to feel that help is on the way and they don't quit.
I don't buy the reasoning/justification.
The HR folks I worked with threw out fake job adverts to gauge the quality of applicants, salary expectations, and ability/speed to fine new hires. Essentially lets you create a few action plans if Jimmy in Accounting gets a better gig, or gets fired for sexually harassing people. Also generates plans / forecasting for layoffs, or windfalls that demand many new bodies.
They certainly can, but to build two you first build one. And if that one is not profitable, why would adding another one make it so? You could say that building 2 parallel tracks is not significantly more expensive than building one, and when you have the 2 you need less slack in the system, so you can have closer to 100% utilization rate. Yes, you could gain some economies of scale, but the fundamental problem remains: if you cross the canal, you just float on water; if you decide to use this alternative, you need to unload the ship, load 20 trains, run the trains for 300 km, unload them and load them on another ship. To be competitive with the canal, you need to do this for about $200k. The $200k should cover the operating costs (fuel, labor, equipment depreciation), the maintenance costs, the insurance costs, the capital costs and hopefully should include some profit.
I've read if it doesn't go away after a couple weeks it's permanent but I've experienced it before where it took a year maybe one time and another time was 6 months of no improvement and then a couple months of dramatic improvement to where what was left was so much lower that when I heard it it makes me grateful and happy because it reminds me of how lucky I am.
