What an asshole. I don't have a huge objection to discontinuing unprofitable products, but bad-mouthing the previous management because they had a different philosophy of R&D is beyond the pale.
Cool. Money is an AI algorithm for allocating resources, and an extremely buggy one-- some people have very little, and others have a lot, for literally no good reason-- due in part to the massiveness of the problem, but also to the secrecy and lack of transparency.
By getting some insight into what's going on, we can debug the system.
Or: as those languages and their communities mature, people find themselves using Google (a last resort) to find things out, because it's easier for them to use the documentation and tool set.
I don't know which explanation is correct. I'm just proposing one of many alternative explanations.
I don't mean to be hating on the people. I hate the culture of casual sex. The culture is disgusting. The people are mostly not disgusting, just misguided. I don't mean to imply that they're morally depraved people for participating in something stupid; I've certainly done my share of idiotic and embarrassing things and don't consider myself immoral for it.
Really, though, I don't care what people do, as long as it's not in my face and doesn't affect me. I'm five years out of college, so I don't really care that much. I think it's a shame what a farce college has become for most American students, but that problem comes from a lot of factors, most of which have nothing to do with sex.
And some people wouldn't date a woman who isn't Catholic/Jewish/Hindu/whatever. You're within your rights to choose whom you date, but it doesn't really reflect anything about the people you're refusing as much as about yourself.
I didn't say it does.
Having a one-night-stand is stupid. Does it make someone a whore who should be ostracized? No. Is it a behavior that, in my estimation, a rational person would be ashamed of? Yes. Is it worse than the worst or stupidest thing I've done? Probably not.
Because suburban isolation, widespread tolerance of social alcohol dependence, a crass consumer culture, and widening wealth inequalities (leading to social class anxiety) have bred a generation of social retards who can't muster up the courage to do things properly.
[Edit: As acerbic and judgmental as this comment sounds, I admit freely that I was one of those social retards at ages 17-20, although I didn't hook up-- little interest and even less ability.]
Silicon Valley became disgustingly expensive after building substantial momentum in technology, gaining enough strength that entrepreneurs would live there in spite of the quality-of-life/cost-of-living problems.
New York needs something short of a miracle to become a startup hub. It's not "golden handcuffs" that keep people in the banks. It's the fact that the cost of rent for what would pass as an average apartment in most of the country is more than the median American's after-tax income.
Also, although finance is contracting, it's not quants who represent the bulk of the layoffs, but floor traders and M&A types. These people are useless to a startup, unless that startup wants to target the financial industry (which has sufficient resources to develop NIH syndrome, so good luck). Quants are generally being kept.
New York apartment brokers are a frivolous class of overpaid, lazy parasites who collect 12-17 percent of a year's rent for doing virtually nothing. They also handle the nasty work of ethnic screening (which is, yes, still present in the real estate industry), if you've ever heard of a "code 22" building.
Brokers for engineers (and bankers, traders) exist on the business model you described. They're called headhunters. They won't work for equity.
In a way, it's an admission of impotence. When you fire someone, you're saying that you don't have the resources or power to turn that person into a success at your company.
The "resources" angle is crucial. Large companies can afford to have a non-producer for 6 months and train him up to being able to contribute, and they generally should. Startups usually can't afford this.
Of course, this excludes the cases where a person is fired for doing something seriously wrong or unethical. But I imagine it's much easier to fire in those cases.
I think you need both. You need to detect, and rectify, problems as soon as they occur. It's much better to catch potentially badly-fit employees (which doesn't mean they're necessarily bad, but just not right for the position you're trying to fill) in the interview process. However, there are subtle problems (people who can't handle large projects, or who don't document code, or who interview well but are actually unethical) that can't be caught in the interview process at all.
This is oddly similar to the compile/run time distinction in bugs. You want to push as many of your bugs to compile time as possible (not-so-subtle plug for static typing) but it's impossible to have catch all of them in compilation; such is the nature of bugs. Similarly, you want to catch as many problems as possible in the interview process, but can't get all of them.
It depends on the circumstance. In a small startup, it's going to be a given that a certain fraction of the people you bring on are inappropriate for the company, and that you can't predict this in advance. Fire them, before they do too much damage to the codebase, morale, et cetera. In a larger company, firing is much more of a last resort, because people can always be moved around, and because if the only problem is that they aren't producing, it's probably because they weren't mentored and this can be rectified-- large companies usually have enough time and resources that they shouldn't need to fire many people, except when things are so bad that layoffs are necessary.
I have a friend whose test is to sort a linked list using any sorting algorithm (it can be bubble sort) and any language (excluding trivial calls to library functions). It's fairly hard in C, trivial in ML or Haskell, and this is the point of the test: if you're able to use a high-level language, this is a benefit.