[HN Gopher] Layoffs Don't Work
___________________________________________________________________
Layoffs Don't Work
Author : indigoabstract
Score : 285 points
Date : 2025-03-09 10:07 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thehustle.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (thehustle.co)
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| The other question is why C-suite does even need to tell the
| respective division management to lay off employees if the actual
| goal is cost reduction. Shouldn't they impose a budget reduction
| target instead and trust them to allocate the savings between
| capex, opex and salary budget according to specific situation at
| hand?
| wffurr wrote:
| >> why C-suite does even need to tell the respective division
| management to lay off employees if _the actual goal is cost
| reduction_
|
| You answered your own question. For a lot of layoffs, cost
| reduction isn't the goal; it's disciplining the workforce who
| were increasingly assertive at work about direction and
| conditions.
| dartos wrote:
| It's honestly probably not that evil.(generally. There are
| definitely evil orgs out there)
|
| It's just the easiest way to make the stock price go up.
|
| Layoffs caused twitter to bump in price. Same with Microsoft
| when they laid off all those game devs.
|
| C-suite don't care about profit or losses in tech, just the
| stock price.
|
| In the 2010s, hiring devs increased stock prices. In the
| 2020s mass firings do.
|
| It's just money. Simple as.
| slappyham wrote:
| "It's just money."
|
| And real people with real lives and families and steadily-
| increasing expenses. Fuck you, "it's just money"...
| michaelt wrote:
| The C suite wants to take the blame, so the people you deal
| with face to face can honestly say the decision was taken out
| of their hands.
| matwood wrote:
| > actual goal is cost reduction
|
| For many companies the largest cost is labor. Also in many
| companies, managers amass power by the number of people they
| manage. If the C-suite doesn't explicitly push for layoffs they
| will likely not happen, causing them to not reduce costs as
| quickly as they wanted.
| jordanb wrote:
| Nah I've been in meetings before where it was asked "if we
| can find these ten million in cloud costs and licenses, can
| we retain staff?" and the answer was "no, because those are
| different buckets."
|
| Regarding "managers try to amass staff," I've seen some of
| that for sure, but it's not universal and acting like it's
| some kind of iron rule of organizations is an op.
|
| Most managers are evaluated based on the _impact_ their
| organization is having, not the size of it, unless the firm
| is incredibly poorly run.
|
| What _does_ happen, and where these layoff edicts come from,
| is that the executives fear the management is more loyal to
| their directs than they are to leadership. They feel that if
| they want to inflict something on the workforce they have to
| "force" management's hand, because otherwise management will
| resist.
| tetromino_ wrote:
| But then you will still get short-sighted layoff decisions
| getting made, only by directors instead of C-suite.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| They used to be a once a decade "save the company during a
| recession" move. Now they seem to be a quarterly "manage earnings
| per share" move.
| dustingetz wrote:
| software development costs are out of control the whole
| industry is one big grift, there's no accountability anywhere,
| 20% of the devs are doing 80% of the work, the business would
| instantly terminate the 80% for cause if they could only
| discern the difference, but they can't, because the business
| side is also a big grift with the exact same problem all the
| way up to the founders recursively
| only-one1701 wrote:
| Good lord I'm not sure I've ever heard it put so succinctly.
| Well done.
| HappyJoy wrote:
| And, of course, you can site a reference for those
| statistics. That aside, I don't agree with your overall
| sentiment.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| So much of the software industry is just an outrageous
| combination of inexperience and "YOLO". Every problem can be
| solved by just giving AWS another $100,000 this month because
| we don't have time (and don't know how) to make even
| basically optimized software. So just burn the gas and
| electricity and give more money to the YAML merchants at
| Amazon.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| I still have PTSD from around 2012 when a company I worked
| for and loved very much (chumby) imploded financially and
| almost all of the employees including myself got vacuumed
| up in an acquihire-type deal into a streaming media company
| that was building a would-be netflix competitor.
|
| Us former chumby developers were working primarily on the
| front-end across a variety of embedded-system-like devices
| (writing code for early versions of 'Smart' TVs from the
| likes of Vizio, etc) while another team was creating the
| backend and whenever they would show us the infrastructure
| diagrams of what they were working on they would just place
| a "HADOOP Server" wherever they had no idea how they were
| going to solve some large difficult problem, it was
| effectively a stand-in for "magic happens here".
|
| Got to the point where there were a hilarious number of
| layers upon layers of little cylinder icons in the system
| design titled "HADOOP Server" all interlinked in non-
| decipherable directed graphs.
|
| I'm pretty sure every single one of us left the new company
| within 6 months, I lasted about a month and a half.
| thrance wrote:
| I'll start to call this mindset the "DOGE mind-virus": "80%
| of workers are doing absolutely nothing and can be cut with
| no repercussions whatsoever". Sure buddy.
| billy99k wrote:
| Well, it worked for Twitter. Lots of people screamed that
| Twitter would implode withing 6 months, after the massive
| cuts. There was some scrambling for a while, but I haven't
| noticed any issues. In fact, they've added tons of new
| features and Grok AI (which is much better than
| competitors).
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Last I heard Twitter is so desperate they've resorted to
| suing former customers who stopped buying poorly
| performing ad space.
|
| Edit: removed supposition
| Nextgrid wrote:
| This has nothing to do with the tech side of things
| though? In fact the business was always on shaky grounds
| even before the acquisition.
|
| From a tech perspective, the company was indeed massively
| bloated with tons of people clearly not contributing
| anything.
| slackernews9 wrote:
| There go the goal posts, whooshing by at the speed of
| sound.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| My understanding is that twitter's struggles are/were a
| result of advertiser and customer boycotts, not site
| functionality.
|
| People were aghast at the brutality of the layoffs, and
| ideological direction. However, my impression was that
| there was in fact a tremendous amount of bloat.
| thrance wrote:
| If by worked you mean steadily losing users for the first
| time in the history of the platform and a 0.2x of the
| company's valuation, then sure. That worked.
|
| And what's that about Grok AI being better than the
| competition? I think I misheard.
| astrange wrote:
| They fired all the mods and sales reps, so the company no
| longer makes money because it can't sell ads.
|
| They mostly haven't added new features either, just
| turned on some flags for features in testing.
| jmholla wrote:
| They also removed old features. Or can we look at threads
| without being logged in? It's clear people who say
| Twitter didn't change don't remember at all what Twitter
| was like.
| dartos wrote:
| Got news for you.
|
| It's not the devs who are bloating development costs. It's
| the layers of management making hour long meetings to discuss
| button placement.
|
| It's the hours of retros, design meetings, and skip-levels
| designed to remove any personal investment or sense of
| ownership from everything.
|
| Since so few individuals are trusted with real decision
| making power, you need a lot more people to achieve some kind
| of consensus/buy-in so that you can ship anything.
|
| The devs are at the extreme bottom of this totem poll.
|
| It's like blaming construction workers for houses being
| expensive.
|
| And, ofc, that goes without mentioning the multimillion
| yearly bonuses for C-suite, but we can just forget about that
| and blame the lowest ranking corporate employees (devs)
|
| Source: I worked at a large tech firm for many years and saw
| this over and over again.
| ozim wrote:
| Second that, scrum teams having 3 business analysts, scrum
| master, product owner, ops/it, ux designer, 2 testers, 4
| developers is basically how it goes.
|
| Blaming developers in such scenarios is silly.
| ttoinou wrote:
| I agree with your point but at the same time developers do
| need to be managed and they don't want to manage themselves
| dartos wrote:
| I'm not saying just leave everyone to their own devices,
| but some individuals should be able to have ownership and
| make decisions without layers and layers of process.
|
| Ofc decisions can have consequences, but that's what the
| high pay should be for.
|
| It's not a black and white issue and I don't think you
| need to present it like one.
| ttoinou wrote:
| A more risky job should be compensated more ? It'd be the
| opposite, if it's risky then the variance of the income
| should be greater (success = more income)
|
| I don't want to present the problem as black and white
| but merely express a simple idea : developers DO want to
| be managed to simplify their lives and focus their time
| on more important things for them
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Right every step of every dev task is ticketed, scheduled
| and measures within a millimeter of its life in many orgs.
| The people working the tickets aren't to blame when it all
| goes wrong in the big picture.
|
| I've worked at shops with agile coaches, consultants,
| product teams, multiple management layers, etc all
| attending agile planning/retro/blab sessions. They always
| had really strong opinions on the minutae of each footstep
| (tickets/sprint), but couldn't speak to where the path was
| to take us. Essentially zero quarterly let alone annual
| planning.
|
| A lot of management these days is the equivalent of driving
| and saying "I'll decide where I'm going when I get to the
| next stop light", repeated every 2 weeks.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> I 'll decide where I'm going when I get to the next
| stop light_
|
| Surprisingly, this type of iteration can actually work;
| but the caveat is that the people behind the wheel, and
| reading the maps, need to be very good, and also,
| experienced enough to make sound decisions. If mediocre
| (or inexperienced) people try it, it's a disaster.
|
| From what I can see, the entire tech industry has been
| institutionalizing mediocrity, so this type of approach
| is not really available.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Right
|
| If you're copying this approach from someone who copied
| it, after hiring an agile coach and reading the phoenix
| project, you are likely definitionally mediocre.
|
| Also it's not a one size fits all solution even for the
| competent. Requires a more direct interface and two way
| dialogue with users than most devs actually face.
| dartos wrote:
| It doesn't sound like the type of iteration matters at
| all.
|
| If your leadership is good and competent, they can drive
| the company any way they feel and have it work.
|
| The most productive I've been in my career was when my PO
| put all tasks that needed to be done in a Google sheet
| and the whole dev team spent a week just picking tasks
| off the list. It ended with us shipping our app on time.
|
| No planning, no grooming, no nothing. It was a high
| trust, high ownership team.
|
| I miss those days.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Generally you see stuff like this turn into bikeshedding
| and/or sales features only. Way too often I see companies
| push for new features because they will generate sales
| that in the long run cause more customer loss because
| performance and stability was neglected to implement
| them.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's because it's done by folks not up to snuff.
|
| Lots of that, going 'round, these days. Companies are
| firing (or driving off) all the people that can do it
| right.
| oblio wrote:
| Heh, and there's at least one FAANG where it's not even the
| layers of management.
|
| They've just removed a huge amount of manager discretion
| and initiative through multiple top-down dictates that are
| pretty much killing any low level desire to really innovate
| and try risky initiatives.
|
| IBM, but with same level product market fit as IBM had for
| its mainframes, but in this case for markets 100x more
| important for the global economy.
|
| It's just sad.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| It's the devs too. Do you really need an army of developers
| to build a web app or put text onto screen? No, a small
| team can easily handle that much faster and at higher
| quality without all the framework bullshit.
|
| You also have to consider that developers are not sales
| people. They are a cost center.
| slackernews9 wrote:
| Got news for you, too: it's both. It's the useless
| management, it's the "developers" who send me screenshots
| of stack traces while they cry and soil themselves because
| they have no clue what they're doing.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| The twist is that when you layoff the 80% who supposedly only
| did the 20% part, you pretty much still have to hire the same
| amount of people to do that 20%.
| jajko wrote:
| But with lower rates, and with abysmal rampup period (or
| even afterwards).
|
| Don't blame managers, they just follow money, why else
| would they work those crappy jobs. Blame idiots who think
| short term bonuses should be massive instead of some long
| term performance and investment of oneself in company's
| success.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Then by the same principle, don't blame the devs, they
| are just drifting as most people would do.
| dustingetz wrote:
| Blame the board, full stop. "Follow the money", there is
| really no other possible answer. Some set of people are
| responsible and to determine who that is, you read the
| corporate ledger, you read the financing contracts, you
| read the bylaws and governance structures, and what they
| literally state is that the board of directors are
| responsible for directing the company. The board is
| responsible. If _you_ wish to be a director and
| responsible, then go incorporate, now you are the board!
| You are responsible! Good luck!
| gedy wrote:
| > the business would instantly terminate the 80% for cause if
| they could only discern the difference
|
| There's many many companies and leadership who want their big
| empires of people. I'm not too sure they want to fire 80% or
| be more efficient.
| dv_dt wrote:
| The big tech companies paying the largest salaries are raking
| in billions in profits. How does this square with the view
| that software development costs are out of control?
|
| Layoffs today seem more like execs following management fads
| for easy visible actions and this data would suggest that the
| actions are actually detrimental to company profits. Juice
| the numbers for a quarter but add another long term drag to
| the company
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Just because a company can be overall profitable doesn't
| mean costs aren't out of control. If you make enough
| profits, you can literally feed money into a shredder and
| still come out ahead if you earn profits faster than your
| shredder can eat them.
| slackernews9 wrote:
| So maybe we don't take jobs away from people with
| families and mortgages then, if all we have to do is
| sacrifice some profits, yeah? Gee, maybe the company can
| only make $9 billion instead of $9.5 billion, and
| everyone can stay employed.
| dv_dt wrote:
| What you're describing isn't out of control, all
| businesses have income and expenses, good management is
| watching both sides and building the organization that
| connects the two in the middle.
|
| Sudden drastic moves if the business is delivering
| profits seems like the out-of-control action to take. If
| the business salary structure is off, or if you need to a
| different skill mix there are ways to shift that in a
| profitable business without sudden layoffs damaging the
| very organization that delivers your current profits.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Running a business is less and less about actual business
| outcomes and more about juicing stock. And the stock market
| itself is divorced from reality as companies whose output has
| gone down over time sees higher valuations because the owner
| has cult appeal. So everything gets worse and more expensive
| year over year while feckless suits get sloshed over company
| dinners.
| malfist wrote:
| The stock market is like a sports betting pool where the
| players are allowed to bet on themselves
| kibwen wrote:
| The stock market is just a predictions market, and any
| predictions market at scale destroys the subject of its
| prediction.
| mhog_hn wrote:
| What is the long term effect on accuracy when a large
| mass simply moves XX% of their monthly paycheck into top
| ETFs?
|
| I don't disagree with what you said though, simply
| sharing thoughts - I think it leads to markets being more
| sensitive to macro strategies rather than actual
| fundamentals
| gruez wrote:
| >What is the long term effect on accuracy when a large
| mass simply moves XX% of their monthly paycheck into top
| ETFs?
|
| Such investments are typically market cap weighted, which
| means their effect on stock prices are neutral. Moreover
| there's still room for hedge funds (and other
| sophisticated) investors to engage in price discovery.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| Can we have a different kind of stock market which forces
| participants to consider long term outcomes more? E.g. no
| HFT firm should be able to make a profit from such a
| stock market. Selling stocks earlier and often should
| result in a penalty or percentage being taken away as a
| fee. As a retail investor I would love to use invest and
| forget strategy based on trends observed in such a stock
| market.
| gruez wrote:
| >E.g. no HFT firm should be able to make a profit from
| such a stock market. Selling stocks earlier and often
| should result in a penalty or percentage being taken away
| as a fee.
|
| Maybe by "HFT" you only mean "those evil hedge funds that
| are pushing companies to chase next quarters' earnings",
| but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with high
| frequency trading. Market making[1] is high frequency
| trading, and basically involves offering to both buy and
| sell and given stock, and pocketing the spread. That
| increases liquidity, making it easier for other traders
| to buy/sell stock without taking a huge loss. It's
| unclear why you'd want to ban this, or how you'd
| distinguish this from whatever evil HFT you actually want
| to ban.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_maker
| nthingtohide wrote:
| I am not saying HFTs can't sell but there should be
| penalty for higher frequency. It means they have to craft
| algorithms which will take longer term view of stocks
| (and their fundamentals) rather than ignorance of other
| participants
| gruez wrote:
| Market makers make fractions of a percent per trade. How
| will your "penalty for higher frequency" deter traders
| that prey on "ignorance of other participants" or
| whatever, but don't put market makers out of business?
| mistercheph wrote:
| Easy, bye market makers! It's like a layoff, some good
| will end up getting culled with the bad.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| All these HFT stuff reminds me of chinese event where
| people send each other gift money as a good will gesture.
| Revenue is high but no meaningful transaction has
| happened. The money is just being exchanged between the
| same top HFT firms. And the best of our minds are
| fighting it out in the arena of algorithms rather than
| creating real world value.
| gruez wrote:
| >Revenue is high but no meaningful transaction has
| happened. The money is just being exchanged between the
| same top HFT firms. And the best of our minds are
| fighting it out in the arena of algorithms rather than
| creating real world value.
|
| Liquidity is "real world value". Being able to buy/sell a
| stock instantly without a massive premium/discount makes
| stock ownership for the average person possible. Contrast
| this to an liquid market, like buying houses, where you
| need to spend months house hunting, and pay a 6%
| commission on top.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/research-
| publications/resbul...
|
| Conclusions and policy implications
|
| To return to our initial question: does stock market
| liquidity deteriorate when HFTs compete? The results
| suggest that competition among HFTs increases speculative
| high-frequency trades, which could lead to a
| deterioration in market liquidity.
| gruez wrote:
| Taking the study at face value, it only says that
| competition among HFT is bad. It also specifically admits
| that "As market-makers, they can update their price
| quotes fast when news arrives and provide liquidity to
| the market. In this case, the low-frequency traders in
| the market - the investors - benefit from lower
| transaction costs". In other words, at best it's
| advocating for some sort of monopoly for HFT, rather than
| getting rid of HFTs entirely.
| thijson wrote:
| It's not really high frequency trading in the sense of
| day trading, it's a bit of a misnomer. I would say it's
| actually low latency trading, the number of trades isn't
| huge. It ensures that linkages in the market operate
| quickly. Linkages between a stock price and its
| respective options. Or linkages between an index ETF and
| its components. The price discovery process should be
| fast, it benefits all of the market participants.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Benefits how? Even if we are all 'market participants',
| the time investment between a hobbyist and career
| investor is rarely equal. An LFT/low frequency trading
| market would egalise this discrepancy.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/research-
| publications/resbul...
|
| High-frequency traders (HFTs) are market participants
| that are characterised by the high speed with which they
| react to incoming news, the low inventory on their books,
| and the large number of trades they execute. All this is
| possible for HFTs because they use automated, algorithmic
| trading, which enables them to analyse markets and
| execute trades in under a millisecond. The high-frequency
| trading industry grew rapidly after it took off in the
| mid-2000s. Today, high-frequency trading represents about
| 50% of trading volume in US equity markets. In European
| equity markets, its share is estimated to be between 24%
| and 43% of trading volume, and about 58% to 76% of
| orders.
| callc wrote:
| Consider no stock market. Just keep the company private.
|
| Honest question, why do so many companies strive to go
| public?
| mistercheph wrote:
| Access to large pool of capital
| nthingtohide wrote:
| There are other places where people can gamble
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >forces participants to consider long term outcomes more
|
| I remember many years ago telling a senior executive that
| I had concerns that some of the steps we were taking to
| boost current quarter financials would negatively impact
| business performance in the long term. He just chuckled
| and said, "there's no such thing as the long term, only a
| never ending series of current quarters".
| astrange wrote:
| This subthread is nonsense. As a retail investor, HFT is
| good for you and lowers your prices. They have a bad
| reputation because of the book Flash Boys... but
| basically nothing in that book was true.
| echoangle wrote:
| > where the players are allowed to bet on themselves
|
| Wouldn't that be insider trading? You can't short your own
| company before announcing bad things to make money from it.
| slackernews9 wrote:
| If you think the rich people haven't invented a way
| around those pesky "rules"...
| echoangle wrote:
| Well people are also betting on themselves in sport
| betting so if we account for ignoring the rules, I don't
| see why the qualfiier that betting on yourself is allowed
| would be needed.
| cjaackie wrote:
| Shareholders are expecting layoffs now, it's kind of sickening.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think it is because most companies stopped firing.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Research has consistently shown he was right about layoffs:
| They're damaging to companies...
|
| The research is probably misleading. The damage was done to
| companies when the over-hired people who couldn't add enough
| value to justify keeping them employed. The layoffs are just when
| the damage is recognised.
|
| It is like borrowing a huge amount of money, using 90% of it it
| to buy prawns and leaving them out to rot for a few days. The
| damage is now done, the borrowed money is lost. It won't be
| recognised for a while though. There is even enough left over to
| pay an interest payment or two to string everything along. But
| the damage is done.
|
| A lot of people treat economics as though damage didn't happen
| unless someone acknowledges it. That isn't how it works. Not
| acknowledging that something is value-destructive just means more
| value is destroyed by the time people are forced by market forces
| to confront the truth.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| 'The research is wrong because I said so' isn't exactly a
| compelling argument, and certainly not a strong enough one when
| you've been in the modern workforce long enough to recognize
| how badly layoffs are conducted at just about every company.
| I've seen enough 10x engineers get laid off to know that the
| idea that companies have any idea as to who is actually
| productive or not is just false.
| roenxi wrote:
| 1) But I included an actual argument and, furthermore, it
| assumed that the research is correct.
|
| > I've seen enough 10x engineers get laid off...
|
| 2) That is sensible for the company. They have no idea how to
| use a 10x engineer, as can be detected by the fact that
| they're having layoffs. They don't know how to create value
| in the market and they're being forced into a position where
| they have to squeeze what they can out of what assets they
| have.
|
| It isn't economically rational for them to employ 10x
| engineers in that sort of environment. The global and local
| optimum is to let those engineers go so they can do something
| valuable somewhere and keep some more 1x style engineers on
| the cheap.
|
| If a company is having layoffs, that is the invisible hand of
| the market writing on the wall "THIS MANAGEMENT TEAM DOESN"T
| KNOW HOW TO MAKE MONEY AT THE MOMENT, STOP GIVING THEM
| IMPORTANT RESOURCES". That includes 10x engineers.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Unfortunately as I've seen countless times, it's also
| writing on the wall to the management team "TIME TO MOVE ON
| CAUSE DAMAGE TO ANOTHER COMPANY", I don't know why we don't
| expect management's head on the chopping block. If a
| captain orders a course into an iceberg, idk why we can't
| just hang the captain and course correct.
| Muromec wrote:
| Because nobody orders hanging themselves.
| Eextra953 wrote:
| That's how I feel about it too, the times I've been
| around layoffs management and the executives all talk
| about a difficult economic environment and making the
| organization leaner by firing a bunch of IC's. Never once
| have I seen a C level say hey we steered the company in
| the wrong direction its time for new management or hey
| our CFO failed to communicate the economic environment
| and caused us to overspend so we're going to look for a
| new one.
|
| I know it's ridiculous to expect them to blame themselves
| but the fact that we just accept this lack of
| accountability from executives/management in the
| corporate world is insane to me.
| ghaff wrote:
| Execs go on to "pursue new interests" or "spend more time
| with family" all the time. They may get pretty good
| packages to do so but it absolutely happens.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Because the captain owns the ship. Or is the best buddy
| of the person that owns the ship, and can blame
| subordinates in closed-door conversations.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| > 2) That is sensible for the company. They have no idea
| how to use a 10x engineer, as can be detected by the fact
| that they're having layoffs. They don't know how to create
| value in the market and they're being forced into a
| position where they have to squeeze what they can out of
| what assets they have.
|
| Okay, now explain why every company is encountering these
| issues where they're frequently laying off people and are
| unable to create value. The frequency of layoffs is
| diametrically opposed to your thesis because otherwise
| companies would behave in a way to reduce layoffs. Such as
| hiring fewer employees and encouraging longer term
| retention.
|
| > If a company is having layoffs, that is the invisible
| hand of the market writing on the wall "THIS MANAGEMENT
| TEAM DOESN"T KNOW HOW TO MAKE MONEY AT THE MOMENT, STOP
| GIVING THEM IMPORTANT RESOURCES". That includes 10x
| engineers.
|
| This is basically the Just World fallacy but applied to the
| free market. If something occurs then it's justified as a
| perfectly rational action of the invisible free hand of the
| market. In reality layoffs are rarely conducted by the
| people most equipped to do them, but via a mandate from
| heaven that you must cut your team for the sake of Number
| even if you're one of the most efficient teams in the
| company.
| brigandish wrote:
| > now explain why every company is encountering these
| issues where they're frequently laying off people and are
| unable to create value.
|
| Creating value is hard.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Seemingly executives being held accountable is even
| harder, as it rarely happens
|
| Edit: Please reply with concrete evidence of widespread
| accountability of executives
| trescenzi wrote:
| This isn't how all layoffs work though. Some, yes they are due
| to over hiring and a failure of management to plan. They are
| likely necessary for survival of the firm and generally last
| course of action. Although even those come with a cost to
| current and departing employees which harms the business.
|
| But the ones being discussed in the article are the consistent
| ones. The ones you do while you're ahead to make your balance
| sheet look better. Those come with a temporary balance sheet
| boost and all of the negative effects of any layoffs.
| roenxi wrote:
| > But the ones being discussed in the article are the
| consistent ones. The ones you do while you're ahead to make
| your balance sheet look better.
|
| That has to be matched with a strategy of intentional
| overhiring though, and the damage is being done there. That
| is the insight that should be drawn from the research -
| intentionally doing something silly (in this case,
| overhiring) is a classic form of waste and economically
| destructive. Layoff or no layoff, the problem is the
| management team has set up a situation where they believe a
| big chunk of their workforce is unproductive.
|
| This does raising the question of why boards and shareholders
| tolerate these clowns. To me the obvious answer being that
| the major central banks have a history of printing money and
| handing it out to asset owners, so hiring competent managers
| for said assets is a lot of trouble for limited gains - even
| weak managers are enough to drink from the money hose. But
| who knows, maybe the analysts think that a small amount of
| sillyness averts a greater problem.
| gruez wrote:
| >But the ones being discussed in the article are the
| consistent ones. The ones you do while you're ahead to make
| your balance sheet look better. Those come with a temporary
| balance sheet boost and all of the negative effects of any
| layoffs.
|
| This feels like a "no true scotsman" argument. The headline
| of the article is literally "Why layoffs don't work", not
| "why consistent layoffs don't work". The only mention of
| "consistent" layoffs were when referencing Jack Welch's
| management style, but that was more of an attempt to argue
| that layoffs are bad by citing the worst possible example,
| than trying to introduce nuance between the types of layoffs.
| The studies cited also did not distinguish between the type
| of layoffs.
| trescenzi wrote:
| Clickbait headlines aren't anything new. While a better
| headline like: "How the Layoff Culture that Started in the
| 80s and Spread to the Rest of Wall Street is Actually
| Harming Business's Long Term Prospects" would be better,
| punchy headlines like this one spur clicks and conversation
| as seen by this thread.
|
| I believe we took different things from the piece and I
| imagine you'd disagree with my better headline. I
| understood the piece to be telling a story starting with
| Welch and Dunlap of how layoffs as a way to improve numbers
| actually damage those same numbers in the long term.
| andrewlgood wrote:
| > But the ones being discussed in the article are the
| consistent ones.
|
| I worked at GE when Jack Welch was there. First of all we
| never had a systematic firing of the bottom 10%. That is a
| myth. We ranked everyone each year and clearly identified the
| bottom 10% but they were not always fired. The manager did
| have to have a development plan for these individuals.
|
| More importantly, GE did have consistent layoffs. I assert
| this was a good thing. I vividly remember asking an EVP at GE
| Capital when I first joined GE why we did this. It seemed
| inhumane. Wasn't it better to try and fix the so-called 'C'
| players? His response fundamentally changed my view on
| hiring, leadership, and firing. He told me two things. 1)
| Hiring people is always a gamble. The best
| interview/onboarding processes will not produce 100% success.
| There will people that do not have the skills that are
| needed. There will also be people for whom GE is simply not a
| good cultural fit. 2) In good times, when a GE business unit
| is doing well, they always over hire. People working 50 hours
| a week want to work 40, process problems that have built up
| need to be addressed (similar to tech debt), etc. Over time
| this leads to bloat and inefficiency.
|
| For these reasons, consistent layoffs make sense for the
| company. They also make sense for the employee. By not
| waiting for an economic downturn and then making dramatic
| cuts, the exiting employees would have an easier time finding
| the next job as odds are the economy would doing well.
| Particularly in the case where the person was not a good fit
| for the GE culture, they learned this and could find a better
| fitting role elsewhere. And GE was great on the resume back
| in those days (sadly not so today). If we waited for the
| downturn, then the exiting employees would be looking for a
| new job in a bad economy with everyone else who had just been
| laid off. Not a good situation.
|
| Finally, an additional point I learned later by observing
| when and where we made headcount reductions. GE made many
| bets on new markets, new products, etc. We had to if we were
| to grow by 10% each year (GE Capital's rigorous requirement
| for business and strategic plans). The successful GE leaders
| understood is was easier to grow revenue to achieve 10% net
| income growth than to cut expenses. Unfortunately, not all
| new business ventures worked out. In those cases, we had to
| make a decision to shut them down (all new ventures had off-
| ramps). As a result, some people were repurposed, but others
| had to be let go. I posit that is consistent with the tech
| approach of "fail early, fail often." In industries with
| significant people required to try a new approach, the
| consequence of failing will be layoffs.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| This would be more true of management did not play BS with the
| numbers constantly.
|
| I worked at a firm that for 2-3 years straight would report
| great Q1,Q2,Q3 numbers.. tell employees it's looking like a
| good year. And then Q4 report a total wipeout loss that negated
| the quarterly earnings and swung the company to flat or a loss.
| Whoops, sorry, no raises, cutting bonuses.. and need to do some
| layoffs.
|
| Behavior like this reminds us that the numbers are not real
| real in a scientific sense, but only in a relativistic
| accounting sense.
| no_wizard wrote:
| And to top it all off executives never have to eat the shit
| they caused in the same way the rest of the workforce at the
| company ends up having to
| hommelix wrote:
| Similarly when goals are linked to earnings and the company
| reports adjusted earnings... So changing the earnings by
| disregarding some expenses or some sales out of the
| calculation. The one in charge of this adjustment can play to
| allow or dismiss bonus for the year.
| marto1 wrote:
| > A lot of people treat economics as though damage didn't
| happen unless someone acknowledges it.
|
| This is what I call the TV effect. People are trained from an
| early age, by consuming media, to only construct what is "real"
| by what is announced. And it's not just economics, but all
| sorts of aspects of life.
| woopsn wrote:
| You don't know what you're talking about. People are fired when
| they can't add enough value to justify being employed. Sweeping
| industry-wide layoffs are different. Eg the "damage was done"
| to the aviation industry in 2001 due to plummeting demand, due
| (obviously) to new fears and hassle inhibiting travel; the
| damage currently being done to companies in the economy is from
| interest rates, inflation, trade uncertainty, stock
| manipulation, ...
| austin-cheney wrote:
| > You don't know what you're talking about. People are fired
| when they can't add enough value to justify being employed.
|
| That depends upon the employer. Layoffs occur for a plurality
| of reasons and the persons selected for termination are
| selected by various different criteria that may include
| quotas or random selection.
| slackernews9 wrote:
| Look, honey, another nerd who thinks the meritocracy is real!
| Get the camera!
| nativeit wrote:
| Is it not incumbent on the company who hired the employees to
| ensure they are utilized sufficiently? Why imply it's the
| worker's fault for their own mismanagement?
| nativeit wrote:
| This all sounds like the post-mortem justifications of a
| sclerotic executive suite.
| gruez wrote:
| >Why imply it's the worker's fault for their own
| mismanagement?
|
| I'm not sure how you got the impression that OP implied it's
| the worker's fault. If during the 2021-2022 boom, some
| startup hired a bunch of junior programmers for $200k/yr, I
| think describing those people as "people who couldn't add
| enough value to justify keeping them employed" is a fair
| assessment of the situation. It doesn't imply that it's the
| junior programmer's fault, any more than it's not my "fault"
| if I'm asked to play a musical instrument with no prior
| experience, it sounding terrible, and people asking me to
| stop.
| therealpygon wrote:
| Some people will really do a lot of mental gymnastics in order
| to consistently blame workers instead of laying the real blame
| on poor leadership for company failures. If your company is
| failing because Tammy isn't a "rockstar" at her job, you have a
| terrible company.
| rainsford wrote:
| I don't see much reason to think mass layoffs are typically the
| result of over-hiring rather than a reaction to changing
| circumstances that are different than when the hiring
| originally happened. The article opens with a perfect example,
| the constriction of the US air travel market following 9/11.
| The people most airlines fired as a result weren't "over-
| hired". Their hiring made sense at the time and they were fired
| when circumstances changed. I'd argue this is likely more often
| be the case than actual over-hiring, since it's easier for a
| company to see if they can actually utilize new employees _now_
| than it is for them to predict the future.
|
| In cases like that, the layoffs really do seem likely to be
| damaging to the companies. If circumstances change for a
| company and they can no longer effectively use all their
| employees, the most obvious solution is to get rid of
| employees, but it then makes it far more difficult to recover
| when positive opportunities present themselves. I think
| companies trick themselves into believing that since hiring and
| firing employees is relatively quick, it's a good tool to adapt
| to changing circumstances in either direction. But that ignores
| the time it takes for a new employee to become fully productive
| and the increased difficulty/cost in hiring new employees if
| your company has a reputation as an unreliable employer. It
| also ignores the potential boost to productivity that can come
| from employee loyalty and job satisfaction and security.
| ghaff wrote:
| The latter points are true. But it's also the case that
| radical reskilling for very different job roles (with
| possibly rather different market salaries and, honestly,
| different from many people's job preferences) is tough too.
| Probably hard to come up with reliable rules.
| slackernews9 wrote:
| Mmm maybe they shouldn't have hired them in the first place
| then. Ever think of that, you miserable waste?
| Fargren wrote:
| I have tried and failed to understand what is meant by "layoff
| due to overhiring", in the context of Software Engineering.
| When an engineer is employed in a successful project, they are
| incredibly profitable. A handful of engineers can write and
| maintain products worth millions of dollars. Big companies,
| which are the ones we discuss when talking about "overhiring"
| should be capable to find or create projects where an engineer
| will be at least modestly profitable. And having an employee
| creating a small amount of profit, who might eventually be
| moved to something that's better, is certainly more profitable
| than firing him and paying severance.
|
| Note that here I'm talking about firing good performers because
| you have "too many" of them. Firing bad performers because the
| estimated cost of training them is not justified, I can
| understand.
|
| The only explanation I found satisfying is that investors
| heuristically care about profit per capita(ppc) as well as
| total profit, and employees who don't produce _enough_ profit
| reduce ppc and thus investment to point the opportunity cost of
| firing them aligns. You'll make investors happy, which will
| raise valuation, more than what you are losing from the lost
| profit. But this is not "rational" in a full information
| economic sense. It's essentially the company virtue signaling
| that they are capable to fire if they had to, even at the cost
| of actual dollars.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Layoff are like hammers: When needed, in the hands of someone
| skilled, they work perfectly well. But such situations are sadly
| rare, compared to frustrated idiots grabbing hammers to get their
| quick "Hulk Smash!" dopamine hits.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| When it is your money making payroll, than the perspectives
| rapidly shift.
|
| If your Labor doesn't tangibly produce quantifiable profit,
| than you must furlough staff to stay in business. Assigning
| fault in such situations is a fools errand, as everyone suffers
| losses in the end ($18k to $45k in lost training resources per
| person etc.)
|
| Best of luck, =3
| malfist wrote:
| But surely the billionaires in their lavish lifestyles, they're
| the ones that really know how to run a frugal enterprise.
| csomar wrote:
| The layoffs are not the issue. It is the decision makers who took
| the two decisions to both over-hire and then mass-fire shortly
| after. GM is a great example. The company was the largest and one
| of the most innovative car manufacturers in the world. It doesn't
| stand a chance against BYD today and it is not by a lack of money
| (though maybe with a C-suite change).
|
| So my opinion is, yes, the damage is done (or being done) but
| like GM, it'll probably take 10-15 years until we are in the
| visible territory. Maybe a bit shorter because this is tech.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| GM is a great example, Intel as well, that its rarely the
| engineers fault. You can have great talent but if management is
| dead set on bad decisions over & over, theres nothing to be
| done.
|
| And the decision to overhire/overfire, set bad strategy, etc
| all resides in the C-Suite who rarely fire each other or
| themselves when it all goes wrong. It's only the employees that
| suffer for every mis-step.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > It's only the employees that suffer for every mis-step.
|
| They benefit for the overhiring mis-step.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Not necessarily. If you give up a good job to join a firm
| that has over-hired, its only obvious in retrospect that
| you took a bad risk.
| _benj wrote:
| This hits home. I wish there was a way to gauge
| "retrospect" before actually suffering from it. I'm now
| usually quite weary of "we've had to get yet another loan
| of 60 mil, after 6 years in business because we don't
| know how to make a profitable business" also known as a
| series C or whatever.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| These are great because often the founder managed to take
| money out at one round of funding or another and is
| insulated from downside.
| billy99k wrote:
| I don't work full-time for startups, because of this. I
| was contracting for a startup last summer for about 6
| months. They paid really well, but after researching the
| company, they were on their 3rd round of funding. The
| estimated yearly profits were a sliver of this, meaning
| they were burning through VC money hoping for an
| acquisition or somehow massively increasing profits. The
| product was also in a very crowded space with lots of
| competitors.
|
| They had 3 other contractors working on the same
| functionality and they were all let go within a couple of
| weeks, because I could get it done 2X faster and without
| many integration issues.
|
| I would have gladly kept working as a contractor, but
| when I refused a full-time work offer, they cut all
| contact off with me.
|
| I would talk to the FTE frequently and they were always
| overworked and on multiple teams.
| ctb_mg wrote:
| > one of the most innovative car manufacturers in the world
|
| Off topic, but I'd like some more specific thoughts regarding
| what you are aware of for specific automotive technologies that
| GM has innovated over the past decades, to make this statement.
|
| Intuitively, GM cars do not do well internationally, have been
| known to have creaky interior build quality, have silly
| features like turning the reverse lights on when you unlock the
| car in a parking lot, and are not competitive on a scale of
| luxury compared to their European and Japanese counterparts.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| I agree with you that most American cars are junk. I hate all
| these same features plus others like the weird headlight
| controls, parking break on the floor in non-trucks, not to
| mention the loose feeling brakes and steering.
|
| Traditionally, GM sold other models overseas through brands
| like Holden or Opel, but these have all been sold off or shut
| down over the past decade or so except in China. GM now has a
| much heavier reliance on trucks and SUVs in the North
| American market. They sell some of those same product
| overseas still, but in much smaller quantities than before.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| STFU about GM. People who buy their cars love them, and I don't
| trust folks that HN would like to be the designers on the C9
| corvette.
| dehrmann wrote:
| If not for tariffs, we'll all be driving BYDs in a decade.
| lukashoff wrote:
| Because layoffs are not done to make company great but to make
| sure shareholders and execs preserve their wealth. It's never
| about company or people or technology - it's always about money,
| power and wealth.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I remember hearing a take on layoffs that I think is pretty true:
| When you fire the bottom 10%, you lose another 10% who are from
| the top performers. The destruction of psychological safety for
| everyone at the company is irreparable, and you start to bleed
| your most productive talent, too.
| sejje wrote:
| Why do you lose 10% of your top performers?
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| because they see the company struggles and is not loyal, as
| top performers have plenty of options they will be more
| likely to take a better offer when it comes along. Top
| performers will not leave the same day but bleed out over a
| bit longer timeframe. The most popular example is woz
| hesitating so much to leave HP because HP was loyal to
| employees and woz was loyal to HP. Imagine the same situation
| when HP had just let go 10% of employees, he would not have
| thought about it twice.
| Muromec wrote:
| Because they have a good chance of hiring a better employer
| and will either do that or stop being your top ten percent
| eschneider wrote:
| Because people will often see people who they don't perceive
| as low performers getting lumped in with 'low performers' and
| laid off. At that point, you start looking for management
| that seem to know what they're doing.
| sejje wrote:
| But only top 10% start looking?
|
| This all sounds like a hand wavy hypothetical.
| tmoertel wrote:
| Everybody starts looking, but it's the top performers who
| get disproportionately more offers and leave.
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_effect
| Sammi wrote:
| Because disloyalty breeds disloyalty and distrust breeds
| distrust.
|
| The top people have the best opportunities elsewhere, so they
| leave first.
|
| Even if they don't quit outright, they are likely to quiet
| quit, because why put in the effort when it is rewarded with
| disloyalty?
| EPWN3D wrote:
| Top performers have options and value stability. They also
| know that they rely on their manager to accurately reflect
| their work up the chain.
|
| Some percentage of top performers report to deadbeat
| managers, so in an environment doing mandatory layoffs,
| they'll know that it doesn't matter how much they knock it
| out of the park, their manager will screw them. So of course
| they'll leave.
| sejje wrote:
| If you're a top performer stuck under a deadbeat manager,
| how are you able to signal to new companies that you're a
| top performer?
|
| I read posts here all the time about how hard it is to
| hire. How do top performers distinguish themselves as they
| go out for new jobs? When did this become easy?
| meesles wrote:
| > How do top performers distinguish themselves as they go
| out for new jobs?
|
| During an interview process, and by using your network.
| Top performers aren't usually slinging applications
| through LinkedIn in my limited experience
|
| > When did this become easy? It isn't, they're referred
| to as top performers for a reason. It's easier for folks
| who excel in their fields, and that holds true across
| domains.
| rwmj wrote:
| The secret is that top performers are hired by word of
| mouth, they don't go through the usual processes.
| ghaff wrote:
| As others here are saying you know the right people.
| Which is probably a pretty unsatisfactory answer and
| seems very unfair for those who don't.
| Eextra953 wrote:
| I don't know if I'm a top 10% employee, but I'll share how
| layoffs influenced my decision to leave a job of 5+ years. I
| started looking for a new role after they announced the
| layoff of about 200 people in my organization. When I finally
| got an offer, I kept going back and forth on staying and
| negotiating or accepting the offer. There were many other
| reasons why I left, but a huge factor were the layoffs. I
| just kept thinking, they already had layoffs, what's to stop
| them from laying me off next? It's also a crappy feeling
| thinking that you/your team can be on the chopping block at
| any time.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Top performers are generally pretty sharp. If they recognize
| the company is struggling and decide they have a better
| future elsewhere then that's where they'll go.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I have only ever quit jobs in response to layoffs. Layoffs
| demonstrate to me that the company is apparently low on cash
| if they need to fire people to make ends meet. If they are
| not low on cash, it means that they will arbitrarily fire
| anyone in order to pump up their stock.
|
| Though I've never personally been laid off, it's a black mark
| on the company that I think you can never recover from. It
| means I will never trust anything said at a quarterly all-
| hands. The projections they give us employees are spun to be
| more positive than they really are.
|
| During COVID, my company told us that we were going to be
| able to save money by breaking the lease on our office
| building and stop paying for amenities like the snacks in the
| break room and catered lunches (since nobody could use them
| anyways). This, they said, should save us enough money that
| we don't need to lay anyone off!
|
| 10% of the company was laid off a week later. The next day, I
| would later discover, the company applied for a PPP loan:
| they had laid people off pre-emptively so that they wouldn't
| be penalized for it next year when they sought to have their
| PPP loan forgiven.
|
| It illustrated to me that you can't trust leadership, ever.
| Once a company initiates a layoff, it's a permanent black
| mark on that company
| danny_codes wrote:
| Anecdotally layoffs leave a bad taste. I worked at a smallish
| company that laid of 20% going into covid and within 2 years
| most of the best talent churned out.
|
| It gutted moral, basically.
| mock-possum wrote:
| I think because - if you fire a poor performer, everyone kind
| of gets it - they weren't doing a good job, they're a drain
| on company resources, they've got it coming, basically.
|
| But lying off isn't firing someone for performance - it's
| admitting "we don't have enough money to pay you"
|
| And that's something that should be scary to everybody in the
| company.
|
| When your shitty coworker gets fired, you shrug and say,
| yeah, saw that coming. When your shitty coworkers get laid
| off, you look around nervously and think phew, l lucked out.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Companies churn through people constantly. Google famously has
| an employee tenure of like a year[1]. Most companies that
| subscribe to the Jack Welch "fire your bottom 10% yearly"
| philosophy don't usually declare a media stock-pump "layoff"
| but are just letting go of purported non-performers constantly.
| And there are a lot of "top 10%" performers who are very happy
| that the so-called deadweight isn't kept around just for some
| foolish notion of "loyalty".
|
| Sometimes layoffs are unfair, and sometimes the wrong people
| are let go. But often it's entirely necessary and the right
| people are let go.
|
| [1] - Which makes the whole gruelling, multi-month hiring
| process positively _ridiculous_. It would be much better for
| this industry if companies hire fast and fire fast, instead of
| delusions that they 're finding the magical employee base that
| will be with them forever.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I think if you look at companies like Citadel, which
| routinely fire the bottom 10% as part of the job description,
| it attracts a certain set of people who actually do feel
| "safe" in that environment. The trouble comes when you break
| your norms about layoffs.
|
| Also, Google's median tenure of <1 year was due to hiring,
| not employees leaving. In other words, that number included
| people who hadn't left yet. I think if you look at people
| leaving Google, average is about 3 years.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >Also, Google's median tenure of <1 year was due to hiring,
| not employees leaving
|
| Google would have to be growing at >300% per year for this
| math to make sense.
|
| But even if it's 3 years ({X} doubt), that's still
| cartoonishly low for a hiring process that drags on for
| months and months.
|
| >I think if you look at companies like Citadel, which
| routinely fire the bottom 10% as part of the job
| description
|
| Almost all tech companies target firing/pushing out a
| considerable percentage of employees per year. It actually
| is incredibly common, even if it usually doesn't make the
| news. They used to do it overtly via stack ranking, but now
| they just do it more quietly. Microsoft punted 2000 "low
| performers" in the first two months. _Brutal_ firings with
| zero severance, immediate cancellation of health coverage,
| etc.
| surajrmal wrote:
| The Google tenure stat is misleading because it was taken at
| a time when the company was growing 20% per year. The actual
| statistic worth looking at was how long a person who is
| leaving had been with the company on average at the time of
| leaving or what percentage of the overall headcount leaves
| per year. While I don't feel comfortable sharing those
| numbers, I can confidently say they lower than the industry
| norm.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| The _industry norm_ is incredibly short tenures, and often
| when it starts increasing, it 's paradoxically when the
| company is on the track towards complacency and eventual
| failure.
|
| https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/why-googles-high-turnover-
| rat...
|
| This isn't some Google specific thing. The cargo cult "look
| at our super exhaustive, endlessly demanding hiring
| process" is a farce _everywhere_. It 's actually a bit
| paradoxical because it actually selects for employees who
| don't want to actually stay with you, they just want to be
| able to say they were willing to endure your gauntlet.
| moregrist wrote:
| Perhaps in your segment of the industry.
|
| I've worked in places where people stuck around for years
| because they believed in the company and technology and
| wanted to successfully ship a product. In fact, I still
| view repeated 18-month stints as a bit of a red flag.
|
| It's a big industry. There's a difference between a norm
| and something that a sizable subset of people do.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I've seen this happen. I worked at an extremely efficient
| company that had a great product. We got acquired, and within
| months, were part of the acquiring company's yearly mandatory
| layoffs. They fired a bunch of (apparently random) people to
| meet the quota. This absolutely destroyed us. Morale was just
| gone.
|
| Within six months, about a quarter of our employees, mainly top
| performers who could easily find other jobs, left voluntarily.
|
| The whole thing self-destructed within another year, and the
| product we worked on was abandoned.
| marto1 wrote:
| > had a great product
|
| > We got acquired
|
| Can I just ask about the reason for this? Was it owners
| wanting off the ride?
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Owners made half a billion and got high-ranking positions
| at the buyer.
|
| Buyers bought it because they had a very specific problem
| that the product was designed to solve, and thought that it
| would be a competitive advantage to deny the solution to
| their competition. On paper, it was a good decision.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Classic capitalist efficiency right there.
| encom wrote:
| >yearly mandatory layoffs
|
| That sounds grotesque. Who would choose to work at a company
| with that sort of bullshit dangling over your head?
| ghaff wrote:
| Tons of people have gone to work at companies with various
| stack ranking schemes. Most people need jobs.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Enron was famous for this. Supposedly it's a practice that
| Jeff Skilling learned at Harvard business school, where the
| bottom 10% were flunked no matter what their absolute GPA
| was
| slackernews9 wrote:
| I mean, being homeless kinda sucks.
| jarsin wrote:
| I don't think its only psychological safety. If the top
| performers lose staff that did the mundane crap and now they
| have to do it they start to really pay attention to what the
| management is actually doing.
|
| Every layoff I have ever survived the staff inevitably ends up
| talking about how so and so manager and his favorite buddies
| are still out golfing every friday. Why the f are they still
| here etc.
|
| This resentment builds and builds.
| andrenotgiant wrote:
| > After the early-2000s dotcom bust, Bain researchers found that
| stock prices for S&P 500 companies that had no layoffs or laid
| off less than 3% of their workforce increased an average of 9% in
| the next year. Meanwhile, stock prices were flat in companies
| that laid off between 3%-10% of their workers, and prices
| plummeted 38% for companies that laid off more than 10%.
|
| Failing companies go through layoffs. Companies like Sun
| Microsystems, Kodak, Sears, Circuit City, Kmart all went through
| lots of layoffs. But everyone knows that's not what killed them.
| marto1 wrote:
| > But everyone knows that's not what killed them.
|
| Another addition I'd like to add here is more often then not
| wrong people get booted while the "dead weight" tends to stick
| around and becomes even deader due to a motivation fall from
| the layoff. So maybe it doesn't kill, but for sure exacerbates
| an already bad situation.
| fx1994 wrote:
| We are a small team in big company, and management that made
| wrong decisions is still somewhere there but not my direct
| management, still getting same paycheck, car, cards and
| benefits but new managers (that accepted to take over and got
| brand new car for 100kEUR, cards and bonuses, bells and
| whistles) started to layoff workers so we know this is the
| end for my team, and of course they will do whatever it takes
| to "save the product", but not fix the the real issue... lack
| of good developers to fix terrible bugs in our product.
| acdha wrote:
| That's really the key part: if the managers who created the
| problem are still there, layoffs will just make it worse.
| There are cases where getting out of a dubious business
| line can lead to long-term benefit but I've seen that a
| handful of times compared to losing useful people while the
| bad managers failed upwards.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That's basically the story of Philips. They go through a
| tough period and choose to divest a "dubious" line of
| business to focus on higher margin products. The new
| company, freed of Philips management, goes on to surpass
| the revenues of the parent. That's how ASML and NXP were
| born. Signify (Philips lighting) is getting reasonably
| close.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If your small team in a big company does not directly
| generate money, then you'd definitely be ripe for
| elimination. Time and time again we've seen examples of
| trams that are critical to supporting various revenue
| generating parts of the company while not directly making
| money themselves get cut as an "obvious" way to save money
| when only looking at the books. Been there.
| e12e wrote:
| > Time and time again we've seen examples of trams that
| are critical to supporting various revenue generating
| parts of the company while not directly making money
| themselves get cut as an "obvious" way to save money when
| only looking at the books.
|
| Love how your typo turned into a beautiful metaphor for
| infrastructure being cut.
|
| Save the trams!
| Boldened15 wrote:
| Some are kind to eng ICs, you're not laid off from the
| company just given time to join another team. As you can
| still be a high-performer with context on company
| culture/tech stack while on a non-revenue-generating
| team.
| da_chicken wrote:
| The thing is, ending a product that's not making money
| shouldn't mean eliminating the workers. Those were people
| you picked, brought in, and have adapted to your culture.
|
| It always strikes me as weird when a product fails and
| the decision is to eliminate everyone from the product
| manager down... and then make no other changes. Then they
| bring in completely new people for whatever the new
| product line is. Sometimes, sure, an individual or group
| might cause a product to fail that should otherwise
| succeed. But it's weird to default to the production
| team. Is it a design problem? A maintenance problem? A
| product price problem? A sales and marketing problem? A
| management problem?
|
| Like, the Pontiac Aztek did not do badly because one
| welder from Mexico screwed it up. It failed because it
| was ugly. It was ugly because the styling didn't survive
| the requirements to use the same parts as the Buick
| Rendezvous and the same basic platform as the Pontiac
| Montana. The process of making that vehicle fit into GM
| at that time killed the product. Today the Chevrolet
| Equinox, a direct descendent, is one of the best selling
| vehicles on the road at a time when there's a lot more
| competition.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Workers cost money. Layoffs don't just happen, they
| happen when management is under pressure, usually because
| they won't make payroll in a couple months, occasionally
| because the stock market demands better margins.
|
| I get that you have no experience at that level of a
| company but you could spend some time researching it.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67cdcf56-a24c-8006-bc54-b2bcccf
| a7c... Inb4 chatgpt, it knows a lot more than op here.
| ellisv wrote:
| Even if mostly the "right" people are laid off, laying off a
| wrong person can have a cascading effect.
|
| Good people like to stick together. Get rid of a couple and
| the rest will start to leave.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Even if, from the company's perspective, if lays off all
| the "right" people, some of those people will be "wrong"
| from the point of view of other people on the team. Maybe
| the _company_ didn 't value a certain person, for corporate
| or HR reasons, but there's always a chance that person was
| a valued team member for human reasons.
|
| Layoffs will lead to people leaving, regardless of how
| surgical or random they are.
| karparov wrote:
| Exactly. Somebody who is universally hated by their co-
| workers should just be let go. Nothing to do with a
| layoff. So everybody who is around has some reason for
| actually being there. In a well-managed place, that is.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Somebody who is universally hated by their co-workers
|
| How many times have we seen a company fire whoever they
| consider "dead weight" but keep the universally hated guy
| because he's a 10x rockstar whatever?
| karparov wrote:
| A 10x person who brings down 20 others to a small
| fraction of their potential and causes other rockstars to
| leave is still net-negative. Good management understands
| this.
|
| (And I'm not sure why I'm downvoted for this. Nothing
| about that should be controversial?)
| cratermoon wrote:
| Exactly. So the company keeps the guy everyone hates
| after laying off people that get along. The next people
| to leave the company are the ones disgusted by the move.
| karparov wrote:
| Depends on the company. I've seen the opposite case were
| such a person was let go, much to everybody's relief.
| Some people had to clean up his mess, which was genius in
| the sense that it worked flawlessly, but nobody else
| could maintain it, so he had locked in a minimal bus
| factor. Which makes such a move harder to execute, but
| the earlier the better.
| shagie wrote:
| https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/we-fired-our-top-
| talent-be...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474893 (2017) (133
| points | 130 comments)
| silisili wrote:
| Unfortunately, optimizing for not getting yourself laid off
| is not the same as optimizing for max productivity. In many
| ways, they're quite opposite.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Indeed. Like everyone from Lake Wobegon, I think that I am
| effective at my job. One of the most productive things I
| can do is to strangle bad ideas in the crib. This is not a
| popular role. Killing someone's pet initiative can make
| enemies. Yet, it can save countless weeks/months/years on
| doomed-to-fail efforts.
|
| Working to not be laid off usually means just keeping your
| head down and going with the flow.
| bigtimesink wrote:
| This happened to me. There was a layoff, I got overwhelmed
| with work that had to get picked up, lost motivation, and
| burned out.
| dv_dt wrote:
| There is the question of if layoffs saved the company enough to
| save itself or improve? And with that data you could say
| layoffs by themselves don't.
|
| Today the question is why companies making good profits are
| making layoffs. And looking at the damage they cause is
| relevant in trying to predict company performance
| dietr1ch wrote:
| > There is the question of if layoffs saved the company
| enough to save itself or improve?
|
| They at least secured management a final big bonus for
| dealing with that, so management and shareholders cash in a
| bit on the way down.
| dv_dt wrote:
| If the layoffs are taking a company which could be stably
| growing to one which is going downhill - in that case the
| execs actually hurting their long term compensation.
|
| But i get it, it's like junk food for execs, easy to do,
| crisp in the action (even if not in the effects). But
| consumed carelessly its bad for company health
| jaredklewis wrote:
| > And with that data you could say layoffs by themselves
| don't.
|
| I think that is one inference too far? Layoffs may have saved
| some of those companies from bankruptcy. The Bain study is
| looking at share price performance and offers no data that
| would resolve that question.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's a big tendency to look for culprits whether layoffs,
| PE, MBAs, or whatever. But a lot of companies just made wrong
| bets or were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kodak was
| _never_ going to survive in anything like its pre-digital form.
| forty wrote:
| Yet, those who makes those wrong bets are generally paid very
| generously and they are generally not those who suffers from
| the consequences
| ghaff wrote:
| You skipped the second part of my comment. Yes, senior
| execs at large publc companies--assuming they didn't do
| anything actually criminal or stupid related to their own
| finances--generally come out the other side OK. But
| sometimes a company can just reasonably get into a place
| it's hard to come out from. Kodak is a really good example
| IMO.
| forty wrote:
| Maybe I'm expecting too much, but for me the only good
| reason a CEO is paid more than any actually useful
| employee of the company is to anticipate this kind of
| thing and use the money from their leadership position in
| the old tech to invest and not be in a very bad position
| with the new tech.
| ghaff wrote:
| Sometimes companies just aren't in a good position for
| historical reasons. Returning to Kodak you can't really
| say to your investors and employees 90% of our existing
| business is toast and we're going to churn everything
| over the next 5 years.
|
| Sometimes you can do things more incrementally but other
| times it makes sense to basically close up shop and maybe
| shop your brand and some assets while keeping the biz
| afloat at some level with a lot of people still
| collecting a paycheck.
| throwaway3572 wrote:
| Also, failing companies that use layoffs to restructure can
| succeed. For an example see IBM in the 90s. It's hard but
| possible. And since the article uses stock price as a proxy for
| success, IBMs stock struggled for a long time afterward. It hit
| an all time high in 2025.
|
| And then there are non tech industries that just go through
| cycles, like oil.
| derwiki wrote:
| IBM is up 40% from its previous 2012 high point. In the same
| time, S&P is up nearly 400%.
| ghaff wrote:
| Its stock has done pretty well the past couple of years.
| (And it's a pretty good dividend stock as well.)
| glitchc wrote:
| This is it exactly. Layoffs are a symptom of failure, not a
| cause of savings.
| theli0nheart wrote:
| The key takeaway for me is that layoffs are an effect, not a
| cause, of company failure.
|
| The quoted text is a good example of this. If a company is
| struggling strategically or economically, and doesn't do a
| layoff, it's just going to struggle more, and fail more
| quickly. Companies that aren't laying people off are likely not
| even considering layoffs, because their businesses are actually
| doing well.
|
| So, it's pretty obvious to me that companies in that cohort
| would see the biggest stock price appreciation, because layoffs
| are an indicator of poor future performance.
| hinkley wrote:
| Layoffs are an effect of unsustainable success.
|
| If you can lay off people without cratering the company, it
| means you hired too many people in the first place.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| This correlation isn't necessarily causal. Companies that are
| failing are more likely to layoff could be just as true as
| companies that layoff are more likely to fail.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| I wish those departments tasked with busywork would be able to
| build skunkworks inside these dysfunctional molochs and be able
| to keep what they create. Fired into becoming a startup.. a man
| can dream.
| DamonHD wrote:
| I watched up close a multinational try to create a shunkworks
| and the ugly result was a lot more shunk than works...
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| The article lists down why layoffs don't work, but companies keep
| doing it, so it must be working for them.
|
| I hate layoffs (from both perspectives), but the article sounds
| like whining "we shouldn't break up".
|
| The alternative of furlough only works if everyone else is doing
| it. If everyone else fires left right and center, the people
| being furloughed will still have low morale.
|
| I think it's better to avoid it in the first place, by not over
| hiring, as others have pointed out.
| rsfern wrote:
| I think you're right that it's better to avoid these issues in
| the first place, but your perspective on furloughs instead of
| layoffs seems a bit fatalistic. I think a company that did
| rolling furloughs (and importantly was transparent about the
| whole process) would probably maintain pretty good morale,
| especially if the rest of the industry is laying people off.
| But yeah singling people out for furlough would probably be a
| big morale hit
| mattmaroon wrote:
| "After the early-2000s dotcom bust, Bain researchers found that
| stock prices for S&P 500 companies that had no layoffs or laid
| off less than 3% of their workforce increased an average of 9% in
| the next year."
|
| Do non-science journalists just not know about correlation vs
| causation? Does it really not occur to them that maybe the
| companies that didn't do layoffs were healthier and that's why
| they overperformed? Wouldn't a 10 year old know that?
| altcognito wrote:
| How would you correct for it? As someone who works with ten
| year olds, they would ask you what causation and correlation
| is.
| gruez wrote:
| They might not know those words, but intuitively know that
| stuff like "ice cream trucks cause heat waves" make no sense.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I was being hyperbolic about the ten year olds, but that's
| funny.
|
| Correcting for it: I don't know. It would be very hard. You
| could try to control for variables like profitability, etc.,
| but there are so many and you don't know what you don't know.
| But the correct response to absence of valid data isn't
| drawing conclusions from obviously bad data.
|
| It just cracks me up that one paragraph later the author
| points out:
|
| "Mass layoffs are often symptoms of unsound business
| strategies and don't do anything to cure the larger problem."
|
| and yet somehow didn't see that that sentence alone proves
| his previous one was pointless.
| dehrmann wrote:
| One big problem is layoffs cluster around events like the dot
| com bubble, the financial crisis, or covid, so there are
| weird things happening. You might be able to look at
| companies' quarterly profits to identify healthy companies
| that remained healthy, but still did layoffs.
| slappyham wrote:
| I find it fascinating that every single post on this
| godforsaken orange website inevitably has several comments that
| amount to "nuh uh!", and then they trot out the same three or
| four reasons why, this one being one of them.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Because it's a very common logical fallacy. You're also
| describing sample bias, someone who wholeheartedly agrees
| with the article probably has little to discuss.
| sleight42 wrote:
| The top comments read like HN of a decade or two ago when
| armchair exporting was rampant.
|
| Paraphrasing: "I, an engineer, am smarter than an economist
| therefore the article is wrong."
|
| Nothing of value to be found at the top of the comments.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| No, we're saying the majority of economists are more likely to
| be accurate than this particular economist.
| slappyham wrote:
| Combine that with temporarily-embarrassed billionaires and it's
| a recipe for disaster. Every last asshole here is hoping for a
| fat exit for some ReactJS garbage that probably just grinds up
| poor people into McDonald's hamburger meat; of course they
| don't give a shit about actual workers with actual lives, whom
| layoffs predominantly hurt.
|
| I've been laid off, eight months after a hiring blitz for the
| exact division I worked for. Now, I could've told them the
| acquisitions they did were stupid and that the products were
| never going to be profitable, but I don't live in Manhattan, so
| those decisions are above me. But that didn't stop them from
| juicing the stock price and ruining our lives anyway.
|
| Fuck these companies. They could do better, and they choose not
| to. And every last sycophant here is complicit.
| JadoJodo wrote:
| Having lived in the Boise (Idaho) area, I saw this happen over
| and over with Micron and HP. I knew dozens of people who had
| worked for one or the other (and sometimes both) and were then
| let go in those companies frequent mass layoffs. One person I
| knew had been laid off - rehired by Micron 3x in the span of
| 10-years.
|
| I think the biggest issue is that it is far too often the _first_
| tool that companies reach for, instead of the last. Oh, the
| market feels unstable? Better cut 5% "just to be safe". There's a
| national event that might impact our business? We're going to
| drop 10% of our employees before we know anything.
|
| While it certainly doesn't apply to every company, I wonder what
| it might look like for executive leadership to make a pledge that
| it always comes from the top first: The leadership team agrees
| that it will take a (public) $X financial cut for N months in the
| event of a layoff-level event/period to help guide the ship
| through the storm (with compensation on the other side). If it
| works, you have the loyalty/respect of your employees. If it
| doesn't, you do the layoffs anyway and those who remain know that
| you tried.
| DanielHB wrote:
| In Europe where most countries are notoriously hard to fire
| people they don't do layoffs like that "just to be safe", they
| instead just cut-back on hiring more people during though
| times.
|
| It has an impact of morale, but not nearly as bad I imagine. I
| wonder if that is one of the reasons why Europe companies tend
| to be smaller companies, while US tend to be bigger. Expansion
| is easier when you can fire at any time, smaller companies are
| more likely to succeed if they don't over-hire and keep talent
| around.
| luckylion wrote:
| I don't know whether it's a reason for size ("one market"
| isn't just about taxes, it's also about culture and language,
| and that's more different in the EU than the US), but it
| definitely makes companies more risk-averse towards expansion
| and disadvantages people with non-average backgrounds. The
| risk your CV suggests (e.g. mental health, unemployment, non-
| traditional career) gets multiplied if it's close to
| impossible to fire you.
| karparov wrote:
| The article doesn't actually explain _why_. It claims _that_ they
| don 't work and supplies statistical evidence. But _why_ don 't
| they work? I've only really seen speculation...
| slappyham wrote:
| Have you ever been laid off?
| karparov wrote:
| Yes. And your point being ...?
| alphazard wrote:
| There is a theory about large complex systems which seems to be
| true in biology and maybe applies here. Intentional downsizing
| during times of stress works when it preferentially targets
| defective or dysfunctional components of the larger system. The
| system improves because the worst parts were removed.
|
| Layoffs don't help companies unless they can reliably remove the
| worst parts. At most large public companies, the cancerous
| bureaucracy protects itself and the parts removed are closer to
| median performers, or even above-median performers. The system
| gets smaller and _less_ efficient.
|
| Layoffs can be necessary to get the company to fit through a
| certain sized hole (in the form of cash flow constraints), but it
| won't be better at what it does on the other side of the hole, it
| will just continue to exist.
|
| Layoffs work when there is an _accurate_ discriminating mechanism
| for who stays and goes. The best example of this (outside of
| private equity turn-arounds that are not widely known) is
| Twitter. Outside engineering talent was brought in as an oracle,
| immune to Twitter 's bureaucracy. It reliably discriminated
| between value-adding and not. As a result, the company became
| incredibly lean and even consistently profitable.
| davidcbc wrote:
| Twitter was profitable before the takeover and now it is not
| alphazard wrote:
| Maybe we disagree about what "profitable" means. Posting an
| authoritative source, so others can decide for themselves.
|
| https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/twtr/financials/
| davidcbc wrote:
| So over the 4 years before the takeover they had a net
| profit of $1.3 billion. What's their profit been in the 4
| years since?
| hkpack wrote:
| I don't have that much of an experience analysing similar
| reports, but it seems to me to be a healthy and growing
| company?
|
| If you mean a negative cash flow and operating income - it
| doesn't mean much, as we need to know why.
|
| Taking into account the jump in "Revenue", positive "EBIT"
| and so on, I would imagine that it was because of some sort
| of "strategic investment", like some acquisitions probably?
|
| What am I missing? I would definitely be happy with such
| reports if that was my company.
| monocasa wrote:
| Unless I'm missing something, your data you've voted seems
| to be pre-acquisition.
|
| Also, by all accounts their revenue has dropped so much
| they're having issues even covering the loan payments, much
| less having enough for any semblance of profit.
| bdangubic wrote:
| twitter is just about the worst example you could have used -
| by wide margin...
| dehrmann wrote:
| It depends if you mean keeping Twitter the service
| operational or Twitter the product relevant.
| Ologn wrote:
| By the late 1960s, software projects had finally reached a
| certain size, and the particularities of managing these large
| projects were discussed at NATO software engineering
| conferences, and codified by Fred Brooks in 1975 in the
| Mythical Man Month. The upshot being, software projects at
| corporations can't be run in the same manner as non-software
| projects. Yet at Fortune 500 companies today, and in the past
| two years that includes at least some of the FAANGs, you see
| them trying to run software projects and treating programmers
| in the same manner they treat non-programmers, and it doesn't
| work.
|
| I just happened to watch some old talk or interview with Gabe
| Newell recently, and he said industry thinking at the time
| Valve was founded was of a certain kind, and Valve took the
| opposite approach from the industry - the industry was looking
| to get cheaper programmers, and Valve went the other way and
| looked for the most expensive programmers, and so forth. Valve
| has probably less than 400 people working there (don't know the
| 2025 headcount), but makes billions a year in profit.
| logsr wrote:
| Large tech companies are inefficient and have very poor
| engineering productivity but this is largely for systemic
| reasons. They definitely do not have any mechanism for
| identifying high performers.
|
| The basic problem they face is that they pay a fixed wage for
| complete IP ownership (horrible deal) and so they intentionally
| do not measure and reward actual performance because they do
| not want to compensate high performers based on the value they
| create.
|
| There isn't really a solution because these companies are
| making rational profit maximizing decisions, it just happens
| that mediocrity and managed decline of locked in revenue
| streams is profit maximizing for them.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > they intentionally do not measure and reward actual
| performance because they do not want to compensate high
| performers based on the value they create.
|
| Ten years ago, an oft-repeated quote: "you're not paid what
| you're worth, but for the value you create."
|
| In light of that, is the argument that performance is
| institutionally obscured so that devs don't realize how much
| leverage they really have? I can see traces of that in seeing
| shipped products as less the result of one/few devs working
| hard and more as multiple teams, as you now have two levels
| of personnel abstraction to diffuse potential leverage
| (individual/their team, and the teams among themselves).
| CPLX wrote:
| There's absolutely no reason whatsoever to think Twitter's
| financial performance improved after going private.
| hobs wrote:
| Outside engineering is not ever an oracle, and it has its own
| interior motives and bureaucracy, firing people is generally a
| one way street.
|
| Twitter has literally issued authoritarian threats to
| advertisers to come on its platform or else because of how much
| its valuation has dropped and how much money has been lost -
| this is the worst example of "engineering oracle fixing things"
| I could possibly imagine.
| cjaackie wrote:
| Could I be missing something, but are you seriously promoting
| layoffs? You must be trolling by using twitter as functional
| example of why they work? I think sometimes I miss sarcastic
| tones and I really hope i did with this one
| srpablo wrote:
| lmaoooooo buddy "oracle" implies they know something; the
| people brought in to fire people at Twitter spent almost no
| time in determining who was good or even how the company
| worked, completely undermining your thesis. It was madness:
| people were instructed to _print paper copies of their code_ to
| bring into an office, like it was 1995. Remember geohot in a
| Spaces saying "the main problem with Twitter is that you can't
| run it locally?", as if any company of that size has run that
| way at any point in the last decade? Additionally, the horrible
| communication and chaos made it even harder for performers to
| perform. As others have pointed out, its stock lost a ton of
| value, it performs worse financially, and as a product by
| virtually every other metric has gone to hell (outages, CSAM
| safety, spam, bots...).
|
| You tell a decent story at the start, but your choice of
| example couldn't be worse.
| EasyMark wrote:
| They work to get quarterly profits up/losses down, and that's
| really all the matters to stockholders who want to decide to hodl
| or sail.
| snozolli wrote:
| I've been through several layoffs, on both sides of the coin. The
| one consistent factor I've seen is managerial incompetence.
| Management will fail to provide any leadership or guidance to
| employees, then blame them for not being productive enough. They
| can't see their own incompetence, so they blame hiring practices
| and keep ratcheting up interview difficulty. It's like corporate
| America has evolved to protect the ego of the managerial class.
| mathattack wrote:
| I've been through several waves of corporate layoffs across many
| industries.
|
| Some observations:
|
| 1 - It's rarely one round.
|
| 2 - Companies tend to be the most thoughtful on the first round.
| Then it looks easy and the precision (and severance) of future
| cuts goes down. That's why it's smart to take a voluntary offer.
|
| 3 - Cuts that are broad based ("Every department cuts 15%") are a
| sign the company doesn't know what's going on or prefers harmony
| over hard choices.
|
| 4 - Layoffs can be a crutch for firms that don't do performance
| management. (Less work to do a layoff than have managers counsel
| bad performers out)
|
| 5 - Managers should never promise "No layoffs"
| yalogin wrote:
| Layoffs are a blunt instrument. I don't know if al layoffs should
| be seen through the same lens. I see layoffs as signals from the
| companies. They see the future as unsure and so they want to
| reduce costs. That should be an immediate layoff for the ceo and
| his team
| dehrmann wrote:
| > That should be an immediate layoff for the ceo and his team
|
| Maybe not quite that, but investors and the board (hah!) should
| ask really hard questions about how they got there.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Real talk here, and I'm sorry for being "that guy"
|
| Why do tech workers get so wrapped around the axle of layoffs
| when most people are in a chronic state of tech job hopping? I
| know multiple people who have worked their entire career thus far
| without ever staying at a place for more than 3 or 4 years. Some
| no more than two. Tech job culture is practically a mono culture
| with "hop jobs" being a hallmark.
|
| From an employers perspective it's not laying off a bunch of
| family members (Southwest has an average tenure of 11.5 years),
| it's laying off a bunch of people who were gonna dip in 6 months
| to a year anyway.
|
| I know this is controversial take, but recognize that the tech
| industry is an outlier industry, with outlier amounts of money
| and outlier amounts of volatility.
| CaffeineLD50 wrote:
| I resent the fake legal douche move of falsely asserting "low
| performance" as the rationale for their cuts.
|
| Some people work hard and take pride in their work. And on top
| of their gaming down our wages with h1b workers and low benefit
| contracting they have the gall to assert we're low performers
| when what they want is a $20 million bonus for their execs.
|
| But yeah, I see your point.
| filoleg wrote:
| I cannot speak for layoffs in all industries ever, but I agree
| with your assessment of layoffs in big tech from personal
| experiences.
|
| I have way too many "lifer" friends in big tech who are deadly
| scared of layoffs and job hopping. They are also the ones who
| rarely got promoted and havent had a significant pay bump
| pretty much ever.
|
| On another hand, half my team at a big tech company got laid
| off back at the start of 2023. 4 months later, I caught up with
| them over drinks, and the results were rather interesting. They
| all got around 4-6mo worth of severance pay, spent 2-3 months
| just skiing/traveling/hiking/vacationing, then 1 month or so
| interviewing, and then starting their new jobs shortly after.
| All seemed rather happy, both with their new positions/pay
| (which had a significant paybump) and, essentially, paid
| vacation break they took right before.
|
| It seems like the heavity majority of those stressed about
| layoffs in big tech are lifers and those who are chronically
| averse to and dread the interview process.
| lumost wrote:
| Big tech interviews tend to be daunting. Many long term
| employees lose the skill, and fear the impact of work
| interruption on their resume as well as their ability to get
| in again.
|
| Anecdotally, the LC bar for many firms has risen to the point
| that passing requires at least one through of the question
| before. If you Time bound your practice per question to 20
| minutes, this means that you can solve most LC problems at
| least once in around 8 weeks of 40 hour weeks. Or 6 weeks at
| 60 hours.
|
| Not a pleasant way to spend two months - but not impractical.
| I'm unclear what employers are deriving from this exercise at
| this point.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I'm unclear what employers are deriving from this
| exercise at this point
|
| It filters out the complete frauds.
|
| Yes, there are people who know all the right things to say
| in a job interview, but cannot code at all. If you hire one
| of them, it takes a bit to find out they cannot code, and a
| bit longer to fire them, so you're out $$$$ paying their
| salaries for nothing.
|
| For example, a recruiter I know will ask a tech candidate
| "what is 20% of 20,000?" A significant percentage cannot
| answer the question. Some even cry. It's shocking.
|
| A friend of mine was looking at getting a FAANG job. He was
| worried about the leetcode tests. I suggested he spend a
| month going through the leetcode books studying them - that
| the return on his time investment doing that will be one of
| the best ROIs he's ever done. He did, and got the job.
| (Although the LC was just a first gate one had to go
| through to get to the real job interview.)
|
| Personally, I have no idea how I'd do on an LC test without
| prep. But I don't have a problem with studying it to get a
| top job.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I get that perhaps you were using the proverbial "I" in
| your last sentence as an example of something everyone
| should be willing to do in/for their career, but does
| someone of your stature even need a real interview, much
| less a LC test, to obtain a top job? It's kind of funny
| imagining a young tech bro interviewing you, tbh.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's an interesting question. I'll try to answer.
|
| I generally do not use clever algorithms in my code. I
| just use straightforward ones. Rarely, I might need a
| better one and go looking for it (like a better hash
| algorithm). I rarely use a data structure more
| complicated than an array, list, binary tree, hash, or
| single inheritance.
|
| What I have, though, is decades of experience with what
| works and what doesn't work. (My favorite whipping boy is
| macros. Macros look like they are great productivity
| boosters. It takes about 10 years to realize that macros
| are a never-ending source of confusion, they just confuse
| and obfuscate every code base that uses them. I could go
| on about this! ...)
|
| I have become pretty good at writing modules that
| minimize dependencies, and pretty good at the user
| interface design of a language.
|
| But still, if the job wanted a leetcode test, I'd take
| it, no problem. I'd study up first, though.
|
| If a young tech bro was interviewing me, I'd suggest he
| show me his best code, and I'd do a review of it :-) The
| point of that would not be to humilate him, but to
| demonstrate the value I can bring to improving code
| quality.
|
| If I was being interviewed for a job writing a faster
| divide routine (the ones I wrote were shift-subtract,
| slower but bulletproof), a better random number
| generator, a cryptographically secure hash function, a
| tighter compression algorithm, a faster sort, I'm not the
| right guy for that.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Thanks for that very interesting and insightful feedback!
| WalterBright wrote:
| P.S. I was once asked to review the code of a famous
| programmer I won't name. I was shocked to discover that
| the large codebase had 3 different implementations of
| bubblesort in it. I replaced them all with a call to
| qsort(). He asked me how I managed to speed it up :-/
|
| We all have our blind spots. I do, too.
| acdha wrote:
| My favorite blind spot is how our definitions of quality
| change over time. I knew someone who had a mature
| codebase which a new developer made substantially faster
| by removing his old optimizations. He'd measured very
| real improvements back when he made that hand-rolled
| assembly code on early Pentium generations but by the
| time we revisited it less than a decade later the
| combination of compiler and processor improvements meant
| that the C reference implementation was always faster. (I
| was assisting with the port to PowerPC and at first we
| thought that it was just XLC being especially good there,
| but then we tested it on x86 with GCC and found the same
| result)
|
| Beyond the obvious lesson about experience and sunk costs
| it was also a great lesson about how much time you assume
| you have for maintenance: when he'd first written that
| code as a grad student he'd been obsessed with
| performance since that was a bottleneck for getting his
| papers out but as his career progressed he spent time on
| other things, and since it wasn't broken he hadn't really
| revisited it because he "knew" where it was slow. Over
| time the computer costs eventually outweighed that
| original savings.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| I have done probably 500 to 1000 tech screens for big
| tech companies (as the interviewer) and this is
| completely true.
|
| I have interviewed _many_ people employed in tech as
| programmers for their entire career and they can 't code.
| I don't meen leetcode, I mean they get confused trying to
| write brute force substring search. The nested for loop
| seems to be too complex for them to keep in their head
| all at once.
|
| I have had numerous people cry. Again this was a screen,
| not leetcode. I'm asking them to check if text has
| mismatched parens, or find a substring. Things you do for
| homework in your 2nd programming class freshman year.
| Things every competent programmer can do while
| chitchatting about the job.
|
| I would estimate that more than 10% of screens are like
| this, again these are employed people in the industry for
| years, sometimes tens of years.
|
| Edit: I understand that people can get flustered, I
| understand that some people have trouble under pressure
| or while being observed. That's why I pointed out
| multiple times that the problems I gave are extremely,
| EXTREMELY easy. I'm basically asking them to write down
| their name and they sit and look at the pen like they've
| never seen one before. If you can't write a 5 line
| function to find whether a substring occurs in a larger
| string when given 45 minutes, your choice of programming
| language, and as many attempts as you need to debug and
| try again you simply will not be able to do any useful
| work as a programmer. If you don't know that to match
| parens you need to use a stack (or at least that it's one
| way to do it) you either have a very poor memory or no
| training in computer science at all - either of which is
| frankly disqualifying. Anyone _borderline competent_
| would invent a stack when presented with this problem if
| they hadn 't already been told this fact a dozen times
| during their education or even light reading about
| algorithms.
| momocowcow wrote:
| You are still not testing if they can code. But whether
| under the scrutiny of another person, they can code.
| Maybe this is important to you, maybe peer programming is
| important to you for example. I remember a young dev who
| couldn't pass such tests, as he would get too nervous,
| yet he had written the core tech for many shipped
| products. The type of guy you would just stick in dark
| room. With age this type of stuff settles down.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I agree with both you and the parent to some degree. I
| have experienced interviews that went badly because they
| were in an IDE I wasn't familiar with, or in Leetcode
| (never used it). So I'm distracted by how to use the tool
| rather than how to code the solution. But I can also see
| how stuff like finding a substring is easy - most
| languages have a function for it. But at that point,
| you're testing different things - problem-solving vs rote
| memorization of a provided function.
|
| I feel like a good middle is to allow Google for
| documentation searches, not solution searches. Without
| searching (or IDE with radix completion), I'd probably
| fail the test for not knowing the syntax off the top of
| my head.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| "Scrutiny of another" who's a peer or even a client is
| super different from an interview.
|
| The latter has more in common with an open mic night, the
| prospect of which the vast majority of people are
| terrified and would break down if they attempted it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My first attempts at public speaking were a frozen
| horror. But I kept doing it, and it kept getting easier
| and easier.
|
| I recommend that when there's an opportunity to get up in
| front of a mike, take it, and get comfortable with it.
| It's a skill that will serve you well.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Some people are good coders but can't do it with an
| adversarial person watching. I'm often one of them.
|
| Might as well put a suitcase with $200k and a copper
| clock ticking away on the table next to them.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| As someone who does these types of interviews on both
| ends, something like this is why I like to start with an
| outrageously simple question to break the ice.
|
| Surprisingly, I have an 80% fail rate on the first
| question usually, which is just "find the second largest
| number in an array of numbers" for a 5 YOE role.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| I just saw that this comment was fading from downvotes.
|
| I think HN is just overwhelmed with people who somehow
| got hired into technical jobs but can't do them. Anyone
| who thinks that 'finding second largest number in an
| array' or 'finding if a string is a substring of another
| string' are hard, or that the pressures of an interview
| are a valid excuse for being unable to do it are simply
| not intelligent enough to be successful in this field and
| they are casting about for some excuse to protect their
| ego. These are problems that a bright 12 year old with no
| programming experience could do for fun, and these folks
| are purporting to be educated, experienced,
| _professional_ programmers.
|
| As much as people like to say 'muh anxiety', I've yet to
| meet someone who can't do very basic coding in an
| interview but also they are capable of basic coding in
| any other context. I would suggest that this sort of
| person is so rare that you will probably never meet one
| over the course of a normal career.
| hibikir wrote:
| What is really crazy about this though is that sometimes
| it really is the interview setting, as people unused to
| interviews can, at times, emotionally collapse. I have
| seen people who are actually good programmers get wrecked
| by simple questions because of their inability to handle
| stress, and how the lack of interview practice turns a
| simple exercise into a hellscape.
|
| It's not as if testing for performance under stress is
| useless: Tough on call rotations happen, and you might
| need someone that does well under pressure at 3 am in the
| morning. But the picture you get on a screening isn't as
| clear as it appears.
| geoka9 wrote:
| Not to imply that you're wrong, but I've always been bad
| at LC interviews, but surprisingly (for myself) passable
| when called upon to troubleshoot and code up a hot fix in
| the middle of the night. Maybe those are not entirely
| similar types of pressures.
| quinnirill wrote:
| It's also not the same kind of stress. I've interviewed
| many a candidate who were sweating and/or shaking at some
| point of the interview (with heavy reassurance and me
| trying to to steer the conversation towards and area
| where they feel stronger), but they can often end up
| being calm and reliable alert responders nonetheless. So
| far I've seen very little if any correlation between
| being able to handle interview stress and on-call stress.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Knowing the right answer and knowing the right answer
| with a gun to your head are two different skills.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| The other replies to this comment aren't wrong but I feel
| they fail to take into account that (especially with
| startups): having someone watch you code during an
| interview is one of the the least stressful experiences
| the person will face with the company - once the job
| begins. Companies can't take on the risk of dealing with
| a bunch of passive-aggressive bullcrap once the real code
| reviews begin after the hire. Most tech job reqs contain
| the words "Excellent written and verbal communication
| skills" on purpose.
|
| Imagine a person with a pilot's license refusing to fly
| tandem for an airline interview.
| acdha wrote:
| > Imagine a person with a pilot's license refusing to fly
| tandem for an airline interview.
|
| That's not a great comparison since a pilot has already
| passed substantially harder tests to get that license and
| a flight is exactly what the job is. If you have a
| candidate with a pilot's license you can assume at least
| a baseline level of capability which you can't assume for
| a software engineer. That has pros and cons but it
| definitely means interviewing is a noisier process.
|
| The other problem, however, is deeper: the job of flying
| a plane is exactly what's tested to get a pilot's license
| but what many places do for developer interviews is
| wildly unlike the actual job so it's more like
| interviewing pilots based on trivia questions about the
| number of rivets on a B-52 and how well they can solve
| 3-D puzzles, and then being surprised when there isn't
| much correlation with real world performance. For
| example, only at the most toxic companies will the
| interview be one of the least stressful parts because the
| rest of the job is a team effort. What makes the
| interview challenges stressful is doing it without your
| normal tools while someone else is looking for reasons to
| fail you, but in a normal job your coworkers are trying
| to help you succeed because even if you're not friends
| you are all better off when your company succeeds. At a
| startup, trying to ding someone for trivia challenges is
| like hitting the iceberg to prove that the navigator made
| a mistake.
| throwaway151883 wrote:
| > check if text has mismatched parens
|
| I always try to give everyone I've interviewed the
| benefit of the doubt. You never know what's going on in
| their lives, and even if they fail a trivial question it
| doesn't mean they are faking the ability to code.
|
| I joined Facebook back in 2018. Didn't study at all for
| the interview and passed somehow. Then I probably
| conducted 200-300 interviews in my time there, so I
| became quite familiar with the questions. My performance
| ratings were all exceeds or greatly exceeds. I
| voluntarily left on my own after four years to join a
| unicorn startup. I didn't prep for that interview either
| but passed it too. Well, the startup failed and many
| people went back to Meta. So I actually prepared quite a
| bit this time and scheduled a mock interview with them.
| The mock interviewer said I did great and not to change a
| thing. When it came time for the real screening
| interview... I failed the matching parentheses question.
|
| I generally try not to make excuses. Almost every
| interview I've failed has clearly been my own fault. But
| in this particular one the interviewer kept interrupting
| me every two seconds and I absolutely could not think. I
| had done matching parentheses many times before in
| practice, but the constant interrupting rattled me to the
| point where I totally lost focus and bombed it. Not a
| great experience.
|
| So yeah, I'd just recommend giving people the benefit of
| the doubt. Everyone has difficult moments occasionally,
| but it doesn't mean they're stupid or can't code.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| I run coding interviews at BIGCO. Half of the candidate
| success relies on the skills of the interviewer. A bad
| interviewer can bomb the best candidates.
|
| Something I have changed my stance on a bit is automated
| coding interviews. I used to be adamantly against a
| company giving candidates automated code tests, but I see
| now that it takes the interviewer out of the equation.
| 3vidence wrote:
| As an interviewer at Google, we arent given an exact list
| of questions to ask or what to evaluate (there are broad
| categories).
|
| It is really entirely up to each interviewer how the
| interview goes and they are usually scheduled between 2
| other meetings so often the interviewer is distracted.
|
| Very strange system imo, lots of randomness
| al_borland wrote:
| Pre-screening, depending on how it's done, could
| eliminate good candidates.
|
| There have been times I've received answers in interview
| that weren't the written answers, but I looked it up
| afterward and tested it out... and they were right. I
| learned something news and tweaked the answer reference
| as a result. If those questions were in the pre-screening
| instead of asked directly by me, it would have filtered
| out good people.
|
| I remember fighting to get access to the pre-screen data
| to see what the answers were and find if there were any
| other cases like this, where the non-technical pre-
| screener was filtering out potentially good candidates,
| because we couldn't give them exhaustive answers to
| questions being asked.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Welcome to the wonderful world of coding under pressure,
| which almost never occurs in the real world. It's a non-
| issue when you're young and don't feel the pressure. But
| when you have grey hairs in your beard and know you're
| already walking in with two strikes, all of a sudden the
| fog of war kicks in.
| jjav wrote:
| > I have interviewed many people employed in tech as
| programmers for their entire career and they can't code.
|
| Think about this contradictory statement for a while. Can
| it actually be true? Or is there something else going on?
|
| If the interviewee has nothing but sub-1yr stints on
| their resume, perpetually getting fired before vesting at
| any company, then yes, it's very possible they actually
| can't code and just fake it at every interview.
|
| But _everyone else_... if they have spent years at tech
| companies writing production code then obviously they
| know how to code. They might be great or maybe mediocre,
| but guaranteed they at least know how to code.
|
| So, if your interviewing technique is concluding
| something that is obviously impossible, then start by
| considering how to improve the interview technique.
| al_borland wrote:
| I know a lot of people who can tweak code that already
| exists. However, if they are sitting in front of an empty
| text editor and given a goal, they don't know how to
| break the problem down and build a solution with the
| tools the language gives them.
|
| In a large environment, someone may rarely need to start
| from nothing, so the interview format throws them.
|
| That said, I think being able to break down a problem to
| solve it with code is a really important skill. Without
| it, the person will always have to lean on others to fill
| that skill gap.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| 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.
| geoka9 wrote:
| There's another extreme, too: people who can code up an
| app in a matter of days, but can never learn to navigate
| and successfully maintain a legacy code base (even their
| own!).
| suzzer99 wrote:
| And there's no easy objective way to screen for this in a
| job interview. So they pretend it doesn't exist and never
| ask questions like: "Suppose you're designing a green-
| field app that you think will grow over time like X, Y,
| and Z. How would you design and organize your code so
| that the app stays maintainable and flexible over time?"
|
| I could talk for hours on this subject with concrete
| examples if anyone ever asked.
|
| I think another problem is that there are so few
| engineers/architects who really "get it" on this subject.
| I can only think of a few ex-coworkers with whom I could
| have the kind of in-depth conversation about app design
| and organization that I'm picturing.
|
| I've never worked in big tech, always for startups or
| non-tech corps with a few rock star devs and a lot of
| decent devs. So maybe it's different at a FAANG. But in
| my head I'm picturing a bunch of algo-geniuses whose code
| turns into a big mess over time when requirements take a
| right-turn and break all their beautiful abstractions.
| I've worked on a few apps like that and it's not fun.
| lordnacho wrote:
| > I know a lot of people who can tweak code that already
| exists. However, if they are sitting in front of an empty
| text editor and given a goal, they don't know how to
| break the problem down and build a solution with the
| tools the language gives them.
|
| But being able to break things down and come up with a
| solution is not necessarily something that needs to be
| done quickly, in the time you have for an interview.
| Quite often I've been faced with a new problem and done
| absolutely nothing visible for ages. Literally just
| reading around the problem, asking questions, and
| sketching in my mind without writing a single line of
| code.
|
| This is often faster and better than starting
| immediately.
| throwaway3572 wrote:
| I'm an electrical engineer who does circuit design. I've
| interviewed many electrical engineers over the years and
| the situation of applicants having "years" of experience
| while simultaneously not knowing how to design a single
| circuit is real. In our field it's usually because
| although the person's title is engineer, in practice,
| they don't do any engineering. There's just a ton of
| peripheral work (basically paperwork related to
| operations and compliance), which is very important, but
| is not design.
|
| My guess is computer science has a similar issue.
|
| Lots of people with programming in thier job title but
| they don't actually program. And based on ltbarcly3's
| empirical measurement, "lots" is above 10%. ;)
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| 10% of applicants that make it to a phone screen. I
| estimate that the number is much lower than 10% overall
| because incompetent people with good looking resumes tend
| to do a lot more interviews than good candidates.
| visarga wrote:
| > it takes a bit to find out they cannot code, and a bit
| longer to fire them, so you're out $$$$ paying their
| salaries for nothing
|
| Not just that. They block the hiring process. Maybe there
| was just that one open position on your team, and that
| bad 3 month hire postponed a good hire by 6 months. It's
| also very incomfortable to fire and start again.
|
| My interviews contain questions that are basic, and any
| new team mate should know. I keep asking them because 90%
| of the candidates actually can't answer them well. You
| should know what a "dot product" is if you want to work
| as a ML engineer, that kind of stuff. Or be able to open
| a text file and count word frequencies.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| True words. It's not 'imposter syndrome' if one comes
| across as an imposter (though it might have been just be
| a bad day).
|
| I can appreciate the gating process because it's a real
| drag to get hired and then spend more time than necessary
| not doing my work but trying to help coworkers catch up
| on very basic and fundamental skills in order to be able
| to collaborate with them.
| eastbound wrote:
| > For example, a recruiter I know will ask a tech
| candidate "what is 20% of 20,000?" A significant
| percentage cannot answer the question. Some even cry.
| It's shocking.
|
| During our interview, we ask candidates to design a
| history system. The key is to realize that our database
| is only 8Gb, and storing a year of updates is only 160Gb,
| so $2pm in AWS. Once there, a simple DB table suits, no
| need to set up Amazon S3.
|
| So we ask them for the multiplication. First we give them
| the data, and if they don't do the calculation, we nudge
| them, then we ask them, then we write the multipliers for
| them, then we take the calculator out and write the
| result for them.
|
| Those are Masters degrees. They can't even do
| calculations, let alone getting it right, because 500MB x
| 200 days a year = a few petabytes apparently. And after
| that, they're exhausted, it's impossible to ask them the
| rest of the questions like "So is it worth worrying about
| a Rube Goldberg machine when you're in for $2 of AWS
| costs?".
| DarkContinent wrote:
| Does your interview process require knowing cloud costs
| off the top of your head? Because that's hard to track
| tbh
| eastbound wrote:
| What the... no.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| Sounds like it requires knowing them to an order of
| magnitude or so... Which honestly sounds like a pretty
| good bar to have your team above?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Just do what everyone is doing today and use those AI tools
| for cheating. There's a whole industry of invisible and
| hard to detect leetcode AI cheating tools.
|
| Glad they exist and I fully support all candidates using
| them aggressively.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I definitely feel that first part. I landed in a nice
| company in SF about 8 years ago and am still here. The
| culture has changed a lot but I often find myself doubting
| whether I could repeat the whole thing or if I got lucky.
| (The work is fine, and the company is one of the good ones
| I feel, so no real qualms there).
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I agree, but I look at it like trying out for an athletic
| team.
|
| Once you're on the team, you are mostly practicing plays,
| doing clinics, and simulating competition, but to get on
| the team in the first place you have to prove your general
| fitness by running, say, a 6 minute mile.
|
| You may not be able to do that again easily right away once
| you've been on the team for a while because you don't
| practice running for pure time at that distance, but it's a
| level of fitness you should be easily able to obtain again
| if you had to, and it's a very useful benchmark to a scout.
|
| When you're laid off, it's time to start doing that
| "roadwork" again. It will be a bit hard at first in
| practice, but if you've been a solid contributor, you
| should be able to get fit enough again to prove that.
| bbqfog wrote:
| This is a persistent myth in our industry. If you're a good
| manager, you can tell within minutes if someone is "for
| real", if you can't, you aren't qualified to be hiring
| people. Have you even looked at their GitHub?
| munificent wrote:
| A few months of skiing sounds nice, but not as nice as the
| profound pleasure of working on a team of people I've know
| and cared about for over a decade.
|
| You're going to spend half your waking life at work. For me,
| that's too much time to not want to do so at a place where I
| have real relationships with my coworkers.
| mym1990 wrote:
| This is ultimately what some of the risk comes down to: you
| invest time(a decade is a long time!) into creating
| meaningful relationships at work and one day you come in to
| have your key card de-activated and some corporate speak as
| to why. There are certainly people working on truly
| meaningful projects out there, with teams they trust and
| adore...but for most of the workforce, even in tech, its
| just work and any fun had at work is a great cherry on top.
| andrewlgood wrote:
| How is this different than the manager who has spent
| years developing an employee - making sure they are
| getting the experiences they need to build a better
| career, hiring the right people to complement the team,
| fighting for bonuses and pay raises - only to have them
| quit to join the next company for a 10% raise. It is
| difficult to build a long-term culture when society seems
| to expect job hopping to rapidly advance a career.
|
| On a related note, it is odd that HN comments rarely seem
| to include a manager's perspective.
| nine_k wrote:
| I've never seen people leaving great jobs for a 10%
| raise. It's always something else: a much bigger benefit,
| or a significant downside of the current job, which are
| not widely publicized. Instead, I've seen people going to
| a _lower_ -paying position for a more interesting job, a
| chance to learn new hot thing hands-on, a different set
| of responsibilities, etc.
| al_borland wrote:
| I worked with a guy who left for more money, found out
| the grass wasn't greener, and came crawling back. Then
| did it again. For some reason they hired him back a
| second time. When he quit the 3rd time I think that was
| the final bridge burned. I asked him about it and he said
| money was his singular metric for choosing a job, he was
| always looking, and would never stop.
| nine_k wrote:
| I once left for a 50% raise, and once for a large chunk
| of equity in a promising startup (and being able to do
| early-stage formative work). But 10%?..
| bbqfog wrote:
| An experienced manager would know that is how the game is
| played and act accordingly. Don't get emotionally
| attached to _any_ work relationships. It 's
| transactional, keep that in mind.
| andrewlgood wrote:
| Agreed. Shouldn't employees behave/feel the same way?
| bbqfog wrote:
| Absolutely.
| al_borland wrote:
| This mentality is why people don't get promoted
| internally, which leads to the job hoping in the first
| place.
|
| Fix this and a lot of the job hoping problem goes away.
| bbqfog wrote:
| Job hopping is not a problem, it's how you get ahead
| quickly.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| It's really cool unless your visa is on the line. At least
| the US is falling apart fast enough that maybe it's not a
| bad idea to leave and stay out.
| bbqfog wrote:
| Wow, I couldn't disagree more. My personal life is what I
| enjoy, the random people I work with to make money and will
| be gone as soon as I quit or get laid off, well... I just
| don't want them to be toxic. I already have a ton of
| friends, I don't need to convert work people into my social
| life. Skiing for a few months sounds super amazing though!
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| You need to find better ski spots!
|
| Just joking :) I firmly respect your opinion on the matter,
| and understand different people value different things in
| life.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| This story is changing. There is now an oversaturation of us
| ex-BigCo people in the market. I quit Google before the
| layoffs, after being there for 10 years and sick of it. The
| first year was serious ego boost, having Google on the resume
| opened doors all over the place. Then my ex-coworkers started
| getting laid off and things began to shift.
|
| Now I know people I used to work with who have been without
| work for many months and having a hard time getting
| interviews.
|
| Granted, I'm not in the Bay Area, so. But the market is
| saturated.
| screye wrote:
| Yep, a sabbatical is taken to mean laid off and low
| performer. Have to sign an offer before leaving the old
| one.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Its not that the market is saturated, its that a lot of
| incompetent ex googlers are interviewing now. People
| usually have a pretty good idea they can't do their job.
| They find a niche where a manager is not paying attention,
| or they can obfuscate and take credit for others work, etc.
| These people don't usually job hop, the interviews are way
| too hard and then they are very unlikely to find another
| long term safe niche to hide in. So previously seeing
| google on a resume correlated highly with strong
| competence. A lot of people laid off from google are
| complete incompetents. A lot were hard working geniuses
| too, but it doesn't take many interviews where a exgoogler
| is completely useless to spoil the brand.
|
| The reputation for googlers on the market right now is very
| bad, and it will keep getting worse as the group of ex
| googlers who are basically unemployable keep interviewing
| over and over and over.
| shagie wrote:
| There's also the "we can only pay a third of what Google
| paid you..." and given two candidates that interview
| equally well, one is former Google and appeared to be
| making $300k and another is from somewhere where they
| were making $70k before...
|
| I'd argue for the $70k person. They are less likely to
| have experienced lifestyle inflation and looking at this
| position as a "slumming it until they can get a job
| making $300k+ again."
|
| It further complicates the issue that most companies
| don't have Google scale problems and don't have the
| engineering culture for a Google scale solution.
|
| There are several factors working _against_ even not
| incompetent former Google employees - especially if their
| experience is entirely within Big Tech.
|
| A bit ago a former Tesla person was in the set of
| interviews and it became clear that they wanted to make
| the organization that was considering hiring them into a
| copy of how Tesla works... and that wasn't something that
| was going to be doable. The post interview discussion was
| "this person is going to try to make us into a copy of
| Tesla for six months, and then leave shortly after they
| realize that we weren't a place that _could_ become
| another Tesla. "
|
| Big Tech experience may be a positive signal for getting
| hired at other Big Tech companies... but it can be a
| negative signal at a company that isn't trying hiring for
| an organization that can't become a Big Tech company -
| especially if that is the only thing that is known.
|
| Hiring isn't necessarily picking the "best" person for
| the role, but rather the least risky. Former Big Tech
| employees are often riskier than other candidates given
| their lifestyle expectations and the mismatch of the
| engineering cultures.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| In part true, for sure.
|
| Personally when I left Google and interviewed elsewhere I
| made clear to potential employers two major things:
|
| 1. I never expected to be paid "Google level" money
| again. I was nowhere near high up in the pay tier there,
| but it was still almost twice what local shops were
| paying, at times (depending on how RSUs worked out, etc.)
|
| Google can pay what it can because of the ads firehose,
| and it was actually, more than anything, a strategy used
| to deprive the competition of talent.
|
| 2. I never actually _liked_ the Google internal culture,
| so although I was there for 10 years I was constantly
| aware of the things that I didn 't like and the things I
| would _not_ be trying to bring over to future gigs. And I
| had 10+ years work experience _before_ Google. Which didn
| 't serve me well while I was inside Google, but
| definitely has afterwards.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > The first year was serious ego boost, having Google on
| the resume opened doors all over the place.
|
| Before I worked in FAANG, My subjective view of big tech
| SWEs was they were very skilled, in a different league.
|
| My current view is that it "just" takes very good
| preparation and a decent resume to get in. And they've
| hired so many people that it's not so special anymore to be
| an "ex-Google". There are just a lot of them.
|
| That being said, I think someone who gets hired in such a
| company, and manage to stay for many years has to be quite
| productive and competent. Especially if they reached higher
| levels.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Competent, yes. Intelligent, yes.
|
| Productive, not necessarily.
|
| Google is not a "produce a lot of code" place. It's a
| careful and deliberate and systematic type of place.
|
| One thing I think ex-Google does bring especially to the
| table is a disdane for over-complicated and overly trend-
| driven solutions.
|
| For one Google's internal review culture is (or at least
| was when I was there) very stringent. Pointless
| complexity and showboating is usually spanked.
|
| For two, because Google basically rolls its own
| everything in regards to frameworks and the like,
| developers who come out of there have been mainly cured
| of "flavour of the month" and "my ego wants us to use
| this new shiny new-coloured tech".
| tayo42 wrote:
| I don't get how people get jobs so easily. It took me like 8
| months and it was extremely stressful.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| They have connections from previous jobs who will vouch for
| them.
| ryandrake wrote:
| How does this work, though? Every company I've worked for
| has an HR system, and resumes flow through it, and
| there's a set process. If I have worked with a candidate
| in the past and highly recommend them, all I can do is
| submit their resume into the great void and check a box
| "Recommend". I don't have any other power. There is no
| "Skip the interview, I _vouch_ for him! " button that I
| can push.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| That's how it works in my company too. The recruitment
| teams barely work with the engineering teams themselves.
| You may know a very good fit for the team, possibly even
| a previous member/intern of that team, and you won't be
| sure you can put the person into the recruitment loop.
| And then they'll need to pass the interviews...
| grandempire wrote:
| And at the end of the day the HR work for your VP. And
| your VP needs people to do things, and if he hears you
| are a good person and you are available it will happen.
| HR is just a layer of process. Make them happy in regards
| to the things they care about.
| tmh88j wrote:
| > How does this work, though? Every company I've worked
| for has an HR system, and resumes flow through it, and
| there's a set process. If I have worked with a candidate
| in the past and highly recommend them, all I can do is
| submit their resume into the great void and check a box
| "Recommend
|
| I haven't worked for any massive companies with thousands
| of employees where there might be a lot of bureaucracy,
| but the few I've worked for ranged from ~100-700 and it
| was pretty easy to get interviews for referrals. One of
| my employers encouraged referrals and offered bonuses if
| it led to a hire.
| vunderba wrote:
| It's probably related to the size of the company. Most of
| the companies I've worked for in the past have been
| between 50-200 employees across the entire org. The dev
| teams were usually around a 10-20 people and the director
| of R&D often encouraged us (the devs) to recommend new
| hires. They still had to pass through HR but it was more
| of a formality and the director had the proverbial
| majority vote.
|
| Smaller teams are also more tight-knit so recommending a
| new potential dev wasn't a matter of process - it was
| literally head down a few doors and have a chat with the
| director.
|
| I'm sure it's significantly different for huge
| enterprises where even the teams within the R&D
| department are heavily siloed.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| If you are regarded very highly, if you suggest to your
| manager there's another person out there like you they
| will work the system to get that person lined up for an
| interview ASAP. If you aren't very highly regarded, your
| suggestions will be put into the HR system and never
| looked at.
|
| If your manager is inexperienced or not very good then
| there's nothing you can do about that.
| mehphp wrote:
| Interviewing is a skill of its own. Some people are really
| good at it.
| screye wrote:
| Has to do with H1b visas.
|
| Post layoff, a person on H1B has 2 months to sign a new job
| offer or they must leave the country.
|
| Majority of Indian and Chinese H1bs do not have green cards,
| and are the main group that suffers. Some of these folks are
| well into their 30s, with kids and houses in the US.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| I'm familiar with H1b visas. Yes it's an irritating
| situation for an immigrant to be in but it's not as bad as
| you make it out to be.
|
| If you have good life savings, you can convert to tourist
| visa, and stay in the country for an additional 6 months
| and a higher hassle when restarting your career.
|
| You can leave the country, and get back as long as your H1b
| is still valid.
|
| If your spouse is working, you can be convert to being a
| dependent on them with H4 visas.
|
| At the end of the day I think the government should not let
| people end up in such a situation. After the 6 year H1b
| deadline, I would prefer if the government just sends a
| notice to those that it thinks can immigrate long term and
| send the rest back. At least then we won't have the
| ridiculous situation of upending families and children who
| have started schooling just because their parents lost a
| job.
| plussed_reader wrote:
| What was the age range of the referred 2023 sample of
| workers?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, I make the same adjusted for inflation that I did when
| I got my last/only promotion 10 years ago. I have grey hair,
| a disability, and a family that relies on the health
| insurance. Switching or being laid off is a risky proposition
| for me. It sounds like all your examples are young, childless
| people (who else could take a month off to go vacationing?).
| Life is much harder for some of us.
| andrewlgood wrote:
| I understand the trade offs you mention. I do disagree with
| your assertion that "Life is much harder for some of us."
| You have chosen a different payoff - your family, certainty
| of health insurance, etc. You get the benefits that
| children bring and the joy of being a parent. The "young,
| childless people" have made a different choice - more
| freedom in employment decisions but no joy from children.
| Everyone has their own cost/benefit analyses on these
| issues. That is life.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Your good health is an invisible crown that can only be
| seen by those who do not wear it.
| hakaneskici wrote:
| Wisdom speaks. Hidden gem of this thread.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| What a great saying. I feel this in my very core.
|
| Dealing with poverty in my youth, homeless at 16, no
| parents to help me, debilitating ADHD, tourettic OCD,
| bipolar type II, CPTSD from 10 years of intense childhood
| physical/emotional abuse, my full-ride college
| scholarships illegally stolen from me by a high school
| who knew I was homeless and had no recourse and allowed a
| teacher to illegally modify my grades out of pure spite,
| malnourished, intense, crippling sciatica, fused lumbar
| discs, possible fibromyalgia, and then developing
| excruciating daily pains and physical disability which
| greatly impacted my life and sometimes made me suicidal,
| which turned out to be an autoimmune disorder that took
| 10 years for doctors to figure out... an extremely
| intense case of gout developing since my teens...
|
| I just keep pushing on but every day I see people who
| take so much for granted, and who are so ready to pass
| judgement without appreciating the basic privilege of
| good health.
|
| I've had to deal with so much struggle that the average
| person wouldn't even want to take the time to hear all of
| it much less believe it, once someone momentarily
| realizes that they'd have it comparatively easy compared
| to others, they often get defensive as they begin to
| realize that their life doesn't have nearly as many
| barriers as they've convinced themselves, and they have
| to come to terms with not applying themselves harder.
| It's easier for them to be dismissive and tell me, "all
| your problems would go away if you worked out more" or
| tell me to get on a keto diet, or whatever have you, as
| if I haven't tried every single thing I can think of.
|
| And the insane thing is I am still quite privileged
| compared to some people in war-torn countries, even if
| they are able to move around without swallowing a
| truckload of ibuprofen. Reminding myself of that is a
| source of strength and determination to keep moving
| forward.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| "You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved
| you from." -- Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
| andrewlgood wrote:
| How do you know I have good health? What an incredibly
| smug comment meant to silence someone with no basis in
| fact.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Well, the person you originally replied to mentioned
| having a disability, and your response was "yeah but you
| have kids so really you chose this and also I disagree
| that life is harder for some people."
|
| The generous interpretation would be that you have
| sufficiently good health that you do not have to
| structure your life around it, and therefore lack
| understanding of the challenges faced by those who do.
|
| The alternate interpretation, that you _do_ understand
| and choose to ignore and dismiss, would be rather less
| generous to you.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Haha you must be young. It's entirely possible young
| people will make the same choices and face the same
| realities I currently do. They just havent gotten to that
| stage yet. Even comparing my life now to my life 10 years
| ago would show the younger me had an easier life.
| However, having a disability is not a choice, and in
| general makes life harder than those without a
| disability. Don't get me wrong - I believe life is hard
| for almost everyone at at least one point or another in
| unique ways and to varying degrees.
| andrewlgood wrote:
| Actually, I am not young. I just retired and have been
| thinking about my life, career, etc. I do not have a
| disability (my wife may disagree) and I agree it makes
| life more challenging (wouldn't be called a disability
| otherwise). I also agree with you that life can be hard,
| children are born with health challenges, children make
| poor decisions with terrible consequences, spouse dies,
| you get cancer, etc. We all need to get through these.
| That does not change the fact that we all have decisions
| to make everyday about our careers, our families, our
| health, our financial situation, and so on. When we look
| at those who made different decisions, it does not
| necessarily mean they made better or worse decisions,
| just different decisions.
|
| I have been thinking about this a lot recently. A former
| boss and good friend who is incredibly smart and
| effective in the work place asked why the two of us had
| never gone the PE route and been more successful. While
| he is very successful by most standards, he sees people
| flying private jets all the time who do not appear more
| skillful, yet have been more successful. As I think on
| this, I feel I simply was never willing to go all in on
| the risk required to achieve that level of financial
| success. I tried co-founding a company once when I was 28
| while engaged and importantly, before children. I felt I
| could take the risk and if I failed, could bounce back. I
| did fail - company did ok but my I ended up disliking
| working with my senior partner - and I did bounce back,
| ending up at GE.
|
| After that, I did not feel comfortable taking that level
| of risk until my children were off to college and no
| longer dependent on me an I had enough money saved that
| my wife and I would be ok for a long time. The people I
| know who have been jet-money financially successful took
| huge risks. They were all in on their venture(s).
| Frequently this cost them their marriage and/or
| relationships with the children. This was their choice.
| Their cost/benefit analysis to optimize their success
| criteria. Some regret the decisions - they underestimated
| the effort and impact on those they cared about. However,
| most have not. They are happy with how things have turned
| out.
|
| Different strokes for different folks.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| The other factor you are missing in your analysis of PE
| route is the number of musical chairs are limited. There
| can only be 1 taylor swift not millions. So the choice is
| not for everyone. Even if everyone made that choice, a
| million taylor swifts will not happen. Surviorship bias
| is real.
| fifticon wrote:
| your argument sounds like "some people choose to do the
| dishes, some of us choose to let other people do the
| dishes".
|
| Some of the "free choices" you claim people can make,
| will only be possible if some other people don't make
| those same choices.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| People don't chose the abilities or disabilities they're
| born with, nor those they receive at the hands of others.
|
| Many also don't have the choice to start a family, no
| matter how badly they want it.
| tocs3 wrote:
| Not passing any judgements on any life choices here, but
| occasional months off sounds like a good thing. I would not
| necessarily need to go anywhere to enjoy (make use of) the
| time. The notion of getting a month off with pay sounds
| good.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That sounds good, so long as there is similar employment
| at the end of it. As a sabbatical it sounds great. As a
| layoff, the uncertainty sounds crushing. It could take
| months to find a new position, especially with the
| disadvantages I have, I would likely need to start
| looking immediately and wouldn't be able to enjoy it.
| bb88 wrote:
| Yeah, it's the same problem I have when the 20 somethings
| use the term "funemployment".
|
| If you're single and have no responsibilities, sure. The
| second you have a mortgage, medical conditions that need
| health insurance, or need money because you had a family
| emergency and had to dip into savings, it's not
| "funemployment" at all.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Yeah, the prospect of layoffs hits a little different when
| you're in your 50s. I have some non-techie friends in their
| 50s (sales, project management) who have been looking for a
| job for years. I've even heard third-hand about some good
| programmers in their 50s in the same boat, although I don't
| know them personally.
|
| The last time I was looking for a job at age 48, I
| interviewed at a bunch of startups and only got a second
| interview from one. It was clear that most of them were
| never going with someone my age unless I'd written a book
| or had patents or something (or was ex-FAANG), even if they
| didn't consciously realize that.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yep. The subliminal message I'm getting from my current
| managers is that I should just be a good little disabled
| person and work as a Walmart greeter. It's turning into
| harassment at this point. Just all sorts of BS. Like
| telling me they are doing _so_ much for me, when my ADA
| accommodation is weekly 1-on-1s with the manager and my
| tech lead. Is that really a lot? There are people without
| disabilities getting weekly 1-on-1s with their managers.
| Maybe the weekly tech lead meeting is more than others
| get, but it doesn 't seem that hard. I got told my
| productivity looked bad. I asked if he ran the numbers -
| he didn't. He didn't even look at my productivity before
| telling me it looked bad. I ran the numbers and I was in
| line with my peers. I would think that's the definition
| of bias... nobody gives a fuck. I didn't get my
| accommodation for 6 months last year and then they gave
| me a bad rating based on opinon and not metrics. They
| said me not getting the accommodations wasn't a factor in
| my performance (how?).
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I stayed in the same job for nearly a decade, it got really
| interesting in the second half; in a way that it never would
| have gotten if I had job hopped every 3 to 5 years.
|
| That being said, once I got bored in the job, I sniffed out
| that the parent company wanted to lay a few people off, and
| hinted that I was open to it. It worked out well for me.
|
| I was just too busy in my personal life to look for a job on
| the side, and honestly I didn't want to walk away halfway
| through a project.
| stogot wrote:
| How do you bring up that you want to be laid off?
| nquicksherlock wrote:
| I don't think that this narrative works in the current job
| environment. But nice try.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Those "lifer" friends may just be later in their career,
| though. Your ability to significantly advance your
| compensation depends on how early in your career you are. You
| will plateau at some point, but early on it makes a lot of
| sense to job hop. My first job hop was for +66% comp
| increase. My next was for about +25%, next for +15% or so.
| Eventually you hit a ceiling. After 30 years in the industry,
| my last job change was probably about +0.05%. I expect if I
| have to interview again, it's a toss up whether I'd get a
| higher or _lower_ offer.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Sure, maybe that's how people in their 30s living in NYC or
| bay area feel about layoffs. But when you're older, have a
| family, and live in an area with a less dynamic job market,
| you may see things differently.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Why does it have to be an age thing? Some men and women are
| players and the game is the game to them. Those who are
| naturally monogamous would be stressed in a game like that.
| Constantly uprooting is a stressful lifestyle and can truly
| be torture (as evidenced by constant anxiety, no way to
| be). I can promise you people who are job hopping are
| hopping around other things in life (friends, family,
| relationships, projects, interests, roles, identities).
| It's a whole way of being.
|
| Edit: This is not a judgement, but if you felt like it was,
| I very much want to hear about it.
| darkwater wrote:
| > Why does it have to be an age thing? Some men and women
| are players and the game is the game to them.
|
| Yes, buuut many will be players from 25 to 35 (with some
| degree of flexibility), that's why it's still an age
| thing. Yes, there are persons that are players for life,
| sure. But IME they are a minority.
|
| Or maybe I'm just projecting, who knows?
| neumann wrote:
| Doesn't have to be an age thing, but it often is an age
| thing. Because lots of us were carefree before dependents
| and a mortgage as well.
|
| Unexpected or deliberate change was an opportunity, a
| challenge, a stimulant! Job hopping (or hopping around
| relationships) when young can be about exploring the
| world, finding yourself and your values and isn't
| inherently bad.
|
| Then you discover what you are good at doing and that you
| like doing and dedicating time to (or perhaps another
| person with whom you want to spend all your time) and
| your priorities change.
|
| Then you might have kids and the work becomes more about
| financial security for the family then about your
| personal growth. And so you aren't looking at layoffs and
| unexpected change as opportunity because you are happy
| with what you've got.
|
| It just often is an age or 'stage of life' thing for many
| people.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It seems like the heavity majority of those stressed about
| layoffs in big tech are lifers and those who are chronically
| averse to and dread the interview process.
|
| Not helped by the fact a lot of interview processes - unless
| you can rely on word-of-mouth _and_ the corporate structure
| allows for shortcuts - are byzantine, maddening and /or don't
| have much relations to the work one will be doing afterwards.
| No fuck you I'm in for a sysop/cloud position, I won't waste
| my time doing Fizzbuzz. Give me a laptop with internet and an
| actual work task if you want to judge my competence.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| Maybe that perception that people chronically job hop is not
| true? I would welcome a data source that shows chronic job
| hopping is the norm.
|
| Anecdotally speaking, I spent 6+ish years at my first "old
| tech" company. My org in this (very large) company was
| constantly simmering with resource actions (mostly small scale
| layoffs). There was lots of negative energy there. I left to
| take a programming/data analytics gig in a large, privately
| held financial company that had never had a layoff. This was
| unfortunately timed, 2 years later the financial crisis of 2008
| kicked off and I (and my entire team) were all laid off. I have
| been with my current employer for approaching two decades and
| several of my peers have been on our team for that much time.
|
| I have had a SINGLE manager in that time window. I can't even
| name all the managers I had in my first job due to near-
| constant re-orgs and layoffs.
| DamonHD wrote:
| I contracted/consulted around London for decades, and though
| I was with some clients for many years in total, others were
| much shorter, and short entries on a CV were not seen as a
| red flag AFAIK.
|
| (Well, there was one hiring manager idiot who could not
| conceive of anything other than linear non-concurrent
| contracts as being honest - that interview did not go well,
| but I dodged a bullet!)
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Another anecdote from my part. I graduated in roughly 2015.
| I've had 5 software eng jobs since then. Each one I've had at
| least 2 different managers in the average 2 years I spent in
| each. My latest role, however, I was at for 2.5 years and had
| 6(!) managers. I had originally intended to stay at that role
| longer term but it was obvious the constant managerial
| turnover was a negative for my career growth - so I hopped
| again.
|
| I've not experienced a layoff, but I also think its extremely
| abnormal to be in a position for so long and only have one
| manager.
| ajkjk wrote:
| It seems impossible to think that it's not true given how
| fundamental it is to (new) tech culture.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I think it's possible that the majority of tech workers
| aren't hoppers, but the majority of applicants are. This
| just stands to reason, since hoppers aren't doing much
| applying and interviewing. This would tend to make
| interviewers think that this is a dominant strategy even if
| it isn't really.
|
| It's also the case that the "everything is transactional,
| fuck your coworkers, leave your job the minute you can
| plausibly say you learned something and move on, chase
| impact at any cost because you only have one career" live-
| to-work contingent is just much louder online, especially
| here. After all, these are people that are investing a lot
| in their career, while IME most of my coworkers, even
| managers (though I don't personally know very many VP-and-
| up managers) are work-to-live people, mostly interested in
| their families and hobbies, and seem to rarely post on
| forums like this.
|
| In any case, I'm fairly certain that there are (or were
| until recently) Labor Department researchers who have
| figured this all out empirically and could give us an
| answer if we knew where to look.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| The thing is, the tech industry is also an outlier in a sense
| that the quality of the job you find varies _massively_
| depending on (1) the timing, sometimes literally by a few weeks
| and (2) whether you already have a job or not.
|
| And so, layoffs are not "just another bump" in people's career.
| They represent a major net negative for people who would
| otherwise have much more control over the trajectory.
| atrettel wrote:
| This is an interesting question to ask, though I personally
| would not attribute it to "culture" as much as it may be a
| product of the environment people are put in. From my
| experience, there are a lot of jobs that make it difficult to
| continue past a few years, so job hopping is the inevitable
| outcome of that. I think many companies need to examine why
| _they_ have a lot of turnover instead of attributing it all to
| individual employees.
|
| And to be frank, layoffs are scary for any industry, because
| they usually are correlated with layoffs at other companies. A
| rising tide lifts all boats, but a sinking tide is difficult to
| escape. You might be laid off at a time when there is no other
| job to hop to.
| bigtimesink wrote:
| > there are a lot of jobs that make it difficult to continue
| past a few years
|
| This has been a lot of my career. All my long, successful
| jobs have lasted around 2-3 years, and it's the time it takes
| for the company to realize the initiative wasn't worth it. I
| count four of these stints where I left, and the team was
| essentially dissolved within a year. I'm not saying I was the
| key person for the project; I just saw the writing on the
| wall.
|
| It's been career limiting not having a large-scope project on
| a growing team, but I don't know if this is something about
| me, something about the projects I'm a good fit for, or the
| reality that a lot of projects and teams don't survive 5
| years, and I've been exposed to some survivor bias of smart
| people who have gotten lucky.
| atrettel wrote:
| That is a great example of what I was talking about.
|
| Another example is the changing nature of the contracts
| people are hired under. I'm a scientist, and a lot of
| positions are inherently term-limited. You end up with a
| lot of organizations with two different groups of
| employees: employers who have worked there for decades, and
| employers who are temporary and work there for a few years
| hoping to be converted to permanent. Just like in the
| situation you describe, if you end up on a project that
| just isn't working out, that does not bode well for your
| own prospects. That has nothing to do with your own
| capabilities or how hard you worked on the project. And
| just like you mention, a lot of the "permanent" people have
| survivorship bias and do not really understand that they
| ultimately got lucky and timed the market well.
|
| (Or many of the permanent people were hired as permanent
| staff originally and do not understand the conditions under
| which new staff are hired.)
| no_wizard wrote:
| The tech industry also doesn't reward loyalty, even at big
| tech.
|
| There's a reason for the low tenure at most firms and it's
| primarily due to the lack of rewarding experience and depth of
| field knowledge at most companies. When you _have to_ get a new
| job just to get a salary increase that keeps up with inflation
| you are going to see a lot of job hopping when the skills of
| the workforce are generally in demand.
|
| How often is it that someone leaves because they can get paid
| better elsewhere? Why do we think this wouldn't drive the
| primary cause of people leaving companies?
|
| Where the fuck is the company showing any loyalty to its
| workforce?
| generic92034 wrote:
| > Where the fuck is the company showing any loyalty to its
| workforce?
|
| They have been and are out there. But all it takes is a
| change on C level and cost cutting suddenly is everything,
| loyalty a thing of the past. That is, you cannot count on
| loyalty anymore, even if the company you are working for is
| currently showing it (or seems to).
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Big tech employees have been abandoning companies the second
| they can get higher TC for decades, and as soon as the
| companies start firing a very small fraction (in a lot of
| cases people who were coasting or incompetent) its a problem
| of morality?
|
| You can really see what people are made of when they face
| adversity. Good luck.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Big tech employees are a fraction of all tech employers and
| employees. There's problem so systematically pervasive that
| you see this across the board. Companies do not value long
| term retainment of employees up and down the size spectrum
| and it's very clear in how they behave.
|
| They don't award experience and depth of knowledge in any
| way that is indicative of fostering retention
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Yeah I don't see the big mystery here. People leave to keep
| up with cost of living or get away from toxic elements in
| their current workplace that are otherwise difficult - if not
| impossible - to change by staying. It's not something we want
| to do, it's something we have to do for one good reason or
| another. If we had better rights and meaningful raises to
| improve or even sustain our quality of life, the job hopping
| would surely decrease. The layoffs and the reason for job
| hopping are both attributed to actions on the employer's
| side.
| ryandrake wrote:
| For _almost_ every job I 've had, I would have been more
| than happy to stay there if it provided the career growth
| that job hopping provides. Companies seem to deliberately
| make internal promotion far more difficult than just job
| hopping to L+1.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| > The tech industry also doesn't reward loyalty
|
| Anecdotally, I've heard of many cases of "up or out" in
| FAANGs, which in other terms is a negative preference for
| loyalty.
|
| (This, in fact, is one of the reasons people working in those
| companies perpetually seem to be practicing interview
| questions and Leetcode every day.)
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > when most people are in a chronic state of tech job hopping?
|
| Citation needed. The vast majority of people in tech that I
| know do NOT job hop. So please, I need a citation, not your
| feelings.
| huang_chung wrote:
| Well, getting fucked out of your 401k money 6 months before it
| vests stings some.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Is that an average time given a 12 month vesting schedule?
|
| edit: Actually curious about the dead comment. What companies
| have multi year _401(k)_ vesting?
|
| Every company I have worked at or seen does a match on a 12
| month schedule or less.
|
| Are they thinking of stock options?
| Barracoon wrote:
| IIRC Amazon has a 2 years 401k match vesting period.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| per this article, Amazon 401k has a cliff vesting on
| matched funds at 3 years of employment. After reading
| around, it seems like 3 years is the legal maximum for
| 401k cliff vesting, with 6 years permitted for
| incremental vesting.
|
| https://www.consiliowealth.com/insights/breaking-down-
| amazon...
| huang_chung wrote:
| Two years is more typical.
| saghm wrote:
| I think there are two reasons: choosing to change jobs on your
| own gives you ability to pick a time when it's minimally
| disruptive to yourself and your actual family, and then the
| pretend "family" vibe you cite is pushed by the employer in the
| first place. Companies insising on a game of make-believe where
| the relationship between employer and employee isn't
| transactional makes it hard not to be bothered by the
| hypocrisy. I agree that on average, the tech industry isn't as
| bad as other industries often are, but I don't see why that's a
| compelling argument not to care about the fact that it still
| could be better. There's nothing stopping me from wanting fewer
| tech layoffs and better conditions for workers in other
| industries as well (and in some circumstances even advocate for
| that even knowing that it might require changes to my own
| quality of life to achieve that; as a trivial example, I go out
| of my way to tip much larger than 20% when I use Uber because
| I'd rather risk getting ripped off than a driver not getting
| paid a fair wage for the work they do for me, even if it's at
| my own expense).
|
| At the end of the day, everything is a balancing act, and the
| amount of change most of us can make as individuals is a drop
| in the bucket compared to the unfairness that people have to
| deal with every day. We all have to make judgement calls on
| where to take a stand and where to play it safe to avoid making
| things harder for ourselves without actually making a
| difference that ends up helping anyone, and if people are
| acting in good faith when trying to make those choices, I don't
| see any value in criticizing what they end up deciding. If
| anything, most of us in tech are probably in far more of a
| comfortable position to be able to speak out against employers
| (either or own or those in industries where workers are treated
| even worse), so I think there's a reasonable argument that it's
| more important for us to because of that. It's not a zero-sum
| game though; pointing out tech employer hypocrisy doesn't
| inherently take anything away from pointing out even worse
| things that other employers do.
| carlob wrote:
| > I go out of my way to tip much larger than 20% when I use
| Uber because I'd rather risk getting ripped off than a driver
| not getting paid a fair wage for the work they do for me,
| even if it's at my own expense
|
| Honest question, as a European who doesn't fully understand
| tipping culture: don't you think that this might be
| perpetuating a culture of exploitation? Wouldn't you rather
| spend your money on taxis that at least have some regulations
| if you are afraid the drivers are getting the wrong end of
| the deal?
| giantg2 wrote:
| I've worked over 12 years at the same company. Finding a new
| job would be difficult as remote pays lower and isn't the best
| fit for me, my area isn't known for tech job, my spouse doesn't
| want to relocate, I work for one of the biggest employers in my
| area (fewer choices outside the company), and we are seeing the
| highest sector unemployment since the dot com bubble. Oh, and
| my disability makes it all worse. My job has been an absolute
| hell hole for the past 2 years, but internal and external job
| opportunities have been extremely limited.
| oytis wrote:
| There is attrition and there are layoffs. With attrition
| someone leaves every year or so, you part on good terms, and
| the company hires a replacement on a similar level and
| location.
|
| Layoffs means reducing headcount, your team ends up weaker than
| it was, and everyone is left wondering if they are next.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Depends on the country, in many European countries job hopping
| is not well seen regardless of the industry.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I think your idea is a good faith argument, but it's a fallacy:
| high turnover on a job because of stiff competition for labor
| is not a "tech culture" issue, and it's not at all the same
| impact on a person as changing due to a layoff.
| owl_vision wrote:
| In tech, consultancy usually last between 3 months and 18
| months, so one can have many consulting positions of under 2
| years.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I think many people at big tech companies like Facebook truly
| drank the koolaid there, and when they got laid off it laid
| bare that the companies they worked at were just companies.
| Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc are no better than Microsoft,
| IBM, Oracle, or whatever other 20th century company they had
| come to represent the answer to. I think a LOT of people had
| really tied their identities up in being a big tech employee
| and when they got laid off it was like being cast out of
| paradise
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| > Why do tech workers get so wrapped around the axle of layoffs
| when most people are in a chronic state of tech job hopping?
|
| Most of us job-hop because we _have_ to, not because we _want_
| to.
|
| There's a class of people in the tech industry who like to
| write blogs about how fun and fulfilling it is to constantly
| change jobs and roles. Those people are highly visible but not
| representative. Most humans find constant change and
| uncertainty stressful, not exhilarating.
| abeppu wrote:
| I think the other side of it is:
|
| - Detail-oriented nerds with a rich mental framework around
| things like optimization, making decisions based on data,
| perhaps statistical approaches to uncertainty get frustrated
| when they see their organization making big, irreversible
| choices without the benefit of all available information. From
| the IC or line-manager level there may be a bunch of
| information which you can tell was not taken into
| consideration.
|
| - Process-oriented people who have put a bunch of effort into
| planning, goal-setting and measurement based on seemingly
| reasonable assumptions like "this team that provides service X
| will continue to exist for the duration of project Y which
| depends on X" get frustrated when execs throw everything into
| disarray ... and then 3 weeks later want to know why Y is off
| track.
|
| As the article describes, often lay-offs end up being bad for
| the company, not just the employees who get terminated. Even if
| you're not let go, or even if you just care about the value of
| your vested equity, it can be quite frustrating to see this
| happen. And often, because layoffs are generally planned in
| secret, leadership explicitly precludes the possibility of
| getting input from the experts in their organization.
|
| While perhaps some layoffs ultimately turn out ok, I think
| generally the people who go through them can tick off a list of
| parts of it that were ill-considered and needlessly disruptive,
| in part b/c of this lack of trust and communication.
| slackernews9 wrote:
| "Why do tech workers get so wrapped around the axel of
| foreclosure when most people are in a chronic state of moving
| house?"
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Citing an airline for longevity is a bit disingenuous.
|
| I'm not sure how it works with support staff, but aircraft crew
| have contract structures that so heavily favor seniority that
| most pilots and FAs will never leave a major willingly during
| their career.
|
| Your observation, to me, seems more like: tech companies reward
| new employees over old, airlines do the extreme opposite.
| biztos wrote:
| I get the point, but I don't think that's universally true.
| Especially in the less glamorous corners of the tech industry
| -- yes, you have some younger people looking to bounce, but
| most of the people who actually keep the lights on have full
| lives outside of work and all things being equal, they'd rather
| stick around than deal with the hassle of finding a new job.
| They're only going to leave if you create a toxic work
| environment or underpay them by double-digit percentages.
|
| For those industries, I don't think they're getting much from
| the layoffs besides the short-term "we did layoffs" C-suite
| bonus. If you're in the Widgetmaker Control Systems industry,
| why do you want to _make_ your workforce think they have to
| leave in 3-4 years?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I guess there are a broad range of perspectives and how loud
| people are is going to depend on their perspectives. Some
| reasons to dislike layoffs:
|
| - visas may be dependent on employment, and can make changing
| jobs harder. In the United States, lots of visa rules are at
| the discretion of the government (eg how long one may live in
| the United States on an employer-sponsored visa while
| unemployed)
|
| - the recent (and dot-com era) tech layoffs have been cyclical:
| many companies are in layoff-mode or hiring-spree mode at the
| same time. The time when many companies are not hiring is the
| worst time to be thrust into the job market
|
| - people may have other job security worries - big tech
| companies tend to always be growing so it is worrying if they
| are laying people off instead of moving them from a failing
| business line to a new one
|
| - in general some people may have a lot of anxiety about
| changes to income. If you are applying for new jobs while
| currently holding another, there is much less pressure than if
| you're unemployed and need to find a new job (and possibly at a
| pay cut requiring outgoings to be reduced) before you run out
| of savings, especially if you don't have much in savings
| compared to outgoings, which may be the case for some tech
| workers (some people spend a lot, or have much of their wealth
| tied up in property or have a family which requires spending
| more on eg housing or school fees). The much-worse consequences
| of failing to get a new job may increase the
| pressure/stress/discomfort
|
| - this reveals an obvious truth about where the power lies in
| 'engineering-focused' companies and people don't like it
|
| - people can see a layoff as being like a firing and therefore
| be unhappy due to hurt pride (or worries about being less
| desirable in the job market)
|
| - the lack of agency in a layoff is unpleasant. It is quite
| different from choosing to apply to other jobs.
| mock-possum wrote:
| I mean in all fairness, I move around because I'm looking for a
| place to stay - if I'm not enjoying myself at my job, why would
| I stick around? And conversely, when I find a spot I like, why
| job hop?
|
| And besides, the last time I was laid off, it was from a place
| I'd been at nearly 5 years, a place that did feel almost like
| family - that's why I stayed as long as I did.
| m104 wrote:
| Because a lot of tech workers today aren't actually job hopping
| and instead get very cozy in a job and a team and a career
| trajectory, which feels unfairly ripped away during layoffs for
| reasons that don't feel connected to their personal
| performance.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Because it's usually only true in your early 20s. Then you find
| a place and stay. These people bragging about company hopping
| every 3 or 4 years don't do that for 20 years.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Job hopping is done to maximize your salary in the least amount
| of time - but everyone knows that there's a ceiling. You can't
| just keep job hopping for the rest of your career, and
| magically end up making 25% more every time you hop to the next
| gig.
|
| Sooner or later you'll start to reach a ceiling, and have to
| defend your salary more. The idea is that if you can end up
| hitting that ceiling in 10 years by job hopping, that's better
| than spending 25 years at one place to hit the same figure. The
| earlier you have maximized your salary, the more you can invest
| and hopefully retire earlier.
|
| Now, once you hit that ceiling - it kind of sucks to be in a
| constant state of job hopping. You actually don't get rewarded,
| and it is more stress than anything. And the older you get, the
| more stability you'll value - after all, you probably have a
| mortgage, kids, and all that to account for.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| It's a chicken and egg problem. If people feel they could have
| a meaningful career in a given place, they would stay longer.
| When you see your teammates getting laid off one after the
| other - including people with 5-10 years of seniority and
| history of good performance, you start to wonder whether you
| should have any sense of loyalty to the company.
|
| I joined my company with the naive hope there would be some
| sentiment of family/community and that I'd do a big chunk of my
| career there. But after seeing how they treat employees, I'm
| looking for the way out.
| hankchinaski wrote:
| I agree with parts of what you say. I'm a career contractor or
| job hopper. I like it this way. I also am aware of the
| volatility of the industry. I prefer hopping and getting 20%
| pay bump each year. This more than offsets the risk of being
| laid off and staying a few months without income.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Many of the stereotypes you mention are for startup founder /
| early employee types.
|
| That's not everyone, it's just who's on HN.
|
| Most employees of these companies are just regular people
| wanting regular jobs.
| paulddraper wrote:
| What % of the your coworkers have been there 5+ years?
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I work at salesforce. 100% of my immediate team and gotta
| be over 50% of my broader team. We've barely hired since
| 2020.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| 100% (I have owned and worked at my own company for 10
| years)
|
| Anecdotally, I've also worked at many startups that became
| big companies through acquisition and Let me tell you - J&J
| has a lot of employees who have been there more than 5
| years, thousands. They also had several big layoffs of such
| people during the process.
| grandempire wrote:
| Different groups of people. Some confidently job hop, others
| live in fear of losing a comfortable job.
|
| There are deep differences in expectations and attitudes in
| these areas, driven by family, culture, and upbringing.
| al_borland wrote:
| I've been at my company working in tech for 19 years and I hate
| the pushing of job hopping as a norm. Job hoppers have no skin
| in the game. They don't need support what they build, they
| don't get to see where it fell short... they really can't learn
| from their experiences and mistakes. What they do isn't in the
| best interest of the company, it's just enough (an MVP if you
| will) to add to the resume so they can leverage it for a bump
| in pay on their next job.
|
| I see wave after wave of job hoppers hired to "transform" the
| organization and all they ever do is repeat the same old
| mistakes, which we could tell them if they weren't too arrogant
| to listen.
|
| Every job hopper I've worked with has simply been a distraction
| to the greater goals of the organization to serve the customer.
| I've lost all patience and respect for the people who practice
| it, and the companies that set themselves up in a way which
| encourages it.
|
| I don't know how we find our way back, but I think companies
| and employees would all be better off with some stability and
| more long term thinking.
| jagraff wrote:
| I think the solution for this would be for companies to
| proactively raise wages in order to keep up with the market.
| al_borland wrote:
| Yes, but it also takes some level of patience on the part
| of the employee.
|
| Corporate bureaucracies often move slow, and they also want
| to see you can do the job first. I'm seeing most younger
| people don't seem to have patience for this.
|
| They also grossly overestimate their knowledge and ability.
| I've seen a significant number of people talk like they
| mastered a job after 1 year, then they stared asking me how
| they could get on my team doing what I do. I did the job
| they were doing for 10+ years. The reason they think it's
| easy is because I defined the processes of how to do it
| all, wrote all the documents on how to do it, made a
| training program they went through, and worked with other
| teams to remove a lot of the toil. I then started building
| tools to make it easier for anyone off the street to do a
| lot of the work, and do it at scale. Thats why I have the
| job I have; it wasn't given to me, I created it out of a
| desire to make the team better after realizing we could
| only go so far if I just worked faster. They didn't see any
| of that.
|
| For those that seemed interested, I'd give them the tools
| they needed to help, to see if they were the type to do
| this kind of stuff. I'd provide feedback, answer questions,
| or do anything else I could to help them. Out of the dozen
| or so who asked, only 1 person has done it to a limited
| degree. Thats why companies don't just offer it up quickly
| and easily. A lot of people talk, but not many back it up.
| soerxpso wrote:
| That's kind of a chicken and egg issue, isn't it? Why is it
| that employees can get more money/promotions from a company
| they have no relationship with, than from a company where
| they've already been working for multiple years and have more
| company-specific knowledge than their replacement will? Unlike
| with government work, years at the company isn't really
| considered when deciding who layoffs are going to hit. You're
| proposing that tech workers should loyally stay at the same
| company for 10 years, make less money, and then get laid off
| just as easily anyway?
| sgustard wrote:
| The average tenure of an employee at HP is 6.6 years (source:
| Google AI) to pick a company that may be outside your bubble.
| And the lifelong career holding older employee at a legacy
| enterprise tech company is the kind of worker who is most
| adversely affected by an unexpected return to the job seeking
| pool.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Tech is a huge field. If you work in big tech or well-known
| companies, it is common to job-hop. If you're at something more
| established, traditional, or mid-sized, you'll probably find
| lifers.
|
| Additionally, I think fewer people are job-hopping considering
| the market is so competitive. I would expect new grads to start
| staying at their first job for longer, too.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| 2 way street. you say "it's laying off a bunch of people who
| were gonna dip in 6 months to a year anyway."
|
| to the new grad, it's "wow half my team just got laid off when
| the company seems to be doing fine, i guess i better not get
| too comfortable here"
| stego-tech wrote:
| Because not every company gives severance during layoffs. As
| someone who got RIFed ( _again_ - fourth time in my 15yr
| career), this is the first time I 've had severance, and the
| first time I had a notice period that wasn't just "till the end
| of the month". As such, layoffs are _traumatic_ just on their
| own.
|
| Adding more rapid-fire context (for the sake of brevity):
|
| * Parents changed jobs every few years growing up, which meant
| a new city, new home, new schools, and a complete cycling of
| relationships (forcibly out with the old, forcibly in with the
| new)
|
| * I watched layoffs in non-tech sectors gradually go from tech-
| style severance packages, to no packages beyond the required
| WARN notice period payouts, to filing the notices and hoping
| nobody asks, to now just paying out any damages after-the-fact
| in lawsuits
|
| * I spent ~15mo unemployed during the "Great Recession" of '08,
| ending up having to move to another region of the country for
| work and spending a night homeless, followed by six-months
| couch surfing, then another month in a hotel before finally
| having an apartment again
|
| So all that put together, layoffs and job changes are
| _incredibly traumatic experiences_ I do my best to avoid at all
| costs. I am one of those "lifers" who would much rather hunker
| down for a good wage today, buy a home, sock away savings, and
| work my way up an internal career ladder than throw myself into
| an entirely new workplace, colleagues, culture, and standards
| every year or two. I claw for multiple roles in an org (at the
| most recent one, I was juggling roles on Private Cloud & Public
| Cloud, Governance Councils, leading a CaaS ops overhaul, _plus_
| other PoCs) specifically to make myself as indispensable as
| possible and position myself on the internal promotional
| ladder, because I 'd rather stay with one org provided I can
| eke out a modest living and take care of those I care about
| (myself included).
|
| Now _all that aside_ , there's also the reality that wage
| growth from job hopping hasn't turned out to be as big as folks
| thought. The real growth comes from career promotions, which
| companies hate doling out internally for profoundly stupid and
| arbitrary reasons (hence job hopping). I get the impression
| most folks would stay put if they could get the growth in their
| career they wanted, but companies would rather hire someone
| externally to fill a spot than promote someone internally
| operating at that level; I am very much in that group myself.
| Heck, we're seeing that now with folks not leaving jobs because
| they're having difficulty finding that growth (in comp and
| title) elsewhere, as everyone kind of knuckles down for tough
| times ahead. That taste of stability will create more "lifers"
| as you put it, _especially_ when the world outside is
| increasingly unstable; it 's natural that humans (and most
| animals) will seek stability in times of crisis, taking only as
| much risk as necessary to preserve their survival.
|
| Something the article doesn't get into is the knock-on effect
| of layoffs in future business: if workers are let go for what
| they perceive to be arbitrary or irrational reasons, they're
| less likely to want to do business with that company again in
| the future. This is particularly why tech companies offer such
| good severance packages, as it's their mea culpa of sorts by
| trying to buy themselves a good reputation on the way out the
| door. When _everyone is doing it_ though (like the current
| layoff cycles), it becomes a broader disgust or distaste for
| established vendors in general, and those workers - _when_ they
| land a new role - are likely to want to migrate off their
| employer 's products unless their career is tied to it somehow.
| This can reduce business _after_ cuts had already been made,
| potentially putting an organization into a cycle of self-harm
| wherein more cuts are made in response to declining business,
| which then causes more declines in business, which leads to
| more cuts, etc. This in turn leaves a huge opening for new
| startups to enter the hole left behind by established players,
| undercutting them on pricing _and_ providing better service.
|
| So taking all of that into context when reading the article
| again, and it paints a pretty telling picture of widespread
| mismanagement at companies doing unwarranted and highly
| traumatic layoffs. If the only thing your leadership can do to
| grow the business is to layoff staff, that's a pretty telling
| sign that business ain't doing so great in general and leaders
| are out of ideas to improve it.
| kristianc wrote:
| Kind of sucks when you have stock...
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _Why do tech workers get so wrapped around the axle of
| layoffs when most people are in a chronic state of tech job
| hopping?_
|
| When I leave a job, I leave on good terms, they're always sad
| to see me go but understanding, and I always give my employer 6
| or more weeks notice with the additional offer that they can
| still reach out to me for help if they need after that for as
| long as my memory remains helpful. A couple even took me up on
| my offer and asked to pay me for my time.
|
| The time I got caught in a layoff I had the door slammed in my
| face literally minutes later and barely two weeks severance
| contingent on signing away rights. So, fuck me I guess.
|
| Maybe the workers who complain understand that circumstances
| are not always equal.
| bodegajed wrote:
| It's an outlier because unlike other service industries the
| software has global presence. An app written by software
| engineers laid-off 3 years ago will still run by itself with
| exceptions like servers running out of disk space. Unlike other
| services industry tech workers get laid off for:
|
| 1. When the product has failed market-fit and company is not
| raising anymore capital.
|
| 2. When the backlog has been cleared.
|
| Tech workers get more pay by job hopping.
| CaffeineLD50 wrote:
| "Companies who enact them as part of a broader change in
| strategy, Cascio says, fare better than those who enact them
| simply to cut costs."
|
| Ah, the old strategic realignment PR BS. "Its not cost cutting
| because our C levels are clowns and screwed up. Its a strategic
| realignment for AI investment ". Lol. Didn't Salesfarce and
| Fakebook both use that one?
|
| When will AI replace upper management? It can't do any worse.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > Companies must invest to train current workers to pick up new
| tasks -- and invest to recruit replacement employees after the
| economy improves or the company's financial troubles clear up.
|
| It always baffled me how could a businessman fail to understand
| that loosing a reliably working employee (even of mediocre
| productivity) is like shooting your own leg - resulting in having
| to look for a replacement, train them and hope (certainty is
| value worth money as well) they are going to be as good. To me it
| seems it is always better to increase the wage to avoid losing
| people already working for you so you save yourself from the
| hassle.
| scott_meyer wrote:
| Layoffs are not about cost, they are about power. The economic
| result is just confirmation.
|
| A large company in actual financial distress will sell off a
| division.
| bawolff wrote:
| Seems like a clear case of correlation != causation.
|
| Of course layoffs are correlated with bad company performance. I
| dont know if they help, but i would expect the pattern either
| way.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Kelleher wasn't around to see them. He died in 2019."
|
| That's how it works. You have someone who is a great leader who
| started a company and treated their employees well, then the
| behemoth corporation waits for them to die to start gutting their
| values. It happened at my company. It's basically just a lite
| version of a private equity takeover.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| A large airline like southwest is one thing but I'm always so
| surprised at how much over hiring we do in software companies.
|
| Every problem/opportunity seems to just need a few more
| headcount.
|
| Lots of managers are actively trying to increase their headcount
| for self promotional reasons.
|
| The whole thing seems really counterproductive.
| horns4lyfe wrote:
| And right now companies are doing the same thing with overseas
| hires, always assuming more is better
| mistercheph wrote:
| This whole article is selection bias:
|
| > There are findings that suggest layoffs lead to both short-term
| and long term issues, including: > - A 2x as likely chance of
| bankruptcy compared to companies that haven't done layoffs.
|
| Obviously! Because a huge number of the companies undergoing
| layoffs are about to go under and are using layoffs as a last
| ditch survival effort.
|
| The author may be right, but every fact and figure presented in
| this article fails to distinguish between healthy companies in
| healthy industries using layoffs as a lever to increase stock
| prices, and layoffs happening in industries/companies that are
| collapsing.
| nielsbot wrote:
| Former Nintendo CEO Iwata said something similar:
|
| "If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term
| financial results, employee morale will decrease," he said. "I
| sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will
| be able to develop software titles that could impress people
| around the world."
| nullorempty wrote:
| what about layoffs that balance hiring elsewhere - laying off in
| NA hiring in India.
| kazinator wrote:
| Nothing kills your culture like layoffs, but what if the culture
| has been overtaken by a whole lot of getting nothing done while
| collecting pay?
| velcrovan wrote:
| I can't believe no one here is talking about how horrible these
| charts are.
| ssssvd wrote:
| Had been advocating slower hiring & targeted reductions in a mid-
| sized tech firm for years after COVID, but it happened much
| faster under a newly appointed CEO.
|
| Under new leadership, we executed 1/3 layoffs framed as a
| "culture refresh" and to briefly lift the stock. It wasn't about
| survival, we had plenty of cash, okayish growth and fantastic ARR
| - more about a new corp-backed CEO adopting a "do-it-like-Elon"
| approach.
|
| Being mostly Europe-based but US-led, it turned into a massive
| and costly process (Americans don't exactly dig EU/UK workers
| rights - Spain was the biggest shock), stalling most productive
| activity for half a year. Internal trust and brand perception
| tanked. Since it began with ousting old execs, it quickly
| devolved into a blunt-force exercise with no internal knowledge,
| led by scared managers with percentage targets - many good people
| were cut. Managers hesitated to shield talent, given the "culture
| reboot" framing. I ended up personally cutting entire offices.
|
| When the CEO's broader strategy failed (for reasons beyond
| layoffs), high performers started eyeing the exit. Ironically,
| many first saw the layoffs positively - COVID overhires had left
| uneven team dynamics, and some dead weight was on high salaries.
| But when it became clear there was no coherent plan, people began
| leaving.
|
| That triggered a chain reaction. Senior hiring pipelines dried up
| (reputation matters, esp. when your top-talent is on the way out
| and is loud about it), and panic set in. Eventually, it turned
| into survival mode. The CEO didn't last long after that.
| mock-possum wrote:
| > Americans don't exactly dig EU/UK workers, right?
|
| I'm actually curious to hear your take on it - what's your
| experience been?
| ssssvd wrote:
| UK was horrible. No real protection for workers - just layers
| of mandatory legal mumbo-jumbo with zero actual chances for
| people to keep their jobs. It was like ripping off the band-
| aid 1mm at a time for four months.
|
| Spain/France were an employer's nightmare. Anyone without
| another job lined up secured a "special deal"--workers have
| massive leverage, they know it, and they're actively
| litigious. People on parental leave had close to a year of
| guaranteed no-shows. The reaction was, of course, "never
| again" rippling across American corporate circles.
|
| The rest of Europe was okay-ish.
|
| US was predictably the easiest. We were generous with
| packages, but it's easy to see how the system can be used to
| screw people over.
|
| Middle East was the roughest. Visas in UAE/Qatar expire
| instantly, and the local tech market is almost non-existent.
| We extended until the end of the school year to help with
| visa concerns, and some people managed to arrange golden
| visas. But for many, it was a massive shock -- losing both
| jobs and residency overnight.
| callc wrote:
| > But when it became clear there was no coherent plan, people
| began leaving.
|
| I see this more any more, to the point of wondering what % of
| execs and decision makers are actually meaningfully good at the
| job? When times are good, any exec action will turn out fine.
| But when times are tough, who is worth their salt?
|
| And if all these decision makers are bad at decision making,
| what would a better organization look like?
| ssssvd wrote:
| There's definitely a "peacetime" / "wartime" divide. There's
| also an overreliance on pedigree. But above all, it's the
| pressure of being a public company (which often means losing
| the founder).
|
| As a new CEO, you have to impress the board and investors
| without really knowing the company. You probably get two
| earnings calls - six months at most - to prove yourself.
| That's nothing, even for a senior dev, let alone an exec. And
| if you're being brought in, it means the company isn't in
| great shape - or is at least perceived that way.
|
| You don't have time to really figure out how things work, and
| even if you did, it's political suicide. The board didn't
| hire a "looks fine to me" person. They hired a fixer. So, it
| turns into narrative games and rapid actions with massive
| tail risks.
|
| I don't think it's a people problem. It's a system problem.
| Leadership replanting is hard, but it's one of the very few
| tools in the board's toolbox.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| There's _weirdly_ (to intuitive sense and business zeitgeist
| since the 80s or so) mixed data on layoffs in general. There's
| a decent chance they cause more mid-term harm than good, _most
| of the time_.
|
| They also didn't used to be a regular feature of business.
|
| It's funny how such things become "ordinary" and "obviously
| good things to do sometimes" that haven't always been the
| former, and _may not really be the latter_ either.
|
| Business management is vibes, trend-following, and fear of
| straying from the pack. And the best of that is vibes! That's
| how bad it is.
| ssssvd wrote:
| You nailed it. In our case, EBITDA margins were "pencil on a
| napkin" at best -- only because the CFO is usually the sanest
| person in the room. At the same time, Elon's moves and Meta's
| "year of efficiency" were super influential.
|
| A lot of what happens in the boardroom or C-suite is "stick
| with the crowd" -- e.g. template-based "tech modernization."
| (That's often a new CTO's hedge if the real problems are too
| hard. Just "go Cloud" or "go AI" for five years -- four
| vests, one to jump off.) You broadcast confidence, you own
| the narrative. Which means never, ever saying "I don't know."
|
| This is especially common in PE "turnarounds" or post-IPOs
| after founder exits. And it's especially harmful there
| because current staff is often seen as a liability, not an
| asset.
|
| I thought a lot about this after the layoffs, and I think it
| boils down to how "professional C-levels" see execution as a
| commodity. They tend to overemphasize leadership (sometimes
| self-serving, but often genuine) and resource availability.
| The focus is on "what?" and "how to pay for it?" -- with
| "how?" left to be figured out on the go.
|
| I don't think that's completely wrong. Sometimes execution is
| a commodity. But not when you're short on time and planning
| for a rapid sprint.
| andrewlgood wrote:
| Unfortunate click bait title for such an important topic. The
| various metrics quoted of why companies without layoffs appear to
| do better do not address the idea of underlying causes such as
| companies doing better do need mass layoffs while companies not
| doing as well likely to reduce expenses with actions to include
| layoffs.
| culi wrote:
| The article compared companies within the same industries (e.g.
| the airline industry) which faced the same problems
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| People are overthinking this.
|
| It's about power, and inculcating fear.
|
| The CEO who "cuts" people at a company is like the Aztec priest
| who plunges the knife in atop the pyramid. The bloody spectacle
| is the point. It's as much about everyone who's watching as it is
| about the specific victim. It says, "I can do this to you. I can
| inflict pain without reprisal. Behold my power."
|
| That's the whole point. Who is afraid of whom?
|
| These people have the money. We depend on that money in order to
| live. They are reminding us of that fact. Now they demand
| obedience and harder work. 40 hours? Not enough. Elon sleeps at
| the office, why don't you? You have to be "super hardcore".
|
| Partly, this is punishment for the challenge that was raised to
| CEO power from around 2016 to 2022. CEOs have been furious that
| they have felt fear of their workers. Now they want those workers
| to feel fear. In interviews, Andreesen has said almost exactly
| this, if not in quite so many words.
|
| A similar theory is at the root of Fed policy, which hinges on
| the idea of a "wage price spiral". In their view, inflation is
| caused not by the accumulation of capital within a price-
| insensitive upper quantile, or by the constriction of economic
| chokepoints by consolidation, but by workers' ability to bargain
| for higher wages. The solution to inflation, they essentially
| come out and say, is to put workers in their place.
|
| There is a united front here. It is about who fears whom, the
| end. It is about your emotional state. In a literal sense, it is
| terrorism.
|
| So in that sense, yes, layoffs work. Are you financially
| independent? No? Are you afraid? Yes? Then they're working.
| jpgvm wrote:
| I find layoffs very context sensitive.
|
| Atleast 2 of the fast growing companies I have been a part of
| have had serious layoffs that were very successful in cutting
| dead weight that had accumulated because of fast and loose hiring
| and poor middle management. So it can be done well.
|
| By and large though they are a sign to jump from the soon to be
| sinking ship... so it's very important to know what kind it is
| and act accordingly.
| deviantbit wrote:
| This is a terrible opinion piece. Layoffs do work. Cutting hours
| does not work. I am always amazed how few people understand how a
| business operates. They think its a community organized event
| where there is unlimited revenue.
|
| There are a few basic accounting principles employees need to
| understand. It all revolves around Assets = Liabilities + Owner's
| Equity. If you think otherwise, take a "Cost Accounting" course.
| This is a pure numbers game. Everyone wants to wrap a psycho
| analysis into something that has ZERO relevancy.
|
| If a company is bleeding revenue, it cannot sustain the overhead
| of employees. They have to go. Cutting hours does nothing for
| those on a salary, and those that are hourly, benefit costs are
| far more expensive than their wage. If a company has stagnant
| growth, that means leadership has made bad decisions, and things
| have to change.
|
| Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income
| Statement and Cash Flow Statement. There is not a "Employee's
| Feelings" column on the ledger. Everyone can be replaced. No one
| is special, unless you're a majority shareholder.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I mean, everything you said is true, but only because we have
| deliberately set up the system as such. Shareholder Primacy is
| a choice we have made as a society. It's not some natural law
| or something carved by god into stone tablets. It's not hard to
| imagine alternatives, but obviously the shareholding class is
| going to work hard to ensure that only their preferred rules
| have traction. Whether or not alternatives are workable given
| human nature is another thread altogether.
| astrange wrote:
| Shareholders don't have "primacy", eg they're last in
| bankruptcy. If you're asking for them to never get anything,
| then they're not going to participate, and this is supposedly
| a forum about startups.
|
| In tech the employees also tend to be shareholders which I
| think is healthier.
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| >only because we have deliberately set up the system as such.
| No one can sell at a loss all the time. That's just
| stupidity. Either I get a return on money invested later or I
| get a return on my balance sheet now in the form of profit.
| Shareholders primacy is because they can only be cut trough a
| buyout.
| deviantbit wrote:
| No, it's not a choice we made as a society. It was a choice
| the shareholders made. You didn't make that choice, you were
| not part of it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| That's a good point! I never got the chance to vote on
| whether or not shareholders should get all the votes.
| throwaway3572 wrote:
| Why should you get a vote? You don't get a vote on what
| groceries I buy. What entitles you to a vote on this
| purchase decision? (In this case "all the votes" means
| when making decisions on actions a particular corporation
| is considering, not any vote on anything)
| heeen2 wrote:
| Lots of places take vote on what you can buy, eg weed,
| alcohol, which additives are allowed and so on
| throwaway3572 wrote:
| The creation and transacting of corporate shares is also
| highly regulated. But it doesn't address the question of
| why a third party should get a vote that helps decide a
| particular corporate action. Votes that limit the
| possible actions of all corporations equally are a
| different thing.
| grandempire wrote:
| Why do you feel entitled to something someone else built?
| davidw wrote:
| Math wise, yes, you're correct, but layoffs can also hurt
| morale, especially if not done well. And in a competitive
| environment, the _most_ talented people might be next to leave
| after a layoff, as they see things aren 't going well and have
| the easiest time finding alternatives. I've seen that happen
| myself.
|
| And some of those people you're laying off did revenue
| generating activities, so, as above, yes, it may be necessary
| to reduce costs, but it has to be done carefully.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| At least for public companies, accounting is FAR from the end
| all be all.
|
| Most of the time, company valuations are completely divorced
| from valuations. And much of what public companies do these
| days is try to game their stock price.
|
| Government employment is 95% the time completely divorced from
| reality.
|
| That being said, private companies employee a lot of people and
| this is very relevant.
| no_wizard wrote:
| > Government employment is 95% the time completely divorced
| from reality
|
| This is a pretty big claim to make without any evidence to
| support it.
|
| The government, whether it be state, local, county federal
| etc. does in have a different pace and certainly like with
| any big organizations can have issues such as waste, but to
| say it's _completely divorced from reality_ , especially in
| context of somehow private (as in not government or NGO)
| companies don't also act completely divorced from reality is
| a really big claim
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Private companies generally need to be efficient and make
| money or go out of business.
|
| VC funded startups are a VERY small percentage of jobs
| compared to ALL private company employees. But, sure, there
| is much shenanigans there.
|
| Public companies can play tons of games as well - but the
| vast majority of people employed at public companies are at
| relatively efficient and profitable companies.
|
| Government services are under no obligation to be
| efficient.
|
| Often people vote for them to be LESS efficient, hoping
| that they'll get similar benefits from their private
| employers.
|
| Though, hope is a bad strategy, and it rarely works for
| non-government employees.
|
| But there's enough state employees that you don't have to
| win over that many private employees to win votes for
| things that make the services less efficient (like ever
| juicier retirement benefits).
| moregrist wrote:
| > Private companies generally need to be efficient and
| make money or go out of business.
|
| Half of this statement is true. A private company
| definitely can't run at a loss forever. Although in the
| era of ZIRP a few definitely made a solid go of it.
|
| However nothing requires an any company, and especially a
| private one, to be efficient. If an otherwise profitable
| and privately-held company wants to swell its middle
| management ranks or spend lots of cash employing the
| owners' dubiously capable relatives, there's nothing to
| stop it.
|
| Incidentally that's mostly true of public companies with
| diverse shareholders, too.
|
| The idea that private enterprise is always efficient is a
| myth, as is evident to anyone who's worked for a large
| enough corporation, or even a small one where management
| weirdly shields some obviously incompetent people for
| internal political reasons.
|
| The only correcting factor is that companies can fail,
| and smaller competitors can _sometimes_ find ways to
| undercut large, inefficient firms. But often the small
| company gets acquired or out-marketed. So there's nothing
| inevitable about any of this.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > If a company is bleeding revenue
|
| Not what happened with some of the recent layoffs. Some big
| tech companies generate huge revenues, laid off 5-10% of people
| (sometimes with false pretext of performance), and do keep
| hiring at the same time or soon after. This happens not to
| reduce cost but to stress out remaining employees.
| deviantbit wrote:
| That is what happened in recent layoffs. You can look at the
| company as a whole and say, well they were making money.
| Specific divisions of the company were in the red. Many
| companies rotate the bottom N percent to dump the bad
| performers. If you're not doing your job to the best of your
| ability, there is someone else out there that is willing to
| do the job. You're not special.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| What's actually happened is that activist investors have
| bought their way onto the boards of highly profitable
| companies with insufficient poison pills and made them fire
| some percentage of workers under the guise of making the
| stock price go up.
|
| Does worker happiness matter at all, or is it OK to have a
| net miserable company where the bottom line is slightly
| higher profit than it would otherwise have been if the
| environment were a pleasant place to work? Because that's
| the tradeoff here; rabid billionaire investors are unhappy
| because numbers aren't as high as they could be.
| deviantbit wrote:
| Activist investors are a problem. Most recent activist
| investors have been centered around climate and DEI.
| Exxon had activist investors try to get on the board.
| There was a lawsuit over it, I believe it was Arjuna
| Capital.
|
| Whoever is funding these activist investors, probably a
| nation/state, is doing it on purpose. Natasha Lamb has to
| be the dumbest investors to ever live, next to Cathie
| Wood, IMO. You could invest in an S&P index fund and
| perform better at 264% for the past 11 years, compared to
| her 132% realized, and taking far less risk.
|
| I get everyone has their idealistic views of how the
| world should work, but capitalism dominates every other
| society, providing better living standards, and security.
| It is unfortunate we have had leftists in the Democratic
| party take control of it, and pushing some very strange
| agendas, that doesn't reflect reality. These strange
| agendas have been exploited by other nations, like China.
|
| Some activist investors have brought better function
| management and boards. Carl Icahn is a great example. But
| he has also brought his fair share of problems.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| This is not what happened in recent layoffs where I am
| familiar with the company. Perhaps you would like to make
| the argument that in theory, lay-offs can be done that way.
| whstl wrote:
| _> Many companies rotate the bottom N percent to dump the
| bad performers_
|
| I have never seen this actually happen in practice.
|
| It's always specific teams and projects that get fired
| because some C-Level fucked up and pushed for some ego
| project, or over-hired and placed those poor souls in
| useless projects.
| deviantbit wrote:
| Yes, because you've never seen it means it doesn't
| happen. I appreciate your appeal to ignorance, but it
| happens in most large companies, and this should continue
| in most companies.
| YZF wrote:
| It is still to reduce cost. Hiring would often be in cheaper
| geographies. The reason to reduce cost is not to e.g. save a
| business from collapsing but it is to improve the financial
| results with the hope of making the stock price go up.
| notadoomer236 wrote:
| They have way, way more employees than they need.
| TZubiri wrote:
| >This happens not to reduce cost but to stress out remaining
| employees.
|
| Or to cull the low performers.
|
| I personally am less stressed when the competition I
| outperform gets fired.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Many larger do companies behave as if revenue is unlimited.
|
| Too many times, I've seen layoffs followed by acquisitions of
| 10x the cost reduction from the layoffs -- often even in the
| same quarter. And when parent company has a track record of
| driving acquisitions into the ground from mismanagement, where
| is the profit?
| callc wrote:
| > Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income
| Statement and Cash Flow Statement. There is not a "Employee's
| Feelings" column on the ledger.
|
| Sure they do. Just in the sense that employees feelings need to
| be controlled and made to fear any collective action or sense
| of agency.
| voxl wrote:
| Your horribly simplistic take has already received a lot of
| backlash, but whatever I'm angry enough to add onto the pile:
|
| 1. Big tech companies doing layoffs are not hurting on revenue,
| so your basic assumption is wrong. 2. "Cutting hours" needs to
| be steelmaned if you're not going to anything but a charlatan.
| That means you have to interpret it as taking a paycut, as in a
| salary cut. This has actually been done before in worker-
| focused companies to survive covid, and in one instance I'm
| aware of the company gave workers back pay after surviving
| covid.
|
| You also ignore all the intangibles that are no easy to
| measure, because of course the business acumen of "make number
| go up this quarter" is too short sighted to care about
| institutional knowledge or long term strategy.
| danans wrote:
| > If a company has stagnant growth, that means leadership has
| made bad decisions, and things have to change.
|
| There is a bigger picture.
|
| Developed economies across the globe are experiencing stagnant
| growth, and the trickle down economics they have engaged in has
| failed to fix that.
|
| Knowing this, the wealthiest, through their proxies in
| corporate leadership and government, are cutting back their
| biggest cost - employees - to maximize their near term returns,
| which will then be put into relatively fixed-supply assets,
| rather than risking capital on new ventures, and the employees
| that traditionally requires.
|
| Corporations are betting that "growth" going forward is going
| to come from AI-enabled efficiency and productivity gains, not
| more employees making more product or innovating on
| product/service development and delivery. While it's too early
| to say whether they are right, many signs point in that
| direction.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| A good friend of mine has a PhD in labor economics and is now a
| senior management consultant for a big firm and I've been told
| that in general just cutting people is bad for businesses and
| most businesses will be worse off by just cutting people,
| especially without changing any of the underlying systems that
| got the company to the position it's in. Next time I'll have to
| ask him about the studies on it but there definitely isn't a
| consensus that general layoffs help businesses in the
| medium/long term. He was saying the times they seem to work
| best is in the context of a broader restructuring, (which in my
| experience is not common for companies).
| eikenberry wrote:
| > If a company is bleeding revenue, it cannot sustain the
| overhead of employees. They have to go.
|
| No, they don't. During the dotcom bubble my company gave us 2
| choices, layoffs or 20% pay cut. We took the latter. Everyone
| stayed and we had our pay back to previous levels in a couple
| years and the company remained profitable.
|
| You can, in fact, treat people as people and still run a
| company.
|
| > Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income
| Statement and Cash Flow Statement.
|
| This is only true of companies of a certain (large) size, when
| all semblance of employees being people have been abstracted
| away. In companies of more reasonable sizes you must take
| employee moral into account or you will lose critical employees
| which could kill the company.
| deviantbit wrote:
| Which dot com was that?
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Why can't the outrageously overpaid leadership who made the
| mistakes be the ones who are punished instead of the individual
| contributors who are just trying to survive?
| theptip wrote:
| Unsurprisingly, both the OP and this are oversimplified
| statements.
|
| The more nuanced point is to note that simply reducing the
| world to accounting equations omits all of the human detail.
| Morale is a meaningful thing, or if you prefer, knowledge,
| expertise, Metis; these are damaged in layoffs, especially
| repeated rounds. And furthermore, the recent tech layoffs were
| not generally about fixing unsustainable businesses, they were
| about juicing profit margins for already profitable ones.
|
| On the other hand, of course the OP title is wrong and layoffs
| can work. There are many examples even within tech where
| cutting deep is the only way of surviving.
|
| Complex systems are complex.
| culi wrote:
| The article cited actual statistics and data comparing
| companies that enacted layoffs vs those that didn't. It showed
| very clear evidence, even within the same industry, that those
| that enacted layoffs fared MUCH worse
|
| Also many of these layoffs are NOT coming when companies are
| "bleeding revenue". E.g. Meta and Twitter enacted massive
| layoffs after posting their most profitable quarters yet
| conductr wrote:
| That's what should be expected. A company in a stronger
| position can more confidently avoid laying off people and
| "ride out" the painful market conditions. Not every company's
| revenue is composed of similar risk items even within similar
| industries. Some companies are already knee deep in some new
| strategy and need everyone on board to roll it out. The other
| company is just a bunch of variable labor that can be culled
| when volume shrinks. It also means they're not investing in
| the future and going to get beat by a more strategic
| competitor. So many other riffs to take on this, but short
| term minded financials are absolutely improved by layoffs and
| that's usually all the action is trying to effect.
| sgustard wrote:
| Layoffs are like closing factories that don't produce, cutting
| products that don't sell, closing deserted retail locations,
| and so on. Likely bad business decisions got you there in the
| first place. Maybe market conditions changed. Maybe your whole
| company is going to fail no matter what you do. But blanket
| statements about what does or doesn't "work" are not very
| instructive.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Also cutting hours sounds terribly out of touch with the gig
| economy dilemma, I'd rather be let go than put on half my
| salary?
| kypro wrote:
| Also I'd argue that a lack of layoffs at a company probably
| causes stagnation and inefficiency. I don't thin the only good
| argument for layoffs is that a company has no choice because of
| cash flows.
|
| I see this in the public sector where you often find people who
| have been working at the same dept for a decade or more. These
| people feel very safe and know they don't really need to try
| that hard. They also know nothing about how things function
| elsewhere so they'll put up with using spreadsheets and fax
| machines because that's just how they've always done things.
|
| It seems rather obvious to me that a good economy is one where
| employers feel some nervousness about losing good employees, so
| offer pay rises and perks; And where employees feel some
| nervousness about layoffs so work hard and try to be as
| productive as they reasonably can be.
|
| If a company is not cutting a few percentage of their least
| productive workers each year they're probably doing something
| wrong imo. I think it's far to argue big tech companies built
| up a lot of these under productive workers over the years.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Don't work to do what? If you think layoffs are about efficiency
| or saving the company, at least in tech you couldn't be more
| wrong. Companies like Meta and Google have done multiple rounds
| of layoffs despite being insanely profitable and never taking a
| loss.
|
| The real purpose of layoffs is to get people to do more work for
| the same or less money (by firing people and distributing their
| responsibilities to those who remain) and to suppress wages
| because nobody is asking for raises when they fear for their
| jobs.
|
| Big Tech is really out of ways to grow their business. The only
| way they can keep growing profits is by cutting costs and the
| biggest cost is labor. It's really that simple.
| ChiMan wrote:
| The more fundamental question is: If mass layoffs are so
| necessary, then who's responsible for the unnecessary mass
| hiring? In any mass layoff, fire that person first. Get to the
| root of the problem.
| hankchinaski wrote:
| The tech layoffs are the results of couple of years of exuberance
| that happened right after 2020. Companies are laying off and we
| are getting back to trendline. Nothing to see here.
| asveikau wrote:
| I feel that companies just repeat discredited strategies because
| they are conventional wisdom, and no amount of explaining why
| layoffs don't make sense will stop them from laying off.
|
| It's mostly about conformity. They heard that all the serious
| companies are laying off. So they've got to lay off too. Can't be
| seen breaking convention.
|
| With big tech, a few years back when over-hiring was the
| conventional wisdom they were for that too.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| A couple weeks ago Google announced more layoffs in their HR and
| cloud divisions. They have $100 billion cash on hand, literally
| more than any other tech company, and much more in longer term
| investments.
|
| In round numbers, that's enough money to cover roughly 10,000
| employees for 25 to 50 years (depending on how much you think the
| salary averages out to).
|
| Regardless, the CFO said one of her priorities this year was more
| cost cutting.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| It's a business, not a jobs program
| fossuser wrote:
| This blog post is wrong, it also just doesn't matter in practice.
| Nobody who is making this sort of decision is going to give this
| kind of obviously false argument a second thought. When you're
| the one that actually has to make decisions that matter you're
| going to be better at ignoring bullshit. The audience for this is
| just people wanting something to upvote that sounds good to them
| - driven by motivated reasoning.
|
| > "You could blame the workforce," he says, "or the managers and
| leaders who are leading that workforce."
|
| They often do fire large swaths of middle managers - when Musk
| bought Twitter cutting out the middle of the hierarchy and the
| orgs that didn't need to exist was a big part of it. It's the
| same with DOGE. After the twitter layoffs they've shipped more
| features, faster, with better margins (and he fired the CEO).
| Meta and Coinbase over hired during the covid 'zero interest rate
| phenomena' and had to fix it. Reducing hours instead is a joke -
| I find it hard to believe anyone being honest takes that
| seriously.
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