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Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

matduggan.com

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Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#81

Post by bena »

lapcat wrote: post #46
tomnipotent wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the next bit, "by the third year, these differences became statistically nonsignificant". So the layoffs... worked?

> So the layoffs... worked? How does that follow? The conclusion would be that both the companies and workers suffered unnecessarily for 2 years, with no long-term benefit afterward to the layoffs. In other words, you should just ride out the downtimes instead of panicking.

Companies typically don't layoff because they want to have a laugh.

Companies layoff when they're in some sort of trouble. If you don't have the cash to support the staff, you can't will that into existence.

So it follows that companies that laid people off struggled for a bit. Because they were already struggling. It's not an instant cure, or even a guaranteed one. It's a measure to spend less so you can ride out the downtimes.

Another way of stating it is that "People who were sick with the flu seemed to tire more easily in the days that followed compared to people who weren't sick at all". It's to be expected.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#82

Post by [deleted] »

bradleyjg wrote: post #6

This place isn't your home, these people aren't your friends and your executive leadership would run you over with their cars if you stood between them and revenue growth. Your relationship to work changes forever. You will never again believe that you are "critical" to the company or that the company is interested in you as a person. This has always always been the case. Grow up.

[deleted]

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#83

Post by munchbunny »

tikhonj wrote: post #37
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

Nobody likes getting laid off. But it's weird to see all of these think pieces implying that once someone is hired into a job, that job should exist forever. Things change. Company growth isn't monotonically increasing. Not all positions will exist forever. Joining a company was never a guarantee that you'd have a paycheck and work to do until you decided to leave. Also, pointing out that companies that did layoffs h…

There's a big difference between "things change" and "mass top-down layoffs are an effective way to adapt to change"!

The organizations that are using mass top-down layoffs as a strategy may not have the ability to do something more granular. And I don't mean that in terms of organizational size (though it seems inevitably correlated), I mean it in the sense that an organization's ability to manage its talent is a direct result of the quality of the organization's management hierarchy, which is the same hierarchy responsible for organizational bloat.

If your management hierarchy has too many mediocre managers, you lose the ability to evaluate who is/isn't pulling their weight at fine granularity, so you're stuck with blunt tools.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#84

Post by ROTMetro »

bradleyjg wrote: post #6

This place isn't your home, these people aren't your friends and your executive leadership would run you over with their cars if you stood between them and revenue growth. Your relationship to work changes forever. You will never again believe that you are "critical" to the company or that the company is interested in you as a person. This has always always been the case. Grow up.

Grew up with parents working in startups/small tech companies in Santa Cruz from the late seventies through the 2000s. No, it has not always been the case. It's sad you are happy to accept it as both acceptable and the norm. Grownups realize they have the agency to choose the environment they place themselves in and choose to spend the majority of their day somewhere not adversarial.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#85

Post by abeppu »

I think the crappy thing here is because upper management wants to plan a layoff in extreme secrecy, they put themselves in the position of not being able to consult with the parties that have the most context. The cuts end up being crude and poorly targeted because of this secrecy. Because the assumption is that an employee who is being laid off, or thinks they may be laid off, becomes a liability immediately, no knowledge transfer or hand meetings can happen, and people may abruptly be cut off from internal systems. The company then has some extra short-term issues from the remaining staff trying to cover for their laid-off peers while missing important information and context.

The responses to this post, of "we're adults that accepted an at-will employment contract" are correct. But if we all had that attitude, and if execs could treat staff like responsible adults rather than potential saboteurs, perhaps a more targeted, less disruptive and ultimately smaller layoff could be arranged.

(updated for typos)

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#86

Post by stumblindrunk »

bradleyjg wrote: post #6

This place isn't your home, these people aren't your friends and your executive leadership would run you over with their cars if you stood between them and revenue growth. Your relationship to work changes forever. You will never again believe that you are "critical" to the company or that the company is interested in you as a person. This has always always been the case. Grow up.

> your executive leadership would run you over with their cars if you stood between them and revenue growth.

This is ridiculous. I’m sure such sociopaths exist but there’s literally 30MM+ companies in the US. If only 1MM have an executive team this proposes there are millions of near murderers about. Pretty sure there’d be more murders.

It’s stupidly hyperbolic and actually implicitly assumes that which it purports to reject. Namely, it conflates job loss with death, giving companies more agency over your life than they actually have; the phrasing ignores its own first statement, in pursuit of clickbait nonsense.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#87

Post by dbingham »

dtdimond wrote: post #55
lapcat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the layoffs... worked? How does that follow? The conclusion would be that both the companies and workers suffered unnecessarily for 2 years, with no long-term benefit afterward to the layoffs. In other words, you should just ride out the downtimes instead of panicking.

Group 1: companies in a good enough financial situation to not need layoffs Group 2: companies in a dire financial situation requiring layoffs After 3 years, what group would you expect to perform better financially? And if we told you it was a tie, you might ask: what did group 2 to improve their situation? Layoffs? Ok, sounds like they worked.

The assumption that the companies doing layoffs "need" to do layoffs isn't necessarily well founded. Really we should be comparing companies in comparable financial situations - with one group doing layoffs and the other not. For public companies, we could probably reasonably set up this comparison, but for private companies we don't have the data.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#88

Post by likeabbas »

Layoffs work, I just think companies tend to layoff the wrong folks.

I had 7 layers of management between myself (IC) and the CEO at my last job with just a couple thousand people. How much of a “multiplier effect” can those people truly have? What ended up happening was feature creep ran too large, the company scrambled to hire engineers to keep up with pace of development, then the debt caught up with them once interest rates blew up.

Honestly, layers between ICs and CEOs should be logarithmic. 0 layers for 10 employees, 1 layer for 100, 2 layers for 1000, etc. IMO the “multiplier effect” ends with line managers

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#89

Post by [deleted] »

dtdimond wrote: post #55
lapcat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the layoffs... worked? How does that follow? The conclusion would be that both the companies and workers suffered unnecessarily for 2 years, with no long-term benefit afterward to the layoffs. In other words, you should just ride out the downtimes instead of panicking.

Group 1: companies in a good enough financial situation to not need layoffs Group 2: companies in a dire financial situation requiring layoffs After 3 years, what group would you expect to perform better financially? And if we told you it was a tie, you might ask: what did group 2 to improve their situation? Layoffs? Ok, sounds like they worked.

[deleted]

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#90

Post by tablespoon »

dtdimond wrote: post #55
lapcat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the layoffs... worked? How does that follow? The conclusion would be that both the companies and workers suffered unnecessarily for 2 years, with no long-term benefit afterward to the layoffs. In other words, you should just ride out the downtimes instead of panicking.

Group 1: companies in a good enough financial situation to not need layoffs Group 2: companies in a dire financial situation requiring layoffs After 3 years, what group would you expect to perform better financially? And if we told you it was a tie, you might ask: what did group 2 to improve their situation? Layoffs? Ok, sounds like they worked.

> Group 1: companies in a good enough financial situation to not need layoffs Group 2: companies in a dire financial situation requiring layoffs

Companies do layoffs all the time, even when their financial situation isn't dire.

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