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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

#201

Post by vivegi »

This is obviously false. Layoffs do work. 2003 - 2007 is not a sufficiently long enough period to assess layoff impacts on a company.

For example:

>Apple Computer Inc. said late Friday it was slashing its work force by 4,100 in a last-ditch effort to save the troubled computer maker.

> Out of the total number affected, about 2,700 are full-time workers. The remainder are part-time and contract employees. The cuts will affect about 30 percent of Apple's work force. Fifty-five percent of the job cuts will be in the United States.

(Source: https://money.cnn.com/1997/03/14/technology/apple/)

This is from 1997 in the pre-Steve Jobs era when Gil Amelio was CEO.

You can call it what you want, but if that action didn't occur at that time, Apple as we know today may not have existed.

I am picking Apple as a deliberate example because they are the the only big-tech company that hasn't announced a large scale layoff (yet). So, many people may be quick to jump to point out, "Look Ma! No layoffs at Apple".

For a large corporation, business cycles are a reality and layoffs become part of the tactic. It is very unpleasant for the people involved. But, that doesn't mean it doesn't work (in the long run).

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#202

Post by TapWaterBandit »

techsupporter wrote: post #170
TapWaterBandit wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stable pensions are gone because they were built on a ponzi scheme based on a demographic moment in history that has now passed. In hindsight those stable pensions were actually extremely immoral in a way. They allowed for a demographic moment where a large portion of workers consumed everything they produced with too little saving while supporting a much smaller number of retired and simultaneously telling themselve…

> If you want a stable pension alongside an often decades long retirement, then start saving when you're young or have a lot of children to support you. I just want to point out that you're largely proving my point. I got started on saving later in my career because the first few years were spent laboring under the idea that pensions existed. (The 401k was rolled out after I got my first job, for example.) We had the…

> We had the rug pulled

If by "We had the rug pulled" you mean "the people we intended to force to pay for our pensions said 'no thanks'" then I agree.

I get why you may be upset how it played out because I agree that spending all your money your whole life then forcing other people to pay for your retirement is a sweet deal. But as one of the people who was expected to be paying, I'm sure you'll understand why I'm not particularly sympathetic.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#203

Post by 3vidence »

908B64B197 wrote: post #145
commandlinefan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody likes getting laid off. Much better than being fired for poor performance, too - "laid off because the company wasn't doing well" doesn't look that terrible on a resume.

Here's the thing: mass layoffs make it easier to get rid of people with performance or behavioral problems in a lot of jurisdictions. I had to let someone go at a company we had just acquired in Montreal a few years ago. The guy was underperforming and had a huge attitude problem (bursts of anger actually). One of the frequent arguments he had with everyone was that he insisted he didn't need to learn French to live…

I usually just casually lerk on HN for topics I'm interested in learning about or generally topics I don't have expertise in.

This whole layoff discussion had been an eye opener for me as to how uninformed a lot of comments are and just made on speculation.

I was there at the North acquisition, the vast majority of people kept there jobs and so did the founders.

People keep talking about these layoffs like they were done from some critical lens that can evaluate individuals performance. They're not!

The layoffs are organized exclusively at such a high level the people making the decisions have absolutely no idea how the people they are choosing perform.

These layoffs are temporary moves to get the stock price to move up, that's it.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#204

Post by deafpolygon »

lapcat wrote: post #65
dtdimond wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 None of the big tech companies are in a "dire" financial situation. Indeed, some of them have just announced modest revenue increases this week. Yet they still conducted big layoffs. Did they "need" to do it? (Note in contrast that Apple announced a significant revenue decre…

> Apple announced a significant revenue decrease yet didn't panic and do layoffs.

I would say that Apple is in the unique position of being particularly volatile since they rarely post losses. If they posted a decrease AND did layoffs, I'm sure some of their brightest would jump ship, and stocks would tumble further.

Plus they didn't really do a strong round of hire during the past few years.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#205

Post by actionablefiber »

sangnoir wrote: post #178
actionablefiber wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take but I think everyone is allowed to recognize the cutthroat, impersonal nature of corporate hiring and firing and commiserate about it without needing to walk around with a fully-formed proposal for an alternative economic system in their pocket.

I may try out gp's approach with the next adverse code review I get: "While my naming is generic and the code difficult to understand - it is the best solution to date. Stop whining and provide your alternative diff before I can take your criticism seriously"

Really not an alternative diff but a pathway to transition to an alternative codebase built on an alternative development methodology with strong guarantees that said methodology could not yield code that presents problems resembling the ones in your PR.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#206

Post by anothernewdude »

oconnore wrote: post #17

This is incredibly dumb. > The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones during the initial two years following the downsizing. Can you think of any confounding factors in this analysis? How do you control for important factors like, say: whether the board is in enough financial trouble to downsize ?

Yes. They won't have data for companies that failed. So the downsized group should be doing even worse than the data suggests.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#207

Post by bayarearefugee »

TapWaterBandit wrote: post #202
techsupporter wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want a stable pension alongside an often decades long retirement, then start saving when you're young or have a lot of children to support you. I just want to point out that you're largely proving my point. I got started on saving later in my career because the first few years were spent laboring under the idea that pensions existed. (The 401k was rolled out after I got my first job, for example.) We had the…

> We had the rug pulled If by "We had the rug pulled" you mean "the people we intended to force to pay for our pensions said 'no thanks'" then I agree. I get why you may be upset how it played out because I agree that spending all your money your whole life then forcing other people to pay for your retirement is a sweet deal. But as one of the people who was expected to be paying, I'm sure you'll understand why I'm n…

The thing is there's more than enough wealth out there to fund the equivalent of those pensions you're so worried about footing the bill for if the wealthy were taxed appropriately and the "pensions" took the form of a government program like society security (but properly funded with a sane progressive tax system).

But you've fallen hook, line and sinker for the story purposefully seeded by the wealth class (the real wealth class, not the 6-figure salary FAANG 'wealth') to cause the middle class to go to war with each other instead of waging war against their real common enemy.

So well done, hope you enjoy being bent over by the wealth class your whole life because that's what is in store for you.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#208

Post by 29athrowaway »

How do you define "don't work"?

It depends on what goals you have.

Sometimes products, services, teams and organizations are not aligned with the business strategy, and have to be restructured.

Sometimes there are locations with a high cost of life, but the value generated at those locations are not proportionally higher.

Sometimes you have outliers in the compensation distribution that no longer meet productivity expectations. Some individuals make key contributions and then stop making them while enjoying the same benefits.

And sometimes you have pseudoscience like "Vitality curve" style layoffs which are proven to make things worse.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#210

Post by kqr »

oconnore wrote: post #17

This is incredibly dumb. > The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones during the initial two years following the downsizing. Can you think of any confounding factors in this analysis? How do you control for important factors like, say: whether the board is in enough financial trouble to downsize ?

I read the referenced (apparently peer reviewed) study hoping that it controlled for this obvious problem, but no. (I don't count that they measured "in a period characterised by growth" because individual organisational performance is rather noisy.) Maybe I'm the dumb one here, but when I read their results I draw the complete opposite conclusion: layoffs work but they are not a quick fix; it takes some time for the positive effects to kick in.

This is somewhat counter-intuitive to me so I suspect there are other confounders (overhiring, measuring financial performance in a complicated way, etc.) but I haven't had time to run the analysis for myself yet. Maybe the data is too sparse to support a more sophisticated model.

If someone else would like to give it a shot, it looks like these people have compiled the data in a convenient format, for at least the past two years: https://fueled.com/blog/2022-fortune-1000-companies-spreadsh...

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