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Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

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Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#491

Post by quietbritishjim »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #487
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah no nothing like that. And 10 is just a pithy way to say that they want people to stay a long time if they're good. And they did that by, each year, if they wanted you out, you got a very small bonus. If they wanted you to stay, you got a very large bonus. That's all I meant - they retain you by giving you many dollars via payroll.

Sensible, but if they can afford to give you a substantial bonus every year, you're making way too little to begin with. You're anyway better with job hopping.

I think the point is that salary + bonus = your real salary, but they give much if it in the form of a bonus so they can more easily choose to give your overall "salary" a cut.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#492

Post by mr_00ff00 »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #92
arbuge wrote: post #56

At this point it's beginning to look like tech companies are doing this because it's the trendy thing to do, along with inserting a few words about AI in their websites and pitch decks.

> tech companies are doing this because it's the trendy thing to do, No, they are doing this because we are in a recession and businesses are always the first to know and labor is the last to know.

Considering a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth…

No, we are not in a recession

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#493

Post by charcircuit »

hashmap wrote: post #337
charcircuit wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These companies overhired and now they are realizing that the positive cash flow to justify all of these new employees isn't existing. None of these layoffs are focused on laying off their most expensive people. The severance packages have been very good meaning that the laid off employees have a long time to find another well paying job.

> These companies overhired and now they are realizing that the positive cash flow to justify all of these new employees isn't existing. This is false in a broad sense - the majority of CEOs plan to increase headcount this year in spite of layoffs . You can find examples here and there where it is true, but in general it is not. There's tons of literature of this readily available, but here is an example from as rece…

>the majority of CEOs plan to increase headcount this year in spite of layoffs.

This just means that companies are continuing to hirer. It doesn't mean that they plan on increasing headcount to above where it was before the layoff.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#494

Post by jdgoesmarching »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #116
msm_ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with analyses like this is they argue that layoffs are a bad idea and it's just companies shooting themselves in a foot. That's what people want to hear, so it gets a lot of clicks and citations. But, this also means that all the big companies (and that's a lot of them) that just announced layoffs made a obviously bad move. Are they all stupid? I find it hard to believe. It's more plausible, that yeah, layof…

> Are they all stupid? I find it hard to believe. I find it very easy to believe. A lot of executives appear to have a prime motivation that is "number goes up" which IMHO makes them extremely susceptible to the same levels of groupthink and other cognitive fallacies as one would see on /r/wallstreetbets. I appreciate that isn't necessarily the case for all executives but given that executive's fallacies are mostly d…

Agreed. Most of the time using a substantial layoff to boost your balance sheets would raise eyebrows with shareholders. This layoff spree is gives shortsighted leadership the cover they need to bump numbers during a not-a-recession-for-PR-purposes recession.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#495

Post by pclmulqdq »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #392
xyzelement wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, equivalently, "people like that are paid a lot and are engrossed in their careers." When someone makes $500k+, what does "unpaid overtime" even mean?

Money doesn’t magically make burnout go away. In fact, it will make it worse, because you’ll keep telling yourself to hold on for the money while your mental health exponentially deteriorates.

Being ambitious and having an environment that lets you run (and rewards you for it) is what prevents burnout at a place like that.

A lot of people at hedge funds like having a baseline level of good stress in their lives. It's only when the stress starts to make you feel insecure that it creates problems.

I worked at one of these firms for a while, and my "burnout" point came when I realized I wasn't actually getting rewarded for my extra contributions to the company (my bonuses were going up by a small amount each quarter, no matter what).

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#496

Post by roncesvalles »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #449
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only things that ever gave me burnout were incompetent coworkers, and organizations that were doomed to fail.

Great anecdote, but burnout generally isn't caused by that for most people. At its core, it's because of stress. Incompetent coworkers and organizations may certainly cause stress, but rarely is it so bad that it causes burnout. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in... https://www.helpguide.org/articles/stress/burnout-prevention...

Loss of efficiency/productivity might not be the product of burnout. It might be the cause.

People get addicted to the dopamine hits of getting things done and when they hit a wall, enter a vicious cycle of depressive withdrawal. Recovering from burnout by taking a break is simply resetting that dopamine addiction. Just a personal theory.

If you work in a high paced environment with competent colleagues, management and tooling, you can just keep rolling with the punches and never hit the wall.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#497

Post by beepbooptheory »

Apocryphon wrote: post #417
beepbooptheory wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hehe I think you might be reading that too literally :). I was just using an analogy to make my point.

But as amusing as it is to riff off of your analogy, your point is still wrong. When studying the behavior of human beings, and corporations are people, friend, it is important to try to fathom the motivations of their decisions. You can’t simply look at the behavior of companies, even in aggregate, and pretend it’s scientific to say, “ah, that is simply how they sustain themselves.” And in this case perhaps what peo…

If it is irrationality, it seems like a huge case of mass-hysteria is happening!

When would it be time for you to consider adjusting your framework here? Is there really enough variation in the obervables here to justify seeing each company as its own fully-personed snowflake?

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#498

Post by atomicnumber3 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #487
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah no nothing like that. And 10 is just a pithy way to say that they want people to stay a long time if they're good. And they did that by, each year, if they wanted you out, you got a very small bonus. If they wanted you to stay, you got a very large bonus. That's all I meant - they retain you by giving you many dollars via payroll.

Sensible, but if they can afford to give you a substantial bonus every year, you're making way too little to begin with. You're anyway better with job hopping.

It's how it works in the trading world. The base is decently competitive (for devs anyway) but the bonus is based on trading results and functions similarly (from an incentives/alignment and retention perspective) for how stock works for other companies.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#499

Post by slowmovintarget »

jlmorton wrote: post #190

> The current macroeconomic environment is tough No, it isn't, and it's embarrassing at this point to continue insisting this. The macroeconomic environment is good, particularly in the United States. Business investment is growing at 3% a quarter (annualized), which is better than the average over the past decade. Employment is growing rapidly. Inflation has been tame over the past six months. And wages are growing…

Tech went bananas hiring during the pandemic, and are only suddenly discovering that this may have been a bad idea.

You know who didn't? Apple. You know hasn't announced a hand-wringing, gosh-golly, tough times, BS announcement about layoffs? Apple. Got to hand it to Tim Cook, he seems to have stayed level-headed through the nonsense.

Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff

#500

Post by ISL »

whatever1 wrote: post #151
softwaredoug wrote: post #63

Listened to a great podcast about layoffs yesterday ( https://hbr.org/podcast/2023/02/why-many-companies-get-layof... ) The takeaway is that layoffs are extremely trust destroying for employees NOT laid off, and in the end not clear they're a financial net positive. Both with direct and indirect costs (lack of engagement from employees, etc).

It takes long time for the layoff effects to hit the company. The main effect is that you lose the trust of the top performers. These will be the in the lookout for new opportunities the day after the layoffs are done. If you cut 10%, expect 10% from the top to flee within a couple of years. The second effect is related to the fact that companies usually target older people with expensive jobs. In an a big org these…

Things might be a little different regarding losing trust of top-performers when layoffs happen broadly across a sector.

If every semiconductor manufacturer reduces headcount by N%, there may not be much incentive for an engineer to jump ship. If only one of those companies doesn't lay anyone off, though, the dynamics are completely different.

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