Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Layoffs Don't Work

thehustle.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 801 posts

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#71

Post by InsideOutSanta »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #41

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.

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.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#72

Post by gjsman-1000 »

sleight42 wrote: post #69

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.

No, we’re saying the majority of economists are more likely to be accurate than this particular economist.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#73

Post by dartos »

ttoinou wrote: post #32
dartos wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I agree with your point but at the same time developers do need to be managed and they don’t want to manage themselves

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.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#74

Post by JadoJodo »

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.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#75

Post by nativeit »

roenxi wrote: post #17

> 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…

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?

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#76

Post by dartos »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #51
steveBK123 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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, s…

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.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#77

Post by nativeit »

nativeit wrote: post #75
roenxi wrote: post #17

> 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…

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?

This all sounds like the post-mortem justifications of a sclerotic executive suite.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#78

Post by therealpygon »

roenxi wrote: post #17

> 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…

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.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#79

Post by acdha »

fx1994 wrote: post #53
marto1 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 100k€, 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 "sav…

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.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#80

Post by [deleted] »

dustingetz wrote: post #8
DebtDeflation wrote: post #5

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.

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

[deleted]
Post reply on HN