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Layoffs Don't Work

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Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#181

Post by DebtDeflation »

nthingtohide wrote: post #91
kibwen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock market is just a predictions market, and any predictions market at scale destroys the subject of its prediction.

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.

>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".

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#182

Post by DamonHD »

clusterhacks wrote: post #161
Workaccount2 wrote: post #150

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 employ…

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…

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!)

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#183

Post by qwerty456127 »

> 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.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#184

Post by thrance »

billy99k wrote: post #126
thrance wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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).

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.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#185

Post by no_wizard »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #150

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 employ…

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?

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#187

Post by cmrdporcupine »

filoleg wrote: post #160
Workaccount2 wrote: post #150

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 employ…

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…

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.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#188

Post by WalterBright »

lumost wrote: post #167
filoleg wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#189

Post by bawolff »

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.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#190

Post by cratermoon »

karparov wrote: post #130
cratermoon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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?

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