311–320 of 801 posts
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> had a great product > We got acquired Can I just ask about the reason for this? Was it owners wanting off the ride?
Owners made half a billion and got high-ranking positions at the buyer. Buyers bought it because they had a very specific problem that the product was designed to solve, and thought that it would be a competitive advantage to deny the solution to their competition. On paper, it was a good decision.
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…
- visas may be dependent on employment, and can make changing jobs harder. In the United States, lots of visa rules are at the discretion of the government (eg how long one may live in the United States on an employer-sponsored visa while unemployed)
- the recent (and dot-com era) tech layoffs have been cyclical: many companies are in layoff-mode or hiring-spree mode at the same time. The time when many companies are not hiring is the worst time to be thrust into the job market
- people may have other job security worries – big tech companies tend to always be growing so it is worrying if they are laying people off instead of moving them from a failing business line to a new one
- in general some people may have a lot of anxiety about changes to income. If you are applying for new jobs while currently holding another, there is much less pressure than if you’re unemployed and need to find a new job (and possibly at a pay cut requiring outgoings to be reduced) before you run out of savings, especially if you don’t have much in savings compared to outgoings, which may be the case for some tech workers (some people spend a lot, or have much of their wealth tied up in property or have a family which requires spending more on eg housing or school fees). The much-worse consequences of failing to get a new job may increase the pressure/stress/discomfort
- this reveals an obvious truth about where the power lies in ‘engineering-focused’ companies and people don’t like it
- people can see a layoff as being like a firing and therefore be unhappy due to hurt pride (or worries about being less desirable in the job market)
- the lack of agency in a layoff is unpleasant. It is quite different from choosing to apply to other jobs.
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> 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 can…
I have done probably 500 to 1000 tech screens for big tech companies (as the interviewer) and this is completely true. I have interviewed many people employed in tech as programmers for their entire career and they can't code. I don't meen leetcode, I mean they get confused trying to write brute force substring search. The nested for loop seems to be too complex for them to keep in their head all at once. I have had…
Imagine a person with a pilot's license refusing to fly tandem for an airline interview.
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>> why C-suite does even need to tell the respective division management to lay off employees if the actual goal is cost reduction You answered your own question. For a lot of layoffs, cost reduction isn't the goal; it's disciplining the workforce who were increasingly assertive at work about direction and conditions.
It’s honestly probably not that evil.(generally. There are definitely evil orgs out there) It’s just the easiest way to make the stock price go up. Layoffs caused twitter to bump in price. Same with Microsoft when they laid off all those game devs. C-suite don’t care about profit or losses in tech, just the stock price. In the 2010s, hiring devs increased stock prices. In the 2020s mass firings do. It’s just money. S…
Under new leadership, we executed 1/3 layoffs framed as a "culture refresh" and to briefly lift the stock. It wasn't about survival, we had plenty of cash, okayish growth and fantastic ARR - more about a new corp-backed CEO adopting a "do-it-like-Elon" approach.
Being mostly Europe-based but US-led, it turned into a massive and costly process (Americans don't exactly dig EU/UK workers rights - Spain was the biggest shock), stalling most productive activity for half a year. Internal trust and brand perception tanked. Since it began with ousting old execs, it quickly devolved into a blunt-force exercise with no internal knowledge, led by scared managers with percentage targets - many good people were cut. Managers hesitated to shield talent, given the "culture reboot" framing. I ended up personally cutting entire offices.
When the CEO's broader strategy failed (for reasons beyond layoffs), high performers started eyeing the exit. Ironically, many first saw the layoffs positively - COVID overhires had left uneven team dynamics, and some dead weight was on high salaries. But when it became clear there was no coherent plan, people began leaving.
That triggered a chain reaction. Senior hiring pipelines dried up (reputation matters, esp. when your top-talent is on the way out and is loud about it), and panic set in. Eventually, it turned into survival mode. The CEO didn't last long after that.
The article lists down why layoffs don't work, but companies keep doing it, so it must be working for them. I hate layoffs (from both perspectives), but the article sounds like whining "we shouldn't break up". The alternative of furlough only works if everyone else is doing it. If everyone else fires left right and center, the people being furloughed will still have low morale. I think it's better to avoid it in the…
It's about power, and inculcating fear.
The CEO who "cuts" people at a company is like the Aztec priest who plunges the knife in atop the pyramid. The bloody spectacle is the point. It's as much about everyone who's watching as it is about the specific victim. It says, "I can do this to you. I can inflict pain without reprisal. Behold my power."
That's the whole point. Who is afraid of whom?
These people have the money. We depend on that money in order to live. They are reminding us of that fact. Now they demand obedience and harder work. 40 hours? Not enough. Elon sleeps at the office, why don't you? You have to be "super hardcore".
Partly, this is punishment for the challenge that was raised to CEO power from around 2016 to 2022. CEOs have been furious that they have felt fear of their workers. Now they want those workers to feel fear. In interviews, Andreesen has said almost exactly this, if not in quite so many words.
A similar theory is at the root of Fed policy, which hinges on the idea of a "wage price spiral". In their view, inflation is caused not by the accumulation of capital within a price-insensitive upper quantile, or by the constriction of economic chokepoints by consolidation, but by workers' ability to bargain for higher wages. The solution to inflation, they essentially come out and say, is to put workers in their place.
There is a united front here. It is about who fears whom, the end. It is about your emotional state. In a literal sense, it is terrorism.
So in that sense, yes, layoffs work. Are you financially independent? No? Are you afraid? Yes? Then they're working.
> 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…
Note that here I'm talking about firing good performers because you have "too many" of them. Firing bad performers because the estimated cost of training them is not justified, I can understand.
The only explanation I found satisfying is that investors heuristically care about profit per capita(ppc) as well as total profit, and employees who don't produce _enough_ profit reduce ppc and thus investment to point the opportunity cost of firing them aligns. You'll make investors happy, which will raise valuation, more than what you are losing from the lost profit. But this is not "rational" in a full information economic sense. It's essentially the company virtue signaling that they are capable to fire if they had to, even at the cost of actual dollars.
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No sympathy from me either; instead, he gets appreciation. Thank you, OP, for bringing more life into the world. It's hard and (obviously) frequently thankless.