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

401–410 of 801 posts

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#401

Post by forty »

ghaff wrote: post #366
forty wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, those who makes those wrong bets are generally paid very generously and they are generally not those who suffers from the consequences

You skipped the second part of my comment. Yes, senior execs at large publc companies--assuming they didn't do anything actually criminal or stupid related to their own finances--generally come out the other side OK. But sometimes a company can just reasonably get into a place it's hard to come out from. Kodak is a really good example IMO.

Maybe I'm expecting too much, but for me the only good reason a CEO is paid more than any actually useful employee of the company is to anticipate this kind of thing and use the money from their leadership position in the old tech to invest and not be in a very bad position with the new tech.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#402

Post by nthingtohide »

andrewlgood wrote: post #343
giantg2 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha you must be young. It's entirely possible young people will make the same choices and face the same realities I currently do. They just havent gotten to that stage yet. Even comparing my life now to my life 10 years ago would show the younger me had an easier life. However, having a disability is not a choice, and in general makes life harder than those without a disability. Don't get me wrong - I believe life i…

Actually, I am not young. I just retired and have been thinking about my life, career, etc. I do not have a disability (my wife may disagree) and I agree it makes life more challenging (wouldn’t be called a disability otherwise). I also agree with you that life can be hard, children are born with health challenges, children make poor decisions with terrible consequences, spouse dies, you get cancer, etc. We all need…

The other factor you are missing in your analysis of PE route is the number of musical chairs are limited. There can only be 1 taylor swift not millions. So the choice is not for everyone. Even if everyone made that choice, a million taylor swifts will not happen. Surviorship bias is real.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#403

Post by eikenberry »

deviantbit wrote: post #334

This is a terrible opinion piece. Layoffs do work. Cutting hours does not work. I am always amazed how few people understand how a business operates. They think its a community organized event where there is unlimited revenue. There are a few basic accounting principles employees need to understand. It all revolves around Assets = Liabilities + Owner’s Equity. If you think otherwise, take a "Cost Accounting" course.…

> If a company is bleeding revenue, it cannot sustain the overhead of employees. They have to go.

No, they don't. During the dotcom bubble my company gave us 2 choices, layoffs or 20% pay cut. We took the latter. Everyone stayed and we had our pay back to previous levels in a couple years and the company remained profitable.

You can, in fact, treat people as people and still run a company.

> Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement.

This is only true of companies of a certain (large) size, when all semblance of employees being people have been abstracted away. In companies of more reasonable sizes you must take employee moral into account or you will lose critical employees which could kill the company.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#404

Post by ssssvd »

callc wrote: post #388
ssssvd wrote: post #315

Had been advocating slower hiring & targeted reductions in a mid-sized tech firm for years after COVID, but it happened much faster under a newly appointed CEO. 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" approa…

> But when it became clear there was no coherent plan, people began leaving. I see this more any more, to the point of wondering what % of execs and decision makers are actually meaningfully good at the job? When times are good, any exec action will turn out fine. But when times are tough, who is worth their salt? And if all these decision makers are bad at decision making, what would a better organization look like?

There's definitely a "peacetime" / "wartime" divide. There's also an overreliance on pedigree. But above all, it's the pressure of being a public company (which often means losing the founder).

As a new CEO, you have to impress the board and investors without really knowing the company. You probably get two earnings calls - six months at most - to prove yourself. That's nothing, even for a senior dev, let alone an exec. And if you're being brought in, it means the company isn't in great shape - or is at least perceived that way.

You don't have time to really figure out how things work, and even if you did, it's political suicide. The board didn't hire a "looks fine to me" person. They hired a fixer. So, it turns into narrative games and rapid actions with massive tail risks.

I don't think it's a people problem. It's a system problem. Leadership replanting is hard, but it's one of the very few tools in the board's toolbox.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#405

Post by yodsanklai »

ryandrake wrote: post #358
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have connections from previous jobs who will vouch for them.

How does this work, though? Every company I've worked for has an HR system, and resumes flow through it, and there's a set process. If I have worked with a candidate in the past and highly recommend them, all I can do is submit their resume into the great void and check a box "Recommend". I don't have any other power. There is no "Skip the interview, I vouch for him!" button that I can push.

That's how it works in my company too. The recruitment teams barely work with the engineering teams themselves. You may know a very good fit for the team, possibly even a previous member/intern of that team, and you won't be sure you can put the person into the recruitment loop. And then they'll need to pass the interviews...

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#406

Post by KerrAvon »

deviantbit wrote: post #376
yodsanklai wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a company is bleeding revenue Not what happened with some of the recent layoffs. Some big tech companies generate huge revenues, laid off 5-10% of people (sometimes with false pretext of performance), and do keep hiring at the same time or soon after. This happens not to reduce cost but to stress out remaining employees.

[flagged]

What’s actually happened is that activist investors have bought their way onto the boards of highly profitable companies with insufficient poison pills and made them fire some percentage of workers under the guise of making the stock price go up.

Does worker happiness matter at all, or is it OK to have a net miserable company where the bottom line is slightly higher profit than it would otherwise have been if the environment were a pleasant place to work? Because that’s the tradeoff here; rabid billionaire investors are unhappy because numbers aren’t as high as they could be.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#407

Post by nthingtohide »

soulofmischief wrote: post #342
margalabargala wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your good health is an invisible crown that can only be seen by those who do not wear it.

What a great saying. I feel this in my very core. Dealing with poverty in my youth, homeless at 16, no parents to help me, debilitating ADHD, tourettic OCD, bipolar type II, CPTSD from 10 years of intense childhood physical/emotional abuse, my full-ride college scholarships illegally stolen from me by a high school who knew I was homeless and had no recourse and allowed a teacher to illegally modify my grades out of…

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#408

Post by cratermoon »

karparov wrote: post #240
cratermoon wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

A 10x person who brings down 20 others to a small fraction of their potential and causes other rockstars to leave is still net-negative. Good management understands this. (And I'm not sure why I'm downvoted for this. Nothing about that should be controversial?)

Exactly. So the company keeps the guy everyone hates after laying off people that get along. The next people to leave the company are the ones disgusted by the move.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#409

Post by jmholla »

astrange wrote: post #359
billy99k wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They fired all the mods and sales reps, so the company no longer makes money because it can't sell ads. They mostly haven't added new features either, just turned on some flags for features in testing.

They also removed old features. Or can we look at threads without being logged in? It's clear people who say Twitter didn't change don't remember at all what Twitter was like.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#410

Post by huang_chung »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #255
huang_chung wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, getting fucked out of your 401k money 6 months before it vests stings some.

Is that an average time given a 12 month vesting schedule? edit: Actually curious about the dead comment. What companies have multi year 401(k) vesting? Every company I have worked at or seen does a match on a 12 month schedule or less. Are they thinking of stock options?

Two years is more typical.
Post reply on HN