Ask HN: Why do corporate failures always seem to punish the wrong people?

A good place to see the difference is an Airline. Strong unions, like the pilot's union...makes for very different outcomes for them versus the salaried/non-union HDQ type workers.

But yes you're right it really depends on power dynamics.

Yes, the term of art is “resources”. Human Resources

We are onboarding resources We are cutting resources We are shifting resources

The easiest (but not necessarily best or most effective) way to survive corporate life is to give your boss quiet, make your peers happy, and your direct reports miserable. Therefore, naively, people look very different depending on whether they are your direct reports, your peer, or your boss. Your partner is below him looking up; he looks very different from the standpoint of the executive looking down at him.

Case in point: budget cuts and layoffs are not fundamentally speaking failures from a business perspective. Sometimes, an executive just wants the money spent elsewhere, on some shiny new project. Often enough, failures to produce expected revenue do not have unambiguous scapegoats. Frequently, executives just suck at oversight - determining for themselves how things are going instead of letting their direct reports control the narrative and tell them how things are going.

There are further reasons: the consequences are harder for mid-level fires than for low-level fires. For one, there are much fewer open positions the more senior of a title you expect, and termination may simply result in early retirement. The personal consequences are worse compared to firing people with less seniority, who are perceived as having many more jobs open to them to find (for the sake of argument, leave aside for the moment the continued enshittification of hiring processes and actually getting hired anywhere, for any job). This is important both internally - executives don't want junior employees to perceive promotions as notice they'll soon be terminated - and externally, as disgruntled ex-employees have more influence on bad-mouthing their ex-employer if they are more likely to belong to the same upper socioeconomic groups. Firing 30 lower-level employees, by contrast, doesn't have the same effect on internal morale, or on external reputation among executive peers (just look at how many layoffs happened in the last few years).

The advice for most people is the same, because employment stability is an illusion:

  * Love your calling, not your employer.
  * Live below your means. The key challenge in life is how to desire less.
  * Stay in touch with recruiters and take an interview loop at least once a quarter.
  * Have a backup plan. It doesn't need to be fleshed out, just real enough in your mind.

The most cogent reply I have seen here.

She and/or you have a false conception of what a big five corporation is, or how it works. Yous probably also have a false conception of how relations of production under capitalism work as well. The man higher up the hierarchy at the FAANG has a better grasp of how these things work. Often, people don't realize their conceptions were wrong until they get let go.

That she worked tirelessly, was well liked does not matter. That in this short life we have, that she skipped vacations to devote more time to the company does not matter.

You said the person above her is not smart but he clearly is - he is higher up and survived and she is lower down and was cut.

Insofar as it being healthy for these companies for him to be there - him being there is in the nature of the corporation and perhaps its intrinsic infirmities, just as it is intrinsic to relations of production under capitalism.

One would hope that something as dramatic as not only him being over her, but him staying and her going would disabuse you of these notions. Especially the idea that she had sone kind of relationship within the corporation where working tirelessly and skipping vacations would engender any loyalty on the part of the corporation's higher managers and owners.

You're under the assumption that corporations (especially big ones) are some form of meritocracy. Don't believe the bullshit, it's all about politics, timing, and luck (in that order).

Publicly-traded companies always put short-term profits over anything else; if they don't demonstrably do that, the leadership exposes themselves and the company to shareholder lawsuits. I've been at a BigCorp where layoffs happen at the end of each quarter to look good on the balance sheet, only to hire most of those people back. Rinse and repeat.

Again, this has nothing to do with "doing a good job" or being a model employee. The days of working hard and getting rewarded are dead and buried, and the MBAs are the ones with the guns and shovels.