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

“Copycat” layoffs won’t help tech companies or their employees

gsb.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 310 posts

Re: “Copycat” layoffs won’t help tech companies or their employees

#131

Post by notfromhere »

treis wrote: post #71
wpietri wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have missed most of blinkingled's point, and I encourage you to address it fully.

There's no point in debating the meaning of productivity unless someone claims it's neutral or up. If they're willing to make that claim then it might be worth that debate. Otherwise, it's a pointless side track.

If you're using productivity to justify firing people, but then you proceed to avoid discussing how is calculated, you can't use it as a justification.

There's no clear way to measure employee productivity in a white collar job. So claiming "productivity is down" with no objective evidence, is just groupthink.

Re: “Copycat” layoffs won’t help tech companies or their employees

#132

Post by kris_wayton »

I can't help but wonder how many of these layoffs are really just "rank and yank" in disguise. Where the company will soon go back to backfilling pretty much the same spots from the open market. And, funny enough, if the pool is full of companies doing the same thing, well...it's essentially just trading your laid off workers for someone else's.

Re: “Copycat” layoffs won’t help tech companies or their employees

#133

Post by roncesvalles »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #114
idopmstuff wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem with this strategy is that it causes the wrong people to leave. If you're a top performer, you're going to feel like a 10% pay cut is very unfair, and you're going to be able to get another job elsewhere fairly easily, even in this environment. If you're not performing particularly well, it probably doesn't feel as unreasonable, and even if you don't like it, it's tough to leave. When done correct…

This ignores the morale. I've been in both situations and the pay cut definitely felt like "we're in this rough economic situation together". Compare this with a layoff where I made my peace while waiting for "you still have a job email" and started interviewing shortly after. Of course pay cuts always ignore shareholders as they are really getting the benefit of paying less for same number of people.

Exactly. I think a 10% pay cut with no layoff would create a sense of job security that most people would consider well worth a 10% cut.

Re: “Copycat” layoffs won’t help tech companies or their employees

#134

Post by notfromhere »

treis wrote: post #29
wpietri wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand you feel that way. And clearly, that's the dominant narrative about layoffs. What makes you value those feelings enough to reject out of hand a professor who has been studying it for decades?

Because you can't study an unprecedented situation for decades Because rules derived over the last decades or whatever don't necessarily apply to an unprecedented situation Because pretty much all the CEOs and employees say that productivity is in the toilet Because I don't see 20% or whatever more useful products/features coming out of any of these companies

CEOs are going to say that productivity is down to justify layoffs or to kill remote work (something they have been against before, during, and after the pandemic).

"pretty much everyone says" is not an actual defense.

Re: “Copycat” layoffs won’t help tech companies or their employees

#135

Post by bdavisx »

novok wrote: post #18

This really depends on the percentage of the workforce your laying off. A small %2-%6 one is really getting rid of people you don't want, but it's too much of a pain in the ass to do the entire PIP & political process to do so, or they're toxic / unproductive but well positioned that firing them is hard. A streamlined 'just pick people' layoff process helps with all of those issues. The bottom %5 percentile people th…

Lower level management at Google was definitely not consulted on these layoffs. It had to be upper level only or it would have leaked more. Like really upper level. So there's no way the people @ that level know who's coasting and who isn't. I'm sure there were a lot of high performers cut along w/ some "fat".

Re: “Copycat” layoffs won’t help tech companies or their employees

#136

Post by s1artibartfast »

wpietri wrote: post #77
broast wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have any evidence that the over-hiring was a mistake? Could companies not have seen the free money and decided to beef up their staff for short term gains in their roadmap, with the knowledge and intention that they will likely be cutting later while getting to keep all that intellectual output? I don't see why we put this past them.

Another question I'd ask is: why can't the find something useful to do with these people in the meantime? Downturns are definitionally temporary. Can managers really find no way to prepare for the coming good times? Or is there no way to use those staff to gain ground while everybody else is retreating? Workers are getting blamed by many for (claimed) low productivity. But why isn't that seen as a managerial failure?…

>Isn't it better to have the same number of people and use them much better than a smaller number of people that are just as poorly used?

Of course! But that is much easier said than done. If it was as simple as just telling managers find a use that will make money, everyone would do that instead.

Re: “Copycat” layoffs won’t help tech companies or their employees

#137

Post by hinkley »

musingsole wrote: post #40
wpietri wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will it? Most of the top performers I know are not very motivated by money, and instead value doing interesting work with people they like. Granted, there are a set of people who are very good at job-hopping while executing a performance of being a top performer. But maybe a company will do just fine those people hop away. Maybe it would do better.

Layoffs and paycuts don't bode well for any interesting work or keeping people in a mood where they are likeable. The handwringing and psuedo-calculus of cuts does further damage to any interesting work. Can't do interesting work when instead you have to fill in for a job previously covered by a junior engineer. It'd take a hell of a company culture to fight these trends.

I do a lot of DevEx and performance and reliability work. It’s not as sexy as a mid-boom greenfield Shiny Shiny project, but most of us are reinventing software IBM wrote in 1988 anyway, so the shiny is mostly an illusion.

You need the sort of work I do when you’re trying to get more done with less. Do I prefer using these skills to prevent over hiring in the first place? Of course I do. I’ll even take it for winding down a cash cow so we can start new product lines.

The “goodness” of most people who conflate new with better is a matter of prospects. This kid is going to be amazing someday. In a downturn you need amazing now, not some day.

Re: “Copycat” layoffs won’t help tech companies or their employees

#138

Post by jmyeet »

ryandrake wrote: post #124
jmyeet wrote: post #90

It makes me physically ill to hear billionaire CEOs "take full responsibility" for the layoffs in an impersonal email while taking no pay cut themselves. Look at Meta as one of the worst offenders. Meta's layoffs will save what? $5 billion a year? Assuming those employees were actually producing some value, the true savings will be less (since you also have to factor in severance costs). Now consider that Meta has sp…

> It makes me physically ill to hear billionaire CEOs "take full responsibility" for the layoffs in an impersonal email while taking no pay cut themselves. To be fair, Microsoft's executives partied with Sting[1] right before announcing their layoffs. They probably would have rather had Lady Gaga perform for them, but had to take some responsibility so they settled for Sting. It's hard times for everyone. 1: https://…

And we should focus on the true victims of the recession: landlords.

Re: “Copycat” layoffs won’t help tech companies or their employees

#139

Post by revlolz »

notfromhere wrote: post #120
revlolz wrote: post #33

Deleting the post, I no longer wish to discuss this.

Google printed like $75B in net income, are we going to pretend that they need to do layoffs in order to stay profitable? Google isn't some startup that needs to bump metrics in order to survive until their next tranche.

I don't disagree with that sentiment at all. These company's min/max their strategy and operations regardless of the human impact and that is terible. However, I find the sentiment irrelevant to calling out a fallacy in the thinking through the article that layoffs are social contagions.

Re: “Copycat” layoffs won’t help tech companies or their employees

#140

Post by Jiejeing »

petilon wrote: post #8

Not all of it is "copycat". During the pandemic consumer spending moved online. People purchased hardware to work from home, ordered more from Amazon and other online stores as opposed to physical stores, used online services such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams more. Tech companies responded to the increased demand by increasing the pace of hiring. Were they wrong to do so? Possibly, because they should have expected th…

One small correction: the pandemic certainly is not over.
Post reply on HN