Why is every layoff 10-15%? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#171

Post by blowski » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 9:13 AM UTC

lozenge wrote: post #160

bitcharmer wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost for fully remote employees is £9k pa I'm really surprised by such high figure. How was this clalculated?

They did say it includes taxes, maybe they are including a 3% pension contribution or even Employers' NI which can run to 12% of salary.

The taxes I mentioned are part of the cost of running an office - especially local government taxes ("rates" in UK parlance).

The £9K figure _doesn't_ include taxes on individuals, such as NI and pension contributions. That comes from a different budget, and is typically an extra 25% on top of salary.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#172

Post by kramerger » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 9:16 AM UTC

bbreier wrote: post #13

> Remote work > Anticipate more mid-size and smaller companies will go back more fully into the office as times get tougher. This will not be one size fits all, but will be an increasing trend. Up to this point in the article, whether you agree or disagree with the points, the author offers some arguments and reasoning supporting each. Here, they simply assert that small and mid-size companies will go into the office…

Edit: he has another article with si6nce explanation about CEOs need to directly interact with employees when the company is of certain size

https://blog.eladgil.com/p/back-to-office

But reading between the lines, he seems to consider remote workers being the lowest performers and a danger to the company culture and mission.

If fell he is also deliberately missing the point of remote work even when it hits him in the face, for example

> a few companies anecdotally see more employees going back in NYC offices than SF. This probably has more to do with local work culture

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#173

Post by Andrew_nenakhov » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 9:16 AM UTC

heurisko wrote: post #163

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of office space for tech employees rarely exceeds 5% of pay (for high-paid tech workers). It's not as expensive as you might first expect. To the people who actually go into the office, it's probably well worth it.

If employers offered the same working environment as a home office, it would be much more expensive. Open plan is only cheap on the books. It costs a lot in decimating the focus of people working there.

Ymmv, but for me work from office is far more productive than from home. It also allows a very effective context switch so you don't feel like working when you are at home.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#174

Post by davidkuennen » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 9:17 AM UTC

Is going back to the office such a huge thing in other countries? Here in Germany almost nothings changed from the main COVID time in terms of home office.

It seems like our standard of working has transformed and will not revert back.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#175

Post by PartiallyTyped » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 9:21 AM UTC

davidkuennen wrote: post #174

Is going back to the office such a huge thing in other countries? Here in Germany almost nothings changed from the main COVID time in terms of home office. It seems like our standard of working has transformed and will not revert back.

Micromanaging mostly. My company wants to return to the office by Dec, but I don't really see that happening.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#176

Post by synu » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 9:23 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #118

synu wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me unlikely that they both couldn’t tell who was performing in normal times and then find them with surgical precision while panicking.

How so? You just don't bother to ask these questions, until you need to know the answers. The information is there at the leaf nodes of the org-chart; it's just not normally being propagated up to anyone who can do anything actionable with it. All it takes is asking the hard question, recursively.

I guess I just don’t believe the leaf nodes in your example actually know who isn’t performing, but had decided to keep them on the team for reasons. And that if they are asked, they will suddenly name names with pinpoint accuracy. In my experience, in this situation, the managers are clueless and figuring out what is actually going on is a hard problem.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#177

Post by closeparen » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 9:26 AM UTC

justahuman74 wrote: post #131

jjav wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some days I am much more productive in the office because I need to, say, communicate with a bunch of people But on that day all of those people might've chosen to work from home so you sit all alone in the office. The hybrid solution only really works well if the office days are the same for everyone.

Forced-hybrid is just using a sledgehammer on the calendar rather than providing the flexibility that is actually liked by optional-attendance-office. If the staff actually find this face-to-face time valuable, they'll organize and go into the office themselves, personally I've had zero requests from anyone to do that outside of explicit team-building activities.

In the before times, "Is there a Zoom for this?" was a live question. Zoom fatigue, such as it was, did not dominate working life. Savvy collaborators anticipated when a conversation would demand more than Zoom, and they made judicious use of the public transit between our offices to keep things smooth.

My enthusiasm for RTO is not about changing the venue from which we take our Zoom calls, but about changing our relationship with Zoom to something like its pre-pandemic state. To have some conversations naturally again. But there's no getting around that the WFHers would have to either show up or be excluded from them.

I personally find Zoom excruciating, and I blame the transition to remote meetings for all communication for turning a once optimistic and joyful career experience into a miserable slog.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#178

Post by rightbyte » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 9:32 AM UTC

irrational wrote: post #125

Clent wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many or a few? Most software engineers find themselves most effective in work from home. This breaks in favor at 3:4 or higher. The software engineers that want to work in office are the odd-balls. I am interested in the break down when one factors in whatever concept of '10x developers' -- which do the most productive of us prefer?

I haven’t met any SWE that want to go back to the office. Heck, even my managers manager has said she never wants to go back, and she is a complete extrovert. These developers online that claim they want to go back must be as rare as hen’s teeth.

Is there a big commute? Since I moved to a 15 000 pop town and work here my view on remote as the best thing ever has changed. Also we have private offices. So I don't know if it is the commute or offices that makes it so much better.

We have a remote of you want policy and the only two guys who use it also live in the nieghboring towns.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#179

Post by mortenlarsen » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 9:32 AM UTC

davidkuennen wrote: post #174

Is going back to the office such a huge thing in other countries? Here in Germany almost nothings changed from the main COVID time in terms of home office. It seems like our standard of working has transformed and will not revert back.

Same here in Denmark. Maybe it is easier due to a flat company structure, and micro-managment being less common. It is not expected or even tolerated by workers, who will just jump ship if it happens.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#180

Post by quelltext » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 9:38 AM UTC

ilyt wrote: post #152

quelltext wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, let's ignore the extra day but why isn't anybody doing that today instead of the 10-15% layoffs? I guess the fear seems to be that it will lead to uncontrolled attrition of good people. But I would assume hiring freezes in the industry would still prevent this. Also, you will retain the truly "loyal" employees that are willing to suffer a bit for future growth. It also addresses the wasteful folks in a fair way…

Well, it would result in exactly that, best people leaving > I guess the fear seems to be that it will lead to uncontrolled attrition of good people. But I would assume hiring freezes in the industry would still prevent this. The best are near-immune to that. It's the average worker that will have problems finding next job, not the best one. > Also, you will retain the truly "loyal" employees that are willing to suff…

I know many many people who went the extra mile for their company (doing more work than expected).

Is it healthy? No. Is it needed? Not always/necessarily. But a company that's laying off members to save costs should likely try to retain those that do go the extra mile.

Also, I mean you can argue all you want that those people aren't productive but in my experience that's just not true. People who live and breathe the company tend to care a whole lot about quality and thinking through user experience. The typical "it's just a job, I can quit any time and find something better" folks just don't stick around long enough to suffer from their decision or care about the company's image / their coworkers.

I mean I've been there. A bunch of folks get hired because they were at Google or Meta before and they must know their stuff, and get elevated to somewhat high positions, but they never deliver on their promise and I cannot say they were particularly productive and they generally also do their "I only work as much as I need" or "Sorry I won't join this one time meeting that needs to happen at odd hours to accommodate time zone issues, it's 30 mins past my end of day" routine. Then after a year or so they leave for greener pastures, probably getting paid more.

Again, I think for a company where it's the norm that people protect their time it might not matter and I'm not saying it's an issue. But if you take a company full of heavily invested employees that see it as their family, and you add, simply because there's a bubble, equal the amount of people who just see it as another job and the company tanks in an economic downturn, retaining more of the latter portion (at all cost) does not seem wise.

The people who don't see the company that way / care are still likely to leave the sinking ship soon, but the damage to the laid off as well as remaining loyal employees has already been done.

And no, if companies were able to accurately identify low performers they could have dealt with them before. I've seen many good folks lose their jobs in the last few months and folks who never released a single thing or provide other tangible output (design docs) be retained.