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Why is every layoff 10-15%?

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Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#241

Post by hakfoo »

Clent wrote: post #62
TexanFeller wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but many CEOs will tend to believe that things will go better with everyone back in the office Many of us SWEs believe the same!

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?

The one thing I can see (as a SWE) is if you want to be able to fully box-off your work-life balance.

For my first few years of WFH, my office was my bedroom, so I just threw a KVM between my home PC and the work laptop and shared monitors and input devices. I eventually set up a standalone office.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#242

Post by scarface74 »

throwaway5959 wrote: post #236
scarface74 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last company I worked for did something similar. It cut everyone’s salary (60 people) to avoid a layoff right after Covid hit. As soon as they did, I started looking for another job. Your best employees can leave and you are left with the “Dead Sea Effect”

Why did you leave? Was it because you weren’t being paid enough or purely principle (or both)?

Oh it had nothing to do with principle. My manager, the CTO was the best manager I ever had. He was new to the company when I was hired in 2018 and they were bringing development in house from a contracting shop and he tapped me to lead cloud initiatives even though he knew I didn’t know anything about cloud.

I would have left anyway over the next year. By the time the paycut came, I had already basically purposely “put myself out of job”. I trained other coworkers. Put processes in place and I had nothing left to do but normal CRUD development.

They were pivoting to selling various microservices to large health care providers and he wanted to move away from VMs to Fargate (serverless Docker) and Lambda along with some other projects.

He was a great mentor and he was very straightforward and unapologetically blunt (after we got to know each other).

3 months after I left, they gave everyone additional equity to make up for the paycut and they restored everything a month later.

When they got bought out six months later for 10x, everyone made a decent amount of money from $50K - $200K (we aren’t talking a tech hub), the founders gave everyone bonuses and they reached out to someone who had been there for years and who had left and gave them an extra “thank you” bonus.

I would have stayed, but a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE position. I didn’t want to be an SWE at any large company, I didn’t want to relocate, and I wasn’t about to spend months “grinding LeetCode”.

We kept talking and she suggested I apply for a fully remote position at AWS ProServe as a consultant specializing in enterprise app dev + “devOps”.

It was too good of opportunity to pass up.

The rest of the story with the startup. Soon after it got acquired, the CTO left and most of the best employees went with him to a new startup in the same space.

If I were working anywhere else and he could afford me, I would definitely work with him again. I still give him free advice from time to time when he calls and we meet for lunch every now and then.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#244

Post by scarface74 »

pyr0hu wrote: post #237
scarface74 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy for me to context switch. I have a separate office. I only go in there to work.

Yeah, but not everyone has the luxury to have a fully separate office room/space for themselves

If you can work remotely from anywhere you can afford a house in the burbs with space for a separate office - somewhere in the US.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#245

Post by seadan83 »

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…

Seemingly lot of other points are similarly made without the supporting evidence. Eg: wage growth driving inflation - what wage growth? Checking this, the pandemic pushed the US out of a period of low wage growth, it's not extreme and is similar to the 60s thru 80s: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wage-growth

Re: printing money and money drops, that seems to entirely ignore that was happening while unemployment was in the double digits.

Re: drivers on inflation, Karie Porter has some really interesting presentations that input costs are not increasing proportionally to profit increases (regardless what you think of her, the data presented stands on its own). That evidence suggests simple price gauging is a significant factor (citation: https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart/corporate-pr...)

Those are just some examples of yet more statements given as assertions, which seem somewhat foundational to the remaining conclusions. These flaws really gives me pause for any of the analysis presented.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#246

Post by ecshafer »

llampx wrote: post #228
fbdab103 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, don't you feel engaged to come to a place with such inspirational artwork? Truly, a company that cares. /s

On the other hand, would you feel inspired and happy about going to a workplace with nothing on the walls or better still, the last company's name on them? If the place feels dingy or like the owners don't care to make it look nice, I doubt it has a positive effect on productivity and employee retention.

>On the other hand, would you feel inspired and happy about going to a workplace with nothing on the walls or better still, the last company's name on them?

I wouldn't really care, I have never felt inspired by something on the walls. But I would legitimately laugh and feel better every day if the old companies name was still on the wall.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#247

Post by derefr »

synu wrote: post #176
derefr wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Think of it like this: you have direct reports who are awful at their jobs. You have no idea who hired these people; you just inherited them from their sociopath ex-manager (now promoted, per the Peter Principle) who hired them for bad reasons. However, the job is a very technically-complex job, where everyone is going to be awful at any new task for the first ~6 months of doing it. Just coming into this situation, you don't really know whether these people are not-good, or just not-good yet. You have a suspicion, but you don't want to air it, because you might be wrong — they might be trying and it might just be too early to see results yet — and there's no internal corporate zeitgeist of purging deadwood to give you any confidence in avoiding backlash if you are wrong.

Later, that zeitgeist comes, and your boss's boss's boss asks your boss's boss, who asks you, to have the hard conversation with those direct reports you've been suspecting — and with their peers — to find out if they're actually making any progress in learning what's required to become productive, or whether they've just been bullshitting you. So you have that conversation, find out the ugly truth, and report it.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#248

Post by roncesvalles »

bawolff wrote: post #164
lll-o-lll wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring freeze is actually a mistake as you trend towards mediocrity. Natural turnover tends to lose you more good people than bad (head hunting, opportunity).

Sure, but i imagine layoffs are even worse for that. The company can pick who to layoff, but once they do i imagine the really talented people start to jump ship.

The trick is to do it when everyone else is in a freeze or doing layoffs :)

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#249

Post by ThunderSizzle »

llampx wrote: post #229
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real. Make some friends outside of work. Or enjoy time with your family. Or take time to make a family.

We are still talking about working during work, right? Or are you playing with your kids and having beers with your friends while you work? It is a strawman argument to claim that people who want to go to the office have no social life. It is in fact easier to claim that "only antisocial people want to hide at home like a hermit with their webcam shut off."

When work and social life are the same, you never need to leave work.

I've seen too many buy into that just to lose their entire social lives over a job change, and also have horrible life satisfaction over the long term.

So yes and no. Depends on how you define work.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#250

Post by whateveracct »

deltree7 wrote: post #63
dymk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my remote only company is way more productive than my previous in-person company, so there’s the counter anecdote to your anecdote

I'll take any IC or low-level employee's productivity claim with a grain of salt. For a CEO, productivity is at a first order is operating margins. 99% of HNers have no clue how to calculate that (nor have the necessary data).

How would a C-level person measure my productivity? Go on GitHub and filter for my PRs and count .. merges/week? commits/week? lines/week? lol
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