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

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

#271

Post by detaro »

terminatornet wrote: post #270

> One thing that Lincoln Electric, which is a famous manufacturer of arc welding equipment, did well is instead of laying off 10% of their workforce, they had everybody take a 10% wage cut except for senior management, which took a larger cut. So instead of giving 100% of the pain to 10% of the people, they give 100% of the people 10% of the pain. anyone have any other examples like this where a company avoided layof…

Not quite the same, but for temporary problems there is a mechanism in Germany (and I think Austria and Switzerland too) where a company can cut working hours (and salary to match) and some of the difference gets paid by social security as kind-of "unemployment benefits". Was used quite a bit when COVID hit.

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

#272

Post by Apocryphon »

rsj_hn wrote: post #177
tw20212021 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the 'massive' increase in cost of capital affecting Google, a company making 60bln profit a year from mostly services?

I will assume you are asking in good faith, so here goes. What you think of as "profit" -- e.g. just some random, arbitrary, completely free bonus that Google should be grateful to have at all -- is actually the cost of capital for Google. It is a payment to equity , and the amount of the payment is determined by the interest rate as well as the time path of expected future earnings, adjustment for risk, and other fa…

Couldn’t Google adopt a wait-and-see approach for a few quarters, if all of this was propped up by interest rates to begin with? Maybe instead of reflexively panic-layoffs they could have some sort of longer term strategy to see if the Fed reversed course in a matter of months, which has been speculated already. Why are these megacorps so dependent on the flighty whims of investors, who themselves sat by and allowed the companies to overhire and possibly demanded such a short-sighted risk?

I see some other comments have mentioned this shareholder myopia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34481450

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

#273

Post by metadat »

veqq wrote: post #235
idopmstuff wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) In my career, I've never seen layoffs which were at all good at selecting the bottom 10%. Who gets dropped is pretty random. This is very true, and I would say definitely the biggest weakness of my point. In a theoretical world in which you can drop the bottom 10% of performers, I think that's clearly the right thing to do, but obviously practice is not the same as theory. I will say the one other thing about 10…

> If you're cutting my pay but still maintaining a shareholder dividend, I am gone. After 1-2 years in any big tech company your equity surpasses your salary.

This has not been my experience, at all. Have I been working at the wrong FAANGs?

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

#274

Post by metadat »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #249
as-j wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll laugh but bear with me, Meta recruiter just reached out to me this week, so even parts of Facebook are hiring, and my relevant skill set. Of course I don’t care about VR goggles, but you just had large layoffs, why would I work for you? (Plus ok Zuck is ruining your core business, but that aside) Layoffs hurt inside and outside too.

If meta is hiring for VR, they are probably taking advantage of the recent Microsoft layoff anyways to pick up talent.

Do you mean the Microsoft VR layoffs literally announced only 1 or 2 days ago? That's giving BigCo a lot of credit in the agility department, skirting over the edge into conspiracy theory territory.

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

#275

Post by gumby »

idopmstuff wrote: post #56
tarr11 wrote: post #31

The professor recommends across the board pay cuts as an alternative to layoffs. > One thing that Lincoln Electric, which is a famous manufacturer of arc welding equipment, did well is instead of laying off 10% of their workforce, they had everybody take a 10% wage cut except for senior management, which took a larger cut. So instead of giving 100% of the pain to 10% of the people, they give 100% of the people 10% of…

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…

> but you get to select the worst-performing people.

Anecdotally I'm not necessarily seeing this. Amazon's cuts were concentrated in groups. Some parts of Amazon, like AWS were essentially untouched, except for recruiters. In a comment a few days ago I pointed out that the headlines could have said "Amazon pulls back on Alexa efforts", "Amazon reduces its bet on retail" rather than just the number of people...though that would have hurt the stock price, while cutting people often raises it :-(. And AWS appears to still be hiring at some rate (source: couple of friends who mentioned interviewing candidates in the past couple of weeks). I am sure, of course, that if Amazon did cut half of the Alexa team, where they had a choice they chose the lower performing one.

The same is true of Microsoft's cuts, AFAICT. Slaughter in the hololens team, for example.

Google's cuts seemed to include some people I have worked with in the past and who are IMHO good. Notably they are long termers, though, so perhaps google was considering people who were more expensive. My gf mentioned to me that someone she knew was laid off, and they had just been promoted.

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

#276

Post by crakhamster01 »

> "The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing."

I think this social contagion can describe a lot of the moves that have been made in the tech industry over the last few years. Some examples:

* "Embracing remote work" - prior to 2020 the prospect of working hybrid, let alone fully remote, was extremely rare in tech. Mid-pandemic a couple of large tech companies announce that remote work is here to stay, and pro-WFH policies spread like wildfire. This is a positive example IMO, but still seems like big tech gave this trend the kick to get going.

* The pandemic hiring spree - this one feels the dumbest IMO. As expected from being stuck at home, FAANG in general saw an increase in usage and therefore an increase in revenue. Either leadership made some willfully ignorant revenue projections, or maybe it was just a land grab, but a couple of the big players started aggressively hiring, and all of a sudden the market for tech employees was at an all time high. Less stable companies assumed the bigger players knew something they didn't, and a lot of them followed suit only to get burned by the current bear market we're in.

And now the mass job cuts. So many tech pundits are heralding these waves of layoffs as FAANG forecasting darker days ahead. "If companies with troves of consumer data like Meta and Google are trimming the fat, they must know something we don't!"

_Maybe_ big tech is right this time around, but it doesn't seem like they have the greatest track record. At what point are we going to stop assuming these companies are omnipotent, and realize the man behind the curtain is just some mid-level data analyst with a penchant for SQL queries.

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

#277

Post by danielrpa »

blagie wrote: post #123
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…

Having seen both, I'm much more likely to leave /after/ a layoff than after a 10% paycut. In abstract, if there were a way to rank employees by ROI and contribution perfectly fairly, I might not worry about layoffs personally. However: 1) In my career, I've never seen layoffs which were at all good at selecting the bottom 10%. Who gets dropped is pretty random. 2) I care about other people I work with. A 10% layoff m…

I'd leave ASAP if I got a 10% pay cut so the poor performers could remain coasting. Thank you, but no thank you. I'd only consider staying in this scenario if I felt there weren't poor performers around, which is almost never the case in the big companies capturing the headlines right now.

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

#278

Post by medvezhenok »

nishs wrote: post #214
petilon wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid is not over. But the pandemic is over.

What is your distinction between the two?

"Pandemics are known to cause widespread disruption, illness and hardship as we have experienced since 2020. An endemic means a disease is spreading in a community at the normal or expected level. A pandemic begins to shift to an endemic once the disease becomes more stable and manageable."

COVID has mostly moved from pandemic to endemic (like the flu).

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

#279

Post by kamaal »

idopmstuff wrote: post #56
tarr11 wrote: post #31

The professor recommends across the board pay cuts as an alternative to layoffs. > One thing that Lincoln Electric, which is a famous manufacturer of arc welding equipment, did well is instead of laying off 10% of their workforce, they had everybody take a 10% wage cut except for senior management, which took a larger cut. So instead of giving 100% of the pain to 10% of the people, they give 100% of the people 10% of…

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…

>> 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.

Nobody outside of your immediate team, manager and may be at best a few people apart from them know you are the top performer. It's not like sports or movie industry that people know who you are. Where you go next, you have to work from the beginning to prove you are a top performer. And that take 2+ years too. Overall rage quitting for these reasons is a bad move.

>>When done correctly, layoffs give 100% of the pain to 10% (or whatever) of the people, but you get to select the worst-performing people.

In nearly all companies the rating system is fixed. And largely depends on political lobbying at the management levels. There is literally no way to know who are the real top performers.

In fact in many companies, money comes from top projects/products, not top performers. This is why often the companies let go people on the lines of which businesses they want to be running or shutting down, not which people they want to keep and let go.

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

#280

Post by hinkley »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #239
hinkley wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’ve never been in a layoff where you lost someone you trust as much as you trust yourself, it’s a terrible experience that may come to define your time at the company. If they can lay “Dave” off they can lay any of us off. What if I’m next? Or god what if you’re next? I do not want your job and they’ll make me do it if you’re gone. I have to be very careful in meetings now, save 95% of my political capital for…

Cassandra the db or the mythical figure?

The mythical figure.
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