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Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

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Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#271

Post by hyperman1 »

There isa logical conclusion of this: The quality of an individual's work is irrelevant in a bigco.

1) It is generally accepted that the best people leave first in this kind of layoff. But 3 years later, the corporation is doing as well as the others. Hence, removing the best people does no damage to a bigcorp.

2) A post in this thread describes how regular aggressive layoffs turn the culture toxic, setting people against each other. But one common response in nature is cooperation: people form a clique, and exclude colleagues who could damage them. They make nonmembers perform badly by e.g. witholding information. This sers outsiders up for being laid off. An evolutionary pressure selects for people having the political prowess to survive layoffs, and against good performers which endanger the status quo.

So a bigco's level of performance does not depend on having good workers. Instead, all this points to the work performed by the worst workers to be the major determinating factor for success.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#272

Post by juve1996 »

ramphastidae wrote: post #192
juve1996 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At a lower average compensation rate too, most likely. highly doubt it. The labor force is shrinking. There's already a dearth of talented software devs. And then there will be huge upward pressure on wages from lower level jobs that now have to pay 20$ an hour to get workers.

People have been saying that for 50 years and it hasn’t happened in the US. Upward pressure on wages will result in interest rate increases to manufacture unemployment and keep wages down.

It's happening right now, in front of our very eyes, as predicted. Once the population shifted, it would happen. Here we are, take it in.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#273

Post by vivegi »

anon7725 wrote: post #270
vivegi wrote: post #201

This is obviously false. Layoffs do work. 2003 - 2007 is not a sufficiently long enough period to assess layoff impacts on a company. For example: >Apple Computer Inc. said late Friday it was slashing its work force by 4,100 in a last-ditch effort to save the troubled computer maker. > Out of the total number affected, about 2,700 are full-time workers. The remainder are part-time and contract employees. The cuts wil…

None of the large tech companies conducting layoffs have had their back against the wall. They are mostly just purging after their irrational pandemic hiring as well as doing galaxy-brained copycat layoffs. Isn’t it remarkable that “economic conditions” lead dozens of companies to need to cut the same 5-7% of staff?

I agree with you that the pandemic era hiring went off the rails. We don't hear any media mentioning The Great Resignation anymore. It is all just doom and gloom.

Labor cost is the major cost driver for big-tech. They just decided to axe that because that is the quickest way for them to impact costs and conserve cash when revenues are expected to drop, stay flat, or at best grow very slowly.

At best, they are right in their economic activity projection, it slows their revenue and profit growth (they will still be profitable). At worst, they are wrong about it and the revenue and profit growth is not slowed (a good problem for them to have) and they can just resume hiring.

Regarding your comment on companies not necessarily having their back against the wall -- unfortunately, this is behavior is quite common. Companies don't have to be bleeding in their P&L to take layoff decisions.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#274

Post by spokeonawheel »

Disclaimer: I am NOT advocating for layoffs, I do agree with their cruel nature. However, this comment in the article is ignorant:"Sure, except presumably at-will employers could have done that at any time if they had hard data that suggested this pool of employees weren't working out."

Here is why. Just because someone is at-will doesnt mean the manager has the power to fire someone without any repercussions. Management can be a political house of cards and "layoffs" is a safe blanket to wipe these people out.

case 1: Another deadweight case is to rip through the relational bias. Fred is a very nice guy and he does an OK job, but could the market provide someone else cheaper and/or better than fred? since hes not excelling lets roll the dice and find out. Fred wouldnt normally get let go because hes doing just the bare minimum to get by and there is no case for such a thing.

case 2: manager is incompetent(say it aint so!) and is hiring the wrong people. What a mess! how do you deal with that?! Time to clean up the whole department and start fresh.

The obvious downside of layoffs is that all too often, talented, loyal, and undeserving people get caught up in the mix, but at least management "feels terrible about it"

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#275

Post by mixmastamyk »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #227
karaterobot wrote: post #16

> Imagine you had a dog... Imagine that instead of a dog, it's an adult who makes their own choices and gets paid money, and who signed a contract where the terms of employment were spelled out very clearly..

A better analogy would be: imagine that you hired a gardener. And you were paying them every week to mow your lawn. But one day you thought, "hey I'm paying $100 for this guy to mow my lawn, but I could do it myself in an hour". And you told the gardener "your services are no longer needed" and started to mow your lawn yourself.

First would have to blow sunshine up the ass of the gardener, about how “we are a family and humans are our greatest resource.” ;-)

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#276

Post by 908B64B197 »

3vidence wrote: post #203
908B64B197 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the thing: mass layoffs make it easier to get rid of people with performance or behavioral problems in a lot of jurisdictions. I had to let someone go at a company we had just acquired in Montreal a few years ago. The guy was underperforming and had a huge attitude problem (bursts of anger actually). One of the frequent arguments he had with everyone was that he insisted he didn't need to learn French to live…

I usually just casually lerk on HN for topics I'm interested in learning about or generally topics I don't have expertise in. This whole layoff discussion had been an eye opener for me as to how uninformed a lot of comments are and just made on speculation. I was there at the North acquisition, the vast majority of people kept there jobs and so did the founders. People keep talking about these layoffs like they were…

> I was there at the North acquisition, the vast majority of people kept there jobs and so did the founders.

You worked there? I hired former North employees. Most of them were looking at a way out since their equity had negative value at the point [0]. Founders are "advisors" at Google. Basically a retainer when someone is under NDA after an acquisition.

Regarding the layoffs, the company 1/3rd of it's workforce right before getting acquired [1][2] (So much so that some of the funding was pulled out! [3]). Internally, it was a patent play to keep the Intel Vaunt patents from getting auctioned to Apple or Microsoft [4].

> The layoffs are organized exclusively at such a high level the people making the decisions have absolutely no idea how the people they are choosing perform.

Layoffs give leeway to engineering managers to trim as they see fit. CEO won't have a case for every underperforming employee or employee with an attitude problem. Mass layoffs are for purely economical reasons, but it's notorious that it's a pretty convenient way to get rid of "hard to fire employees" without having to put in place HR counselling, performance improvement plans and so on.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/kitchener/comments/hg11tl/a_vision_...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18236253/north-focals-sma...

[2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-a-vision-fa...

[3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/north-inc-...

[4] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144221/north-focals-in...

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#277

Post by jwr »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #248
jwr wrote: post #245

The dog analogy is terrible. You should never, ever consider your employer to be your family. The employer is not your friend, nor a relative. They are your employer. I really dislike the whole "let's build the team spirit and be a great family together" approach. It's dishonest, and often done with the (explicit or implicit) intention of brainwashing. Also, this goes both ways: I was an employer for the majority of…

Interesting to see it from a (smaller) employers point of view. Can you give some examples, ie how did you do things before getting screwed and what have you changed after? What are your top lessons you learned?

I don't want to talk about specifics, because these stories involve real people. But some examples from the bad side: I've seen employees quit right after an extensive training period, disappear without a word, fake being ill for many months to get social security money, fake an illness to avoid a difficult assignment, and sue the employer for (imagined, not real) theft from a company that was going bankrupt. I've also seen people steal equipment from the company to pay for their drug addiction. All of this behavior was seen in people that the company previously worked with for months to years, and believe me when I say the companies involved were really doing their best to "be good" to employees. We're not talking Amazon warehouse jobs here.

More generally, I learned to treat the relationship as a professional one. I strive to be fair and play by the book, but no longer have any expectations of people acting "fairly" or "nicely" towards their employer. Similarly, I don't think anybody should expect their employer to be their family — business decisions are made differently from family decisions.

I should probably also mention that my disillusionment led me to starting a bootstrapped business where I have no investors and no employees, so that I don't have to depend on anyone.

All this doesn't mean that we all have to be mean or evil to each other. Everything can still be fair. But an employee should not expect a company to be "good to them", nor should a company expect an employee to be "good to them". There are business boundaries to how far "good" can go on the company side, and on the employee side there are people who err on the side of treating a company like family (wrong) and who treat the company as the devil incarnate (wrong too).

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#278

Post by jdmichal »

bink wrote: post #141
jdmichal wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. Bleeding small numbers of people is absolutely terrible for morale. Everyone will be wondering whether it's their turn this week, and that will 100% have knock-on effects. If you have to do a layoff, your goal should be to make it deep enough to only do it once and allow the healing process to start. If your goal is to avoid layoffs, the solution is to build a war chest with months or even years of runw…

I'd argue that bleeding small numbers of people randomly and/or arbitrarily is terrible for morale. Firing those who aren't performing or whose teams aren't contributing is actually good for morale. People know who is and isn't contributing and are far more understanding when the layoffs are the result of failed projects or unnecessary cost centers.

This discussion is already in the context of layoffs, not firing for non-performance.

Re: Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

#279

Post by ROTMetro »

drewcoo wrote: post #189
ROTMetro wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked at two companies where people pooled vacation time for sick co-workers who had already been granted extended leave time by the company way past the company norm when they got cancer. If that is not an act of friendship what is it? I've worked on a team where we scheduled our production schedule and the company their release schedule for a year around making sure a co-worker could go back to their country…

> I've worked at two companies where people pooled vacation time for sick co-workers who had already been granted extended leave time by the company way past the company norm when they got cancer. If that is not an act of friendship what is it? It is a sad attempt at compensating for a missing social safety net.

True, but it is still an act of friendship.
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