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Layoffs Don't Work

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Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#31

Post by steveBK123 »

csomar wrote: post #27

The layoffs are not the issue. It is the decision makers who took the two decisions to both over-hire and then mass-fire shortly after. GM is a great example. The company was the largest and one of the most innovative car manufacturers in the world. It doesn't stand a chance against BYD today and it is not by a lack of money (though maybe with a C-suite change). So my opinion is, yes, the damage is done (or being don…

GM is a great example, Intel as well, that its rarely the engineers fault. You can have great talent but if management is dead set on bad decisions over & over, theres nothing to be done.

And the decision to overhire/overfire, set bad strategy, etc all resides in the C-Suite who rarely fire each other or themselves when it all goes wrong. It's only the employees that suffer for every mis-step.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#32

Post by ttoinou »

dartos wrote: post #16
dustingetz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

software development costs are out of control the whole industry is one big grift, there’s no accountability anywhere, 20% of the devs are doing 80% of the work, the business would instantly terminate the 80% for cause if they could only discern the difference, but they can’t, because the business side is also a big grift with the exact same problem all the way up to the founders recursively

Got news for you. It’s not the devs who are bloating development costs. It’s the layers of management making hour long meetings to discuss button placement. It’s the hours of retros, design meetings, and skip-levels designed to remove any personal investment or sense of ownership from everything. Since so few individuals are trusted with real decision making power, you need a lot more people to achieve some kind of c…

I agree with your point but at the same time developers do need to be managed and they don’t want to manage themselves

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#33

Post by malfist »

fzeroracer wrote: post #18
DebtDeflation wrote: post #5

They used to be a once a decade "save the company during a recession" move. Now they seem to be a quarterly "manage earnings per share" move.

Running a business is less and less about actual business outcomes and more about juicing stock. And the stock market itself is divorced from reality as companies whose output has gone down over time sees higher valuations because the owner has cult appeal. So everything gets worse and more expensive year over year while feckless suits get sloshed over company dinners.

The stock market is like a sports betting pool where the players are allowed to bet on themselves

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#34

Post by kgwgk »

steveBK123 wrote: post #31
csomar wrote: post #27

The layoffs are not the issue. It is the decision makers who took the two decisions to both over-hire and then mass-fire shortly after. GM is a great example. The company was the largest and one of the most innovative car manufacturers in the world. It doesn't stand a chance against BYD today and it is not by a lack of money (though maybe with a C-suite change). So my opinion is, yes, the damage is done (or being don…

GM is a great example, Intel as well, that its rarely the engineers fault. You can have great talent but if management is dead set on bad decisions over & over, theres nothing to be done. And the decision to overhire/overfire, set bad strategy, etc all resides in the C-Suite who rarely fire each other or themselves when it all goes wrong. It's only the employees that suffer for every mis-step.

> It's only the employees that suffer for every mis-step.

They benefit for the overhiring mis-step.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#35

Post by FreebasingLLMs »

georgemcbay wrote: post #23
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much of the software industry is just an outrageous combination of inexperience and "YOLO". Every problem can be solved by just giving AWS another $100,000 this month because we don't have time (and don't know how) to make even basically optimized software. So just burn the gas and electricity and give more money to the YAML merchants at Amazon.

I still have PTSD from around 2012 when a company I worked for and loved very much (chumby) imploded financially and almost all of the employees including myself got vacuumed up in an acquihire-type deal into a streaming media company that was building a would-be netflix competitor. Us former chumby developers were working primarily on the front-end across a variety of embedded-system-like devices (writing code for e…

[dead]

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#36

Post by steveBK123 »

dartos wrote: post #16
dustingetz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

software development costs are out of control the whole industry is one big grift, there’s no accountability anywhere, 20% of the devs are doing 80% of the work, the business would instantly terminate the 80% for cause if they could only discern the difference, but they can’t, because the business side is also a big grift with the exact same problem all the way up to the founders recursively

Got news for you. It’s not the devs who are bloating development costs. It’s the layers of management making hour long meetings to discuss button placement. It’s the hours of retros, design meetings, and skip-levels designed to remove any personal investment or sense of ownership from everything. Since so few individuals are trusted with real decision making power, you need a lot more people to achieve some kind of c…

Right every step of every dev task is ticketed, scheduled and measures within a millimeter of its life in many orgs. The people working the tickets aren't to blame when it all goes wrong in the big picture.

I've worked at shops with agile coaches, consultants, product teams, multiple management layers, etc all attending agile planning/retro/blab sessions. They always had really strong opinions on the minutae of each footstep (tickets/sprint), but couldn't speak to where the path was to take us. Essentially zero quarterly let alone annual planning.

A lot of management these days is the equivalent of driving and saying "I'll decide where I'm going when I get to the next stop light", repeated every 2 weeks.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#37

Post by Avicebron »

roenxi wrote: post #25
fzeroracer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'The research is wrong because I said so' isn't exactly a compelling argument, and certainly not a strong enough one when you've been in the modern workforce long enough to recognize how badly layoffs are conducted at just about every company. I've seen enough 10x engineers get laid off to know that the idea that companies have any idea as to who is actually productive or not is just false.

1) But I included an actual argument and, furthermore, it assumed that the research is correct. > I've seen enough 10x engineers get laid off... 2) That is sensible for the company. They have no idea how to use a 10x engineer, as can be detected by the fact that they're having layoffs. They don't know how to create value in the market and they're being forced into a position where they have to squeeze what they can o…

Unfortunately as I've seen countless times, it's also writing on the wall to the management team "TIME TO MOVE ON CAUSE DAMAGE TO ANOTHER COMPANY", I don't know why we don't expect management's head on the chopping block. If a captain orders a course into an iceberg, idk why we can't just hang the captain and course correct.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#38

Post by fzeroracer »

roenxi wrote: post #25
fzeroracer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'The research is wrong because I said so' isn't exactly a compelling argument, and certainly not a strong enough one when you've been in the modern workforce long enough to recognize how badly layoffs are conducted at just about every company. I've seen enough 10x engineers get laid off to know that the idea that companies have any idea as to who is actually productive or not is just false.

1) But I included an actual argument and, furthermore, it assumed that the research is correct. > I've seen enough 10x engineers get laid off... 2) That is sensible for the company. They have no idea how to use a 10x engineer, as can be detected by the fact that they're having layoffs. They don't know how to create value in the market and they're being forced into a position where they have to squeeze what they can o…

> 2) That is sensible for the company. They have no idea how to use a 10x engineer, as can be detected by the fact that they're having layoffs. They don't know how to create value in the market and they're being forced into a position where they have to squeeze what they can out of what assets they have.

Okay, now explain why every company is encountering these issues where they're frequently laying off people and are unable to create value. The frequency of layoffs is diametrically opposed to your thesis because otherwise companies would behave in a way to reduce layoffs. Such as hiring fewer employees and encouraging longer term retention.

> If a company is having layoffs, that is the invisible hand of the market writing on the wall "THIS MANAGEMENT TEAM DOESN"T KNOW HOW TO MAKE MONEY AT THE MOMENT, STOP GIVING THEM IMPORTANT RESOURCES". That includes 10x engineers.

This is basically the Just World fallacy but applied to the free market. If something occurs then it's justified as a perfectly rational action of the invisible free hand of the market. In reality layoffs are rarely conducted by the people most equipped to do them, but via a mandate from heaven that you must cut your team for the sake of Number even if you're one of the most efficient teams in the company.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#39

Post by steveBK123 »

kgwgk wrote: post #34
steveBK123 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GM is a great example, Intel as well, that its rarely the engineers fault. You can have great talent but if management is dead set on bad decisions over & over, theres nothing to be done. And the decision to overhire/overfire, set bad strategy, etc all resides in the C-Suite who rarely fire each other or themselves when it all goes wrong. It's only the employees that suffer for every mis-step.

> It's only the employees that suffer for every mis-step. They benefit for the overhiring mis-step.

Not necessarily. If you give up a good job to join a firm that has over-hired, its only obvious in retrospect that you took a bad risk.

Re: Layoffs Don't Work

#40

Post by lukashoff »

Because layoffs are not done to make company great but to make sure shareholders and execs preserve their wealth. It's never about company or people or technology - it's always about money, power and wealth.
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