Buffer Layoffs

Sometimes what the family gets out of it is a sense of moral correctness, and self assurance that what they are doing is correct. People use cost benefit analyses for everything, it's just that we often don't take into account some aspects (such as how we feel about an action,or how it affects our self image) when trying to rationally weigh those costs and benefits mentally.

If cutting off ties with your child makes you feel extremely guilty or like a horrible person, to the degree where you can't stand it, then obviously you weren't correctly weighing the impact that action would have on you.

Note, in the case of children, it's a bit more complicated, because IMO you've essentially contractually obligated yourself to your child for at least 18 years, but generally for much longer. By bringing that person into the world, you bear some of the responsibility for their outcome. Often this doesn't feel much like responsibility because our strong emotional connection and need to protect and help subsumes it, but if those are removed, responsibility does remain.

The Prince is relevant in any organization where a strict hierarchy needs to be maintained. Which is why it was relevant here to the question of how a CEO who needs to implement a painful decision (in this case big financial cuts including laying people off) should go about it.

I'm sure thousands of people have been thrilled with Buffer growing and thriving and see it as a breath of fresh air in a climate filled with bean counter CEOs who think anything and everything boils down to a number that can be turned like a set of knobs to change outcomes (and of course, most of them fail and jump to another job with a nice golden parachute). I personally think the executive compensation disparities that traditional CEOs bring in and how they deal with things are very damaging to all the humans who work with them. As a society, it doesn't forebode well at all to continue with the traditional model.

Regardless of how Buffer ends up faring in the next year or so, it will always be remembered for being different and doing things differently than most other companies. I feel bad for all the Buffer employees that they had to face this - letting go of a significant percentage of the workforce in a small company (or even a small division in a large company) can be really upsetting for everyone involved. The best that they can do, which they seem to be doing, is making sure that these people who're laid off get a decent enough job elsewhere. One can't really hope for that in many other companies.

But in my own experience, I've worked at one specific place that was very very good about identifying people who plainly didn't help and letting them go. It helped immensely over time: the culture was really good (people were really invested in their job, and loved working as a team) and the retention rate was about 6x higher than most places in the same field.

They didn't use bogus metrics or anything, it was always a "feeling" kind of thing. If several people said someone was not helping, they were most likely right. It was arbitrary I admit, but rarely wrong.

There's books about it (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Asshole-Rule-Civilized-Workplace-Surv...) but personally haven't read them yet.