Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see what you are saying. I am an engineer-turned-EM and you don't know me, so please take everything I say with a grain of salt: > Your job is NOT safe. Nothing will make execs happier than having this line of thought popularized amongst engineers. It will allow them to hire cheaper, and exploit existing engineers more. I think a better way to put it is: "A job is not your family, and a job is not your identity. Yo…
> Nothing will make execs happier than having this line of thought popularized amongst engineers. It will allow them to hire cheaper, and exploit existing engineers more. Why? The lay-offs are so broad, not selective at all. You're just as likely to get cut if you're working hard or not, if you're overpaid or underpaid. It's completely out of the employee's control, so why would it change the employee's behavior?
Employees don’t have visibility into their peers actual performance. They see a silver of it and infer. This makes layoffs look random. Then, we rely on publicly reported “I was given a great review and still let go!” posts — which are all self-interested. No one wants to hire or refer someone who was doing poorly so there’s an incentive to fib or have selective amnesia.
The whole cohort of folks let go are incentivized to keep up the fiction that it was random.
All things being equal, there is no reason to layoff someone high performing over their less capable peer. I’ve never seen it done randomly, and I’ve sat in these meetings.
This is not to say whole divisions or companies haven’t been let go, but that’s not the same situation here. We’re talking about selective cuts across the entire company where core, or advertising lost some folks, while others remained. That is not random.