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Why is every layoff 10-15%?

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Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#81

Post by ianbutler »

Clent wrote: post #62
TexanFeller wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but many CEOs will tend to believe that things will go better with everyone back in the office Many of us SWEs believe the same!

Many or a few? Most software engineers find themselves most effective in work from home. This breaks in favor at 3:4 or higher. The software engineers that want to work in office are the odd-balls. I am interested in the break down when one factors in whatever concept of '10x developers' -- which do the most productive of us prefer?

Uhhhhh want to back that up?

Edit: Clearly not so your assertion is bull.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#82

Post by TexanFeller »

Spivak wrote: post #57
UncleOxidant wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He seems to be writing for CEOs. Reading further he seems to figure that CEOs will be able to reassert control of employees by forcing them back to the office since employees are not going to be able to easily jump ship for another job. As CEO now is your opportunity to rethink remote work. You may decide you want to continue as is, or you may want to make changes. You have an opportunity to act. Not that returning t…

We're just gonna gloss over, "quick your employees don't have leverage, make changes they won't like" like that isn't indicative of a capitalist hellscape? If shit like this doesn't radicalize you into democracy in the workplace then we're fucked. Especially since right now that lack of leverage was literally manufactured on purpose by the fed.

> that lack of leverage was literally manufactured on purpose by the fed

As was the leverage. They artificially drove the economy in the other direction in an unsustainable manner for a number of years before that.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#83

Post by anothernewdude »

deltree7 wrote: post #72
lostcolony wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> nobody's firing productive workers. Remind me why Twitter is trying to rehire workers they let go, within a week?

They are only rehiring a handful. Stop spreading propoganda

They'll be rehiring more when the people they thought they were keeping leave because remote is a deal breaker.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#84

Post by lll-o-lll »

bawolff wrote: post #12

I think if you only need to get rid of say 3%, then you can probably just do a hiring freeze and wait for natural turn over. If you need to get rid of 40%, doing it all at once is probably too much of a shock to the company (too difficult to figure out who to transfer responsibility to). So 10-15% is just right: enough to be worth it, not too much to cause excessive turmoil.

Hiring freeze is actually a mistake as you trend towards mediocrity. Natural turnover tends to lose you more good people than bad (head hunting, opportunity).

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#85

Post by mjevans »

lostcolony wrote: post #48
Psyonic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah I think Twitter isn't useful here. Having a dramatic change of management + a layoff + serious product upheaval is definitely different than just a layoff. Now Elon is ending a policy literally called "Work From Home Forever" and with no flexibility -- back to the office 5 days a week. Why would an employee feel safe when literally everything about Twitter changed overnight?

Yeah, Twitter is basically a running case study in what not to do when it comes to acquiring a company successfully, and can't be held up as anything other than "what happens when you do everything wrong". Certainly, it's not a useful example for others, even as a warning, because you can't easily tell what bad actions led to what bad consequences; there are so many of both.

Success might be difficult to define. If this produces the results that are desired by Elon and the investors then it's probably a success from their perspective. I worry if that's the case, it'll be like all the buy out, chop up, and liquidate value takeovers they made movies about.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#86

Post by derefr »

lostcolony wrote: post #48
Psyonic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah I think Twitter isn't useful here. Having a dramatic change of management + a layoff + serious product upheaval is definitely different than just a layoff. Now Elon is ending a policy literally called "Work From Home Forever" and with no flexibility -- back to the office 5 days a week. Why would an employee feel safe when literally everything about Twitter changed overnight?

Yeah, Twitter is basically a running case study in what not to do when it comes to acquiring a company successfully, and can't be held up as anything other than "what happens when you do everything wrong". Certainly, it's not a useful example for others, even as a warning, because you can't easily tell what bad actions led to what bad consequences; there are so many of both.

...presuming the goal is to retain any of the current employees, rather than just building a new company around the existing IP+assets.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#87

Post by rendaw »

Skunkleton wrote: post #74
Clent wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many or a few? Most software engineers find themselves most effective in work from home. This breaks in favor at 3:4 or higher. The software engineers that want to work in office are the odd-balls. I am interested in the break down when one factors in whatever concept of '10x developers' -- which do the most productive of us prefer?

Nit: Many can still be a minority.

It can also be understood as the majority, per wiktionary

> the generality; the common herd

GP was countering the possibility that GGP meant the above.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#88

Post by bruce511 »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #55
Psyonic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah I think Twitter isn't useful here. Having a dramatic change of management + a layoff + serious product upheaval is definitely different than just a layoff. Now Elon is ending a policy literally called "Work From Home Forever" and with no flexibility -- back to the office 5 days a week. Why would an employee feel safe when literally everything about Twitter changed overnight?

Knowing its financials, I would feel more "safe" after a 50% cut than a 25% cut. But why would we want employees to feel safe? They should feel like they need to produce value, or they'll get cut.

You're being down-voted (not by me) because your point is both cynical, and common as a caricature of management.

Employees need to feel safe because that improves their ability to focus on the job at hand.

Employees that do not feel safe spend time updating their resume, playing office-politics games to make others look worse, spend time with other employees (detracting them) to either spread rumours or get gossip.

In an unsafe environment, where the unsafty is internal, people don't "work harder" they work much less.

If the risk is external, then yes, people can pull together for the common good. When covid started our staff accepted huge pay cuts so that all jobs could bd preserved. They did a fantastic job, and all ultimately got back-pay, and all jobs were preserved. But that was "us against the world" - cuts included management, and salaries returned from the bottom to the top, not the other way around.

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#89

Post by dymk »

deltree7 wrote: post #63
dymk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my remote only company is way more productive than my previous in-person company, so there’s the counter anecdote to your anecdote

I'll take any IC or low-level employee's productivity claim with a grain of salt. For a CEO, productivity is at a first order is operating margins. 99% of HNers have no clue how to calculate that (nor have the necessary data).

And what’re your qualifications and citations?

Re: Why is every layoff 10-15%?

#90

Post by derefr »

10–15% is about the maximum amount of dead-weight employees (the kind who don't have the skills to perform the job-role they're hired for, who were hired due to favoritism, bribes, blackmail, or pure hiring-process "throw a dart" laziness) you can have on a corporate balance sheet before the aggregate lack of expected productivity per OpEx dollar starts to be suspicious. The further below this limit a company is operating at, the 'safer' hiring managers can feel in making arbitrary/capricious decisions without being called out on them.

And so — presuming at least some hiring managers in each bigcorp are unethical and lazy or able to be manipulated — 10–15% dead-weight becomes an equilibrium point: the number of dead-weight employees asymptotically approaches 10–15%, where firing one means being able to hire one more, and hiring one means being unable to hire one more.

(Which isn't to suggest that there's top-down awareness in all these companies of these employees being dead-weight; rather the opposite — they survive because the structure of these companies has no continuous visibility into employee productivity. But when they consider layoffs, that's the time to do a point-in-time productivity audit... and that's when they find that this dead-weight has been accruing, and set out to burn it off. And, if they're smart, to also "burn off" the people who were willing to commit malfeasance by hiring/endorsing them.)

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