3 ms·
Even if your layoffs were 100% based on refocusing on certain areas, surely you'd (often) still want to keep the best employees you have in areas you no longer
by corin_ 11y ago
Even if your layoffs were 100% based on refocusing on certain areas, surely you'd (often) still want to keep the best employees you have in areas you no longer care about over the worst employees you have in areas you still care about, if you have to get rid of someone.
- ghshephard 11y agoIt's true that you do what you can to hold onto your top 1-5% of employees - but, I've been through two real layoffs - one at Netscape, and one at Loudcloud, very little differentiation occurs below that layer. At Netscape, when Microsoft effectively killed the browser-as-a-product space by giving theirs away for free, entire buildings were let go, and all the client side developers, and wan-dialer people, customer service, sales - 100% of the divisions were just gone, with pretty much zero concern as to how "good" they were. Same thing at Loudcloud, 1/3 of the company that had revenue bearing jobs went to EDS, 1/3 of the back-end developers went to Opsware, and then the other 1/3 (including everyone in the field, all the service delivery/sales teams/support) - were just let go, with very little attention to how good they were. The difference between these types of these "real" layoffs, and "faux" layoffs, is that in "real layoffs" - companies will try and fight to hold onto the top 5%, but the bottom 95% are let go. In the "faux" layoffs, the bottom 5-10% are let go, but the top 90% are basically okay. Of course, the reality is that it's never totally black and white, and any real world reductions-in-force are is likely to be some combination of these two, which is why I like the term "Reduction in Force" rather than "Layoffs" - though there are probably some legal reasons why companies use the exact word "layoffs"