12 ms·

Where are you in your company's layoff list?

111 points by pietrofmaggi 11y ago

thedevil 11y ago
I loved this article, but I do have to disagree on one point: your productivity matters. Lots of teams have someone who is not pulling their weight but the boss doesn't want to have to fire them.
- lbotos 11y ago
  Isn't that what he was getting at though, even if someone is NOT productive, the boss has a list, figure out where you stand and act accordingly.
  - thedevil 11y ago
    I was arguing against the below statements specifically, which I don't think are accurate based on my experience. I've been at companies that let slide non-productivity because it's easier than firing, until times are tight. Then, since they have to layoff someone, they layoff the unproductive since they don't hurt their departments that way. "You may argue that this doesn't take into account productivity, but I believe that's irrelevant. If you're at a company that values productivity, then everyone will be productive; the idea that there's a 10x difference between top and bottom is a myth"
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      I think he's arguing that if you think you're productive, chances are everybody is productive on the team, at least in the boss's eyes. If you're not productive, you certainly do have to worry about getting laid off (or fired). But when I've known folks who were fired for non-productivity, they didn't really care all that much. In fact, they were fired because they didn't care. These folks often get let go before an official round of layoffs, although in some companies they accumulate until the first round of layoffs. The fact that you're worrying about your place on the layoff list at all is an indication that you won't be laid off for productivity reasons, only for salary/strategic reasons.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  I agree. I've been part of teams in which the person who was clearly most productive and most critical to the team's short-term and medium-term success was laid off. The organization was going through a "restructuring" which just meant that anyone making over a certain threshold in salary was fired and "replaced" with someone half as expensive but a thousand times less capable. The bosses probably didn't enjoy doing this (the ones who had to actually break the news) but they also didn't care too much either. If firing the most experienced people really had an impact on productivity, then the team would just be reassigned to do different work, clients would be cut, budgets would shrink, whatever it required to ensure that whichever personnel you happened to have were acceptable for whatever work your team did. I think a lot of people don't realize this. The company exists solely to service and enhance the lifestyle of executives. If the executives see a way to maintain the same lifestyle for less business cost, even if it means terminating an entire business line and upsetting many happy customers & laying people off who are doing great at their jobs, so be it. They utterly don't care. It has literally nothing to do with productivity except as a totally unintended side effect of how to service the lifestyle of some executive. As companies succeed and grow, they start investing in wargaming scenarios for effectively having total bargaining power over their staff. When HR types meet with executives in these kinds of firms to talk about strategies for hiring, a high priority is how to structure the business so that it is never "dependent" on employees. If it means ending an otherwise profitable business line, so be it. It just depends on whether ending that business line is going to have any serious impact on the lifestyles of executives or not. You see a lot of job advice that advocates working really hard to "become necessary" to your employer. It's just wishful thinking, though. Rule number one is: no employee is necessary. If we ever discover that an employee is necessary, then we simply restructure the business, changing as much as is needed, to make sure that property is no longer true. The best you can hope for is to be "necessary" for a short period of time as the business recognizes that this is the case and immediately begins plotting about how to restructure so as to ensure no one in your position can possibly be necessary.
  - Havoc 11y ago
    It comes down to a question of degrees I think. No employee can be allowed to be so necessary as to become a single point of failure. However I think it's all possible for an employee to be reasonable "necessary" without the employer actively trying to make that position replaceable.
mooreds 11y ago
I have a friend who works for a big aerospace conpany, and he keeps an eye on his team members. One in particular is "the buffer". This person is apparently not that good at tasks. If "the buffer" ever gets laid off, my friend has to be concerned. Until then, "the buffer" is a source of comfort to my friend.
- CapitalistCartr 11y ago
  More likely, they'll lay off the whole team.
  - mooreds 11y ago
    Or the whole location. But having someone of questionable competence helps my friend's peace of mind. Don't know how much it slows down the team, though.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- borvo 11y ago
  The mere existence of this "buffer" increases the likelihood of a layoff ... oh "aerospace", might be a while.
- HillRat 11y ago
  It's horrible to say, but almost every manager at the tactical to low-operational level keeps people around in good times specifically to act as ablative shielding in the bad. Sometimes they're low performers who can still be useful as tape-monkey equivalents, or perhaps they're "nice to haves" who aren't of any use when everyone has buckets out and are bailing, but in either case they exist to protect everyone else from layoffs or forced-ranking herd culling. This isn't a workable strategy in eat-what-you-kill environments, but you see it all the time in midsized and large companies.
  - jloughry 11y ago
    HillRat, you made my day---"ablative shielding"---thank you for that phrase.
urda 11y ago
While the article is a nice run down, honestly there's not a whole lot you can do when "your number is up". You may be told that you are low on the list or think you have a "buffer", but honestly if push comes to shove you will be laid off. It doesn't matter where you may be positioned.
js2 11y ago
I've been a sys admin and/or coder professionally since 1996. I've been a manager and an individual contributor. I've worked for big companies (HP, Yahoo), and small (in the first dozen employees). I've been through a company growing from 100 employees to nearly 1000 and back down to 100 again. I've been through two acquisitions, and probably a dozen layoffs. I've never been let go. No doubt I've been lucky. But there's a saying: luck favors the prepared. I consistently get shit done, and have a reputation for doing so. Do your job. Do your job well. Make sure you're not invisible. The rest is out of your control, but it's worked for me. Knock on wood.
- sjtgraham 11y ago
  The way I've seen it play out time and time again is the most expensive staff are let go first when money starts to run low. If you've never been let go, have you considered you simply might be undercharging?
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    Which is to say, if you use the layoff list as a measure of "value received" and you the company gets some value from keeping you employed, and you get some value by being employed. Then being at the top of the layoff list means you are getting way more value out of being employed than the company is, and being at the bottom of the list means the company is getting way more value out of you being employed. So if you are aggressive shoot for the top, if you are defensive shoot for the bottom :-)
    - tryitnow 11y ago
      This comment pretty much nails it. I've definitely seen a pattern of highly compensated people getting sacked. If someone does play the aggressive pattern I'd highly recommend saving up a lot of cash so you can weather longer spells of unemployment. This is especially true if you intend to be selective in who you work for after getting laid off.
    - gozur88 11y ago
      I like to shoot for the spot on the list that's one below the last guy that gets laid off.
Havoc 11y ago
Pretty far down - got key knowledge and experience on a key project. Definitely replaceable but would be painful for the company so I'm betting they'd rather not. My employer doesn't really do layoffs anyway or rather something pretty cataclysmic would have to happen to trigger it. Its also not a big deal for me - employers are replaceable too. ;)
justin_vanw 11y ago
Keep your resume always up to date? That is the kind of risk free but pointless advice you see here and there, but what is the point? Are you going to forget the highlights of the work you have done? Not really. Does it take a lot of work to update a resume, such that upon being laid off you have to delay your job search for a significant amount of time because you have to go into full time 'resume updating' mode for a month? Not at all. Updating a resume takes like 4 hours. If you've been at the same job for 20 years, it might take 8 hours. There is just no reason to 'always keep your resume up to date'. Not a real reason not to do it, but no reason to do it either. It's like advising people to always wash the bottoms of their running shoes with an old toothbrush after every run. Will it hurt? Not really. Will it help? Nope. Should you do it? If you feel like it or enjoy it, shit, go for it, but it's also a waste of time.
- eropple 11y ago
  > Are you going to forget the highlights of the work you have done? Not really. It's less about the highlights and more about the numbers. I found (when I worked FT) that if I spent a little time every month or two--and I mean a little time, maybe ten minutes--reviewing my LinkedIn and my resume and updating anything that might be useful. Like--oh, hey, I was using Ruby now, and I'd like to keep using Ruby, I'd better update those. Or I might have gotten hard numbers about the outcome of a project I worked on--HR and prospective employers love hard numbers--and could go back and update a bullet point from before. In addition, it made me think more about the story that my resume is going to tell a future employer, and made me think about what I wanted out of my career in general. Because I was doing it on a regular basis every so often, and it became a habitual thing. So, personally, I wouldn't be so dismissive of something that helps you be prepared and helps you be mindful.
- cheez 11y ago
  > Are you going to forget the highlights of the work you have done? Not really. I do. I implemented a specific kind of distributed calculation in the financial industry before it was a thing. We (I didn't design the calculation) literally invented something that hadn't been done. Totally forgot about it. It just got patented 15 years later. It's not on my resume. Right now, I'm applying machine learning to a domain that hasn't yet had it applied and it feels similar: it's going to be awesome, going to do great things, and I probably won't remember it when I need to update my resume. If I were to start all over, I would write down every single thing I ever did in the resume and when it came time to send that resume out, I'd whittle it down to the things that apply just for that job. Here's to hoping I never need to send out a resume again, otherwise I'm screwed.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
phn 11y ago
This way of thinking feels a bit toxic. I don't do my job with the objective of not being laid off. A business relationship such as employment works as long as it works for both parties. Pretty much like other relationships, when it stops working for one party, it's time to move on.
bjourne 11y ago
While we're doling out life pro tips, mine wold be to "never make it so your value of self is dependent on your job." E.g. you can believe that you never having been laid off is a testament to your great skill and awesomeness, but that will only make the fall much harder when you are laid off. I mean that in a positive way.
ja27 11y ago
I'd like to think I'm safe, since I'm sleeping with the CEO - my wife, but since I'm the only other employee I guess I'm the first to go. But my last job... All of my product code, even stuff I'd inherited, had been stabilized, documented, and had decent test coverage. Strike one. I was given a manager title but had no direct reports. Strike two. I was moved to an architect role on a struggling cross-product effort. Strike three.
phamilton 11y ago
As a Yahoo employee, I can say with certainty that I'm not in the bottom 15%.
an4rchy 11y ago
M&A is also another interesting case for layoffs, in this case it might not follow this traditional format as it could be redundancies that are eliminated because of political reasons and not necessarily performance/salary. It feels like the reasons for layoffs boil down to: - Money (Run rate/market/shareholders) - Strategy (Company decides to go in a new/different direction) - Politics (Internal to the company/executives/board)
sudeepj 11y ago
I can relate to this article. While in UK, back in 2008/9, I was a senior developer (C/C++). The favourite topic during lunch times was who will be gone or who will be retained. One guy, who everyone thought would be safe was a Team Lead (of a system written in COBOL). This guy had been awarded topmost grade in recent appraisal cycle. He was layed-off and I got the charge of handling his system, in addition to mine, with no promotion. Apparently the only thing mattered was how much "value-for-money" an employee is bringing to the table. I came to know later that almost all team leads were layed-off because the systems in question were in existence for last 10 yrs and were stable.

111 points by pietrofmaggi 11y ago

I loved this article, but I do have to disagree on one point: your productivity matters. Lots of teams have someone who is not pulling their weight but the boss doesn't want to have to fire them.

lbotos 11y ago
Isn't that what he was getting at though, even if someone is NOT productive, the boss has a list, figure out where you stand and act accordingly.
- thedevil 11y ago
  I was arguing against the below statements specifically, which I don't think are accurate based on my experience. I've been at companies that let slide non-productivity because it's easier than firing, until times are tight. Then, since they have to layoff someone, they layoff the unproductive since they don't hurt their departments that way. "You may argue that this doesn't take into account productivity, but I believe that's irrelevant. If you're at a company that values productivity, then everyone will be productive; the idea that there's a 10x difference between top and bottom is a myth"
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    I think he's arguing that if you think you're productive, chances are everybody is productive on the team, at least in the boss's eyes. If you're not productive, you certainly do have to worry about getting laid off (or fired). But when I've known folks who were fired for non-productivity, they didn't really care all that much. In fact, they were fired because they didn't care. These folks often get let go before an official round of layoffs, although in some companies they accumulate until the first round of layoffs. The fact that you're worrying about your place on the layoff list at all is an indication that you won't be laid off for productivity reasons, only for salary/strategic reasons.
p4wnc6 11y ago
I agree. I've been part of teams in which the person who was clearly most productive and most critical to the team's short-term and medium-term success was laid off. The organization was going through a "restructuring" which just meant that anyone making over a certain threshold in salary was fired and "replaced" with someone half as expensive but a thousand times less capable. The bosses probably didn't enjoy doing this (the ones who had to actually break the news) but they also didn't care too much either. If firing the most experienced people really had an impact on productivity, then the team would just be reassigned to do different work, clients would be cut, budgets would shrink, whatever it required to ensure that whichever personnel you happened to have were acceptable for whatever work your team did. I think a lot of people don't realize this. The company exists solely to service and enhance the lifestyle of executives. If the executives see a way to maintain the same lifestyle for less business cost, even if it means terminating an entire business line and upsetting many happy customers & laying people off who are doing great at their jobs, so be it. They utterly don't care. It has literally nothing to do with productivity except as a totally unintended side effect of how to service the lifestyle of some executive. As companies succeed and grow, they start investing in wargaming scenarios for effectively having total bargaining power over their staff. When HR types meet with executives in these kinds of firms to talk about strategies for hiring, a high priority is how to structure the business so that it is never "dependent" on employees. If it means ending an otherwise profitable business line, so be it. It just depends on whether ending that business line is going to have any serious impact on the lifestyles of executives or not. You see a lot of job advice that advocates working really hard to "become necessary" to your employer. It's just wishful thinking, though. Rule number one is: no employee is necessary. If we ever discover that an employee is necessary, then we simply restructure the business, changing as much as is needed, to make sure that property is no longer true. The best you can hope for is to be "necessary" for a short period of time as the business recognizes that this is the case and immediately begins plotting about how to restructure so as to ensure no one in your position can possibly be necessary.
- Havoc 11y ago
  It comes down to a question of degrees I think. No employee can be allowed to be so necessary as to become a single point of failure. However I think it's all possible for an employee to be reasonable "necessary" without the employer actively trying to make that position replaceable.

mooreds 11y ago

I have a friend who works for a big aerospace conpany, and he keeps an eye on his team members. One in particular is "the buffer". This person is apparently not that good at tasks. If "the buffer" ever gets laid off, my friend has to be concerned. Until then, "the buffer" is a source of comfort to my friend.

CapitalistCartr 11y ago
More likely, they'll lay off the whole team.
- mooreds 11y ago
  Or the whole location. But having someone of questionable competence helps my friend's peace of mind. Don't know how much it slows down the team, though.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
borvo 11y ago
The mere existence of this "buffer" increases the likelihood of a layoff ... oh "aerospace", might be a while.
HillRat 11y ago
It's horrible to say, but almost every manager at the tactical to low-operational level keeps people around in good times specifically to act as ablative shielding in the bad. Sometimes they're low performers who can still be useful as tape-monkey equivalents, or perhaps they're "nice to haves" who aren't of any use when everyone has buckets out and are bailing, but in either case they exist to protect everyone else from layoffs or forced-ranking herd culling. This isn't a workable strategy in eat-what-you-kill environments, but you see it all the time in midsized and large companies.
- jloughry 11y ago
  HillRat, you made my day---"ablative shielding"---thank you for that phrase.

urda 11y ago

While the article is a nice run down, honestly there's not a whole lot you can do when "your number is up". You may be told that you are low on the list or think you have a "buffer", but honestly if push comes to shove you will be laid off. It doesn't matter where you may be positioned.

js2 11y ago

I've been a sys admin and/or coder professionally since 1996. I've been a manager and an individual contributor. I've worked for big companies (HP, Yahoo), and small (in the first dozen employees). I've been through a company growing from 100 employees to nearly 1000 and back down to 100 again. I've been through two acquisitions, and probably a dozen layoffs. I've never been let go. No doubt I've been lucky. But there's a saying: luck favors the prepared. I consistently get shit done, and have a reputation for doing so. Do your job. Do your job well. Make sure you're not invisible. The rest is out of your control, but it's worked for me. Knock on wood.

sjtgraham 11y ago
The way I've seen it play out time and time again is the most expensive staff are let go first when money starts to run low. If you've never been let go, have you considered you simply might be undercharging?
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  Which is to say, if you use the layoff list as a measure of "value received" and you the company gets some value from keeping you employed, and you get some value by being employed. Then being at the top of the layoff list means you are getting way more value out of being employed than the company is, and being at the bottom of the list means the company is getting way more value out of you being employed. So if you are aggressive shoot for the top, if you are defensive shoot for the bottom :-)
  - tryitnow 11y ago
    This comment pretty much nails it. I've definitely seen a pattern of highly compensated people getting sacked. If someone does play the aggressive pattern I'd highly recommend saving up a lot of cash so you can weather longer spells of unemployment. This is especially true if you intend to be selective in who you work for after getting laid off.
  - gozur88 11y ago
    I like to shoot for the spot on the list that's one below the last guy that gets laid off.

Havoc 11y ago

Pretty far down - got key knowledge and experience on a key project. Definitely replaceable but would be painful for the company so I'm betting they'd rather not. My employer doesn't really do layoffs anyway or rather something pretty cataclysmic would have to happen to trigger it. Its also not a big deal for me - employers are replaceable too. ;)

justin_vanw 11y ago

Keep your resume always up to date? That is the kind of risk free but pointless advice you see here and there, but what is the point? Are you going to forget the highlights of the work you have done? Not really. Does it take a lot of work to update a resume, such that upon being laid off you have to delay your job search for a significant amount of time because you have to go into full time 'resume updating' mode for a month? Not at all. Updating a resume takes like 4 hours. If you've been at the same job for 20 years, it might take 8 hours. There is just no reason to 'always keep your resume up to date'. Not a real reason not to do it, but no reason to do it either. It's like advising people to always wash the bottoms of their running shoes with an old toothbrush after every run. Will it hurt? Not really. Will it help? Nope. Should you do it? If you feel like it or enjoy it, shit, go for it, but it's also a waste of time.

eropple 11y ago
> Are you going to forget the highlights of the work you have done? Not really. It's less about the highlights and more about the numbers. I found (when I worked FT) that if I spent a little time every month or two--and I mean a little time, maybe ten minutes--reviewing my LinkedIn and my resume and updating anything that might be useful. Like--oh, hey, I was using Ruby now, and I'd like to keep using Ruby, I'd better update those. Or I might have gotten hard numbers about the outcome of a project I worked on--HR and prospective employers love hard numbers--and could go back and update a bullet point from before. In addition, it made me think more about the story that my resume is going to tell a future employer, and made me think about what I wanted out of my career in general. Because I was doing it on a regular basis every so often, and it became a habitual thing. So, personally, I wouldn't be so dismissive of something that helps you be prepared and helps you be mindful.
cheez 11y ago
> Are you going to forget the highlights of the work you have done? Not really. I do. I implemented a specific kind of distributed calculation in the financial industry before it was a thing. We (I didn't design the calculation) literally invented something that hadn't been done. Totally forgot about it. It just got patented 15 years later. It's not on my resume. Right now, I'm applying machine learning to a domain that hasn't yet had it applied and it feels similar: it's going to be awesome, going to do great things, and I probably won't remember it when I need to update my resume. If I were to start all over, I would write down every single thing I ever did in the resume and when it came time to send that resume out, I'd whittle it down to the things that apply just for that job. Here's to hoping I never need to send out a resume again, otherwise I'm screwed.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

phn 11y ago

This way of thinking feels a bit toxic. I don't do my job with the objective of not being laid off. A business relationship such as employment works as long as it works for both parties. Pretty much like other relationships, when it stops working for one party, it's time to move on.

bjourne 11y ago

While we're doling out life pro tips, mine wold be to "never make it so your value of self is dependent on your job." E.g. you can believe that you never having been laid off is a testament to your great skill and awesomeness, but that will only make the fall much harder when you are laid off. I mean that in a positive way.

ja27 11y ago

I'd like to think I'm safe, since I'm sleeping with the CEO - my wife, but since I'm the only other employee I guess I'm the first to go. But my last job... All of my product code, even stuff I'd inherited, had been stabilized, documented, and had decent test coverage. Strike one. I was given a manager title but had no direct reports. Strike two. I was moved to an architect role on a struggling cross-product effort. Strike three.

phamilton 11y ago

As a Yahoo employee, I can say with certainty that I'm not in the bottom 15%.

an4rchy 11y ago

M&A is also another interesting case for layoffs, in this case it might not follow this traditional format as it could be redundancies that are eliminated because of political reasons and not necessarily performance/salary. It feels like the reasons for layoffs boil down to: - Money (Run rate/market/shareholders) - Strategy (Company decides to go in a new/different direction) - Politics (Internal to the company/executives/board)

sudeepj 11y ago

I can relate to this article. While in UK, back in 2008/9, I was a senior developer (C/C++). The favourite topic during lunch times was who will be gone or who will be retained. One guy, who everyone thought would be safe was a Team Lead (of a system written in COBOL). This guy had been awarded topmost grade in recent appraisal cycle. He was layed-off and I got the charge of handling his system, in addition to mine, with no promotion. Apparently the only thing mattered was how much "value-for-money" an employee is bringing to the table. I came to know later that almost all team leads were layed-off because the systems in question were in existence for last 10 yrs and were stable.