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I don't think it's as common to hire consultants to announce layoffs as the Up In The Air / Office Space caricatures lead people to believe. Layoffs are a huge

I don't think it's as common to hire consultants to announce layoffs as the Up In The Air / Office Space caricatures lead people to believe. Layoffs are a huge distraction for a business, and so, don't happen except at need. When they do happen, they almost invariably involve losing employees tasked with things the company still needs to do. That leaves a bunch of short term business design problems of how to reassign those tasks to minimize disruption: "We had to lose 30 salespeople, who will cover those sales territories?" "If we got rid of dedicated agile coaches, would product managers have time to plan and run the scrum meeting? If we're able to keep 1, which teams should they work with?" These types of questions can be analysis-heavy, are non recurring, and land on top of normal workloads (meaning executives may not have time to do them themselves), so it makes sense to hire a contractor to work on them.

mschuster91 6y ago
> When they do happen, they almost invariably involve losing employees tasked with things the company still needs to do. > These types of questions can be analysis-heavy, are non recurring, and land on top of normal workloads (meaning executives may not have time to do them themselves), so it makes sense to hire a contractor to work on them. No one actually does that though, otherwise the people being laid off would not be the poor sods at the bottom of the ladder but the countless layers of middle management. C-level execs rarely give a single flying finger about the people their "decisions" affect, or how the company will fare long term, and that is the point. By the time the consequences of "dumb razor firing" become apparent and the problems untenable, the CEO who had decided on this has long moved on to another company who needed a "savior in need" and pocketed a nice fat bonus for a 20% reduction in payroll.

mschuster91 6y ago

> When they do happen, they almost invariably involve losing employees tasked with things the company still needs to do. > These types of questions can be analysis-heavy, are non recurring, and land on top of normal workloads (meaning executives may not have time to do them themselves), so it makes sense to hire a contractor to work on them. No one actually does that though, otherwise the people being laid off would not be the poor sods at the bottom of the ladder but the countless layers of middle management. C-level execs rarely give a single flying finger about the people their "decisions" affect, or how the company will fare long term, and that is the point. By the time the consequences of "dumb razor firing" become apparent and the problems untenable, the CEO who had decided on this has long moved on to another company who needed a "savior in need" and pocketed a nice fat bonus for a 20% reduction in payroll.