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Much of this is due to the reversal of the tight hiring market. For the past several years tech companies were desperate to hire because everyone was growing a

Much of this is due to the reversal of the tight hiring market. For the past several years tech companies were desperate to hire because everyone was growing and the hiring market was tight. This inevitably results in companies loosening their hiring standards and retaining underperforming employees because they can't afford to reduce team sizes. Layoffs combined with hiring freezes (or slowdowns) signal real stress within a company. However, many of these layoffs are single-digit percentage layoffs from companies that are still hiring across the board. That's not so much a traditional layoff as a pruning of the workforce. That pruning wasn't happening as much when hiring was tight, but now that hiring is easier and real, actual layoffs have put more good candidates back onto the market, the companies who simply collected too many underperforming employees can afford to churn some of them back out of the company. Doing it as a "layoff" makes it more palatable than going on a firing spree. That said, when it comes to interviewing you shouldn't assume that a laid off employee was necessarily underperforming. A lot of companies don't really perform layoffs with surgical precision and will instead drop entire teams at once. I've watched great engineers get swept up in minor staff reductions simply because they were assigned to bad managers or doomed teams that they couldn't save by themselves. I've also hired great people who came right out of layoffs at other companies and I would have missed those resumes if I had been using dumb filtering rules like ignoring anyone who had been laid off.

ruffrey 4y ago
I have to continue this train of thought. It is dangerous that people consider layoff as a performance indicator for the employee. It’s just too hard to tell. I was laid off recently along with many others because an entire experimental project was killed because the market shifted (crypto, I know). Prior to that I’d received top performance marks and had been promoted to team lead. They gave me a great recommendation for the next gig. It’s as easy to get a low performer who’s on a PIP and employed, as a high performer in a risky company. Hard to tell which one you’re interviewing.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
  It's almost as if every human being is complex, multifaceted, and always growing. Perhaps every one of us who's interviewing and writing perf reviews would benefit from questioning a system that tries to reduce human beings to a handful of sentences on a CV. On the other hand... grinding LeetCode is way more measurable. ;)
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    They've had decades to question this the moment researchers came out with evidence of the complexity of the entire matter, and the status quo failing to capture any of said complexity. 'Intuition' has still reigned till this day regardless.
  - Blackstone4 4y ago
    But but but...they have a gap in their resume/CV....can't possibly hire them...bad...bad
- gitfan86 4y ago
  I have never been laid off. Not because I'm an especially good engineer, but because I have a good understanding of business and internal politics. I would have been fired from 4 of my 7 jobs eventually if I hadn't left.
  - triyambakam 4y ago
    That sounds pretty prideful, attributing what is also somewhat luck to your perfect insight. No amount of "understanding of business and internal politics" can prevent it. But it is better than being ignorant to it all.
    - cyberlurker 4y ago
      It can mitigate the chance of being laid off. Keeping your head down and working hard isn't enough anymore.
      - chiefalchemist 4y ago
        It never was. If everyone else is doing that then your value is a commodity. At some point soft skills and other differentiators come into play most of the time.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Certainly awareness of your performance, your relationship with your manager, what's happening with the company/your project etc. all may send signals that it's time to start looking elsewhere. But sometimes executive decisions happen without a lot of warning. And sometimes, to the point of a lot of the discussion here, something may be affecting the sector as a whole (or wider) so it may not be easy to find another position. A lot of people who post here seem to assume that getting a new job is something you send a few emails about and expect to get deluged with interview offers. That's not true of many people even today and certainly isn't true at all during downturns.
    - gnicholas 4y ago
      It also seems to conflate 'laid off' with 'fired', which makes it a little harder to understand. Is GP saying he would have been fired (for cause?) at these jobs? Or is this just using the term 'fired' in the colloquial sense of 'involuntarily terminated, for whatever reason'?
- thomascgalvin 4y ago
  I was laid off a few years ago because the company that hired me hadn't actually won the contract they thought they won. Really hard to pin that on engineering's performance.
  - spidermanjones 4y ago
    Recently laid off under conditions that I'm convinced are similar. I was at my org for roughly 9 months, I came in as part of a large class of new hires across the entire org. The last 4 months we were in crunch mode trying to land a big client that leadership continued saying would be a game changer for us. My eyebrow was already raised, because if one company is that much of a game changer, what happens if we don't get that client? Sure enough, as I was texting with a friend who was spared, he let me know as soon as the last person left the office that day from layoffs, company had the weekly all-hands and announced sure enough, they didn't get the client.
  - mech422 4y ago
    I've seen this in the past, though it hasn't bitten me... I'm really against 'pre-emptive' hiring for this reason. Its not fair to mess with people's livings just because you promised something in a contract that you can't currently fulfill.
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      The worst part is it isn't like they don't have another option. Could choose to hire a contractor or let people know upfront about the risk of the job not being there in a few months, but that would drive up the rates people would ask.
      - mech422 4y ago
        Yeah, and the new hire potentially turned down a long term job for something that evaporates before they even start...
    - jlg23 4y ago
      > Its not fair to mess with people's livings... Given that this is the status quo, employees should adopt the same attitude. When working for an ethical employer, I'll work 48h/day if the situation requires it, but for everyone else, I'll bill them for the "quick question over the phone" outside of my agreed upon working hours; and I'll quit when someone else makes a good offer. Once a (spectacularly unethical) employer tried to pull the "think about the others in your team" stunt only to be amazed when I found them better jobs within a week and everyone else quit, too. I cannot say he learned from that experience, but I equally cannot say I regret my decision.
- peterangular 4y ago
  > It is dangerous that people consider layoff as a performance indicator for the employee. Hard agree. I've hired high performers from dumb layoff situations like start-ups going belly-up, companies resizing, contracts getting prematurely terminated, etc. I wouldn't consider a layoff a negative metric unless the interviewee outright admitted "they were trying to get rid of me." I'm always shocked when people bring it up as signal vs. noise in regards to interviews.
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    There's also always the possibility that someone is struggling in a role or company or project, bored and unmotivated or burned out, and they will be amazing for you in the role you need. And it's also possible they were actually high performing in their last role but they managed to bruise someone's ego and wound up first on the layoff list as a result. There is just way more to firings and layoffs than performance.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      People also are only fungible to a point (depending on role). If a company makes organizational or directional changes and the role someone was hired into doesn't really exist any longer, there's no guarantee that they can do a very different role equally well and/or that the company will necessarily be interested in making a person who would never have been hired into that role from the outside work out somehow just because they're with the company already. Mind you. Companies can do more with internal development/retraining and institutional knowledge is a thing especially with large organizations. But, at some point, no one's going to be happy.
      - skissane 4y ago
        > Companies can do more with internal development/retraining and institutional knowledge is a thing especially with large organizations I remember, many years ago, being tasked with teaching PHP to the mainframe COBOL team - we’d retired the mainframe, and all our COBOL apps with it, but we’d kept the team, and management had struggled with finding them something else to do. It was a painful experience, they were getting it, but very slowly. Didn’t help that I wasn’t the best teacher, I had to slow myself down a lot and found that a struggle - but I was young and inclined to say “Yes” to everything. Eventually, they were all laid-off - and pretty much straight-away found new COBOL jobs (with a higher salary too). I think, in the end, they were happier that way.
- spoonjim 4y ago
  Working in crypto you accepted this risk with open eyes.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  Let me continue this train of thought even further. Your last sentence nails it. Even a firing for "performance" is not necessarily an indicator that the candidate before you would be a low performer at your company. Sometimes, people are fired for "performance," when what that really means is "new manager/tech lead didn't like them." Interview enough people and you'll see this at some point. Sometimes, low performers in one environment are star performers in another. This is what happens when founders are replaced by more experienced executives, among other scenarios. Sometimes, people with impressive credentials (PhD + significant publications + previous experience, for instance) will completely bomb your interview because they can't figure out which of their language of choice's container types is suitable to the task. I literally interviewed that candidate once. Sometimes, people are fired for straight up illegal reasons that have nothing to do with performance. (This literally happened to me at a big company you've probably all heard of and used their product.) As a company and an interviewer, the best thing for all involved is for you to have a structured process with which to evaluate all candidates for a given position, and follow it. No interview process is perfect at either selecting good candidates or rejecting bad ones, but if you have and follow a structured process, at least you should get consistent results out of your interview process, and you can calibrate your hiring bar from there. I don't want to go into much more detail regarding "structured processes," but if you search on HN for u/tokenadult's hiring comment cum copypasta (albeit an informative copypasta), most of what's there still holds true according to the best and most current research on hiring.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  I wouldn’t worry about it - it’s internet message board know-it-all syndrome. Layoffs are financial and political decisions. Sometimes people layoff idiots when given the chance, other times they layoff the smartest people to protect their friends. I consulted at a bank where a SVP would reorganize non-core business units into his org specifically to meet his reduction target while minimizing business impact. Those people were cannon fodder from day 1. Hiring is the same way. If you only hire pristine resumes without gaps, you’re selecting for survivors - not the same as performers. It’s more of a statement about the hirer-er than hire-ee.
  - hodgesrm 4y ago
    > I consulted at a bank where a SVP would reorganize non-core business units into his org specifically to meet his reduction target while minimizing business impact. You never know when you need a sacrificial lamb, eh.
  - MikePlacid 4y ago
    > It’s more of a statement about the hirer-er than hire-ee. Yep. Before the IPO the task came up to increase our development team size to 200 people, cause “people would rather invest money in 200 developers than in 30”. We would hire anybody who was able to say anything sapient about the task “insert an element into a double-linked list” (and were amazed when 80% of applicants were unable to pass this simple barrier). On the other hand - when layoffs came they were rather reasonable and the worst people were let go. (None of them were among the people who passed the above-mentioned barrier though).
    - adriand 4y ago
      > insert an element into a double-linked list I’ve been programming professionally for 20+ years and I had to look this data structure up. Granted, once I reviewed it, node insertion is trivial, but I hope you gave applicants that opportunity. Or perhaps your line of work commonly deals with stuff like this. I’ve spent my career in web and mobile product development, usually with a business focus of some kind, and it still surprises me sometimes how little I’ve used certain topics from college, like mathematics. I think most of the math I’ve used I likely learned by grade 6.
- varispeed 4y ago
  This also depends on the definition of "performance". A top performer at one company may be considered useless at another. It all depends on who they hired. Then of course you can have poor management - someone may not be great a context switching and if manager keep asking to look at different stuff every day or if there is a ton of junior developers needing help with everything, then you may not have mental capacity to do quality work on the stuff you are measured by.
- refurb 4y ago
  Agree 100%. I’ve been through 4 layoffs so far and while there is some correlation with performance, politics still dominates layoff decisions especially at more senior levels. You can be at the top of the layoff list for nothing more than voicing your criticism of company strategy at some random meeting. I’ve seen very talented VPs go from “hero” to “zero” in the span of a month when the CEO decides to change direction and concludes those people aren’t “aligned with the new direction of the company”.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  I was laid off once because the company I worked for went out of business. So there's that. Although maybe some would say it was my fault for not programming better so that the company stayed in business?
  - izzydata 4y ago
    Unless your company was 4 people that is an unreasonable expectation.
  - Animats 4y ago
    I was never laid off, but I once quit three weeks before a company went out of business. When I heard that someone's paycheck had bounced, I was out of there.
- runamok 4y ago
  Not to mention the same employee can flourish or flounder depending on the project, team, manager, culture, company, etc.
nojito 4y ago
Most tech companies were growing through manufactured growth due to how cheap it was to get capital.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
marktangotango 4y ago
> the companies who simply collected too many under performing employees can afford to churn some of them back out of the company. Doing it as a "layoff" makes it more palatable than going on a firing spree. Seems to me this implies that companies that do this, have found a way effectively measure performance and productivity. I don't think OP intends to say this, it is pretty much impossible to measure productivity of individual developers. I mean those on the team know who is or isn't contributing from day to day, but among teams and over time it is much more difficult. If someone has figured this out they should be a $billionaire by now. I'd go further and counter that this is completely bogus claim, and yes, no one hiring should view a candidate being laid off as being related to anything performance or desirability of the candidate. In my experience, layoffs are merely a popularity contest.
- otterley 4y ago
  It is absolutely possible to calculate engineering productivity at the product level. The arithmetic is very simple. It’s far more difficult at the individual level, though.
  - marktangotango 4y ago
    Thank you. This is precisely my point.
  - mattm 4y ago
    What is the arithmetic?
    - foobiekr 4y ago
      Revenue per employee is one, total investment per dollar of ARR is another, and so on. It amazes me to see high salaries at companies which are engineering heavy and the revenue per employe is significantly below the median TC for the median engineer.
TimPC 4y ago
There are some layoffs but from what I’ve seen so far hiring salaries are not coming down. This to me speaks of a subset of tech companies slowing down rather than a general crash. There are plenty of companies still hiring and hiring at top rates. It seems like half of all the layoffs are in crypto which is a typical response to the underlying assets dropping 80+%. The remainder seem to be companies that are over reliant on debt-based capital responding to higher interest rates. To get the tech slowdown you’re proposing the higher interest rates will have to shake out through all of venture capital and start-up money will have to tighten up.
- dc-programmer 4y ago
  Keynes had a theory that wages are sticky-down meaning they rarely decrease. My guess is tech salaries will stagnate for a while. But with poor performance of RSUs and inflation eating into purchasing power this will essentially be a pay cut.
  - tech_tuna 4y ago
    Not only RSUs but stock options as well. I've always pushed/leaned/fought for a higher base over more options. I prefer a bird in the hand. However, if your timing is good and risk tolerance is high, taking more options over a higher base can work out quite well.
    - dc-programmer 4y ago
      Options do not seem like real wages to me because unlike RSUs I’ve never been able to translate them to cash. You’re totally right. And with future expected value of options decreasing (and RSUs), base is more important than ever.
      - TimPC 4y ago
        Base is important but tricky to get a large proportion of. You can negotiate some increase in base but if you want to go too aggressively getting a lot of it will lower total comp. The fact is companies pay base with cash on hand and pay options by issuing new shares. Issuing new shares doesn’t feel like real money in the same way to a lot of corporations so they are happier to do that. I agree markers are currently on a downward trend but I think RSUs are still a valuable portion of compensation. Even if they end up worth only 70% of their initial value you can get a larger total comp from a mix of RSUs and base than just base. Options on the other hand are largely vapour in modern markets. Many start-ups are electing to stay private for time periods exceeding fifteen years. They fully expect most employees to not be able to afford the options they get because of the tax implications combined with limited ability to sell. Some services exist to try and alleviate this problem although most do so imperfectly and take a large premium for the risk and uncertain time window for the shares to become publicly tradeable. These days I mostly don’t bother looking at companies that can only offer options because they generally aren’t willing to offer a high enough base to compensate. I’d far prefer $200k base and $200k RSUs to $300k base and $100k of uncertain options. The first offer is far easier to find than the second as very few start-ups are willing to raise base to compensate people for the lack of liquidity in their options.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
One of my best engineers came from a layoff. He stayed with us until the end. I know he went on (after being laid off from our company) to do pretty intense stuff. Good with math. He was trained as a physicist.
jameshart 4y ago
Also just pruning projects, products and divisions that aren’t panning out as well as others. In simple economic turns, when interest rates are low, investments with relatively low returns can make sense. So initiatives get staffed even if the expected value of their payoff is marginal. When interest rates go up, there are low risk ways to get those same returns, so business expectations of ROI go up. So projects that made sense, were being run well, but which simply aren’t likely to make high enough returns are going to get canned in these conditions. No reflection of the staff laid off in such a case at all.
indymike 4y ago
> For the past several years tech companies were desperate to hire because everyone was growing and the hiring market was tight. Recruitment Tech founder here. The job market is still tight. There are two open jobs for every available person. Source: Fed Chair Jermaine Powell. This means you lay off, someone else will hire quickly. > However, many of these layoffs are single-digit percentage layoffs from companies that are still hiring across the board. That's not so much a traditional layoff as a pruning of the workforce. 100% this is the story. The pruning seems to take two forms: classic "underperformance" and, as much as I hate this, people who just won't come back to the office, or have moved to lower cost areas and will not accept a pay cut.
- rank0 4y ago
  > or have moved to lower cost areas and will not accept a pay cut. Why would anyone accept a pay cut if their job is remote? I get it if location based pay is used for jobs that require in person. But how can the employer have it both ways? Why would the employer want to subsidize more expensive lifestyles for a remote position?
  - indymike 4y ago
    > Why would anyone accept a pay cut if their job is remote? People are not accepting cuts and that is leading to positions being eliminated (layoffs) as employers are realizing they can pay sometimes 50% less than their high cost of living area wages.
  - DragonStrength 4y ago
    Because the people making hiring decisions are mostly located in high cost of living areas, which is why I'm skeptical they'll succeed with it much longer.
    - indymike 4y ago
      > Because the people making hiring decisions are mostly located in high cost of living areas, Cutting costs usually lets those people get bigger bonuses, so the incentive is towards forcing the issue.
spoonjim 4y ago
Exactly - companies that layoff due to careless over hiring do not use surgical precision when laying off.
adrianmonk 4y ago
The mirror image of this churn happened after the recovery from the dotcom bust. During the bust, tech workers took ANY job, no matter how terrible, and held on for dear life so they didn't end up unemployed for 2 years. Finally, the market recovered, and companies experienced turnover as people finally had the opportunity to move to greener pastures.
- MikePlacid 4y ago
  > During the bust, tech workers took ANY job, no matter how terrible Same feeling, but from a bit different perspective. During the dotcom bust I’ve learned to love layoff periods. Cause then friends and neighbors from friendly and neighborly other teams suddenly started to look for more work instead of looking for less work - and my life became a bit easier. At the time my team of 2 (two) was handling 12 (twelve) rather simple but important projects. Steve and his team of 4 (four) in Denver was handling 1 (one) similar project. Then the bust came, and the prospect of layoffs. And here we are at the meeting where I am transferring three of my projects to Steve’s team. After the meeting Paul, a PM from France - we enjoyed working together, asked me, puzzled: Mike, why on earth haven’t you fought to keep your projects?? And I go: Paul, I have nine more of these - do you want some?
mech422 4y ago
>> Much of this is due to the reversal of the tight hiring market. No idea where you are, but I'm not seeing any reversal at my job or in positions listed... Personally, I think the layoffs are due to tech companies not hitting profit numbers the investors expected. Just like the PC market, seems people expected Amazon, FB, Netflix, etc to keep growing at 20+% yoy.
foobiekr 4y ago
In December of 2000, I went to a company all hands. This was a company in the networking industry, a high flyer, and a day or two before the meeting the CEO of the biggest player in the space, Cisco, announced that they were experiencing the biggest slowdown the company had ever seen, and the biggest slowdown that any of the members of the board of directors had ever seen. They were warning that they may miss, and they were even broaching the topic of having a massive inventory write-down (which, later, they would: $2B+ of written off inventory). At the meeting, our CEO announced that he wasn't seeing any of this, that it was a Cisco problem, and that it was an indicator that we were even winning! Of course, a number of our customers were on the brink of declaring bankruptcy, including Cable and Wireless and a few others. Worldcom was about to happen. Of course, our CEO said, not only weren't we laying off, we were going to accelerate hiring, and we did. No layoffs planned, more heads to take more of the market! We did accelerate hiring. Our group almost doubled in the next three months with more reqs opened. One day in early April, I was the last interviewer for a candidate who had done really well and was walking the guy out. Normally at the time we'd make an offer on the spot if the interview was positive enough, we would do incremental round-tables in those days as we went, and this one was positive, so I was a little confused. We happened to walk by my manager's office as we I was seeing him out - were on our way to the elevator. He rushed to join us as and had positive things to day on the way down by gave me a look. We said goodbye and my manager says, "Yeah, there's a hiring freeze as of a few minutes ago, so all reqs closed." A month later, the CEO denied any layoffs were pending or planned, but suggested that we do a prayer at the company all hands in April. To pray for... something? Worldcom not to go bankrupt? I don't quite remember, I was so shocked. Very explicitly, the CEO promised: "no layoffs are planned." And then, about a month later, the company did its first ever layoff. And this brings me to the point. New companies - and there are a lot of them this round just like there were going into 2001 - suck at almost everything. They don't know what they're doing and they do a lot of idiotic stuff. I've worked at companies that peanut butter the layoff, that try and cut functions, that target non-human expenses first (such as HW prototypes or expected builds for labs or server farms), companies that target engineering first (or specific engineering disciplines, like ASICs or new boxes, where the project can, in theory if not reality, be put into hibernation for a bit), that target customer support or marketing first, and even one that targeted sales first (because there weren't any). New companies that have not done it before get stupid. This layoff was the first ever for the company, and they had absolutely no fucking idea what they were doing. What actually happened for about half of the managers was they wanted around the cube area at 9am in the morning and did a sort of "duck duck go" in their heads, and when they approached someone they decided to lay them off or not based on whether they appeared instantaneously busy. To this day a friend who was at the same company swears that when his manager came to lay him off, "can you talk for a few minutes?" he survived entirely because he told the guy to go away because he was incredibly busy on something another team needed and could talk in an hour or two. So yeah, don't judge people by layoffs from small or new (years) companies. Judge each candidate by what they do and can do and what they've done, not that they ended up on the wrong side of the layoff.
grey-area 4y ago
This is entirely down to the recession and rising interest rates. Companies are adjusting for future earnings falling and the cost of money going up.
sharadov 4y ago
Making the statement that companies are laying off "underperforming" employees is a gross assumption - I got laid off with 25% of the workforce at a pre-ipo company that raised 550 million USD. Most large layoffs are happening at pre-ipo companies which raised a ton of money in 2020/2021 and were hoping to go public. Unfortunately the tables turned since Feb 2022, investors want them to tighten belts and reduce cash burn.
- marto1 4y ago
  > tighten belts and reduce cash burn and on a macro level what's the point in reducing cash burn in a high inflation environment ? Driving even more inflation ?
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Reducing cash burn means spending less money which lowers inflation.
hintymad 4y ago
> For the past several years tech companies were desperate to hire because everyone was growing and the hiring market was tight. I'd rather categorize it as for the past several years the managers in tech companies seize the chance to inflate their teams to boost their careers at the cost of their companies, while the leadership in those companies are just too incompetent to tell separate the Wheat from the chaff. It's not their money, after all. I mean, why the hell does DocuSign need 7000+ people? Why the funk did Uber need to build their own Slack? Why in whoever's name does Uber's ATG need to hire > 2000 people under two years to build a research project? Why did Coinbase need to have > 3000 people to build a god damn crypto exchange? Incompetence is just not enough to explain these jokers. And the crown of the crowns, of course and again, goes to Uber: they think that k8s wouldn't scale yet their in-house crap would beat the k8s community and therefore they hire a freaking organization to build their own resource scheduler, as if Uber has "internet scale". Yeah, right.
- parentheses 4y ago
  I have had the same thought and my only explanation is “empire building”. There are indeed companies running at full capacity; most do not. Empire building in the small is “growing your org” and in the large is “growing your company”. Until we stop measuring company performance by customer counts and employee counts, this will probably continue.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  I think this is a good theory. I almost wonder if it's an accidental synchronization of a burst of hiring caused by the FAANGs snatching candidates away from their peers and having outsized psychological impact. Classically, the way to go from l1 manager to l2 manager to director, senior director and VP was to grow your organization in headcount terms, so in a situation where it is "hard" to hire, say Amazon is busy grinding through the entire valley, you might accidentally create a situation where everyone feels urgency but no one feels backpressure.
doktorhladnjak 4y ago
It’s a fallacy to assume there are only good and bad employees on some sort of linear scale. It’s underappreciated how much environment, management, company culture effect how an individual performs. One company’s underperformer can really be another’s superstar.

ruffrey 4y ago

I have to continue this train of thought. It is dangerous that people consider layoff as a performance indicator for the employee. It’s just too hard to tell. I was laid off recently along with many others because an entire experimental project was killed because the market shifted (crypto, I know). Prior to that I’d received top performance marks and had been promoted to team lead. They gave me a great recommendation for the next gig. It’s as easy to get a low performer who’s on a PIP and employed, as a high performer in a risky company. Hard to tell which one you’re interviewing.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
It's almost as if every human being is complex, multifaceted, and always growing. Perhaps every one of us who's interviewing and writing perf reviews would benefit from questioning a system that tries to reduce human beings to a handful of sentences on a CV. On the other hand... grinding LeetCode is way more measurable. ;)
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  They've had decades to question this the moment researchers came out with evidence of the complexity of the entire matter, and the status quo failing to capture any of said complexity. 'Intuition' has still reigned till this day regardless.
- Blackstone4 4y ago
  But but but...they have a gap in their resume/CV....can't possibly hire them...bad...bad
gitfan86 4y ago
I have never been laid off. Not because I'm an especially good engineer, but because I have a good understanding of business and internal politics. I would have been fired from 4 of my 7 jobs eventually if I hadn't left.
- triyambakam 4y ago
  That sounds pretty prideful, attributing what is also somewhat luck to your perfect insight. No amount of "understanding of business and internal politics" can prevent it. But it is better than being ignorant to it all.
  - cyberlurker 4y ago
    It can mitigate the chance of being laid off. Keeping your head down and working hard isn't enough anymore.
    - chiefalchemist 4y ago
      It never was. If everyone else is doing that then your value is a commodity. At some point soft skills and other differentiators come into play most of the time.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Certainly awareness of your performance, your relationship with your manager, what's happening with the company/your project etc. all may send signals that it's time to start looking elsewhere. But sometimes executive decisions happen without a lot of warning. And sometimes, to the point of a lot of the discussion here, something may be affecting the sector as a whole (or wider) so it may not be easy to find another position. A lot of people who post here seem to assume that getting a new job is something you send a few emails about and expect to get deluged with interview offers. That's not true of many people even today and certainly isn't true at all during downturns.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    It also seems to conflate 'laid off' with 'fired', which makes it a little harder to understand. Is GP saying he would have been fired (for cause?) at these jobs? Or is this just using the term 'fired' in the colloquial sense of 'involuntarily terminated, for whatever reason'?
thomascgalvin 4y ago
I was laid off a few years ago because the company that hired me hadn't actually won the contract they thought they won. Really hard to pin that on engineering's performance.
- spidermanjones 4y ago
  Recently laid off under conditions that I'm convinced are similar. I was at my org for roughly 9 months, I came in as part of a large class of new hires across the entire org. The last 4 months we were in crunch mode trying to land a big client that leadership continued saying would be a game changer for us. My eyebrow was already raised, because if one company is that much of a game changer, what happens if we don't get that client? Sure enough, as I was texting with a friend who was spared, he let me know as soon as the last person left the office that day from layoffs, company had the weekly all-hands and announced sure enough, they didn't get the client.
- mech422 4y ago
  I've seen this in the past, though it hasn't bitten me... I'm really against 'pre-emptive' hiring for this reason. Its not fair to mess with people's livings just because you promised something in a contract that you can't currently fulfill.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    The worst part is it isn't like they don't have another option. Could choose to hire a contractor or let people know upfront about the risk of the job not being there in a few months, but that would drive up the rates people would ask.
    - mech422 4y ago
      Yeah, and the new hire potentially turned down a long term job for something that evaporates before they even start...
  - jlg23 4y ago
    > Its not fair to mess with people's livings... Given that this is the status quo, employees should adopt the same attitude. When working for an ethical employer, I'll work 48h/day if the situation requires it, but for everyone else, I'll bill them for the "quick question over the phone" outside of my agreed upon working hours; and I'll quit when someone else makes a good offer. Once a (spectacularly unethical) employer tried to pull the "think about the others in your team" stunt only to be amazed when I found them better jobs within a week and everyone else quit, too. I cannot say he learned from that experience, but I equally cannot say I regret my decision.
peterangular 4y ago
> It is dangerous that people consider layoff as a performance indicator for the employee. Hard agree. I've hired high performers from dumb layoff situations like start-ups going belly-up, companies resizing, contracts getting prematurely terminated, etc. I wouldn't consider a layoff a negative metric unless the interviewee outright admitted "they were trying to get rid of me." I'm always shocked when people bring it up as signal vs. noise in regards to interviews.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  There's also always the possibility that someone is struggling in a role or company or project, bored and unmotivated or burned out, and they will be amazing for you in the role you need. And it's also possible they were actually high performing in their last role but they managed to bruise someone's ego and wound up first on the layoff list as a result. There is just way more to firings and layoffs than performance.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    People also are only fungible to a point (depending on role). If a company makes organizational or directional changes and the role someone was hired into doesn't really exist any longer, there's no guarantee that they can do a very different role equally well and/or that the company will necessarily be interested in making a person who would never have been hired into that role from the outside work out somehow just because they're with the company already. Mind you. Companies can do more with internal development/retraining and institutional knowledge is a thing especially with large organizations. But, at some point, no one's going to be happy.
    - skissane 4y ago
      > Companies can do more with internal development/retraining and institutional knowledge is a thing especially with large organizations I remember, many years ago, being tasked with teaching PHP to the mainframe COBOL team - we’d retired the mainframe, and all our COBOL apps with it, but we’d kept the team, and management had struggled with finding them something else to do. It was a painful experience, they were getting it, but very slowly. Didn’t help that I wasn’t the best teacher, I had to slow myself down a lot and found that a struggle - but I was young and inclined to say “Yes” to everything. Eventually, they were all laid-off - and pretty much straight-away found new COBOL jobs (with a higher salary too). I think, in the end, they were happier that way.
spoonjim 4y ago
Working in crypto you accepted this risk with open eyes.
actually_a_dog 4y ago
Let me continue this train of thought even further. Your last sentence nails it. Even a firing for "performance" is not necessarily an indicator that the candidate before you would be a low performer at your company. Sometimes, people are fired for "performance," when what that really means is "new manager/tech lead didn't like them." Interview enough people and you'll see this at some point. Sometimes, low performers in one environment are star performers in another. This is what happens when founders are replaced by more experienced executives, among other scenarios. Sometimes, people with impressive credentials (PhD + significant publications + previous experience, for instance) will completely bomb your interview because they can't figure out which of their language of choice's container types is suitable to the task. I literally interviewed that candidate once. Sometimes, people are fired for straight up illegal reasons that have nothing to do with performance. (This literally happened to me at a big company you've probably all heard of and used their product.) As a company and an interviewer, the best thing for all involved is for you to have a structured process with which to evaluate all candidates for a given position, and follow it. No interview process is perfect at either selecting good candidates or rejecting bad ones, but if you have and follow a structured process, at least you should get consistent results out of your interview process, and you can calibrate your hiring bar from there. I don't want to go into much more detail regarding "structured processes," but if you search on HN for u/tokenadult's hiring comment cum copypasta (albeit an informative copypasta), most of what's there still holds true according to the best and most current research on hiring.
Spooky23 4y ago
I wouldn’t worry about it - it’s internet message board know-it-all syndrome. Layoffs are financial and political decisions. Sometimes people layoff idiots when given the chance, other times they layoff the smartest people to protect their friends. I consulted at a bank where a SVP would reorganize non-core business units into his org specifically to meet his reduction target while minimizing business impact. Those people were cannon fodder from day 1. Hiring is the same way. If you only hire pristine resumes without gaps, you’re selecting for survivors - not the same as performers. It’s more of a statement about the hirer-er than hire-ee.
- hodgesrm 4y ago
  > I consulted at a bank where a SVP would reorganize non-core business units into his org specifically to meet his reduction target while minimizing business impact. You never know when you need a sacrificial lamb, eh.
- MikePlacid 4y ago
  > It’s more of a statement about the hirer-er than hire-ee. Yep. Before the IPO the task came up to increase our development team size to 200 people, cause “people would rather invest money in 200 developers than in 30”. We would hire anybody who was able to say anything sapient about the task “insert an element into a double-linked list” (and were amazed when 80% of applicants were unable to pass this simple barrier). On the other hand - when layoffs came they were rather reasonable and the worst people were let go. (None of them were among the people who passed the above-mentioned barrier though).
  - adriand 4y ago
    > insert an element into a double-linked list I’ve been programming professionally for 20+ years and I had to look this data structure up. Granted, once I reviewed it, node insertion is trivial, but I hope you gave applicants that opportunity. Or perhaps your line of work commonly deals with stuff like this. I’ve spent my career in web and mobile product development, usually with a business focus of some kind, and it still surprises me sometimes how little I’ve used certain topics from college, like mathematics. I think most of the math I’ve used I likely learned by grade 6.
varispeed 4y ago
This also depends on the definition of "performance". A top performer at one company may be considered useless at another. It all depends on who they hired. Then of course you can have poor management - someone may not be great a context switching and if manager keep asking to look at different stuff every day or if there is a ton of junior developers needing help with everything, then you may not have mental capacity to do quality work on the stuff you are measured by.
refurb 4y ago
Agree 100%. I’ve been through 4 layoffs so far and while there is some correlation with performance, politics still dominates layoff decisions especially at more senior levels. You can be at the top of the layoff list for nothing more than voicing your criticism of company strategy at some random meeting. I’ve seen very talented VPs go from “hero” to “zero” in the span of a month when the CEO decides to change direction and concludes those people aren’t “aligned with the new direction of the company”.
commandlinefan 4y ago
I was laid off once because the company I worked for went out of business. So there's that. Although maybe some would say it was my fault for not programming better so that the company stayed in business?
- izzydata 4y ago
  Unless your company was 4 people that is an unreasonable expectation.
- Animats 4y ago
  I was never laid off, but I once quit three weeks before a company went out of business. When I heard that someone's paycheck had bounced, I was out of there.
runamok 4y ago
Not to mention the same employee can flourish or flounder depending on the project, team, manager, culture, company, etc.

nojito 4y ago

Most tech companies were growing through manufactured growth due to how cheap it was to get capital.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

marktangotango 4y ago

> the companies who simply collected too many under performing employees can afford to churn some of them back out of the company. Doing it as a "layoff" makes it more palatable than going on a firing spree. Seems to me this implies that companies that do this, have found a way effectively measure performance and productivity. I don't think OP intends to say this, it is pretty much impossible to measure productivity of individual developers. I mean those on the team know who is or isn't contributing from day to day, but among teams and over time it is much more difficult. If someone has figured this out they should be a $billionaire by now. I'd go further and counter that this is completely bogus claim, and yes, no one hiring should view a candidate being laid off as being related to anything performance or desirability of the candidate. In my experience, layoffs are merely a popularity contest.

otterley 4y ago
It is absolutely possible to calculate engineering productivity at the product level. The arithmetic is very simple. It’s far more difficult at the individual level, though.
- marktangotango 4y ago
  Thank you. This is precisely my point.
- mattm 4y ago
  What is the arithmetic?
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    Revenue per employee is one, total investment per dollar of ARR is another, and so on. It amazes me to see high salaries at companies which are engineering heavy and the revenue per employe is significantly below the median TC for the median engineer.

TimPC 4y ago

There are some layoffs but from what I’ve seen so far hiring salaries are not coming down. This to me speaks of a subset of tech companies slowing down rather than a general crash. There are plenty of companies still hiring and hiring at top rates. It seems like half of all the layoffs are in crypto which is a typical response to the underlying assets dropping 80+%. The remainder seem to be companies that are over reliant on debt-based capital responding to higher interest rates. To get the tech slowdown you’re proposing the higher interest rates will have to shake out through all of venture capital and start-up money will have to tighten up.

dc-programmer 4y ago
Keynes had a theory that wages are sticky-down meaning they rarely decrease. My guess is tech salaries will stagnate for a while. But with poor performance of RSUs and inflation eating into purchasing power this will essentially be a pay cut.
- tech_tuna 4y ago
  Not only RSUs but stock options as well. I've always pushed/leaned/fought for a higher base over more options. I prefer a bird in the hand. However, if your timing is good and risk tolerance is high, taking more options over a higher base can work out quite well.
  - dc-programmer 4y ago
    Options do not seem like real wages to me because unlike RSUs I’ve never been able to translate them to cash. You’re totally right. And with future expected value of options decreasing (and RSUs), base is more important than ever.
    - TimPC 4y ago
      Base is important but tricky to get a large proportion of. You can negotiate some increase in base but if you want to go too aggressively getting a lot of it will lower total comp. The fact is companies pay base with cash on hand and pay options by issuing new shares. Issuing new shares doesn’t feel like real money in the same way to a lot of corporations so they are happier to do that. I agree markers are currently on a downward trend but I think RSUs are still a valuable portion of compensation. Even if they end up worth only 70% of their initial value you can get a larger total comp from a mix of RSUs and base than just base. Options on the other hand are largely vapour in modern markets. Many start-ups are electing to stay private for time periods exceeding fifteen years. They fully expect most employees to not be able to afford the options they get because of the tax implications combined with limited ability to sell. Some services exist to try and alleviate this problem although most do so imperfectly and take a large premium for the risk and uncertain time window for the shares to become publicly tradeable. These days I mostly don’t bother looking at companies that can only offer options because they generally aren’t willing to offer a high enough base to compensate. I’d far prefer $200k base and $200k RSUs to $300k base and $100k of uncertain options. The first offer is far easier to find than the second as very few start-ups are willing to raise base to compensate people for the lack of liquidity in their options.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

One of my best engineers came from a layoff. He stayed with us until the end. I know he went on (after being laid off from our company) to do pretty intense stuff. Good with math. He was trained as a physicist.

jameshart 4y ago

Also just pruning projects, products and divisions that aren’t panning out as well as others. In simple economic turns, when interest rates are low, investments with relatively low returns can make sense. So initiatives get staffed even if the expected value of their payoff is marginal. When interest rates go up, there are low risk ways to get those same returns, so business expectations of ROI go up. So projects that made sense, were being run well, but which simply aren’t likely to make high enough returns are going to get canned in these conditions. No reflection of the staff laid off in such a case at all.

indymike 4y ago

> For the past several years tech companies were desperate to hire because everyone was growing and the hiring market was tight. Recruitment Tech founder here. The job market is still tight. There are two open jobs for every available person. Source: Fed Chair Jermaine Powell. This means you lay off, someone else will hire quickly. > However, many of these layoffs are single-digit percentage layoffs from companies that are still hiring across the board. That's not so much a traditional layoff as a pruning of the workforce. 100% this is the story. The pruning seems to take two forms: classic "underperformance" and, as much as I hate this, people who just won't come back to the office, or have moved to lower cost areas and will not accept a pay cut.

rank0 4y ago
> or have moved to lower cost areas and will not accept a pay cut. Why would anyone accept a pay cut if their job is remote? I get it if location based pay is used for jobs that require in person. But how can the employer have it both ways? Why would the employer want to subsidize more expensive lifestyles for a remote position?
- indymike 4y ago
  > Why would anyone accept a pay cut if their job is remote? People are not accepting cuts and that is leading to positions being eliminated (layoffs) as employers are realizing they can pay sometimes 50% less than their high cost of living area wages.
- DragonStrength 4y ago
  Because the people making hiring decisions are mostly located in high cost of living areas, which is why I'm skeptical they'll succeed with it much longer.
  - indymike 4y ago
    > Because the people making hiring decisions are mostly located in high cost of living areas, Cutting costs usually lets those people get bigger bonuses, so the incentive is towards forcing the issue.

spoonjim 4y ago

Exactly - companies that layoff due to careless over hiring do not use surgical precision when laying off.

adrianmonk 4y ago

The mirror image of this churn happened after the recovery from the dotcom bust. During the bust, tech workers took ANY job, no matter how terrible, and held on for dear life so they didn't end up unemployed for 2 years. Finally, the market recovered, and companies experienced turnover as people finally had the opportunity to move to greener pastures.

MikePlacid 4y ago
> During the bust, tech workers took ANY job, no matter how terrible Same feeling, but from a bit different perspective. During the dotcom bust I’ve learned to love layoff periods. Cause then friends and neighbors from friendly and neighborly other teams suddenly started to look for more work instead of looking for less work - and my life became a bit easier. At the time my team of 2 (two) was handling 12 (twelve) rather simple but important projects. Steve and his team of 4 (four) in Denver was handling 1 (one) similar project. Then the bust came, and the prospect of layoffs. And here we are at the meeting where I am transferring three of my projects to Steve’s team. After the meeting Paul, a PM from France - we enjoyed working together, asked me, puzzled: Mike, why on earth haven’t you fought to keep your projects?? And I go: Paul, I have nine more of these - do you want some?

mech422 4y ago

>> Much of this is due to the reversal of the tight hiring market. No idea where you are, but I'm not seeing any reversal at my job or in positions listed... Personally, I think the layoffs are due to tech companies not hitting profit numbers the investors expected. Just like the PC market, seems people expected Amazon, FB, Netflix, etc to keep growing at 20+% yoy.

foobiekr 4y ago

In December of 2000, I went to a company all hands. This was a company in the networking industry, a high flyer, and a day or two before the meeting the CEO of the biggest player in the space, Cisco, announced that they were experiencing the biggest slowdown the company had ever seen, and the biggest slowdown that any of the members of the board of directors had ever seen. They were warning that they may miss, and they were even broaching the topic of having a massive inventory write-down (which, later, they would: $2B+ of written off inventory). At the meeting, our CEO announced that he wasn't seeing any of this, that it was a Cisco problem, and that it was an indicator that we were even winning! Of course, a number of our customers were on the brink of declaring bankruptcy, including Cable and Wireless and a few others. Worldcom was about to happen. Of course, our CEO said, not only weren't we laying off, we were going to accelerate hiring, and we did. No layoffs planned, more heads to take more of the market! We did accelerate hiring. Our group almost doubled in the next three months with more reqs opened. One day in early April, I was the last interviewer for a candidate who had done really well and was walking the guy out. Normally at the time we'd make an offer on the spot if the interview was positive enough, we would do incremental round-tables in those days as we went, and this one was positive, so I was a little confused. We happened to walk by my manager's office as we I was seeing him out - were on our way to the elevator. He rushed to join us as and had positive things to day on the way down by gave me a look. We said goodbye and my manager says, "Yeah, there's a hiring freeze as of a few minutes ago, so all reqs closed." A month later, the CEO denied any layoffs were pending or planned, but suggested that we do a prayer at the company all hands in April. To pray for... something? Worldcom not to go bankrupt? I don't quite remember, I was so shocked. Very explicitly, the CEO promised: "no layoffs are planned." And then, about a month later, the company did its first ever layoff. And this brings me to the point. New companies - and there are a lot of them this round just like there were going into 2001 - suck at almost everything. They don't know what they're doing and they do a lot of idiotic stuff. I've worked at companies that peanut butter the layoff, that try and cut functions, that target non-human expenses first (such as HW prototypes or expected builds for labs or server farms), companies that target engineering first (or specific engineering disciplines, like ASICs or new boxes, where the project can, in theory if not reality, be put into hibernation for a bit), that target customer support or marketing first, and even one that targeted sales first (because there weren't any). New companies that have not done it before get stupid. This layoff was the first ever for the company, and they had absolutely no fucking idea what they were doing. What actually happened for about half of the managers was they wanted around the cube area at 9am in the morning and did a sort of "duck duck go" in their heads, and when they approached someone they decided to lay them off or not based on whether they appeared instantaneously busy. To this day a friend who was at the same company swears that when his manager came to lay him off, "can you talk for a few minutes?" he survived entirely because he told the guy to go away because he was incredibly busy on something another team needed and could talk in an hour or two. So yeah, don't judge people by layoffs from small or new (years) companies. Judge each candidate by what they do and can do and what they've done, not that they ended up on the wrong side of the layoff.

grey-area 4y ago

This is entirely down to the recession and rising interest rates. Companies are adjusting for future earnings falling and the cost of money going up.

sharadov 4y ago

Making the statement that companies are laying off "underperforming" employees is a gross assumption - I got laid off with 25% of the workforce at a pre-ipo company that raised 550 million USD. Most large layoffs are happening at pre-ipo companies which raised a ton of money in 2020/2021 and were hoping to go public. Unfortunately the tables turned since Feb 2022, investors want them to tighten belts and reduce cash burn.

marto1 4y ago
> tighten belts and reduce cash burn and on a macro level what's the point in reducing cash burn in a high inflation environment ? Driving even more inflation ?
- imtringued 4y ago
  Reducing cash burn means spending less money which lowers inflation.

hintymad 4y ago

> For the past several years tech companies were desperate to hire because everyone was growing and the hiring market was tight. I'd rather categorize it as for the past several years the managers in tech companies seize the chance to inflate their teams to boost their careers at the cost of their companies, while the leadership in those companies are just too incompetent to tell separate the Wheat from the chaff. It's not their money, after all. I mean, why the hell does DocuSign need 7000+ people? Why the funk did Uber need to build their own Slack? Why in whoever's name does Uber's ATG need to hire > 2000 people under two years to build a research project? Why did Coinbase need to have > 3000 people to build a god damn crypto exchange? Incompetence is just not enough to explain these jokers. And the crown of the crowns, of course and again, goes to Uber: they think that k8s wouldn't scale yet their in-house crap would beat the k8s community and therefore they hire a freaking organization to build their own resource scheduler, as if Uber has "internet scale". Yeah, right.

parentheses 4y ago
I have had the same thought and my only explanation is “empire building”. There are indeed companies running at full capacity; most do not. Empire building in the small is “growing your org” and in the large is “growing your company”. Until we stop measuring company performance by customer counts and employee counts, this will probably continue.
foobiekr 4y ago
I think this is a good theory. I almost wonder if it's an accidental synchronization of a burst of hiring caused by the FAANGs snatching candidates away from their peers and having outsized psychological impact. Classically, the way to go from l1 manager to l2 manager to director, senior director and VP was to grow your organization in headcount terms, so in a situation where it is "hard" to hire, say Amazon is busy grinding through the entire valley, you might accidentally create a situation where everyone feels urgency but no one feels backpressure.

doktorhladnjak 4y ago

It’s a fallacy to assume there are only good and bad employees on some sort of linear scale. It’s underappreciated how much environment, management, company culture effect how an individual performs. One company’s underperformer can really be another’s superstar.