4 ms·

I was at a medium-sized company (~100 employees) that laid off ~60% of their employees. Including 95% of the dev team. Everyone could see just how much of a bad

by phire 4y ago

I was at a medium-sized company (~100 employees) that laid off ~60% of their employees. Including 95% of the dev team. Everyone could see just how much of a bad move it was, and that was only the first bad move. Most of the remaining skilled employees started looking for new jobs immediately. They could see the writing on the wall. Others just checked out and stopped caring about their work, doing just the bare minimum. The bulk of the remaining experienced employees were gone within two months. The people who remained were the lower-level employees, without the experience to keep the company working. Coincidentally, the company fell apart and went into liquidation 6 months later.

smugma 4y ago
“Coincidentally”
- phire 4y ago
  In this case, actually coincidental. It was externally trigged event 3 months later that ended up killing the company. Even a healthy company would struggle to navigate such a scenario. But it was absolutely on a fatal path before that event, just a question of how long.
shalmanese 4y ago
No executives lay off 60% of their employees for fun. Typically, this course of action is reserved for when the company believes they have a 95% chance of failing and that doing the layoff will mean they now have an 80% chance of failing. That the company later failed is not proof positive that the layoffs were a bad idea.
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  But it is proof that it was a good idea for those that weren't laid off to jump ship asap.
  - mcv 4y ago
    Yeah, when a company is going to crash, it's better not to stay around until the end. Quite often, the last month(s) of work is unpaid. With all the upheaval at Twitter, I doubt it's going to survive. Well, the name will remain, and as long as servers keep running, some people will keep using it, so as long as Musk can hire enough people to keep the servers running, Twitter might be able to continue in some form, but it will never be the company it once was.

by phire 4y ago

smugma 4y ago

“Coincidentally”

phire 4y ago
In this case, actually coincidental. It was externally trigged event 3 months later that ended up killing the company. Even a healthy company would struggle to navigate such a scenario. But it was absolutely on a fatal path before that event, just a question of how long.

shalmanese 4y ago

No executives lay off 60% of their employees for fun. Typically, this course of action is reserved for when the company believes they have a 95% chance of failing and that doing the layoff will mean they now have an 80% chance of failing. That the company later failed is not proof positive that the layoffs were a bad idea.

iancmceachern 4y ago
But it is proof that it was a good idea for those that weren't laid off to jump ship asap.
- mcv 4y ago
  Yeah, when a company is going to crash, it's better not to stay around until the end. Quite often, the last month(s) of work is unpaid. With all the upheaval at Twitter, I doubt it's going to survive. Well, the name will remain, and as long as servers keep running, some people will keep using it, so as long as Musk can hire enough people to keep the servers running, Twitter might be able to continue in some form, but it will never be the company it once was.