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> Mass layoffs give you the opportunity to quickly purge poor performers without as much paperwork. It's advantageous to have regular rolling layoffs because of

> Mass layoffs give you the opportunity to quickly purge poor performers without as much paperwork. It's advantageous to have regular rolling layoffs because of this if you can justify them by economic conditions. I've heard people say this, but it seems contrary to how layoffs are run in practice: • entire teams or divisions are often laid off with no eye towards individual employees' tenure, experience or skills • decisions happen on a condensed time scale by higher-level executives—not exactly conducive to a nuanced view of individual employees' performance, which companies struggle to assess effectively at the best of times The "common knowledge" about what layoffs accomplish and why they're necessary really doesn't match what happens on the ground.

kristopolous 4y ago
I've never seen a cold and calculated layoff. It's always been exasperated irrational arm-waving risk mitigation. The "good" people aren't kept - instead it's the ones that can navigate the political waters. For every one competent executive there seems to be 3 deluded narcissistic idiots who will slash and burn people who are overqualified and under-utilized for the positions they've been incompetently assigned. Now before you think I'm a victim of layoffs, I'm actually the political navigator. I constantly survive layoffs as I see the most talented people get let go and the best teams get broken up and reassigned, it's nuts. One of the best techniques is to get yourself into what I call a "management island" - essentially you have either 0 or many bosses, just not 1. The next one is to be associated with a small bet - essentially a cheap investment that may yield a great long-term payoff, preferably related to the company cash cow. A third technique is to not attend too many events. Vagueness works in your favor. People should know generally but not specifically what you do. With details comes critiques so keep it ambiguous by staying quiet. If you survive a layoff then you must not let a good crisis go to waste. Use the fog of the firing and the power vacuum to resituate yourself into this political dynamic as the dust settles. Of course these techniques only work at large companies. I learned all of these techniques from years in management. There's more but that's a good start
- adasdasdas 4y ago
  Yup, most mass layoffs are done without consulting the directly/skip managers who actually know who the strong performers are.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    No. Most layoffs are done by the managers being given either quotas or burn rate caps and tasked with producing lists of people to layoff. The point of "many bosses" is if your manager knows you work on other projects, it's easier to leave you off the list. The point of "no bosses" is no manager is tasked with considering you. You're not on anyone's books. There's numerous ways of doing this if you're interested. If you have to play the one boss game it's harder. Some managers will want to keep their most talented people, other managers are looking for team cohesion and want the most friendly while others will break their project into roles and then assign people on a sheet of paper into those roles and get rid of what they consider redundant. Some bosses will want to get rid of the most talented people on the logic that they probably have one foot out the door anyway and there's always a resignation aftershock after a layoff so might as well be seen as the one bold enough to do the cost cutting. Some bosses will want to get rid of their most expensive people on the logic that they'll have the easiest time finding other work or maybe they'll have to get rid of fewer when they're more expensive, while others might want to get rid of their cheapest with the logic that they'll be easier to replace in the future. There's really no silver bullet way to survive that. You have to know who is making the decision and somehow guess how they'll do it well in advance of the event so you can occupy a safe position in the mind of the decision maker. Almost nobody acts based on some objective logic, instead they have predictable patterns of behavior and varying modalities. That's why you need to shake the org structure and get out of that situation. If you want to insulate yourself from consideration, that's where the small bet team is in play. Preferably this is associated with the company cash cow. Let's say you work for Uber. A small bets team might be optimizing the UI using some behavioral techniques to nudge the users into picking higher margin options. The point here is the managers of managers will have a list of projects which will be sorted by some metric. You want to be at the bottom of that list and so even in the one boss model, your team may never be subject to layoffs. Being a small bet makes it subject to the rational choice theory paradox of the dollar auction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction ... The manager of managers will hang on to the project using a sunk cost, but not a money pit, fallacy. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost) you want to be in a grey middle where you're not a cost of concern.
im3w1l 4y ago
I have an alternative theory. In bad times consumers no longer want to pay for a cherry on top. So you go back to basics and lay off the people putting it there.
- solarmist 4y ago
  I'd adjust this and say the execs believe that, so they do it, whether or not it's true. I seriously doubt these layoffs are from actual, measurable consumer responses.
tr81 4y ago
> Mass layoffs give you the opportunity to quickly purge poor performers without as much paperwork. It's advantageous to have regular rolling layoffs because of this if you can justify them by economic conditions. Yeah, unfortunately, this is believed by so many low level employees that it hurts their confidence, if they ever are part of layoffs. I wish organizations really educated employees how layoffs work. I was part of layoffs in 2008 in which my whole department was eliminated, including managers and their managers. The developers who were hurt the most, were the smartest ones who could not believe that C-level executives didn't see their contributions. Their egos were bruised and some even switched from development to other fields.

kristopolous 4y ago

I've never seen a cold and calculated layoff. It's always been exasperated irrational arm-waving risk mitigation. The "good" people aren't kept - instead it's the ones that can navigate the political waters. For every one competent executive there seems to be 3 deluded narcissistic idiots who will slash and burn people who are overqualified and under-utilized for the positions they've been incompetently assigned. Now before you think I'm a victim of layoffs, I'm actually the political navigator. I constantly survive layoffs as I see the most talented people get let go and the best teams get broken up and reassigned, it's nuts. One of the best techniques is to get yourself into what I call a "management island" - essentially you have either 0 or many bosses, just not 1. The next one is to be associated with a small bet - essentially a cheap investment that may yield a great long-term payoff, preferably related to the company cash cow. A third technique is to not attend too many events. Vagueness works in your favor. People should know generally but not specifically what you do. With details comes critiques so keep it ambiguous by staying quiet. If you survive a layoff then you must not let a good crisis go to waste. Use the fog of the firing and the power vacuum to resituate yourself into this political dynamic as the dust settles. Of course these techniques only work at large companies. I learned all of these techniques from years in management. There's more but that's a good start

adasdasdas 4y ago
Yup, most mass layoffs are done without consulting the directly/skip managers who actually know who the strong performers are.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  No. Most layoffs are done by the managers being given either quotas or burn rate caps and tasked with producing lists of people to layoff. The point of "many bosses" is if your manager knows you work on other projects, it's easier to leave you off the list. The point of "no bosses" is no manager is tasked with considering you. You're not on anyone's books. There's numerous ways of doing this if you're interested. If you have to play the one boss game it's harder. Some managers will want to keep their most talented people, other managers are looking for team cohesion and want the most friendly while others will break their project into roles and then assign people on a sheet of paper into those roles and get rid of what they consider redundant. Some bosses will want to get rid of the most talented people on the logic that they probably have one foot out the door anyway and there's always a resignation aftershock after a layoff so might as well be seen as the one bold enough to do the cost cutting. Some bosses will want to get rid of their most expensive people on the logic that they'll have the easiest time finding other work or maybe they'll have to get rid of fewer when they're more expensive, while others might want to get rid of their cheapest with the logic that they'll be easier to replace in the future. There's really no silver bullet way to survive that. You have to know who is making the decision and somehow guess how they'll do it well in advance of the event so you can occupy a safe position in the mind of the decision maker. Almost nobody acts based on some objective logic, instead they have predictable patterns of behavior and varying modalities. That's why you need to shake the org structure and get out of that situation. If you want to insulate yourself from consideration, that's where the small bet team is in play. Preferably this is associated with the company cash cow. Let's say you work for Uber. A small bets team might be optimizing the UI using some behavioral techniques to nudge the users into picking higher margin options. The point here is the managers of managers will have a list of projects which will be sorted by some metric. You want to be at the bottom of that list and so even in the one boss model, your team may never be subject to layoffs. Being a small bet makes it subject to the rational choice theory paradox of the dollar auction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction ... The manager of managers will hang on to the project using a sunk cost, but not a money pit, fallacy. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost) you want to be in a grey middle where you're not a cost of concern.

im3w1l 4y ago

I have an alternative theory. In bad times consumers no longer want to pay for a cherry on top. So you go back to basics and lay off the people putting it there.

solarmist 4y ago
I'd adjust this and say the execs believe that, so they do it, whether or not it's true. I seriously doubt these layoffs are from actual, measurable consumer responses.

tr81 4y ago

> Mass layoffs give you the opportunity to quickly purge poor performers without as much paperwork. It's advantageous to have regular rolling layoffs because of this if you can justify them by economic conditions. Yeah, unfortunately, this is believed by so many low level employees that it hurts their confidence, if they ever are part of layoffs. I wish organizations really educated employees how layoffs work. I was part of layoffs in 2008 in which my whole department was eliminated, including managers and their managers. The developers who were hurt the most, were the smartest ones who could not believe that C-level executives didn't see their contributions. Their egos were bruised and some even switched from development to other fields.