46 ms·

Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work

212 points by mattikus 4y ago

skee8383 4y ago
The higher educated white collar class is coming to terms with the fact they are just as disposable as the rest of us.
- boringg 4y ago
  Which class do you relate to and as a function of which type of job?
- ilostmyshoes 4y ago
  We are all workers, we are the working class whether we are educated or not. The capital owners want the working class to fight amongst themselves because it allows them to continue enriching themselves off the backs of the working class. Even if you own some stocks or have a 401k, if you depend on a salary to pay your bills then you are a worker
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - iso1631 4y ago
    It annoys me in the UK how people claim that "Tommy who 'does up houses' and flips them or rents them out" is a "working class builder", where as Billy isn't working class because he types on a keyboard. In the UK working people, especially those earning above minimum wage, are taxed far more than the capitalists of the world like Tommy who can structure his income to pay just 30% marginal taxes rather than 60% plus.
    - ilostmyshoes 4y ago
      Honestly it's the same in the US. But unfortunately the ones who fund the political campaigns are usually the ones with the lower tax rate, so that doesn't change.
  - skee8383 4y ago
    Actually there are different levels of working class. A guy earning $18k per year working in retail isn't exactly in the same boat as the manager of the store making $80k a year.
    - ilostmyshoes 4y ago
      That was a story made up by capital owners to keep the working class fighting amongst itself. The reality is that anyone who works for a wage is being taken advantage of
      - mrep 4y ago
        I have > 500k net worth which using the 4% rule gives me 20k a year but I still work. Am I a capitol owner or working class?
        ilostmyshoes 4y ago
        If you can quit your job and live purely off your investments then you are a capital owner, if you cannot do that without adjusting your lifestyle you're working class
      - skee8383 4y ago
        It's called being middle class. middle class != working class, But i don't expect you to be able to see through the decades of propaganda.
        ilostmyshoes 4y ago
        Again, middle class is a concept invented by capital owners to keep the working class fighting amongst themselves. If you depend on a wage to survive, you are a worker Working class is defined as those who must sell their labor in order to survive. If you cannot live off income of your investments alone and must work for a salary then you are a worker, you are working class
        randomdata 4y ago
- rvz 4y ago
  Exactly. Since reality has now hit them in the face after the VC fuelled tech bubble utopia that finally popped with the cheap money disappearing afterwards. So what of the conditioning of employees by telling them: 'We're all a family', 'Sticking together in the long term!' and 'Everyone wins, yay!'. I don't think 'families' do abrupt layoffs en mass to their own in the morning. The era of cruising on cheap money is over. It is time to learn to adapt with AI.
- refurb 4y ago
  Everyone is disposable all the way up to the CEO.
mac3n 4y ago
"the Cruelty is the Point" https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-01-30/column-how-big-tech-is-using-mass-layoffs-to-bring-workers-to-heel https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-01-30...
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beebmam 4y ago
I think it's a huge mistake. The great labor shortage is just beginning. You can thank the retiring boomers for that. (And I hope they enjoy their retirement!)
- blamazon 4y ago
  There is no way to make a mistake here because there are essentially no consequences -- entities of this scale can rehire as easily as they fire. At a lower average compensation rate too, most likely. These companies are basically refinancing their labor force using cruelty and fear. It is working because they're all doing it, because we let them. System working as intended.
  - juve1996 4y ago
    > At a lower average compensation rate too, most likely. highly doubt it. The labor force is shrinking. There's already a dearth of talented software devs. And then there will be huge upward pressure on wages from lower level jobs that now have to pay 20$ an hour to get workers.
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    - ramphastidae 4y ago
      People have been saying that for 50 years and it hasn’t happened in the US. Upward pressure on wages will result in interest rate increases to manufacture unemployment and keep wages down.
      - deleted 4y ago
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      - juve1996 4y ago
        It's happening right now, in front of our very eyes, as predicted. Once the population shifted, it would happen. Here we are, take it in.
bradleyjg 4y ago
This place isn't your home, these people aren't your friends and your executive leadership would run you over with their cars if you stood between them and revenue growth. Your relationship to work changes forever. You will never again believe that you are "critical" to the company or that the company is interested in you as a person. This has always always been the case. Grow up.
- cebert 4y ago
  If you think work and your coworkers are friends or family, you’re in for a world of hurt.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    I've worked at two companies where people pooled vacation time for sick co-workers who had already been granted extended leave time by the company way past the company norm when they got cancer. If that is not an act of friendship what is it? I've worked on a team where we scheduled our production schedule and the company their release schedule for a year around making sure a co-worker could go back to their country of origin for a couple of months. This was neither a technically irreplicable nor senior individual but they were valued because they were part of our team. When I had kids my coworkers surprised me with a ton of baby clothes. Those people were definitely my friends and we definitely had each others backs. I've been to more work friend's weddings than any other weddings. I burned out and crashed and burned, but it was more about me finding my self worth in work and the need to be superman and get that recognition and then later to keep funding a lifestyle that I again has substituted as my value and self worth.
    - drewcoo 4y ago
      > I've worked at two companies where people pooled vacation time for sick co-workers who had already been granted extended leave time by the company way past the company norm when they got cancer. If that is not an act of friendship what is it? It is a sad attempt at compensating for a missing social safety net.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
The Steve Jobs quote makes me hopeful that Apple won't follow their lemming peers off this cliff. Hopefully the payoff for Apple is significant and obvious so that at least some learn the lesson in the article.
jmclnx 4y ago
> You got the dog when it was young, trained I get the point, but we are in the 21st Century. Very few people stay a Company (assuming stats are true) as they did before the 1990's. In this case, the dog would have expected to stay in that home forever, where people in a company would probably move on after a few years.
pictur 4y ago
Companies don't care if layoffs work. They are confident that when the time comes, they will replace the dismissed with other employees. Whether the new hires will be as efficient and skilled as their predecessors is, of course, a question mark. But they don't care. Please stop thinking of companies as emotional creatures. The only thing companies care about is money. Who cares people.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  But decision-makers at companies frequently make irrational decisions, or at least decisions that are irrational based on their stated objectives. "Only caring about money" doesn't necessarily mean you make the best decisions to earn more money. Look at how many sports franchises have desperately wanted a win and then made a lot of atrocious decisions that did not achieve that -- why would we think that's the only field of human endeavor where that happens?
karaterobot 4y ago
> Imagine you had a dog... Imagine that instead of a dog, it's an adult who makes their own choices and gets paid money, and who signed a contract where the terms of employment were spelled out very clearly..
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  And imagine you told that dog how much you loved it and how important it was to you, but only paid attention to it when it was misbehaving, fed it recalled Chinese dog food and avoided taking it to the vet, then decided to put it down the second it needed any expensive care. All the while telling your friends what a dog lover you are, and what a great relationship you have with your dog.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    And imagine still, that instead of a dog, it was an adult, and you shake hands agreeing to hire their skills in exchange for regular payment, but when their skills are someday no longer required or adequate, and that day will come, the payments will cease and they will have to peddle their skills elsewhere.
    - CuriouslyC 4y ago
      That is totally valid for the fraction of companies that treat each piece of work as a transaction with terms agreed upon beforehand, and don't try to wheedle extra work/crunch effort with nebulous promises or talk of "loyalty" then deliver a sad token while enriching shareholders and executives. I might be able to get on board with your ideology if your ideal was the norm and the second case the exception, but it's quite the reverse.
- Joeri 4y ago
  That’s the view of someone who is lucky to have many choices. Many people, in fact I suspect most people, pretty much have to accept what they’re offered because they don’t really have other choices. For some of the people in these layoffs it will be accurate to say they could have made different choices, and for others it won’t be.
oconnore 4y ago
This is incredibly dumb. > The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones during the initial two years following the downsizing. Can you think of any confounding factors in this analysis? How do you control for important factors like, say: whether the board is in enough financial trouble to downsize?
- brookst 4y ago
  What? Next you’re going to find fault in my analysis that proves CPR kills people, as evidenced by the number of people who die after receiving CPR compared to those who just have a normal day.
  - ejb999 4y ago
    good analogy (not being sarcastic)
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    You have to prove that CPR works. The burden of proof is not on anyone to prove that CPR does not work. In that sense the idea that the difference becomes insignificant after just 3 years is quite damning
    - recursive 4y ago
      Damning to which side of the argument? Sounds like evidence that the layoffs worked to me.
      - cuteboy19 4y ago
        If an action makes no difference then it makes no sense to actively do it.
        mlyle 4y ago
        Assuming the companies that layoff are in equivalent situation to those that didn't. If the companies that lay people off are much worse off than the average comparison company, and they look the same as comparison companies after 3 years... then it sure makes sense to do it.
coliveira 4y ago
I think Amazon, Google, and Meta workers should band together and get funding to start competitors to these companies. If there were some smart investors, that would be a great way to start a new company.
- wonks 4y ago
  I suppose if there were backers who would issue loans instead of investing in equity, the workers could form a cooperative. I don't think that would fully eliminate the risk of them getting fired (by each other), but perhaps it would be a start?
- zwkrt 4y ago
  I've worked for Amazon and have friends that work for Meta. As much as it pains me to say it, I don't think that as a whole those who were laid off would make a very good company. There are exceptions, like I think Amazon made such heavy reductions in the Alexa org that there were probably some very competent engineers let go. But mostly the layoffs affected (1) HR and product, (2) low performers, and (3) people with very little political savvy. This doesn't sound like it would make a good company.
  - langsoul-com 4y ago
    Point 3 is fine, wasting all time and energy being political has nothing to do with contributing to the companies end revenue stream. Think the manager who does nothing, but is a smooth/shit talker, hence is very let go. Does and contributes nothing except for the moments they have to.
- adave 4y ago
  The thing is they kept everyone from the 2-5 main teams that actually run these companies. And what sucks even more is those people don't know that they are so critical and worth millions if not billions each.
- bbor 4y ago
  That’s a great idea! We just need to write a design doc for the company, get comments, write up resource usage tickets, pass it by ux, contact sales for input, iterate on a new design doc because the old one used an outdated framework for business organization, get the final business plan doc through our autolinters, and setup 6 automated tools to track our progress - then we should be ready to contact some VCs. Should only be a handful of quarters - if you don’t count time for retrospectives and writing packets about how complicated and impressive the process was ;)
readthenotes1 4y ago
If they don't work, it's probably because they are too late. Every company I've worked at has had a bunch of people who don't actually work. One example: I was talking to someone at a social event and they was complaining that her company had laid off so many people they was doing the work of 3. They then went on to say that they was running two fantasy football leagues. I asked them what kind of computer they had at home and they looked at me confused and said "oh no, I don't have a computer at home. If I did then they would expect me to work some there too" From that I realize that they (singular) was doing the work of three people and running two fantasy football leagues in their eight hour work day. This may be exceptional, but with all the talk of quiet quitting, and all the other observations of people not working at work, I don't think it's all that rare.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Maybe they ran the two leagues together with two colleagues before ;)
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Nobody likes getting laid off. But it's weird to see all of these think pieces implying that once someone is hired into a job, that job should exist forever. Things change. Company growth isn't monotonically increasing. Not all positions will exist forever. Joining a company was never a guarantee that you'd have a paycheck and work to do until you decided to leave. Also, pointing out that companies that did layoffs had worse performance than those that didn't have layoffs is an impressive example of missing the point. Layoffs usually are a result of declining performance, not the cause of it.
- tikhonj 4y ago
  There's a big difference between "things change" and "mass top-down layoffs are an effective way to adapt to change"!
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > There's a big difference between "things change" and "mass top-down layoffs are an effective way to adapt to change"! I worked at a company that tried to avoid mass layoffs at all costs. Whenever it became obvious that change was necessary, they'd do little cuts here and there, or they'd force people into roles they weren't familiar with (think front-end devs moved to cloud backend dev) to try to salvage people at all costs. They only cut people in small numbers here and there, and always spread out over long periods of time. It was terrible. People were angry because they were hired for one job, but forced to do completely different work because the original needs had disappeared. People were constantly living in fear because there were micro-layoffs multiple times a month. They weren't called layoffs, though, so they weren't announced. You'd just open Slack to message someone and they'd be deactivated. You always wondered if you were next. It's not pleasant to do mass layoffs, but if a company has to change it's much better to just rip the band-aid off and restructure all at once.
    - jdmichal 4y ago
      Exactly this. Bleeding small numbers of people is absolutely terrible for morale. Everyone will be wondering whether it's their turn this week, and that will 100% have knock-on effects. If you have to do a layoff, your goal should be to make it deep enough to only do it once and allow the healing process to start. If your goal is to avoid layoffs, the solution is to build a war chest with months or even years of runway. If you hit hard times, freeze hiring and attrition will help some as you burn through that runway. (But also be careful of piling on the same workload to fewer and fewer people!)
npteljes 4y ago
I find it serves one better to deal with feelings directly. Going on such a long roundabout is a distraction. Do we really care about how large companies deal with their problems? Are we running one, do they depend on our judgment? I think not. So, the more straightforward way is to realize that one has been fucked over. At first it doesn't matter who's responsible for that, just the fact that one feels that it happened, and that it feels like shit. Talking to people about that helps. It someone is worth their salt, they'll tell that this has always been the case - the one that cares about a person the most, and especially the one that can do the most, is the person themselves. And another important realization is that most of the time, this doesn't happen because of specific cruelty - most of the time, it's ignorance. The other party didn't care to consider the impact of their act, and that is normal. There's not enough energy to care about all. And even if we care, sometimes things must be done. Or we need to take part, even if we know the impact and don't want that. I do believe that this all doesn't need to make one jaded and cynical all the time, about life and people. In fact I believe the opposite: that one needs to find a way to love all this, in spite of all of these things working in such a way. After all, to love, one needs to know. Because if one doesn't know, they don't know what they love in the first place.
whatever1 4y ago
Well it depends on the kind of business you are running. It seems that nowadays software companies mostly work on modularized toy problems that new grads can solve effectively. If you go to the chemical industry that is not the case. Layoffs in senior personnel will bite you within months.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  Most of the people working on glue code are already at risk to job migration to HCL, Wipro etc.
YuriNiyazov 4y ago
"In addition, nearly one-third of the executives thought their companies terminated the wrong person at least 20% of the time, and approximately an additional quarter indicated that their companies made the wrong decision 10% of the time." Within corporate decision-making, this rate is actually "fucking genius" level. This article doesn't say what it thinks it says.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  Yeah an 80% success rate is amazing.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Layoffs are like going on a diet: in the short term companies are able to maintain discipline through a mixture of execs getting their feet held to the fire by shareholders and employee panic. In the long term, execs are gonna do the same old shit that they always do.
- outside1234 4y ago
  The execs will never stop doing the same old shit. They will still fly business class and have concerts with Sting (ht Satya). The only change is that they will temporarily work everyone else harder.
lgsilver 4y ago
This is a completely naive view of companies and how they work. An alternative metaphor is this: imagine you got a dog, raised him, lost your sources of income and couldn’t afford to feed him. You kept him anyway out of pride or loyalty or whatever, and watched as he withered away without adequate resources to make him thrive. At the same time, others were looking for dogs and were fully willing to feed them and support them. When companies don’t do thoughtful adjustments like layoffs, they end up instead in a cycle of slow withering, where the best resources leave and aren’t replaced, and the quality of the workforce slowly decays. Layoffs may not be “fun” but they’re a necessary part of operating a successful company… and much better than the alternative.
- uxcolumbo 4y ago
  That might be true in an imaginary world, but in the real world lots of dogs end up in shelters and some get killed because they can’t be rehomed. During the pandemic lots of ppl got pets… acting on impulse. Now they realise a pet is a lot of work and it’s not for them.
tracerbulletx 4y ago
Companies need flexibility, markets are more free and efficient allocators than central control, and people don't all deserve the same wealth because some people are really doing more useful things than others, but we have the capability to provide everyone healthcare and enough money to live simply and comfortably no matter how productive they are as individuals simply because it improves the condition of life and we don't have to become communist to do it.
hbn 4y ago
I do not see myself as a dog and my employer as my owner. It's a very weird/inaccurate analogy, and a bad way of looking at an employer. Dogs don't choose their owners. Dogs can't leave their owners and find another one if they don't like the current one. Dogs can't educate themselves on which owners are more or less likely to value their skills, and aren't over-adopting dogs because it's the trend to do so in 2021, even though they're obviously not going to want to keep all these dogs around once their absurd growth rate slows down. The layoffs suck and I hope the people affected land on their feet, but this dog analogy is nonsense.
Scoundreller 4y ago
I think the way they’re structured in most orgs is dumb for the org. Layoffs should be an opportunity to embrace and accept the Peter Principle and lower a series of people down a rung until you layoff the least valuable person. Of course that only works if managers/directors/seniors/whatever can do the job immediately below them. I think they should but many places think “a manager is a manager and can manage any kind of team” which I think is bunk.
gt565k 4y ago
Posting social media videos of "a day in the life of FANG" company showcasing the little amount of work people do doesn't work either. There's a lot of people at these companies who don't do anything meaningful and are getting paid a boat load. There's people like that in almost every company. Back from the Yahoo peak days I had multiple people tell me that all they did in a week was fix 1-2 small bugs in a day and didn't do jack shit the rest of the week and got paid handsomely. Probably explains in-part the demise of Yahoo as a tech company. My point is, layoffs typically target workers who are not needed by the company anymore. People do layoffs in their personal life too. Your house cleaner or landscaper gets laid off when you decide to stop using their services as you try to do the work yourself and save some money. This ultra-left stance on layoffs being bad is ridiculous. It's part of the business cycle and economic outlook the companies are facing.
- hef19898 4y ago
  There is a very interesting trend among white collar and tech people (or people at tech companies) being laid off and finding this so hard. Well, time to grow up, lower skilled labor experiences that regularly, and those of us who were around during 2008 or the dot com bubble experienced it too. Now a new generation is learning life is not always all roses. Funny to see it on social media so.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  They aren't allowed to show videos of their actual work. So obviously they only show the parts that they can show like lunch or whatever. Most people at FANG companies work quite a lot in my experience.
- askafriend 4y ago
  The people posting those are usually interns...not to mention they'd probably get fired if they actually leaked videos of real work situations. So that's why all you see is the company perks like free food, gym or flexible work hours.
ccn0p 4y ago
It seems to me that many tech workers are experiencing, for the first time, the hard reality that: a) Companies may be formed, operated, and controlled by people, but they are complex systems that do not have feelings and do not care about individuals no matter how much the culture warriors say otherwise. They are systems designed to survive, with or without you. b) We are not defined by our jobs I'm not making a case one way or another for capitalism, or layoffs, or the meaning of life, rather pointing out that this is the reality in which we live and once you realize these two points, things will make more sense.
abeppu 4y ago
I think the crappy thing here is because upper management wants to plan a layoff in extreme secrecy, they put themselves in the position of not being able to consult with the parties that have the most context. The cuts end up being crude and poorly targeted because of this secrecy. Because the assumption is that an employee who is being laid off, or thinks they may be laid off, becomes a liability immediately, no knowledge transfer or hand meetings can happen, and people may abruptly be cut off from internal systems. The company then has some extra short-term issues from the remaining staff trying to cover for their laid-off peers while missing important information and context. The responses to this post, of "we're adults that accepted an at-will employment contract" are correct. But if we all had that attitude, and if execs could treat staff like responsible adults rather than potential saboteurs, perhaps a more targeted, less disruptive and ultimately smaller layoff could be arranged. (updated for typos)
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  Makes me wonder why employees are expected to give two weeks notice when they choose to leave, write docs detailing knowledge transfer, etc. Why can't we just "disappear", as if we were laid off?
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    Well you generally can't do that in Europe. I normally have at least one months notice which I spend documenting and explaining stuff to the people who'll be taking over. That being said, I got laid off this summer (US style no more need for your services, all access revoked) and it absolutely sucked. Additionally, there's a lot of really pissed off Big Tech employees, and it's gonna be interesting to see what happens as a result of these (almost entirely unnecessary) layoffs.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    You can; no one's stopping you. People do it all the time.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  This is not true at all in companies that know how to do layoffs. Layoffs in mature companies consult most of the management hierarchy and even many senior ICs and in addition engage the strategic planning teams to steer resources as needed. That Google, the king of data driven, is flagrantly incompetent on this front is pretty funny, though.
likeabbas 4y ago
Layoffs work, I just think companies tend to layoff the wrong folks. I had 7 layers of management between myself (IC) and the CEO at my last job with just a couple thousand people. How much of a “multiplier effect” can those people truly have? What ended up happening was feature creep ran too large, the company scrambled to hire engineers to keep up with pace of development, then the debt caught up with them once interest rates blew up. Honestly, layers between ICs and CEOs should be logarithmic. 0 layers for 10 employees, 1 layer for 100, 2 layers for 1000, etc. IMO the “multiplier effect” ends with line managers
- itchyouch 4y ago
  I think this is how Starbucks manages their ~120k US employees. They keep a max of around 8-12 direct reports per manager as their policy.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  Sure but in practice ICs are like ~90% of employees. So it's hard to not have them be the bulk of any layoff.
UncleEntity 4y ago
> Imagine you had a dog… I used to have a dog. When I had to get rid of her I ended up in the VA mental health ward for ten days because I tried to shoot myself in the head, not completely because of the dog (becoming homeless helped a lot) but I’m pretty sure it was a significant contribution. To top it off if you take “a dog” to the pound it’s free but if you take “your dog” down there it costs $80 so the poor little thing lost her name because I didn’t have $80 so she was “this dog wandering around the neighborhood I found”. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was get rid of that dog and I’ve done some pretty hard things in my life. Tell me more about your coworkers being out of work for a couple months before finding that next job.
olliecornelia 4y ago
Between the tech layoffs and ChatGPT enjoyers of dogshit think pieces are eating good.
foolinaround 4y ago
this satire of a laid-off techie being interviewed is going viral https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nivva7G1XFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nivva7G1XFw
garbagecoder 4y ago
I think layoffs are a social contagion in a lot of cases, an excuse to overcorrect for overcorrections and all of that but... the cruelty is the point. eta: if the economy at large is adding 500,000 jobs as reported today this makes the laying off companies look either foolish or somehow specially in a downturn.
motbus3 4y ago
The default state for a company is to produce a yearly layoff. This has been dramatically reduced since gen y hit the work market because they were leave the company instead of stressing and they were important as they were bringing the tech power to the industry Now they are getting old and there is no short of people to work on tech so the cycle restarts. Honestly if I do get in a company that practices this I will quit. It has done horrors to people close to me and they will never recover.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  It had nothing to do with genY tech acumen, which is lower the previous crops on average due to weakening curriculum standards and a lack of experience with technology in any deep way, it was the firehouse of free capital and a “starve the competition” model employed by the FAANG constituents that it helped fund.
pkghost 4y ago
> A common argument I've heard is "well ok, maybe layoffs don't help the company directly, but it is an opportunity to get rid of dead weight". Sure, except presumably at-will employers could have done that at any time if they had hard data that suggested this pool of employees weren't working out. I'm guessing letting an individual go carries higher risk of a wrongful termination suit than a bulk layoff, so there is still an incentive to mask performance-based decisions with economic justifications.
amitkgupta84 4y ago
This was too dumb. First, the intro with the dog analogy. If you remotely see your relationship with your employer as you being the beloved family dog, you're the problem. Second, the author quotes a paper on downsizing in a journal and afterwards says, "[i]n all my searching I wasn't able to find any hard data which suggests layoffs either enable a company to better compete or improve earnings in the long term." However the conclusion of the very paper he references says, "[t]he findings of this field study indicate that downsizing can improve an organization's financial performance but not in the near-term.... [R]esearch strongly suggests that it likely will take three or more years for organizations to be able to truly see the financial benefits of downsizing." If you look at all the graphs in the Results section of the paper, it shows that companies who downsize started out being weaker performers than those who weren't downsizing, but a few years after downsizing they were largely able to close that underperformance gap.
- georgewsinger 4y ago
  Nice find (and makes sense).
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Ancalagon 4y ago
Crazy seeing some of the comments in here supporting the layoffs when just a few decades ago people were up in arms about IBMs layoffs because working for one company for a significant portion of your career was seen as the norm.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  Maybe it's not the same people?
0xmarcin 4y ago
Having a single source of income is becoming more and more problematic in current times. If you are married you have at least two sources of income, that may be the biggest _economic_ advantage of the marriage. Those layoffs make me realise why so many people are interested in FIRE movement and passive income. Either you have savings (but fiat currency discourages that) or some source of extra cash flow (be it minimum that allows you to survive) or you are at the mercy of current economy climate (be it FED printing or FED tightening or stock market frenzy). Maybe the universal basic income will be come the solution to this problem in the future? With more automation and unstable world economy we will probably see more layoffs. Entire industries may go extinct. Yes I am on more pessimistic side, but the last decade was great for software engineers and as the Bible says after 7 good years there may be 7 bad years coming.
- pm90 4y ago
  As long as we continue digitizing the economy, there will be a demand for software engineers. What might change is the kind of software engineers. Luckily, software engineers can certainly cross train and quickly pick up new skills much more quickly than workers in other industries, and for massive payoffs. I do think its somewhat unreasonable to be in a position where you do similar work year after year though (similar to e.g. what doctors or lawyers do) and expect to keep getting the same income. That's the deal with Software (or really, any creative field): you get paid really well but you can't stagnate.
lasereyes136 4y ago
Layoffs are cruel and are often done poorly. It is really hard to say if they work or not since there is no consistent reason why they are done and picking some external measure doesn't prove much.
chester_the_dog 4y ago
Whether it’s good or bad for business, the practice of layoffs is becoming more widely accepted. This can serve as a reminder to employees not to become complacent, which is one reason that companies do it. An unfortunate consequence is that employees become more likely to game the system to keep their jobs. Gaming the system can take many forms : avoiding risky assignments, covering up chronic problems, and blaming others. Once people see that these approaches result in greater job security then the incentives for doing the right thing become obscured. At my last job, a cyber-security startup that had a large layoff, this process of gaming the system ruined the software engineering culture. No one wanted to fix a bug, or talk to a customer, or implement a new process, without first checking to see how it would affect their job security.
anm89 4y ago
If you think layoffs "don't work" you have some kind of fundamental misunderstand of what a layoff is.
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
This writes like a Reddit employee who is butthurt about a layoff.
vivegi 4y ago
This is obviously false. Layoffs do work. 2003 - 2007 is not a sufficiently long enough period to assess layoff impacts on a company. For example: >Apple Computer Inc. said late Friday it was slashing its work force by 4,100 in a last-ditch effort to save the troubled computer maker. > Out of the total number affected, about 2,700 are full-time workers. The remainder are part-time and contract employees. The cuts will affect about 30 percent of Apple's work force. Fifty-five percent of the job cuts will be in the United States. (Source: https://money.cnn.com/1997/03/14/technology/apple/ https://money.cnn.com/1997/03/14/technology/apple/) This is from 1997 in the pre-Steve Jobs era when Gil Amelio was CEO. You can call it what you want, but if that action didn't occur at that time, Apple as we know today may not have existed. I am picking Apple as a deliberate example because they are the the only big-tech company that hasn't announced a large scale layoff (yet). So, many people may be quick to jump to point out, "Look Ma! No layoffs at Apple". For a large corporation, business cycles are a reality and layoffs become part of the tactic. It is very unpleasant for the people involved. But, that doesn't mean it doesn't work (in the long run).
- anon7725 4y ago
  None of the large tech companies conducting layoffs have had their back against the wall. They are mostly just purging after their irrational pandemic hiring as well as doing galaxy-brained copycat layoffs. Isn’t it remarkable that “economic conditions” lead dozens of companies to need to cut the same 5-7% of staff?
  - vivegi 4y ago
    I agree with you that the pandemic era hiring went off the rails. We don't hear any media mentioning The Great Resignation anymore. It is all just doom and gloom. Labor cost is the major cost driver for big-tech. They just decided to axe that because that is the quickest way for them to impact costs and conserve cash when revenues are expected to drop, stay flat, or at best grow very slowly. At best, they are right in their economic activity projection, it slows their revenue and profit growth (they will still be profitable). At worst, they are wrong about it and the revenue and profit growth is not slowed (a good problem for them to have) and they can just resume hiring. Regarding your comment on companies not necessarily having their back against the wall -- unfortunately, this is behavior is quite common. Companies don't have to be bleeding in their P&L to take layoff decisions.
29athrowaway 4y ago
How do you define "don't work"? It depends on what goals you have. Sometimes products, services, teams and organizations are not aligned with the business strategy, and have to be restructured. Sometimes there are locations with a high cost of life, but the value generated at those locations are not proportionally higher. Sometimes you have outliers in the compensation distribution that no longer meet productivity expectations. Some individuals make key contributions and then stop making them while enjoying the same benefits. And sometimes you have pseudoscience like "Vitality curve" style layoffs which are proven to make things worse.
manv1 4y ago
If you're looking at layoffs as a way to reduce costs short-term they do work, even accounting for severance.
emodendroket 4y ago
Let's grant the argument. Layoffs can still serve employers' purposes in other ways. Have you heard of a lot of climate walkouts at big tech companies recently?
karmasimida 4y ago
If layoff doesn't work, hiring wont work either.
friend_and_foe 4y ago
I'm not surprised that someone who thought corporations were their family wrote an article about how layoffs don't work.
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
> In general, the study found that both downsized and nondownsized companies reported positive financial outcomes during this period. The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones during the initial two years following the downsizing. By the third year, these differences became statistically nonsignificant. But in the absence of layoffs perhaps those companies would have done worse. Therefore we could easily argue that this does not contradict the claim that layoffs do work. In particular layoffs are not meant to make a company grow faster than other companies, they are meant to prevent extreme bloat and inefficiency and get back to a normal baseline. So if we assume that context the data makes more sense.
zmmmmm 4y ago
I see it more from an investor perspective. What do you read into a company that starts doing large scale layoffs even though it has a massive hoard of cash and remains massively profitable, just because some temporary trouble hits? Given the company can easily retain the staff from a financial perspective, and employee churn is incredibly expensive - it has to mean they really, truly they can't think of anything useful to do with those staff. From that you would have to conclude that management and the board are simply out of ideas for how to grow the business.
khazhoux 4y ago
Clearly the only good answer here is that tech companies should never have employed so many people to begin with. These tens of thousands of people were paid massive salaries and equity only to have that cruelly taken away when the company realized years later it can’t sustain all those projects. I implore these corporations: Please stop hiring so many people if you can’t guarantee lifetime employment!
WalterBright 4y ago
> Coming up with a scientific way of determining who is doing a good job and who is doing a bad job is extremely hard. In fact, it's probably impossible. On the other hand, everyone knows who the deadwood is on their team. > Cruel I know multiple instances of coworkers getting laid off, and being very angry about it. But a year later, they'd ruefully admit the company was right to lay them off, and they had been pushed off-center and decided to do what they really wanted to do - like start a business. More than one was laid off for coming to work high, and as a result got clean. They were, after a year or two, all better off and happier than before they were laid off.
jwr 4y ago
The dog analogy is terrible. You should never, ever consider your employer to be your family. The employer is not your friend, nor a relative. They are your employer. I really dislike the whole "let's build the team spirit and be a great family together" approach. It's dishonest, and often done with the (explicit or implicit) intention of brainwashing. Also, this goes both ways: I was an employer for the majority of my professional life. I had the best intentions and tried to be "good" and a friend to my employees, only to get screwed over many times in various ways by people later on. I learned that a professional relationship is different from a family relationship, and while you should try to be fair, you should never confuse the two.
- uxcolumbo 4y ago
  Interesting to see it from a (smaller) employers point of view. Can you give some examples, ie how did you do things before getting screwed and what have you changed after? What are your top lessons you learned?
  - jwr 4y ago
    I don't want to talk about specifics, because these stories involve real people. But some examples from the bad side: I've seen employees quit right after an extensive training period, disappear without a word, fake being ill for many months to get social security money, fake an illness to avoid a difficult assignment, and sue the employer for (imagined, not real) theft from a company that was going bankrupt. I've also seen people steal equipment from the company to pay for their drug addiction. All of this behavior was seen in people that the company previously worked with for months to years, and believe me when I say the companies involved were really doing their best to "be good" to employees. We're not talking Amazon warehouse jobs here. More generally, I learned to treat the relationship as a professional one. I strive to be fair and play by the book, but no longer have any expectations of people acting "fairly" or "nicely" towards their employer. Similarly, I don't think anybody should expect their employer to be their family — business decisions are made differently from family decisions. I should probably also mention that my disillusionment led me to starting a bootstrapped business where I have no investors and no employees, so that I don't have to depend on anyone. All this doesn't mean that we all have to be mean or evil to each other. Everything can still be fair. But an employee should not expect a company to be "good to them", nor should a company expect an employee to be "good to them". There are business boundaries to how far "good" can go on the company side, and on the employee side there are people who err on the side of treating a company like family (wrong) and who treat the company as the devil incarnate (wrong too).
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technick 4y ago
I feel what you're putting out and hopefully one day we will be a better species. I worked for a company in 2013 which will always be the benchmark that I compare other companies against. They treated me like a person that mattered and the members of my team were definitely my family. The company cared enough to give everyone catered breakfast and lunch, massages twice a week, a game room, and the freedom to work on projects that mattered to us. I had to complete a briggs myers personality test in the beginning, came back as ENTJ. HR brought in a coach to talk about how I can apply my strengths internally to make the company a better place and how I can personally grow. It was a great experience and I doubt another company like this exists. I spent 3 years there as a linux sys admin (it became devsecops towards the end). I grew more in this job than I did in any previous position I held. When I was laid off, I started questioning my self identity and went thru some serious depression of missing my co-workers.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  What company was this?
jimnotgym 4y ago
> The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones I think this misses a piece of logic. A reason companies downsize because their growth plans didn't come through. Like at the moment where tech companies scaled up for the pandemic imagining growth would continue at that rate. So now we are saying that companies that made a sound strategic plan perform better than companies that had to rip their plan up and start again. Layoffs are the effect, not the cause. It is childish to say that layoffs don't work. When a company runs out of cash it dies. Losing staff is hard, but if you can't afford them you can't afford them. Most managers hate layoffs too, even a psychopathic manager would see it as a failure. So whilst layoffs may set back your plan, at least the company survives. For clarity, there is no excuse for being shitty to staff during layoffs. US labour laws seem particularly weak in this area.
majikaja 4y ago
It was always going to be either layoffs/comp cuts or no big bubble in salaries and hiring to begin with. Surely there's much worse to come? Look at how much compensation came down in investment banks since the 00s. It's not conceivable that these large firms require tens of thousands of geniuses to function.
jdmoreira 4y ago
If your employer is a corporation and you are loyal to them, I'm sorry to inform you but you are very gullible and naive. Be loyal to people and be loyal to principles instead.
pcdoodle 4y ago
This is dumb. Dogs don't cost $100k per year to keep in the house. Dogs don't cause the owners of the house to risk loosing the house due to the dogs expenses.
hyperman1 4y ago
There isa logical conclusion of this: The quality of an individual's work is irrelevant in a bigco. 1) It is generally accepted that the best people leave first in this kind of layoff. But 3 years later, the corporation is doing as well as the others. Hence, removing the best people does no damage to a bigcorp. 2) A post in this thread describes how regular aggressive layoffs turn the culture toxic, setting people against each other. But one common response in nature is cooperation: people form a clique, and exclude colleagues who could damage them. They make nonmembers perform badly by e.g. witholding information. This sers outsiders up for being laid off. An evolutionary pressure selects for people having the political prowess to survive layoffs, and against good performers which endanger the status quo. So a bigco's level of performance does not depend on having good workers. Instead, all this points to the work performed by the worst workers to be the major determinating factor for success.
spokeonawheel 4y ago
Disclaimer: I am NOT advocating for layoffs, I do agree with their cruel nature. However, this comment in the article is ignorant:"Sure, except presumably at-will employers could have done that at any time if they had hard data that suggested this pool of employees weren't working out." Here is why. Just because someone is at-will doesnt mean the manager has the power to fire someone without any repercussions. Management can be a political house of cards and "layoffs" is a safe blanket to wipe these people out. case 1: Another deadweight case is to rip through the relational bias. Fred is a very nice guy and he does an OK job, but could the market provide someone else cheaper and/or better than fred? since hes not excelling lets roll the dice and find out. Fred wouldnt normally get let go because hes doing just the bare minimum to get by and there is no case for such a thing. case 2: manager is incompetent(say it aint so!) and is hiring the wrong people. What a mess! how do you deal with that?! Time to clean up the whole department and start fresh. The obvious downside of layoffs is that all too often, talented, loyal, and undeserving people get caught up in the mix, but at least management "feels terrible about it"

212 points by mattikus 4y ago

skee8383 4y ago

The higher educated white collar class is coming to terms with the fact they are just as disposable as the rest of us.

boringg 4y ago
Which class do you relate to and as a function of which type of job?
ilostmyshoes 4y ago
We are all workers, we are the working class whether we are educated or not. The capital owners want the working class to fight amongst themselves because it allows them to continue enriching themselves off the backs of the working class. Even if you own some stocks or have a 401k, if you depend on a salary to pay your bills then you are a worker
- deleted 4y ago
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- iso1631 4y ago
  It annoys me in the UK how people claim that "Tommy who 'does up houses' and flips them or rents them out" is a "working class builder", where as Billy isn't working class because he types on a keyboard. In the UK working people, especially those earning above minimum wage, are taxed far more than the capitalists of the world like Tommy who can structure his income to pay just 30% marginal taxes rather than 60% plus.
  - ilostmyshoes 4y ago
    Honestly it's the same in the US. But unfortunately the ones who fund the political campaigns are usually the ones with the lower tax rate, so that doesn't change.
- skee8383 4y ago
  Actually there are different levels of working class. A guy earning $18k per year working in retail isn't exactly in the same boat as the manager of the store making $80k a year.
  - ilostmyshoes 4y ago
    That was a story made up by capital owners to keep the working class fighting amongst itself. The reality is that anyone who works for a wage is being taken advantage of
    - mrep 4y ago
      I have > 500k net worth which using the 4% rule gives me 20k a year but I still work. Am I a capitol owner or working class?
      - ilostmyshoes 4y ago
        If you can quit your job and live purely off your investments then you are a capital owner, if you cannot do that without adjusting your lifestyle you're working class
    - skee8383 4y ago
      It's called being middle class. middle class != working class, But i don't expect you to be able to see through the decades of propaganda.
      - ilostmyshoes 4y ago
        Again, middle class is a concept invented by capital owners to keep the working class fighting amongst themselves. If you depend on a wage to survive, you are a worker Working class is defined as those who must sell their labor in order to survive. If you cannot live off income of your investments alone and must work for a salary then you are a worker, you are working class
      - randomdata 4y ago
rvz 4y ago
Exactly. Since reality has now hit them in the face after the VC fuelled tech bubble utopia that finally popped with the cheap money disappearing afterwards. So what of the conditioning of employees by telling them: 'We're all a family', 'Sticking together in the long term!' and 'Everyone wins, yay!'. I don't think 'families' do abrupt layoffs en mass to their own in the morning. The era of cruising on cheap money is over. It is time to learn to adapt with AI.
refurb 4y ago
Everyone is disposable all the way up to the CEO.

mac3n 4y ago

"the Cruelty is the Point" https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-01-30/column-how-big-tech-is-using-mass-layoffs-to-bring-workers-to-heel https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-01-30...

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beebmam 4y ago

I think it's a huge mistake. The great labor shortage is just beginning. You can thank the retiring boomers for that. (And I hope they enjoy their retirement!)

blamazon 4y ago
There is no way to make a mistake here because there are essentially no consequences -- entities of this scale can rehire as easily as they fire. At a lower average compensation rate too, most likely. These companies are basically refinancing their labor force using cruelty and fear. It is working because they're all doing it, because we let them. System working as intended.
- juve1996 4y ago
  > At a lower average compensation rate too, most likely. highly doubt it. The labor force is shrinking. There's already a dearth of talented software devs. And then there will be huge upward pressure on wages from lower level jobs that now have to pay 20$ an hour to get workers.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - ramphastidae 4y ago
    People have been saying that for 50 years and it hasn’t happened in the US. Upward pressure on wages will result in interest rate increases to manufacture unemployment and keep wages down.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - juve1996 4y ago
      It's happening right now, in front of our very eyes, as predicted. Once the population shifted, it would happen. Here we are, take it in.

bradleyjg 4y ago

This place isn't your home, these people aren't your friends and your executive leadership would run you over with their cars if you stood between them and revenue growth. Your relationship to work changes forever. You will never again believe that you are "critical" to the company or that the company is interested in you as a person. This has always always been the case. Grow up.

cebert 4y ago
If you think work and your coworkers are friends or family, you’re in for a world of hurt.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  I've worked at two companies where people pooled vacation time for sick co-workers who had already been granted extended leave time by the company way past the company norm when they got cancer. If that is not an act of friendship what is it? I've worked on a team where we scheduled our production schedule and the company their release schedule for a year around making sure a co-worker could go back to their country of origin for a couple of months. This was neither a technically irreplicable nor senior individual but they were valued because they were part of our team. When I had kids my coworkers surprised me with a ton of baby clothes. Those people were definitely my friends and we definitely had each others backs. I've been to more work friend's weddings than any other weddings. I burned out and crashed and burned, but it was more about me finding my self worth in work and the need to be superman and get that recognition and then later to keep funding a lifestyle that I again has substituted as my value and self worth.
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    > I've worked at two companies where people pooled vacation time for sick co-workers who had already been granted extended leave time by the company way past the company norm when they got cancer. If that is not an act of friendship what is it? It is a sad attempt at compensating for a missing social safety net.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

The Steve Jobs quote makes me hopeful that Apple won't follow their lemming peers off this cliff. Hopefully the payoff for Apple is significant and obvious so that at least some learn the lesson in the article.

jmclnx 4y ago

> You got the dog when it was young, trained I get the point, but we are in the 21st Century. Very few people stay a Company (assuming stats are true) as they did before the 1990's. In this case, the dog would have expected to stay in that home forever, where people in a company would probably move on after a few years.

pictur 4y ago

Companies don't care if layoffs work. They are confident that when the time comes, they will replace the dismissed with other employees. Whether the new hires will be as efficient and skilled as their predecessors is, of course, a question mark. But they don't care. Please stop thinking of companies as emotional creatures. The only thing companies care about is money. Who cares people.

emodendroket 4y ago
But decision-makers at companies frequently make irrational decisions, or at least decisions that are irrational based on their stated objectives. "Only caring about money" doesn't necessarily mean you make the best decisions to earn more money. Look at how many sports franchises have desperately wanted a win and then made a lot of atrocious decisions that did not achieve that -- why would we think that's the only field of human endeavor where that happens?

karaterobot 4y ago

> Imagine you had a dog... Imagine that instead of a dog, it's an adult who makes their own choices and gets paid money, and who signed a contract where the terms of employment were spelled out very clearly..

CuriouslyC 4y ago
And imagine you told that dog how much you loved it and how important it was to you, but only paid attention to it when it was misbehaving, fed it recalled Chinese dog food and avoided taking it to the vet, then decided to put it down the second it needed any expensive care. All the while telling your friends what a dog lover you are, and what a great relationship you have with your dog.
- xwdv 4y ago
  And imagine still, that instead of a dog, it was an adult, and you shake hands agreeing to hire their skills in exchange for regular payment, but when their skills are someday no longer required or adequate, and that day will come, the payments will cease and they will have to peddle their skills elsewhere.
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    That is totally valid for the fraction of companies that treat each piece of work as a transaction with terms agreed upon beforehand, and don't try to wheedle extra work/crunch effort with nebulous promises or talk of "loyalty" then deliver a sad token while enriching shareholders and executives. I might be able to get on board with your ideology if your ideal was the norm and the second case the exception, but it's quite the reverse.
Joeri 4y ago
That’s the view of someone who is lucky to have many choices. Many people, in fact I suspect most people, pretty much have to accept what they’re offered because they don’t really have other choices. For some of the people in these layoffs it will be accurate to say they could have made different choices, and for others it won’t be.

oconnore 4y ago

This is incredibly dumb. > The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones during the initial two years following the downsizing. Can you think of any confounding factors in this analysis? How do you control for important factors like, say: whether the board is in enough financial trouble to downsize?

brookst 4y ago
What? Next you’re going to find fault in my analysis that proves CPR kills people, as evidenced by the number of people who die after receiving CPR compared to those who just have a normal day.
- ejb999 4y ago
  good analogy (not being sarcastic)
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  You have to prove that CPR works. The burden of proof is not on anyone to prove that CPR does not work. In that sense the idea that the difference becomes insignificant after just 3 years is quite damning
  - recursive 4y ago
    Damning to which side of the argument? Sounds like evidence that the layoffs worked to me.
    - cuteboy19 4y ago
      If an action makes no difference then it makes no sense to actively do it.
      - mlyle 4y ago
        Assuming the companies that layoff are in equivalent situation to those that didn't. If the companies that lay people off are much worse off than the average comparison company, and they look the same as comparison companies after 3 years... then it sure makes sense to do it.

coliveira 4y ago

I think Amazon, Google, and Meta workers should band together and get funding to start competitors to these companies. If there were some smart investors, that would be a great way to start a new company.

wonks 4y ago
I suppose if there were backers who would issue loans instead of investing in equity, the workers could form a cooperative. I don't think that would fully eliminate the risk of them getting fired (by each other), but perhaps it would be a start?
zwkrt 4y ago
I've worked for Amazon and have friends that work for Meta. As much as it pains me to say it, I don't think that as a whole those who were laid off would make a very good company. There are exceptions, like I think Amazon made such heavy reductions in the Alexa org that there were probably some very competent engineers let go. But mostly the layoffs affected (1) HR and product, (2) low performers, and (3) people with very little political savvy. This doesn't sound like it would make a good company.
- langsoul-com 4y ago
  Point 3 is fine, wasting all time and energy being political has nothing to do with contributing to the companies end revenue stream. Think the manager who does nothing, but is a smooth/shit talker, hence is very let go. Does and contributes nothing except for the moments they have to.
adave 4y ago
The thing is they kept everyone from the 2-5 main teams that actually run these companies. And what sucks even more is those people don't know that they are so critical and worth millions if not billions each.
bbor 4y ago
That’s a great idea! We just need to write a design doc for the company, get comments, write up resource usage tickets, pass it by ux, contact sales for input, iterate on a new design doc because the old one used an outdated framework for business organization, get the final business plan doc through our autolinters, and setup 6 automated tools to track our progress - then we should be ready to contact some VCs. Should only be a handful of quarters - if you don’t count time for retrospectives and writing packets about how complicated and impressive the process was ;)

readthenotes1 4y ago

If they don't work, it's probably because they are too late. Every company I've worked at has had a bunch of people who don't actually work. One example: I was talking to someone at a social event and they was complaining that her company had laid off so many people they was doing the work of 3. They then went on to say that they was running two fantasy football leagues. I asked them what kind of computer they had at home and they looked at me confused and said "oh no, I don't have a computer at home. If I did then they would expect me to work some there too" From that I realize that they (singular) was doing the work of three people and running two fantasy football leagues in their eight hour work day. This may be exceptional, but with all the talk of quiet quitting, and all the other observations of people not working at work, I don't think it's all that rare.

luckylion 4y ago
Maybe they ran the two leagues together with two colleagues before ;)

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

Nobody likes getting laid off. But it's weird to see all of these think pieces implying that once someone is hired into a job, that job should exist forever. Things change. Company growth isn't monotonically increasing. Not all positions will exist forever. Joining a company was never a guarantee that you'd have a paycheck and work to do until you decided to leave. Also, pointing out that companies that did layoffs had worse performance than those that didn't have layoffs is an impressive example of missing the point. Layoffs usually are a result of declining performance, not the cause of it.

tikhonj 4y ago
There's a big difference between "things change" and "mass top-down layoffs are an effective way to adapt to change"!
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > There's a big difference between "things change" and "mass top-down layoffs are an effective way to adapt to change"! I worked at a company that tried to avoid mass layoffs at all costs. Whenever it became obvious that change was necessary, they'd do little cuts here and there, or they'd force people into roles they weren't familiar with (think front-end devs moved to cloud backend dev) to try to salvage people at all costs. They only cut people in small numbers here and there, and always spread out over long periods of time. It was terrible. People were angry because they were hired for one job, but forced to do completely different work because the original needs had disappeared. People were constantly living in fear because there were micro-layoffs multiple times a month. They weren't called layoffs, though, so they weren't announced. You'd just open Slack to message someone and they'd be deactivated. You always wondered if you were next. It's not pleasant to do mass layoffs, but if a company has to change it's much better to just rip the band-aid off and restructure all at once.
  - jdmichal 4y ago
    Exactly this. Bleeding small numbers of people is absolutely terrible for morale. Everyone will be wondering whether it's their turn this week, and that will 100% have knock-on effects. If you have to do a layoff, your goal should be to make it deep enough to only do it once and allow the healing process to start. If your goal is to avoid layoffs, the solution is to build a war chest with months or even years of runway. If you hit hard times, freeze hiring and attrition will help some as you burn through that runway. (But also be careful of piling on the same workload to fewer and fewer people!)

npteljes 4y ago

I find it serves one better to deal with feelings directly. Going on such a long roundabout is a distraction. Do we really care about how large companies deal with their problems? Are we running one, do they depend on our judgment? I think not. So, the more straightforward way is to realize that one has been fucked over. At first it doesn't matter who's responsible for that, just the fact that one feels that it happened, and that it feels like shit. Talking to people about that helps. It someone is worth their salt, they'll tell that this has always been the case - the one that cares about a person the most, and especially the one that can do the most, is the person themselves. And another important realization is that most of the time, this doesn't happen because of specific cruelty - most of the time, it's ignorance. The other party didn't care to consider the impact of their act, and that is normal. There's not enough energy to care about all. And even if we care, sometimes things must be done. Or we need to take part, even if we know the impact and don't want that. I do believe that this all doesn't need to make one jaded and cynical all the time, about life and people. In fact I believe the opposite: that one needs to find a way to love all this, in spite of all of these things working in such a way. After all, to love, one needs to know. Because if one doesn't know, they don't know what they love in the first place.

whatever1 4y ago

Well it depends on the kind of business you are running. It seems that nowadays software companies mostly work on modularized toy problems that new grads can solve effectively. If you go to the chemical industry that is not the case. Layoffs in senior personnel will bite you within months.

foobiekr 4y ago
Most of the people working on glue code are already at risk to job migration to HCL, Wipro etc.

YuriNiyazov 4y ago

"In addition, nearly one-third of the executives thought their companies terminated the wrong person at least 20% of the time, and approximately an additional quarter indicated that their companies made the wrong decision 10% of the time." Within corporate decision-making, this rate is actually "fucking genius" level. This article doesn't say what it thinks it says.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
Yeah an 80% success rate is amazing.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

Layoffs are like going on a diet: in the short term companies are able to maintain discipline through a mixture of execs getting their feet held to the fire by shareholders and employee panic. In the long term, execs are gonna do the same old shit that they always do.

outside1234 4y ago
The execs will never stop doing the same old shit. They will still fly business class and have concerts with Sting (ht Satya). The only change is that they will temporarily work everyone else harder.

lgsilver 4y ago

This is a completely naive view of companies and how they work. An alternative metaphor is this: imagine you got a dog, raised him, lost your sources of income and couldn’t afford to feed him. You kept him anyway out of pride or loyalty or whatever, and watched as he withered away without adequate resources to make him thrive. At the same time, others were looking for dogs and were fully willing to feed them and support them. When companies don’t do thoughtful adjustments like layoffs, they end up instead in a cycle of slow withering, where the best resources leave and aren’t replaced, and the quality of the workforce slowly decays. Layoffs may not be “fun” but they’re a necessary part of operating a successful company… and much better than the alternative.

uxcolumbo 4y ago
That might be true in an imaginary world, but in the real world lots of dogs end up in shelters and some get killed because they can’t be rehomed. During the pandemic lots of ppl got pets… acting on impulse. Now they realise a pet is a lot of work and it’s not for them.

tracerbulletx 4y ago

Companies need flexibility, markets are more free and efficient allocators than central control, and people don't all deserve the same wealth because some people are really doing more useful things than others, but we have the capability to provide everyone healthcare and enough money to live simply and comfortably no matter how productive they are as individuals simply because it improves the condition of life and we don't have to become communist to do it.

hbn 4y ago

I do not see myself as a dog and my employer as my owner. It's a very weird/inaccurate analogy, and a bad way of looking at an employer. Dogs don't choose their owners. Dogs can't leave their owners and find another one if they don't like the current one. Dogs can't educate themselves on which owners are more or less likely to value their skills, and aren't over-adopting dogs because it's the trend to do so in 2021, even though they're obviously not going to want to keep all these dogs around once their absurd growth rate slows down. The layoffs suck and I hope the people affected land on their feet, but this dog analogy is nonsense.

Scoundreller 4y ago

I think the way they’re structured in most orgs is dumb for the org. Layoffs should be an opportunity to embrace and accept the Peter Principle and lower a series of people down a rung until you layoff the least valuable person. Of course that only works if managers/directors/seniors/whatever can do the job immediately below them. I think they should but many places think “a manager is a manager and can manage any kind of team” which I think is bunk.

gt565k 4y ago

Posting social media videos of "a day in the life of FANG" company showcasing the little amount of work people do doesn't work either. There's a lot of people at these companies who don't do anything meaningful and are getting paid a boat load. There's people like that in almost every company. Back from the Yahoo peak days I had multiple people tell me that all they did in a week was fix 1-2 small bugs in a day and didn't do jack shit the rest of the week and got paid handsomely. Probably explains in-part the demise of Yahoo as a tech company. My point is, layoffs typically target workers who are not needed by the company anymore. People do layoffs in their personal life too. Your house cleaner or landscaper gets laid off when you decide to stop using their services as you try to do the work yourself and save some money. This ultra-left stance on layoffs being bad is ridiculous. It's part of the business cycle and economic outlook the companies are facing.

hef19898 4y ago
There is a very interesting trend among white collar and tech people (or people at tech companies) being laid off and finding this so hard. Well, time to grow up, lower skilled labor experiences that regularly, and those of us who were around during 2008 or the dot com bubble experienced it too. Now a new generation is learning life is not always all roses. Funny to see it on social media so.
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
They aren't allowed to show videos of their actual work. So obviously they only show the parts that they can show like lunch or whatever. Most people at FANG companies work quite a lot in my experience.
askafriend 4y ago
The people posting those are usually interns...not to mention they'd probably get fired if they actually leaked videos of real work situations. So that's why all you see is the company perks like free food, gym or flexible work hours.

ccn0p 4y ago

It seems to me that many tech workers are experiencing, for the first time, the hard reality that: a) Companies may be formed, operated, and controlled by people, but they are complex systems that do not have feelings and do not care about individuals no matter how much the culture warriors say otherwise. They are systems designed to survive, with or without you. b) We are not defined by our jobs I'm not making a case one way or another for capitalism, or layoffs, or the meaning of life, rather pointing out that this is the reality in which we live and once you realize these two points, things will make more sense.

abeppu 4y ago

I think the crappy thing here is because upper management wants to plan a layoff in extreme secrecy, they put themselves in the position of not being able to consult with the parties that have the most context. The cuts end up being crude and poorly targeted because of this secrecy. Because the assumption is that an employee who is being laid off, or thinks they may be laid off, becomes a liability immediately, no knowledge transfer or hand meetings can happen, and people may abruptly be cut off from internal systems. The company then has some extra short-term issues from the remaining staff trying to cover for their laid-off peers while missing important information and context. The responses to this post, of "we're adults that accepted an at-will employment contract" are correct. But if we all had that attitude, and if execs could treat staff like responsible adults rather than potential saboteurs, perhaps a more targeted, less disruptive and ultimately smaller layoff could be arranged. (updated for typos)

jonny_eh 4y ago
Makes me wonder why employees are expected to give two weeks notice when they choose to leave, write docs detailing knowledge transfer, etc. Why can't we just "disappear", as if we were laid off?
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  Well you generally can't do that in Europe. I normally have at least one months notice which I spend documenting and explaining stuff to the people who'll be taking over. That being said, I got laid off this summer (US style no more need for your services, all access revoked) and it absolutely sucked. Additionally, there's a lot of really pissed off Big Tech employees, and it's gonna be interesting to see what happens as a result of these (almost entirely unnecessary) layoffs.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  You can; no one's stopping you. People do it all the time.
foobiekr 4y ago
This is not true at all in companies that know how to do layoffs. Layoffs in mature companies consult most of the management hierarchy and even many senior ICs and in addition engage the strategic planning teams to steer resources as needed. That Google, the king of data driven, is flagrantly incompetent on this front is pretty funny, though.

likeabbas 4y ago

Layoffs work, I just think companies tend to layoff the wrong folks. I had 7 layers of management between myself (IC) and the CEO at my last job with just a couple thousand people. How much of a “multiplier effect” can those people truly have? What ended up happening was feature creep ran too large, the company scrambled to hire engineers to keep up with pace of development, then the debt caught up with them once interest rates blew up. Honestly, layers between ICs and CEOs should be logarithmic. 0 layers for 10 employees, 1 layer for 100, 2 layers for 1000, etc. IMO the “multiplier effect” ends with line managers

itchyouch 4y ago
I think this is how Starbucks manages their ~120k US employees. They keep a max of around 8-12 direct reports per manager as their policy.
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
Sure but in practice ICs are like ~90% of employees. So it's hard to not have them be the bulk of any layoff.

UncleEntity 4y ago

> Imagine you had a dog… I used to have a dog. When I had to get rid of her I ended up in the VA mental health ward for ten days because I tried to shoot myself in the head, not completely because of the dog (becoming homeless helped a lot) but I’m pretty sure it was a significant contribution. To top it off if you take “a dog” to the pound it’s free but if you take “your dog” down there it costs $80 so the poor little thing lost her name because I didn’t have $80 so she was “this dog wandering around the neighborhood I found”. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was get rid of that dog and I’ve done some pretty hard things in my life. Tell me more about your coworkers being out of work for a couple months before finding that next job.

olliecornelia 4y ago

Between the tech layoffs and ChatGPT enjoyers of dogshit think pieces are eating good.

foolinaround 4y ago

this satire of a laid-off techie being interviewed is going viral https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nivva7G1XFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nivva7G1XFw

garbagecoder 4y ago

I think layoffs are a social contagion in a lot of cases, an excuse to overcorrect for overcorrections and all of that but... the cruelty is the point. eta: if the economy at large is adding 500,000 jobs as reported today this makes the laying off companies look either foolish or somehow specially in a downturn.

motbus3 4y ago

The default state for a company is to produce a yearly layoff. This has been dramatically reduced since gen y hit the work market because they were leave the company instead of stressing and they were important as they were bringing the tech power to the industry Now they are getting old and there is no short of people to work on tech so the cycle restarts. Honestly if I do get in a company that practices this I will quit. It has done horrors to people close to me and they will never recover.

foobiekr 4y ago
It had nothing to do with genY tech acumen, which is lower the previous crops on average due to weakening curriculum standards and a lack of experience with technology in any deep way, it was the firehouse of free capital and a “starve the competition” model employed by the FAANG constituents that it helped fund.

pkghost 4y ago

> A common argument I've heard is "well ok, maybe layoffs don't help the company directly, but it is an opportunity to get rid of dead weight". Sure, except presumably at-will employers could have done that at any time if they had hard data that suggested this pool of employees weren't working out. I'm guessing letting an individual go carries higher risk of a wrongful termination suit than a bulk layoff, so there is still an incentive to mask performance-based decisions with economic justifications.

amitkgupta84 4y ago

This was too dumb. First, the intro with the dog analogy. If you remotely see your relationship with your employer as you being the beloved family dog, you're the problem. Second, the author quotes a paper on downsizing in a journal and afterwards says, "[i]n all my searching I wasn't able to find any hard data which suggests layoffs either enable a company to better compete or improve earnings in the long term." However the conclusion of the very paper he references says, "[t]he findings of this field study indicate that downsizing can improve an organization's financial performance but not in the near-term.... [R]esearch strongly suggests that it likely will take three or more years for organizations to be able to truly see the financial benefits of downsizing." If you look at all the graphs in the Results section of the paper, it shows that companies who downsize started out being weaker performers than those who weren't downsizing, but a few years after downsizing they were largely able to close that underperformance gap.

georgewsinger 4y ago
Nice find (and makes sense).
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Ancalagon 4y ago

Crazy seeing some of the comments in here supporting the layoffs when just a few decades ago people were up in arms about IBMs layoffs because working for one company for a significant portion of your career was seen as the norm.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
Maybe it's not the same people?

0xmarcin 4y ago

Having a single source of income is becoming more and more problematic in current times. If you are married you have at least two sources of income, that may be the biggest _economic_ advantage of the marriage. Those layoffs make me realise why so many people are interested in FIRE movement and passive income. Either you have savings (but fiat currency discourages that) or some source of extra cash flow (be it minimum that allows you to survive) or you are at the mercy of current economy climate (be it FED printing or FED tightening or stock market frenzy). Maybe the universal basic income will be come the solution to this problem in the future? With more automation and unstable world economy we will probably see more layoffs. Entire industries may go extinct. Yes I am on more pessimistic side, but the last decade was great for software engineers and as the Bible says after 7 good years there may be 7 bad years coming.

pm90 4y ago
As long as we continue digitizing the economy, there will be a demand for software engineers. What might change is the kind of software engineers. Luckily, software engineers can certainly cross train and quickly pick up new skills much more quickly than workers in other industries, and for massive payoffs. I do think its somewhat unreasonable to be in a position where you do similar work year after year though (similar to e.g. what doctors or lawyers do) and expect to keep getting the same income. That's the deal with Software (or really, any creative field): you get paid really well but you can't stagnate.

lasereyes136 4y ago

Layoffs are cruel and are often done poorly. It is really hard to say if they work or not since there is no consistent reason why they are done and picking some external measure doesn't prove much.

chester_the_dog 4y ago

Whether it’s good or bad for business, the practice of layoffs is becoming more widely accepted. This can serve as a reminder to employees not to become complacent, which is one reason that companies do it. An unfortunate consequence is that employees become more likely to game the system to keep their jobs. Gaming the system can take many forms : avoiding risky assignments, covering up chronic problems, and blaming others. Once people see that these approaches result in greater job security then the incentives for doing the right thing become obscured. At my last job, a cyber-security startup that had a large layoff, this process of gaming the system ruined the software engineering culture. No one wanted to fix a bug, or talk to a customer, or implement a new process, without first checking to see how it would affect their job security.

anm89 4y ago

If you think layoffs "don't work" you have some kind of fundamental misunderstand of what a layoff is.

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

This writes like a Reddit employee who is butthurt about a layoff.

vivegi 4y ago

This is obviously false. Layoffs do work. 2003 - 2007 is not a sufficiently long enough period to assess layoff impacts on a company. For example: >Apple Computer Inc. said late Friday it was slashing its work force by 4,100 in a last-ditch effort to save the troubled computer maker. > Out of the total number affected, about 2,700 are full-time workers. The remainder are part-time and contract employees. The cuts will affect about 30 percent of Apple's work force. Fifty-five percent of the job cuts will be in the United States. (Source: https://money.cnn.com/1997/03/14/technology/apple/ https://money.cnn.com/1997/03/14/technology/apple/) This is from 1997 in the pre-Steve Jobs era when Gil Amelio was CEO. You can call it what you want, but if that action didn't occur at that time, Apple as we know today may not have existed. I am picking Apple as a deliberate example because they are the the only big-tech company that hasn't announced a large scale layoff (yet). So, many people may be quick to jump to point out, "Look Ma! No layoffs at Apple". For a large corporation, business cycles are a reality and layoffs become part of the tactic. It is very unpleasant for the people involved. But, that doesn't mean it doesn't work (in the long run).

anon7725 4y ago
None of the large tech companies conducting layoffs have had their back against the wall. They are mostly just purging after their irrational pandemic hiring as well as doing galaxy-brained copycat layoffs. Isn’t it remarkable that “economic conditions” lead dozens of companies to need to cut the same 5-7% of staff?
- vivegi 4y ago
  I agree with you that the pandemic era hiring went off the rails. We don't hear any media mentioning The Great Resignation anymore. It is all just doom and gloom. Labor cost is the major cost driver for big-tech. They just decided to axe that because that is the quickest way for them to impact costs and conserve cash when revenues are expected to drop, stay flat, or at best grow very slowly. At best, they are right in their economic activity projection, it slows their revenue and profit growth (they will still be profitable). At worst, they are wrong about it and the revenue and profit growth is not slowed (a good problem for them to have) and they can just resume hiring. Regarding your comment on companies not necessarily having their back against the wall -- unfortunately, this is behavior is quite common. Companies don't have to be bleeding in their P&L to take layoff decisions.

29athrowaway 4y ago

How do you define "don't work"? It depends on what goals you have. Sometimes products, services, teams and organizations are not aligned with the business strategy, and have to be restructured. Sometimes there are locations with a high cost of life, but the value generated at those locations are not proportionally higher. Sometimes you have outliers in the compensation distribution that no longer meet productivity expectations. Some individuals make key contributions and then stop making them while enjoying the same benefits. And sometimes you have pseudoscience like "Vitality curve" style layoffs which are proven to make things worse.

manv1 4y ago

If you're looking at layoffs as a way to reduce costs short-term they do work, even accounting for severance.

emodendroket 4y ago

Let's grant the argument. Layoffs can still serve employers' purposes in other ways. Have you heard of a lot of climate walkouts at big tech companies recently?

karmasimida 4y ago

If layoff doesn't work, hiring wont work either.

friend_and_foe 4y ago

I'm not surprised that someone who thought corporations were their family wrote an article about how layoffs don't work.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago

> In general, the study found that both downsized and nondownsized companies reported positive financial outcomes during this period. The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones during the initial two years following the downsizing. By the third year, these differences became statistically nonsignificant. But in the absence of layoffs perhaps those companies would have done worse. Therefore we could easily argue that this does not contradict the claim that layoffs do work. In particular layoffs are not meant to make a company grow faster than other companies, they are meant to prevent extreme bloat and inefficiency and get back to a normal baseline. So if we assume that context the data makes more sense.

zmmmmm 4y ago

I see it more from an investor perspective. What do you read into a company that starts doing large scale layoffs even though it has a massive hoard of cash and remains massively profitable, just because some temporary trouble hits? Given the company can easily retain the staff from a financial perspective, and employee churn is incredibly expensive - it has to mean they really, truly they can't think of anything useful to do with those staff. From that you would have to conclude that management and the board are simply out of ideas for how to grow the business.

khazhoux 4y ago

Clearly the only good answer here is that tech companies should never have employed so many people to begin with. These tens of thousands of people were paid massive salaries and equity only to have that cruelly taken away when the company realized years later it can’t sustain all those projects. I implore these corporations: Please stop hiring so many people if you can’t guarantee lifetime employment!

WalterBright 4y ago

> Coming up with a scientific way of determining who is doing a good job and who is doing a bad job is extremely hard. In fact, it's probably impossible. On the other hand, everyone knows who the deadwood is on their team. > Cruel I know multiple instances of coworkers getting laid off, and being very angry about it. But a year later, they'd ruefully admit the company was right to lay them off, and they had been pushed off-center and decided to do what they really wanted to do - like start a business. More than one was laid off for coming to work high, and as a result got clean. They were, after a year or two, all better off and happier than before they were laid off.

jwr 4y ago

The dog analogy is terrible. You should never, ever consider your employer to be your family. The employer is not your friend, nor a relative. They are your employer. I really dislike the whole "let's build the team spirit and be a great family together" approach. It's dishonest, and often done with the (explicit or implicit) intention of brainwashing. Also, this goes both ways: I was an employer for the majority of my professional life. I had the best intentions and tried to be "good" and a friend to my employees, only to get screwed over many times in various ways by people later on. I learned that a professional relationship is different from a family relationship, and while you should try to be fair, you should never confuse the two.

uxcolumbo 4y ago
Interesting to see it from a (smaller) employers point of view. Can you give some examples, ie how did you do things before getting screwed and what have you changed after? What are your top lessons you learned?
- jwr 4y ago
  I don't want to talk about specifics, because these stories involve real people. But some examples from the bad side: I've seen employees quit right after an extensive training period, disappear without a word, fake being ill for many months to get social security money, fake an illness to avoid a difficult assignment, and sue the employer for (imagined, not real) theft from a company that was going bankrupt. I've also seen people steal equipment from the company to pay for their drug addiction. All of this behavior was seen in people that the company previously worked with for months to years, and believe me when I say the companies involved were really doing their best to "be good" to employees. We're not talking Amazon warehouse jobs here. More generally, I learned to treat the relationship as a professional one. I strive to be fair and play by the book, but no longer have any expectations of people acting "fairly" or "nicely" towards their employer. Similarly, I don't think anybody should expect their employer to be their family — business decisions are made differently from family decisions. I should probably also mention that my disillusionment led me to starting a bootstrapped business where I have no investors and no employees, so that I don't have to depend on anyone. All this doesn't mean that we all have to be mean or evil to each other. Everything can still be fair. But an employee should not expect a company to be "good to them", nor should a company expect an employee to be "good to them". There are business boundaries to how far "good" can go on the company side, and on the employee side there are people who err on the side of treating a company like family (wrong) and who treat the company as the devil incarnate (wrong too).

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technick 4y ago

I feel what you're putting out and hopefully one day we will be a better species. I worked for a company in 2013 which will always be the benchmark that I compare other companies against. They treated me like a person that mattered and the members of my team were definitely my family. The company cared enough to give everyone catered breakfast and lunch, massages twice a week, a game room, and the freedom to work on projects that mattered to us. I had to complete a briggs myers personality test in the beginning, came back as ENTJ. HR brought in a coach to talk about how I can apply my strengths internally to make the company a better place and how I can personally grow. It was a great experience and I doubt another company like this exists. I spent 3 years there as a linux sys admin (it became devsecops towards the end). I grew more in this job than I did in any previous position I held. When I was laid off, I started questioning my self identity and went thru some serious depression of missing my co-workers.

foobiekr 4y ago
What company was this?

jimnotgym 4y ago

> The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones I think this misses a piece of logic. A reason companies downsize because their growth plans didn't come through. Like at the moment where tech companies scaled up for the pandemic imagining growth would continue at that rate. So now we are saying that companies that made a sound strategic plan perform better than companies that had to rip their plan up and start again. Layoffs are the effect, not the cause. It is childish to say that layoffs don't work. When a company runs out of cash it dies. Losing staff is hard, but if you can't afford them you can't afford them. Most managers hate layoffs too, even a psychopathic manager would see it as a failure. So whilst layoffs may set back your plan, at least the company survives. For clarity, there is no excuse for being shitty to staff during layoffs. US labour laws seem particularly weak in this area.

majikaja 4y ago

It was always going to be either layoffs/comp cuts or no big bubble in salaries and hiring to begin with. Surely there's much worse to come? Look at how much compensation came down in investment banks since the 00s. It's not conceivable that these large firms require tens of thousands of geniuses to function.

jdmoreira 4y ago

If your employer is a corporation and you are loyal to them, I'm sorry to inform you but you are very gullible and naive. Be loyal to people and be loyal to principles instead.

pcdoodle 4y ago

This is dumb. Dogs don't cost $100k per year to keep in the house. Dogs don't cause the owners of the house to risk loosing the house due to the dogs expenses.

hyperman1 4y ago

There isa logical conclusion of this: The quality of an individual's work is irrelevant in a bigco. 1) It is generally accepted that the best people leave first in this kind of layoff. But 3 years later, the corporation is doing as well as the others. Hence, removing the best people does no damage to a bigcorp. 2) A post in this thread describes how regular aggressive layoffs turn the culture toxic, setting people against each other. But one common response in nature is cooperation: people form a clique, and exclude colleagues who could damage them. They make nonmembers perform badly by e.g. witholding information. This sers outsiders up for being laid off. An evolutionary pressure selects for people having the political prowess to survive layoffs, and against good performers which endanger the status quo. So a bigco's level of performance does not depend on having good workers. Instead, all this points to the work performed by the worst workers to be the major determinating factor for success.

spokeonawheel 4y ago

Disclaimer: I am NOT advocating for layoffs, I do agree with their cruel nature. However, this comment in the article is ignorant:"Sure, except presumably at-will employers could have done that at any time if they had hard data that suggested this pool of employees weren't working out." Here is why. Just because someone is at-will doesnt mean the manager has the power to fire someone without any repercussions. Management can be a political house of cards and "layoffs" is a safe blanket to wipe these people out. case 1: Another deadweight case is to rip through the relational bias. Fred is a very nice guy and he does an OK job, but could the market provide someone else cheaper and/or better than fred? since hes not excelling lets roll the dice and find out. Fred wouldnt normally get let go because hes doing just the bare minimum to get by and there is no case for such a thing. case 2: manager is incompetent(say it aint so!) and is hiring the wrong people. What a mess! how do you deal with that?! Time to clean up the whole department and start fresh. The obvious downside of layoffs is that all too often, talented, loyal, and undeserving people get caught up in the mix, but at least management "feels terrible about it"