6 ms·

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. T

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!)
    - bink 4y ago
      I'd argue that bleeding small numbers of people randomly and/or arbitrarily is terrible for morale. Firing those who aren't performing or whose teams aren't contributing is actually good for morale. People know who is and isn't contributing and are far more understanding when the layoffs are the result of failed projects or unnecessary cost centers.
      - jdmichal 4y ago
        This discussion is already in the context of layoffs, not firing for non-performance.
- munchbunny 4y ago
  The organizations that are using mass top-down layoffs as a strategy may not have the ability to do something more granular. And I don't mean that in terms of organizational size (though it seems inevitably correlated), I mean it in the sense that an organization's ability to manage its talent is a direct result of the quality of the organization's management hierarchy, which is the same hierarchy responsible for organizational bloat. If your management hierarchy has too many mediocre managers, you lose the ability to evaluate who is/isn't pulling their weight at fine granularity, so you're stuck with blunt tools.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> Nobody likes getting laid off. Much better than being fired for poor performance, too - "laid off because the company wasn't doing well" doesn't look that terrible on a resume.
- BizarreByte 4y ago
  Right now is the perfect time to get fired if you are having performance problems though. No one is going to think twice if you claim to be a victim of layoffs.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    It depends. When companies are only cutting 6%, I'd go 50/50 on circumstances vs. performance.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  Here's the thing: mass layoffs make it easier to get rid of people with performance or behavioral problems in a lot of jurisdictions. I had to let someone go at a company we had just acquired in Montreal a few years ago. The guy was underperforming and had a huge attitude problem (bursts of anger actually). One of the frequent arguments he had with everyone was that he insisted he didn't need to learn French to live in Montreal and was somehow hostile to the language. I honestly questioned why he immigrated there in the first place. Since this was an acquisition, it made it easy for us to do so. All we had to do was not to include him in the positions that would join the new company. Simple paperwork. He seemed to really want to come to the US but the performance and behavioral issues made it a big no. I don't think he would have passed the stricter requirements anyways. Some companies like Google will even have engineers at certain acquired companies re-interview to transfer. The North acquisition was a poster-child for that: almost nobody got a job at Google, not even the founders. All they kept were the patents originally purchased from Intel.
  - 3vidence 4y ago
    I usually just casually lerk on HN for topics I'm interested in learning about or generally topics I don't have expertise in. This whole layoff discussion had been an eye opener for me as to how uninformed a lot of comments are and just made on speculation. I was there at the North acquisition, the vast majority of people kept there jobs and so did the founders. People keep talking about these layoffs like they were done from some critical lens that can evaluate individuals performance. They're not! The layoffs are organized exclusively at such a high level the people making the decisions have absolutely no idea how the people they are choosing perform. These layoffs are temporary moves to get the stock price to move up, that's it.
fsociety 4y ago
No one is saying you should have 100% job security, or never be let go / fired. People are saying that these mass layoffs and the way they are conducted are harmful to society and not as beneficial to the business as CEOs and investors want to believe. Layoffs are not always a result of declining performance. We have seen several now where quarterly results point to increased performance but layoffs still occur as an opportunity to dump workers without much criticism.
- techsupporter 4y ago
  > People are saying that these mass layoffs and the way they are conducted are harmful to society and not as beneficial to the business as CEOs and investors want to believe. Exactly this, though I also propose as the end of your sentence, "...as CEOs and investors claim." We get told a lot of false or true-but-in-the-abstract motives. The McSweeney's article[0] nails it perfectly for me. I am in the gap in the middle, where stable pensions were on the way out at the same time as companies dropped loyalty to employees into the bin. So I started my working life with the cultural expectation that existed--work for the same company, or maybe two companies, for 40ish years, then leave the workforce knowing I'd be stable--and am now expected to cover all of my years of life solely from the resources I can scrounge together. This, in a word, sucks, and it's part of why layoffs--especially when companies are still hiring in other areas is so jarring to me. (Does it suck more than the generation or two who have come after me, who had neither the expectation of a pension or potential job stability? No! It's far worse for those later than me; their only "benefit" is people younger than me didn't start out with that false hope. They've always known they're screwed unless they can horde as much as possible in as little time as possible.) 0 - https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-have-made-it-impossible-for-me-to-want-to-pay-you https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-ha...
  - perfecthjrjth 4y ago
    Stable pensions are gone, that's why so much hustle everywhere: ranging from drop shipping to becoming slum lords through BRRRR investing.
BizarreByte 4y ago
> 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. Yah, only the older generation got a chance at that. I wish I could have one lifetime job like my older family members had, but like many things that basically can’t be done now.
jeffwask 4y ago
There are two different contexts around layoffs. 1) The company is struggling, losing money, etc and needs to tackle corrective action before everyone loses their jobs. 2) The company is generating record revenues, profits are high, but growth will be 4% instead of 5% so we need layoffs. There seem to be a staggering number of layoffs from camp two. > 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. It's also really weird to see: - Rescinded offers - People hired and let go in 3 months (not for performance but because oopsie we miscalculated) - Entire teams built in the first half of a year let go in the second half - People with 10+ years of exemplary service dumped without even a phone call. This is all also happening against the backdrop of low unemployment, high demand for tech labor, and a skills gap that's growing. The analysis was of Fortune 1000 companies which typically aren't companies that would be suffering from long term declining performance which would imply the layoffs are a reaction to a short term fluctuation rather than a long term trend that needs to be corrected. And I don't think the author is saying that laying people off won't balance the financials for that year or that quarter but that the ripple effects from a layoff can actually do more harm than the calculated returns. - snap back attrition - loss of knowledge - opportunity cost - lost productivity from demoralized workforce Nintendo is a great example of a company that when confronted with economic hardship due to bad strategy avoided layoff and instead reduced executive compensation. https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/5/4496512/why-nintendos-satoru-iwata-refuses-to-lay-off-staff https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/5/4496512/why-nintendos-sator... Satoru Iwata effectively stated the same conclusions this article did that such moves might resolve short-term difficulties, but always proved counter-productive in the long-term. Long term thinking versus short term thinking not surprising for a company that has been around since 1889 and has evolved constantly. It's almost like maybe investor sentiment and stock price is not a good metric for actually running a successful business. Just look at Apple this morning... Revenue: $117.1 billion versus $121.1 billion expected Investors are pulling their hair out because Apple only made $117 billion. Is anyone really going to miss that $4 billion? You'll hear investors and talking heads calling for corrective layoffs when in reality nothing needs to be done. They are still ridiculously profitable and will continue to be.
- pm90 4y ago
  > Investors are pulling their hair out because Apple only made $117 billion. Is anyone really going to miss that $4 billion? You'll hear investors and talking heads calling for corrective layoffs when in reality nothing needs to be done. They are still ridiculously profitable and will continue to be. I feel like this is hitting on something that hasn't been given enough attention: what happens when a company doesn't meet Wall St. "predictions". The consensus view (at least in the mainstream media) appears to be that this means that the company has "under-performed" and thus should be punished. But... why? Maybe the Wall St analysts were the ones not performing well enough? Where is the accountability in the other direction?

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!)
  - bink 4y ago
    I'd argue that bleeding small numbers of people randomly and/or arbitrarily is terrible for morale. Firing those who aren't performing or whose teams aren't contributing is actually good for morale. People know who is and isn't contributing and are far more understanding when the layoffs are the result of failed projects or unnecessary cost centers.
    - jdmichal 4y ago
      This discussion is already in the context of layoffs, not firing for non-performance.
munchbunny 4y ago
The organizations that are using mass top-down layoffs as a strategy may not have the ability to do something more granular. And I don't mean that in terms of organizational size (though it seems inevitably correlated), I mean it in the sense that an organization's ability to manage its talent is a direct result of the quality of the organization's management hierarchy, which is the same hierarchy responsible for organizational bloat. If your management hierarchy has too many mediocre managers, you lose the ability to evaluate who is/isn't pulling their weight at fine granularity, so you're stuck with blunt tools.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> Nobody likes getting laid off. Much better than being fired for poor performance, too - "laid off because the company wasn't doing well" doesn't look that terrible on a resume.

BizarreByte 4y ago
Right now is the perfect time to get fired if you are having performance problems though. No one is going to think twice if you claim to be a victim of layoffs.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  It depends. When companies are only cutting 6%, I'd go 50/50 on circumstances vs. performance.
908B64B197 4y ago
Here's the thing: mass layoffs make it easier to get rid of people with performance or behavioral problems in a lot of jurisdictions. I had to let someone go at a company we had just acquired in Montreal a few years ago. The guy was underperforming and had a huge attitude problem (bursts of anger actually). One of the frequent arguments he had with everyone was that he insisted he didn't need to learn French to live in Montreal and was somehow hostile to the language. I honestly questioned why he immigrated there in the first place. Since this was an acquisition, it made it easy for us to do so. All we had to do was not to include him in the positions that would join the new company. Simple paperwork. He seemed to really want to come to the US but the performance and behavioral issues made it a big no. I don't think he would have passed the stricter requirements anyways. Some companies like Google will even have engineers at certain acquired companies re-interview to transfer. The North acquisition was a poster-child for that: almost nobody got a job at Google, not even the founders. All they kept were the patents originally purchased from Intel.
- 3vidence 4y ago
  I usually just casually lerk on HN for topics I'm interested in learning about or generally topics I don't have expertise in. This whole layoff discussion had been an eye opener for me as to how uninformed a lot of comments are and just made on speculation. I was there at the North acquisition, the vast majority of people kept there jobs and so did the founders. People keep talking about these layoffs like they were done from some critical lens that can evaluate individuals performance. They're not! The layoffs are organized exclusively at such a high level the people making the decisions have absolutely no idea how the people they are choosing perform. These layoffs are temporary moves to get the stock price to move up, that's it.

fsociety 4y ago

No one is saying you should have 100% job security, or never be let go / fired. People are saying that these mass layoffs and the way they are conducted are harmful to society and not as beneficial to the business as CEOs and investors want to believe. Layoffs are not always a result of declining performance. We have seen several now where quarterly results point to increased performance but layoffs still occur as an opportunity to dump workers without much criticism.

techsupporter 4y ago
> People are saying that these mass layoffs and the way they are conducted are harmful to society and not as beneficial to the business as CEOs and investors want to believe. Exactly this, though I also propose as the end of your sentence, "...as CEOs and investors claim." We get told a lot of false or true-but-in-the-abstract motives. The McSweeney's article[0] nails it perfectly for me. I am in the gap in the middle, where stable pensions were on the way out at the same time as companies dropped loyalty to employees into the bin. So I started my working life with the cultural expectation that existed--work for the same company, or maybe two companies, for 40ish years, then leave the workforce knowing I'd be stable--and am now expected to cover all of my years of life solely from the resources I can scrounge together. This, in a word, sucks, and it's part of why layoffs--especially when companies are still hiring in other areas is so jarring to me. (Does it suck more than the generation or two who have come after me, who had neither the expectation of a pension or potential job stability? No! It's far worse for those later than me; their only "benefit" is people younger than me didn't start out with that false hope. They've always known they're screwed unless they can horde as much as possible in as little time as possible.) 0 - https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-have-made-it-impossible-for-me-to-want-to-pay-you https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-ha...
- perfecthjrjth 4y ago
  Stable pensions are gone, that's why so much hustle everywhere: ranging from drop shipping to becoming slum lords through BRRRR investing.

BizarreByte 4y ago

> 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. Yah, only the older generation got a chance at that. I wish I could have one lifetime job like my older family members had, but like many things that basically can’t be done now.

jeffwask 4y ago

There are two different contexts around layoffs. 1) The company is struggling, losing money, etc and needs to tackle corrective action before everyone loses their jobs. 2) The company is generating record revenues, profits are high, but growth will be 4% instead of 5% so we need layoffs. There seem to be a staggering number of layoffs from camp two. > 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. It's also really weird to see: - Rescinded offers - People hired and let go in 3 months (not for performance but because oopsie we miscalculated) - Entire teams built in the first half of a year let go in the second half - People with 10+ years of exemplary service dumped without even a phone call. This is all also happening against the backdrop of low unemployment, high demand for tech labor, and a skills gap that's growing. The analysis was of Fortune 1000 companies which typically aren't companies that would be suffering from long term declining performance which would imply the layoffs are a reaction to a short term fluctuation rather than a long term trend that needs to be corrected. And I don't think the author is saying that laying people off won't balance the financials for that year or that quarter but that the ripple effects from a layoff can actually do more harm than the calculated returns. - snap back attrition - loss of knowledge - opportunity cost - lost productivity from demoralized workforce Nintendo is a great example of a company that when confronted with economic hardship due to bad strategy avoided layoff and instead reduced executive compensation. https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/5/4496512/why-nintendos-satoru-iwata-refuses-to-lay-off-staff https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/5/4496512/why-nintendos-sator... Satoru Iwata effectively stated the same conclusions this article did that such moves might resolve short-term difficulties, but always proved counter-productive in the long-term. Long term thinking versus short term thinking not surprising for a company that has been around since 1889 and has evolved constantly. It's almost like maybe investor sentiment and stock price is not a good metric for actually running a successful business. Just look at Apple this morning... Revenue: $117.1 billion versus $121.1 billion expected Investors are pulling their hair out because Apple only made $117 billion. Is anyone really going to miss that $4 billion? You'll hear investors and talking heads calling for corrective layoffs when in reality nothing needs to be done. They are still ridiculously profitable and will continue to be.

pm90 4y ago
> Investors are pulling their hair out because Apple only made $117 billion. Is anyone really going to miss that $4 billion? You'll hear investors and talking heads calling for corrective layoffs when in reality nothing needs to be done. They are still ridiculously profitable and will continue to be. I feel like this is hitting on something that hasn't been given enough attention: what happens when a company doesn't meet Wall St. "predictions". The consensus view (at least in the mainstream media) appears to be that this means that the company has "under-performed" and thus should be punished. But... why? Maybe the Wall St analysts were the ones not performing well enough? Where is the accountability in the other direction?