4 ms·
Who ever thought good employees don't get laid off? I've never spoken to anyone who believed that.
by refurb 4y ago
Who ever thought good employees don't get laid off? I've never spoken to anyone who believed that.
- anothernewdude 4y agoYou need to speak to some CEOs then
- refurb 4y agoSince when are CEOs good judges of quality of low level workers?
- anothernewdude 4y agoThey're not. Pretty much my point. They do, however, have an outsize effect on the outcomes of firings, and whether or not layoffs will take place.
- jt2190 4y agoLook through any comment thread about layoffs here on HN and you’ll see multiple comments suggesting that layoffs only hit “low performers”. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34563311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34563311
- WWLink 4y agoYea most of the morons that say that kinda stuff are probably "low performers" themselves lol. HN has this weird complex of people who insist they're "10x" or "high performers" or whatever that want toxic culture because they think they're getting paid more than their peers. But they're probably not, and getting the "hank hill special" (shhhh don't tell your coworkers what a good deal I'm giving you here!)
- Blackthorn 4y agoThe layoff version of the just world fallacy is rampant on hacker news. Just search for one of the many layoff threads over the last six months and you'll see plenty of people saying that.
- moomoo11 4y agoMost of us early in our careers. Then we learn the hard way.
- tayo42 4y agoIt will be interesting to see if work culture changes after these last few months and if it does how. Hopefully for the better for the worker.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- version_five 4y agoI believe it. Obviously there are exceptions, when a whole function is dropped for example. And the biggest caveat is that "low performer" in the eyes of a company is does not equate to any kind of objective judgement about a person's intelligence or competency, it's heavily situation dependent. That aside, it's common sense that the people laid off are skewed towards those that the company doesn't want, so people at the bottom of what the company defines as performance. Companies don't just arbitrarily dump those who are making great contribution to what the company considers important, whatever they may tell you
- enneff 4y agoYou are assuming a lot of competence on the behalf of management which seems naive to me.
- version_five 4y agoNo, I'm trying to explicitly say that performance is subjective, and the judge of it is your bosses, the management.
- enneff 4y agoI understand that point but I think you’re probably off base in your assumption (that businesses will not lay off the people that they have subjectively evaluated as “best”). In my experience these things are handled poorly from start to finish because management in big companies is extremely dysfunctional.
- b4je7d7wb 4y agoLayoffs are to save money. Many companies will rather layoff 1 person making above market rate than 2 making below market rate. Performance is obviously a factor, but not the only one. If you have aggressively negotiated your cash compensation very high based on high performance during an economic boom you are at a high risk of getting laid off when the economy turns around. Imagine a graph with performance and compensation as axises, anyone below some slope is a layoff candidate.
- allenu 4y agoI've never heard this idea before either. I was at Microsoft when they did layoffs in 2008 (either that or 2009). I remember it was communicated that it was the job itself that was being removed, for business reasons, and they weren't targeting individuals for performance reasons. Now maybe behind the scenes there were discussions about which devs were "worth more", but I wasn't a manager, so wasn't privy to any of that.
- fbdab103 4y agoDepending on the scope of the layoffs, the event might also be a secret from the direct manager who is best positioned to rank employees. Which turns it into a game of musical chairs where an HR algorithm picks the loser.
- scruple 4y ago> the event might also be a secret from the direct manager Oftentimes explicitly became managers look like rank-and-file employees to the executives above them just the same way that developers look like rank-and-file workers to their managers. A former employer was hit with ~10% layoffs during January. A shockingly high number of people that were let go were middle and senior management, up to VPs and even an SVP that I'm aware of.
- bart_spoon 4y agoVirtually any thread on layoffs on Hacker News, including this one, has lots of people who apparently think this.