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Every time a layoff is discussed, people talk about how the A players are going to leave. Seemingly, people do not understand that the A players could have easi

Every time a layoff is discussed, people talk about how the A players are going to leave. Seemingly, people do not understand that the A players could have easily left the whole time but are taken care of - already - so they haven’t. It is not that rare for critical employees to get grants as part of the layoff execution in a pre-emotive action, and now that I’m older I will note that I’ve been on the planning side of layoffs and this is fairly commonplace.

thaanpaa 4y ago
Not sure if it's true in Meta's case (and almost certainly not Twitter's), but from what I've heard, they usually tell the key people that they are safe a day before.
secondcoming 4y ago
+1, there are some quite juvenile sentiments about employment evident in this thread. If a company wants someone to stay they'll try very hard to make that happen. Not every employee is treated equally.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  Exactly. When I was younger I was shocked to learn that during an LR companies would “over” cut in order to fund retention for critical people. You’re laying off 7%? This is a good time to free up some additional opex, so just add a few heads above target in order to free opex to comp important people. You won’t get that 7% back but overage you do, usually.
badpun 4y ago
Plenty of A players might be assigned to pointless projects which could be axed wholesale.
- throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
  So "A Player" is on a pointless project not providing value to the company gets axed. The value to the company is losing with that "A Player" is nothing because the project they're working on is pointless. These companies could take a more twitter like "print out your code" or global stack ranking to lay people off but i don't think it dodge the problem people describe. The "A Player" could still be mad that all their coworkers got fired and/or the "pointless project" they enjoyed working on got axed and still leave. You just get the add cost, drama, and blow-back (see twitter) that a performance based firing would entail and probably open yourself up to lawsuits (IANAL) if you don't have an adequate paper trail for those performance based filings.
  - blsapologist42 4y ago
    But it might be better to move those "A Players" to a critical project (ads? lol)

thaanpaa 4y ago

Not sure if it's true in Meta's case (and almost certainly not Twitter's), but from what I've heard, they usually tell the key people that they are safe a day before.

secondcoming 4y ago

+1, there are some quite juvenile sentiments about employment evident in this thread. If a company wants someone to stay they'll try very hard to make that happen. Not every employee is treated equally.

foobiekr 4y ago
Exactly. When I was younger I was shocked to learn that during an LR companies would “over” cut in order to fund retention for critical people. You’re laying off 7%? This is a good time to free up some additional opex, so just add a few heads above target in order to free opex to comp important people. You won’t get that 7% back but overage you do, usually.

badpun 4y ago

Plenty of A players might be assigned to pointless projects which could be axed wholesale.

throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
So "A Player" is on a pointless project not providing value to the company gets axed. The value to the company is losing with that "A Player" is nothing because the project they're working on is pointless. These companies could take a more twitter like "print out your code" or global stack ranking to lay people off but i don't think it dodge the problem people describe. The "A Player" could still be mad that all their coworkers got fired and/or the "pointless project" they enjoyed working on got axed and still leave. You just get the add cost, drama, and blow-back (see twitter) that a performance based firing would entail and probably open yourself up to lawsuits (IANAL) if you don't have an adequate paper trail for those performance based filings.
- blsapologist42 4y ago
  But it might be better to move those "A Players" to a critical project (ads? lol)