5 ms·

This seems like a real weird strategy. Most often, a company's competent people are (at the very least) slightly underpaid and going along out of a sense of in

by Kamq 3y ago

This seems like a real weird strategy. Most often, a company's competent people are (at the very least) slightly underpaid and going along out of a sense of inertia. The day to day routine is comforting and interviewing is a real pain, and while I'd take a good pay bump, it's definitely not worth going through the entire process for a couple thousand dollars a year. I've had teams just shattered when the first person left because it reminds everyone else that leaving is an option. Forcing your most competent people, the ones that preform the day to day work, to get their resumes updated and practice interviewing seems like it's going to make jumping ship a realistic option for all the people you're relying on. Now, maybe half the staff or something is dead weight, and you can afford to offer the competent ones a ~20% pay bump to the new market rate (as opposed to the market rate when you first hired them) while cutting 50% of payroll, but that doesn't seem like what these companies are going to do. It seems like they're going to make everyone interview for the same salary they currently have, and I'd be rather shocked if that was the best deal most people with skills could get. This seems like it's going to backfire hard.

praptak 3y ago
Yeah the classic management by spreadsheet. Intentional "X percent voluntary attrition" might look good in a spreadsheet ("Y million saved in severance!"). Somehow it never takes into account that it's the best people who leave and those who stay won't have a very strong morale.
- flashgordon 3y ago
  Definitely a sad state of affairs. I've learnt to look at management and more importantly corporate leadership from the lens of macleod's theory of org hierarchy - ie org being a pyramid of sociopaths, clueless and losers (in the financial sense). This attrition biz makes a lot of sense as our entire economy is geared towards showing short term improvements by sociopaths who will jump ship before any of the long term impact comes into play or can be attributed to them. Why else would wall st be rewarding these crazy layoff numbers? Take meta. They reduced costs by Culling about 25% of the workforce. While a great short term financial gain, how has that changed the long term outlook re productivity to merit a stock doubling in a good few months (or was it a tripping?). Is anyone seriously beleiving this culling, stack ranking and doubling of workload and stress and infighting is actually going to attract missionaries? Or is it that just warm bodies would do?
rybosworld 3y ago
Yeah I almost don't believe that this article is real. They mention that employees have to do things like project how much revenue their position can bring in. That seems... insane. That's not the job of an individual contributor. Assuming this article isn't bait, then the management are very incompetent.
- kcplate 3y ago
  Projecting revenue happens practically every day for sales pros and to be honest, I kind of feel like it’s probably a good exercise for non-sales folks as well. It puts your contribution and compensation into more holistic company perspective and should make it very real to you just what kind of layoff risk you are at within the organization. If you can’t articulate your value to the company maybe your company cannot either and that is a bad place to be as an employee…
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    How much is it worth to build the pipeline that generates the movie poster images in Netflix?
  - rybosworld 3y ago
    "I kind of feel like it’s probably a good exercise for non-sales folks as well" That's really hard for me to buy. In a world where knowledge workers are specialists, why force everyone to learn the financial side? By the same logic - Why not ask sales people to estimate how long a new software feature would take? Also, comparing sales to any other role in this context is disingenuous. Sales already know how much revenue they generate based on each sale. Projecting that out according to some percentage becomes trivial. I.e., "I sold 100 this year, and think I can do 105 next year". It's barely an "exercise". For nearly every other role, the effort is so abstract that it's virtually useless. How does a QA/PM/Agile Lead measure their revenue impact? The answer is they don't. Because the work they do is part of a larger organism that generates revenue. It's the managements job to know how much revenue the organism will generate.
    - 3y ago
jacknews 3y ago
Exactly, it's one thing to make people interview if the new roles are going to be totally different, or if this is an opportunity to re-match employees from cut positions to other roles etc, but once they've updated their CVs and had interview practice, why would they stop at interviewing for the current employer only? All the capable people will use the opportunity to look around at other opportunities, especially as the whole process is going to be pretty damaging to employee trust.

by Kamq 3y ago

praptak 3y ago

Yeah the classic management by spreadsheet. Intentional "X percent voluntary attrition" might look good in a spreadsheet ("Y million saved in severance!"). Somehow it never takes into account that it's the best people who leave and those who stay won't have a very strong morale.

flashgordon 3y ago
Definitely a sad state of affairs. I've learnt to look at management and more importantly corporate leadership from the lens of macleod's theory of org hierarchy - ie org being a pyramid of sociopaths, clueless and losers (in the financial sense). This attrition biz makes a lot of sense as our entire economy is geared towards showing short term improvements by sociopaths who will jump ship before any of the long term impact comes into play or can be attributed to them. Why else would wall st be rewarding these crazy layoff numbers? Take meta. They reduced costs by Culling about 25% of the workforce. While a great short term financial gain, how has that changed the long term outlook re productivity to merit a stock doubling in a good few months (or was it a tripping?). Is anyone seriously beleiving this culling, stack ranking and doubling of workload and stress and infighting is actually going to attract missionaries? Or is it that just warm bodies would do?

rybosworld 3y ago

Yeah I almost don't believe that this article is real. They mention that employees have to do things like project how much revenue their position can bring in. That seems... insane. That's not the job of an individual contributor. Assuming this article isn't bait, then the management are very incompetent.

kcplate 3y ago
Projecting revenue happens practically every day for sales pros and to be honest, I kind of feel like it’s probably a good exercise for non-sales folks as well. It puts your contribution and compensation into more holistic company perspective and should make it very real to you just what kind of layoff risk you are at within the organization. If you can’t articulate your value to the company maybe your company cannot either and that is a bad place to be as an employee…
- hgsgm 3y ago
  How much is it worth to build the pipeline that generates the movie poster images in Netflix?
- rybosworld 3y ago
  "I kind of feel like it’s probably a good exercise for non-sales folks as well" That's really hard for me to buy. In a world where knowledge workers are specialists, why force everyone to learn the financial side? By the same logic - Why not ask sales people to estimate how long a new software feature would take? Also, comparing sales to any other role in this context is disingenuous. Sales already know how much revenue they generate based on each sale. Projecting that out according to some percentage becomes trivial. I.e., "I sold 100 this year, and think I can do 105 next year". It's barely an "exercise". For nearly every other role, the effort is so abstract that it's virtually useless. How does a QA/PM/Agile Lead measure their revenue impact? The answer is they don't. Because the work they do is part of a larger organism that generates revenue. It's the managements job to know how much revenue the organism will generate.
  - 3y ago

jacknews 3y ago

Exactly, it's one thing to make people interview if the new roles are going to be totally different, or if this is an opportunity to re-match employees from cut positions to other roles etc, but once they've updated their CVs and had interview practice, why would they stop at interviewing for the current employer only? All the capable people will use the opportunity to look around at other opportunities, especially as the whole process is going to be pretty damaging to employee trust.