5 ms·

It doesn't matter where you work at, when layoffs come, the executives will care about location, timezones, desire on finishing the current project you are work

It doesn't matter where you work at, when layoffs come, the executives will care about location, timezones, desire on finishing the current project you are working on, (maybe) performance etc. There are too many criteria and no clear pointer on what is safe and what isn't. Being part of a layoff and also watching other colleagues coming from other Big Tech companies share their experiences, you'd see people laid off from literally everywhere: key projects, R&D (I was part of), sales, high-performing etc. It's a financial decision, the cut NEEDS to happen once the higher ups have decided and you can be cut, for you as an employee, anything can happen. Lots of R&D people end up being on the chopping block as well because you could be suddenly in a very promising project, but that the company no longer cares about, because some executive above even the boss of your boss told it isn't a priority.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
vsnf 3y ago
The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes. At one job, I reported directly to the still-reigning cofounder of a long lived company. Never have I felt a stronger sense of job security than that.
- vasco 3y ago
  It's different security. Like in game of thrones in that scenario you're as safe as your boss is, which will depend on the evolving politics. Even founders get housted sometimes, but I'd agree that I'd choose your scenario over others.
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    I can totally attest to that. I once worked for a company where the CTO that was 3-4 levels above hired me directly and I reported to him. It felt very empowering and motivating because I was working on what he considered a critical area for the day-to-day of the company. Once he was gone, I suddenly was a huge problem to all the middle managers that disagreed with the CTO. If you happen to be in that situation, better to watch Game of Thrones (which I did only for entertainment not for work-related reasons). Ignore politics (like I did) at your own peril.
    - mooreds 3y ago
      What would you have done differently? Built a better relationship with the middle managers? Kept your ear to the ground and left before the CTO did? Interviewed every quarter so you'd be able to leave and land elsewhere? Something else?
      - gtirloni 3y ago
        I think better relationship with middle managers and maybe leave with the CTO if it made sense (it didn't, in my case). I was too focused on doing things and assumed the CTO was taking care of "winning the hearts" of middle managers. He wasn't. It was a very top-bottom initiative and that rarely works when culture is involved. So yeah, I think I should have "managed up" so this initiative wasn't tied to the specific CTO but was a common agreement. If the CTO wasn't doing that, I guess I should have called his attention to it or done it myself. To be honest, middle managers not thinking it was important is just baffling but that's another long story. As for keeping ear to the ground, I wouldn't even attempt that because I really suck at that (and it's distracting, I'd rather leave). But many people have success with that approach.
        bomewish 3y ago
        There's a troubling/fascinating implication here: generally we just want to 'do the thing', but it's rarely that simple. Often to be able to just 'do the thing' you have to game out a bunch of this political/strategic stuff, and start maneuvering across those dimensions, in order to create or maintain the conditions under which you can just keep doing the thing. Yet the more you do that, and the more you think in that way, the less of the thing you're doing...
        maxrecursion 3y ago
        >>"He wasn't. It was a very top-bottom initiative and that rarely works when culture is involved." I work at a very large organization where the top is too scared to give any direction whatsoever, so it's middle managers and their lower staff henchman, that battle it out over major decisions with politics and schemes to get their preferred stuff implemented. It's more terrible than you can imagine, I never seen a more chaotic place. So, I just want to say top-down management isn't the worst thing. I'd prefer that to no top down management at all.
- vincnetas 3y ago
  Because no manager would layoff him selfs even if his position and project is obviously unnecessary. In other words only above people can layoff below people :)
- lp4vn 3y ago
  I already worked for companies where there were management changes at a crazy pace, I'm not sure that all of them got promoted and I have the impression that some of them might have been fired as well. I don't want to start a flame war but it's much easier to replace a manager than a technical person, a technical job is boring and most people don't want to do it while management relies more on soft skills, something that most people can do at a minimum level. Being a manager who's always employed is more about social connections, if you don't befriend the right people your job security might also be at risk.
  - forgotusername6 3y ago
    Most people don't want to do technical jobs? That's not my experience at all. We've had vacant management positions for months because nobody wants to do that role. We'd get no volunteers internally and only a handful of suitable candidates would apply from outside.
    - lp4vn 3y ago
      If you ask people who come here, probably most of them would choose a technical over a managerial position, but I talk about the general population, of course. Being someone who coordinates the work of other people is much more amenable to human nature than banging your head against a many times unintelligible mass of code. But you can always check on linkedin the many hundreds of people who apply to any managerial position.
    - apwell23 3y ago
      trick is to hire women into technical positions and fast track them into management. My company uses this strategy and almost 90% of low/mid management and admin are women.
    - avgDev 3y ago
      You must be in a bubble. Majority of people hate reading a document. Staring at a screen and googling would be misery for them. It is really the minority who can do tech for the long haul.
- apwell23 3y ago
  > The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes Last layoff at my company was predominantly of middle managagers and very few line workers. Even meta layoff was "the flattening". surprised by your comment. Is there any data supporting this?
  - vsnf 3y ago
    No data, just an intuition about being closer to the power centers.
    - apwell23 3y ago
      I guess that makes sense. Level 1 and 2 managers are not really closer to power centers despite being higher in the org chain.
austin-cheney 3y ago
In my experience there are two things that bring layoffs: poor sales and bad product management. When I was at Travelocity they had by far the best brand awareness and marketing. They also had the best pricing algorithms resulting in massive profit margins compared to the competition. Nonetheless they were destroyed in the marketplace. The biggest killer is that Expedia invested heavily in sales to the sacrifice of everything else eventually resulting in inventory relations teams 3-5x greater than what Travelocity could dream of affording. That was enough to achieve market dominance for Expedia. Then to make that worse Travelocity only understood growth which was a colossal strategic failure executives would repeat over and over. When it became clear to the original executive team they simply left the company. There was a later executive that doubled down on this and in one year converted a $100 million business to a $60 million business. That guy is still a travel industry executive. The final nail in the coffin is poor product. It would fail at checkout thereby dropping sales and those customers would never come back. It costs too much to maintain because of poor decisions about software execution. They would also make bad decisions about new initiatives until they doubled down on A/B testing. Then to compensate for all these product failures they would over invest in advertising which drove more customers off the site. Poor software execution resulted in my layoff from my previous job. The thing that has saved me from layoffs in the past was having a skill that was both essential and difficult to replace just by hiring. The thing that resulted in my layoff from the last job was a fragile product and the unwillingness to fix that product. This is why I have abandoned any kind of web related work. More often than not terrible decisions are intentionally made on the basis of immediate people replacement or immediate feature delivery without regard for how shitty or expensive the new feature is. So much of the time it feels like children are running the daycare because people with inadequate experience want to visibility and nobody wants to clean up their messes.
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  Salesforce layoffs had no internal cause - just "investors want us to cut costs". They selected people at random, and we lost tons of people who were essential and difficult to replace. Then they said "we can't guarantee there won't be more, and we can't tell you any way to avoid being hit". And then they said stuff about productivity going down but I didn't care, surprise!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

vsnf 3y ago

The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes. At one job, I reported directly to the still-reigning cofounder of a long lived company. Never have I felt a stronger sense of job security than that.

vasco 3y ago
It's different security. Like in game of thrones in that scenario you're as safe as your boss is, which will depend on the evolving politics. Even founders get housted sometimes, but I'd agree that I'd choose your scenario over others.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  I can totally attest to that. I once worked for a company where the CTO that was 3-4 levels above hired me directly and I reported to him. It felt very empowering and motivating because I was working on what he considered a critical area for the day-to-day of the company. Once he was gone, I suddenly was a huge problem to all the middle managers that disagreed with the CTO. If you happen to be in that situation, better to watch Game of Thrones (which I did only for entertainment not for work-related reasons). Ignore politics (like I did) at your own peril.
  - mooreds 3y ago
    What would you have done differently? Built a better relationship with the middle managers? Kept your ear to the ground and left before the CTO did? Interviewed every quarter so you'd be able to leave and land elsewhere? Something else?
    - gtirloni 3y ago
      I think better relationship with middle managers and maybe leave with the CTO if it made sense (it didn't, in my case). I was too focused on doing things and assumed the CTO was taking care of "winning the hearts" of middle managers. He wasn't. It was a very top-bottom initiative and that rarely works when culture is involved. So yeah, I think I should have "managed up" so this initiative wasn't tied to the specific CTO but was a common agreement. If the CTO wasn't doing that, I guess I should have called his attention to it or done it myself. To be honest, middle managers not thinking it was important is just baffling but that's another long story. As for keeping ear to the ground, I wouldn't even attempt that because I really suck at that (and it's distracting, I'd rather leave). But many people have success with that approach.
      - bomewish 3y ago
        There's a troubling/fascinating implication here: generally we just want to 'do the thing', but it's rarely that simple. Often to be able to just 'do the thing' you have to game out a bunch of this political/strategic stuff, and start maneuvering across those dimensions, in order to create or maintain the conditions under which you can just keep doing the thing. Yet the more you do that, and the more you think in that way, the less of the thing you're doing...
      - maxrecursion 3y ago
        >>"He wasn't. It was a very top-bottom initiative and that rarely works when culture is involved." I work at a very large organization where the top is too scared to give any direction whatsoever, so it's middle managers and their lower staff henchman, that battle it out over major decisions with politics and schemes to get their preferred stuff implemented. It's more terrible than you can imagine, I never seen a more chaotic place. So, I just want to say top-down management isn't the worst thing. I'd prefer that to no top down management at all.
vincnetas 3y ago
Because no manager would layoff him selfs even if his position and project is obviously unnecessary. In other words only above people can layoff below people :)
lp4vn 3y ago
I already worked for companies where there were management changes at a crazy pace, I'm not sure that all of them got promoted and I have the impression that some of them might have been fired as well. I don't want to start a flame war but it's much easier to replace a manager than a technical person, a technical job is boring and most people don't want to do it while management relies more on soft skills, something that most people can do at a minimum level. Being a manager who's always employed is more about social connections, if you don't befriend the right people your job security might also be at risk.
- forgotusername6 3y ago
  Most people don't want to do technical jobs? That's not my experience at all. We've had vacant management positions for months because nobody wants to do that role. We'd get no volunteers internally and only a handful of suitable candidates would apply from outside.
  - lp4vn 3y ago
    If you ask people who come here, probably most of them would choose a technical over a managerial position, but I talk about the general population, of course. Being someone who coordinates the work of other people is much more amenable to human nature than banging your head against a many times unintelligible mass of code. But you can always check on linkedin the many hundreds of people who apply to any managerial position.
  - apwell23 3y ago
    trick is to hire women into technical positions and fast track them into management. My company uses this strategy and almost 90% of low/mid management and admin are women.
  - avgDev 3y ago
    You must be in a bubble. Majority of people hate reading a document. Staring at a screen and googling would be misery for them. It is really the minority who can do tech for the long haul.
apwell23 3y ago
> The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes Last layoff at my company was predominantly of middle managagers and very few line workers. Even meta layoff was "the flattening". surprised by your comment. Is there any data supporting this?
- vsnf 3y ago
  No data, just an intuition about being closer to the power centers.
  - apwell23 3y ago
    I guess that makes sense. Level 1 and 2 managers are not really closer to power centers despite being higher in the org chain.

austin-cheney 3y ago

In my experience there are two things that bring layoffs: poor sales and bad product management. When I was at Travelocity they had by far the best brand awareness and marketing. They also had the best pricing algorithms resulting in massive profit margins compared to the competition. Nonetheless they were destroyed in the marketplace. The biggest killer is that Expedia invested heavily in sales to the sacrifice of everything else eventually resulting in inventory relations teams 3-5x greater than what Travelocity could dream of affording. That was enough to achieve market dominance for Expedia. Then to make that worse Travelocity only understood growth which was a colossal strategic failure executives would repeat over and over. When it became clear to the original executive team they simply left the company. There was a later executive that doubled down on this and in one year converted a $100 million business to a $60 million business. That guy is still a travel industry executive. The final nail in the coffin is poor product. It would fail at checkout thereby dropping sales and those customers would never come back. It costs too much to maintain because of poor decisions about software execution. They would also make bad decisions about new initiatives until they doubled down on A/B testing. Then to compensate for all these product failures they would over invest in advertising which drove more customers off the site. Poor software execution resulted in my layoff from my previous job. The thing that has saved me from layoffs in the past was having a skill that was both essential and difficult to replace just by hiring. The thing that resulted in my layoff from the last job was a fragile product and the unwillingness to fix that product. This is why I have abandoned any kind of web related work. More often than not terrible decisions are intentionally made on the basis of immediate people replacement or immediate feature delivery without regard for how shitty or expensive the new feature is. So much of the time it feels like children are running the daycare because people with inadequate experience want to visibility and nobody wants to clean up their messes.

lazyasciiart 3y ago
Salesforce layoffs had no internal cause - just "investors want us to cut costs". They selected people at random, and we lost tons of people who were essential and difficult to replace. Then they said "we can't guarantee there won't be more, and we can't tell you any way to avoid being hit". And then they said stuff about productivity going down but I didn't care, surprise!