7 ms·

Layoffs are always counter-productive as going forward employees take fewer risks, to evade being the one laid off. Layoffs kill innovation.

faeriechangling 3y ago
Intel is only around today because the leadership was decisive enough to lay off most of the company early in its history, and they then proceeded to release a whack of innovative microprocessor products after these massive layoffs.
- bdd8f1df777b 3y ago
  Is that sarcasm?
  - pavlov 3y ago
    It's what happened. Intel was primarily a manufacturer of DRAM memory chips in the early 1980s. They pivoted hard to CPUs instead when it started looking like the IBM PC clone platform is a winner and their 386 chip could define the industry.
    - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
      So what is Google pivoting from? They are laying people off from various divisions, it's not a strategic shift
    - hajile 3y ago
      Intel pivoted because they couldn't keep up with Asian RAM makers in the race to the bottom.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    What do you mean?
- kqr 3y ago
  I don't know whether your comment is true, but the way to do layoffs while keeping innovation as high as possible is to do one round that is big enough that you can and do give guarantees to the employees that are left behind that they have jobs for life. Multiple rounds of layoffs is what really takes your innovation to zero.
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    Well it is true and there's a book which goes into the details, Andy Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive", and it's a fantastic page turner. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/66863 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/66863
  - hirako2000 3y ago
    Dell has a talent to do the exact opposite. HR should hire your service. But they would fire you since they wouldn't like your advice. For the defense of big corp, finance is often told a figure as to how many in percentage to layoff. Not much more, not much less or you get added to the list. CEO? He also has to follow orders. Who's to blame then? I wonder. The practice and coordinated moves in the tech industry, and beyond, consistency in the pattern observed (and attested so broadly) led me to believe it is well intentional. Instill fear and anxiety to those who are left so that they stop claiming they deserve a significant raise. Will figure out how to innovate once we've regain control over the main cost: wages.
    - kqr 3y ago
      From what I understand, the modern Dell (much like many airlines, for that matter) is in a sort of weird banking/finance business rather than technology and innovation. They are really good at managing capital and that is how they derive much of their profits.
      - hirako2000 3y ago
        Yes. And while Starbucks offers a decent service, Dell's has rather become absolutely mediocre. I'm not even sure Dell has been that good at capital management as of late. His last good shot, and an amazing one, was to buy out his own company at a much undervalued price, with plenty of financing support from investment banks. 10 years ago already.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  How is this comparable to Intel? Is Google struggling financially ?
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    Their profit has been declining rapidly the last two years, so they’re cutting costs to turn things around. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38949755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38949755
    - faeriechangling 3y ago
      Funny. Here I was abandoning their products because they don't SUPPORT them. I dare say Google could have easily used their laid off staff to better maintain their existing products and through that restore confidence in their products and be able to achieve higher sales and profit margins.
      - andsoitis 3y ago
        Maybe. Of course it is up to them to decide strategy.
    - oblio 3y ago
      Compared to Covid boom years... let's normalize the Covid years to their past trend and add the 2022 and 2023 data points as regular years. I'm sure they'd look just fine.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  There are definitely cases where companies have true existential risk and layoffs can help get them through that. That's not Google. Instead, this means that now I need to go have a fire drill where I figure out who has been fired on all the teams I collaborate with and figure out how that fucks with my team's 2024 plans that are getting reviewed and finalized basically right now. I need to deal with the morale killer that is another layoff at just about the one year anniversary of the big one last year when memories of layoffs were on just about everybody's mind anyway. I don't know anybody in Assistant, but when I read this headline I assume that the reason there are layoffs there is because Google wants more people working on new LLM hotness and is unable to naturally transition people from Assistant onto Bard or whatever so they are just firing a bunch of people in Assistant to free up budget to hire people working on LLMs. That's not a mechanism for saving the company. That is covering up for shitty management and incentive structures that can't get people working on the stuff they want without this sort of extreme action.
  - htrp 3y ago
    > I don't know anybody in Assistant, but when I read this headline I assume that the reason there are layoffs there is because Google wants more people working on new LLM hotness and is unable to naturally transition people from Assistant onto Bard or whatever so they are just firing a bunch of people in Assistant to free up budget to hire people working on LLMs. That's not a mechanism for saving the company. That is covering up for shitty management and incentive structures that can't get people working on the stuff they want without this sort of extreme action. Which makes absolutely no sense because a ton of the DialogFlow data would make google's version of an llm much much better than whatever was offered by anybody else.
tarruda 3y ago
> employees take fewer risks Like going to the masseur during working hours?
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago
  Like working on things for internal visibility and ad revenue, not because it’s a good idea
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    That is an issue of maligned incentives, not layoffs. This community is utterly insane sometimes, and I say that as a staunch unionist. This is literally Google, a company with an insanely large number of engineers, doing an insanely large number of different things, due to massive and clearly-net-bad-for-society consolidation, and there’ll still be hoards of people that’ll claim that the layoffs were the wrong thing to do.
steveridout 3y ago
Interesting point but I don't think it's that clear cut. Twitter/X seemed to increase the pace of product changes directly after laying of the majority of its employees after Elon Musk took over. Also, when Steve Jobs returned to lead apple in 1997 he fired a significant fraction of the company before starting an incredible period of innovation. So I think a lot depends on the leadership and incentive structures.
- sabellito 3y ago
  Twitter has lost 70% of its value since Elon took over.
  - infotainment 3y ago
    Important business lessons from Twitter: try not to antagonize your biggest customers, because they might stop buying your products. In addition, if this occurs, make sure to blame external factors or wide-ranging conspiracies.
    - trashtester 3y ago
      Another lesson: Don't ignore the users, as one of them may get angry enough to buy your company and fire you and most of your peers.
    - baq 3y ago
      Another important lesson: do your DD when you buy a company
  - tgma 3y ago
    According to rando analysts who don't have a stake. Note that Twitter pre X as a business was unsustainable and I don't think it ever made a net profit in aggregate over its lifetime. It was all selling the dream even before the acquisition.
    - oblio 3y ago
ndepoel 3y ago
Not just innovation, but layoffs are also devastating to the morale of the employees who are allowed to stay. This I feel is a factor that managers tend to grossly overlook when planning mass layoffs.
tgma 3y ago
This is patently false. Tons of empirical evidence of organizations that have improved and innovated much more effectively. The world’s most valuable company comes to mind.
- okokwhatever 3y ago
  The guy is talking about slow dead. The kind of company dead IBM or Oracle? are facing since decades.
- oblio 3y ago
  The world's most valuable company (Apple, I assume?) wasn't the world's fifth most profitable company in ANY field when they did that, though.
karmarepellent 3y ago
I am not advocating for this but you could turn that argument easily around: Not laying off people makes them feel very secure which does not incentivice them to take risks and innovate either. At least when they are no inherently driven to push their careers forward. Edit: To expand on my comment: At my company the problem with missing innovation is not related to layoffs (which do not happen, thankfully). But rather that hiring is very slow as management thinks teams need to "earn" those additional resources by innovating instead of the other way around: hiring people that are willing to innovate.
zensayyy 3y ago
must disagree. A bloated company is the killer of innovation. Job security is no indicator for innovation. In fact, the most unsecure job produce the most innovative Tech (see Startups).
- lobsterthief 3y ago
  This viewport is very misleading. Startups don’t produce the most innovative tech _because_ they’re less secure.
  - trashtester 3y ago
    In a way, it's natural selection that drives evolution, by removing the unfit genes from the gene pool. This is arguably more important than mutation, and mutations would accumulate to be catastrophic over time without natural selection. Startups that survive tend to be more innovative than other companies because other, less innovative startups were less secure than comparable departments within larger corporations that were also low on innovation. The death of all replicators is unchecked random entropy.

faeriechangling 3y ago

Intel is only around today because the leadership was decisive enough to lay off most of the company early in its history, and they then proceeded to release a whack of innovative microprocessor products after these massive layoffs.

bdd8f1df777b 3y ago
Is that sarcasm?
- pavlov 3y ago
  It's what happened. Intel was primarily a manufacturer of DRAM memory chips in the early 1980s. They pivoted hard to CPUs instead when it started looking like the IBM PC clone platform is a winner and their 386 chip could define the industry.
  - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
    So what is Google pivoting from? They are laying people off from various divisions, it's not a strategic shift
  - hajile 3y ago
    Intel pivoted because they couldn't keep up with Asian RAM makers in the race to the bottom.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  What do you mean?
kqr 3y ago
I don't know whether your comment is true, but the way to do layoffs while keeping innovation as high as possible is to do one round that is big enough that you can and do give guarantees to the employees that are left behind that they have jobs for life. Multiple rounds of layoffs is what really takes your innovation to zero.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  Well it is true and there's a book which goes into the details, Andy Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive", and it's a fantastic page turner. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/66863 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/66863
- hirako2000 3y ago
  Dell has a talent to do the exact opposite. HR should hire your service. But they would fire you since they wouldn't like your advice. For the defense of big corp, finance is often told a figure as to how many in percentage to layoff. Not much more, not much less or you get added to the list. CEO? He also has to follow orders. Who's to blame then? I wonder. The practice and coordinated moves in the tech industry, and beyond, consistency in the pattern observed (and attested so broadly) led me to believe it is well intentional. Instill fear and anxiety to those who are left so that they stop claiming they deserve a significant raise. Will figure out how to innovate once we've regain control over the main cost: wages.
  - kqr 3y ago
    From what I understand, the modern Dell (much like many airlines, for that matter) is in a sort of weird banking/finance business rather than technology and innovation. They are really good at managing capital and that is how they derive much of their profits.
    - hirako2000 3y ago
      Yes. And while Starbucks offers a decent service, Dell's has rather become absolutely mediocre. I'm not even sure Dell has been that good at capital management as of late. His last good shot, and an amazing one, was to buy out his own company at a much undervalued price, with plenty of financing support from investment banks. 10 years ago already.
ChatGTP 3y ago
How is this comparable to Intel? Is Google struggling financially ?
- andsoitis 3y ago
  Their profit has been declining rapidly the last two years, so they’re cutting costs to turn things around. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38949755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38949755
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    Funny. Here I was abandoning their products because they don't SUPPORT them. I dare say Google could have easily used their laid off staff to better maintain their existing products and through that restore confidence in their products and be able to achieve higher sales and profit margins.
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      Maybe. Of course it is up to them to decide strategy.
  - oblio 3y ago
    Compared to Covid boom years... let's normalize the Covid years to their past trend and add the 2022 and 2023 data points as regular years. I'm sure they'd look just fine.
UncleMeat 3y ago
There are definitely cases where companies have true existential risk and layoffs can help get them through that. That's not Google. Instead, this means that now I need to go have a fire drill where I figure out who has been fired on all the teams I collaborate with and figure out how that fucks with my team's 2024 plans that are getting reviewed and finalized basically right now. I need to deal with the morale killer that is another layoff at just about the one year anniversary of the big one last year when memories of layoffs were on just about everybody's mind anyway. I don't know anybody in Assistant, but when I read this headline I assume that the reason there are layoffs there is because Google wants more people working on new LLM hotness and is unable to naturally transition people from Assistant onto Bard or whatever so they are just firing a bunch of people in Assistant to free up budget to hire people working on LLMs. That's not a mechanism for saving the company. That is covering up for shitty management and incentive structures that can't get people working on the stuff they want without this sort of extreme action.
- htrp 3y ago
  > I don't know anybody in Assistant, but when I read this headline I assume that the reason there are layoffs there is because Google wants more people working on new LLM hotness and is unable to naturally transition people from Assistant onto Bard or whatever so they are just firing a bunch of people in Assistant to free up budget to hire people working on LLMs. That's not a mechanism for saving the company. That is covering up for shitty management and incentive structures that can't get people working on the stuff they want without this sort of extreme action. Which makes absolutely no sense because a ton of the DialogFlow data would make google's version of an llm much much better than whatever was offered by anybody else.

tarruda 3y ago

> employees take fewer risks Like going to the masseur during working hours?

rrr_oh_man 3y ago
Like working on things for internal visibility and ad revenue, not because it’s a good idea
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  That is an issue of maligned incentives, not layoffs. This community is utterly insane sometimes, and I say that as a staunch unionist. This is literally Google, a company with an insanely large number of engineers, doing an insanely large number of different things, due to massive and clearly-net-bad-for-society consolidation, and there’ll still be hoards of people that’ll claim that the layoffs were the wrong thing to do.

steveridout 3y ago

Interesting point but I don't think it's that clear cut. Twitter/X seemed to increase the pace of product changes directly after laying of the majority of its employees after Elon Musk took over. Also, when Steve Jobs returned to lead apple in 1997 he fired a significant fraction of the company before starting an incredible period of innovation. So I think a lot depends on the leadership and incentive structures.

sabellito 3y ago
Twitter has lost 70% of its value since Elon took over.
- infotainment 3y ago
  Important business lessons from Twitter: try not to antagonize your biggest customers, because they might stop buying your products. In addition, if this occurs, make sure to blame external factors or wide-ranging conspiracies.
  - trashtester 3y ago
    Another lesson: Don't ignore the users, as one of them may get angry enough to buy your company and fire you and most of your peers.
  - baq 3y ago
    Another important lesson: do your DD when you buy a company
- tgma 3y ago
  According to rando analysts who don't have a stake. Note that Twitter pre X as a business was unsustainable and I don't think it ever made a net profit in aggregate over its lifetime. It was all selling the dream even before the acquisition.
  - oblio 3y ago

ndepoel 3y ago

Not just innovation, but layoffs are also devastating to the morale of the employees who are allowed to stay. This I feel is a factor that managers tend to grossly overlook when planning mass layoffs.

tgma 3y ago

This is patently false. Tons of empirical evidence of organizations that have improved and innovated much more effectively. The world’s most valuable company comes to mind.

okokwhatever 3y ago
The guy is talking about slow dead. The kind of company dead IBM or Oracle? are facing since decades.
oblio 3y ago
The world's most valuable company (Apple, I assume?) wasn't the world's fifth most profitable company in ANY field when they did that, though.

karmarepellent 3y ago

I am not advocating for this but you could turn that argument easily around: Not laying off people makes them feel very secure which does not incentivice them to take risks and innovate either. At least when they are no inherently driven to push their careers forward. Edit: To expand on my comment: At my company the problem with missing innovation is not related to layoffs (which do not happen, thankfully). But rather that hiring is very slow as management thinks teams need to "earn" those additional resources by innovating instead of the other way around: hiring people that are willing to innovate.

zensayyy 3y ago

must disagree. A bloated company is the killer of innovation. Job security is no indicator for innovation. In fact, the most unsecure job produce the most innovative Tech (see Startups).

lobsterthief 3y ago
This viewport is very misleading. Startups don’t produce the most innovative tech _because_ they’re less secure.
- trashtester 3y ago
  In a way, it's natural selection that drives evolution, by removing the unfit genes from the gene pool. This is arguably more important than mutation, and mutations would accumulate to be catastrophic over time without natural selection. Startups that survive tend to be more innovative than other companies because other, less innovative startups were less secure than comparable departments within larger corporations that were also low on innovation. The death of all replicators is unchecked random entropy.