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If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me

by matusp 3y ago

If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.

ParetoOptimal 3y ago
> If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? This presupposes a company can even somewhat accurately track productivity for the short, medium, or long term.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mankyd 3y ago
> is it a really a bad thing? It's great for the company. Not so much for the people. It's a matter of perspective. > The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here. Perhaps, but who's fault is that? Sounds like the company's problem. Who suffers from the layoffs however? Per your example, not the company.
- ytx 3y ago
  One relevant question is would the fired person have been better off had they not been hired or the job didn't exist in in the first place? It's far from clear to me, but admittedly doesn't soften the blow either way.
mathverse 3y ago
Yes. These companies are faceless entities, literal money printing machines where some people in charge are the gods who get to decide what to do with the money printer. They hold an insane monopolistic position. Often these companies utilize verticals which obliterate entire business segments because they are allowed to give products for free (MS Teams for example). This should not happen.
jimbob45 3y ago
Yes. Getting fired ruins lives. It causes divorces, suicides, depression, home defaults, and more. Firing and laying people off should be more painful for the company than it should be for the firees.
- runjake 3y ago
  > Firing and laying people off should be more painful for the company than it should be for the firees. Why? How? You start making it painful for the company to lay off people, I anticipate they stop hiring people to minimize risk, and then unemployment shoots up and presents it's own set of (some overlapping) problems.
euroderf 3y ago
Probably a good way to cultivate your garden of technical debt.
davesque 3y ago
For the sake of argument, does that mean all those employees were useless or does it mean the management isn't doing a good job of allocating them to effective work? I've been at a few companies that were rudderless and yeah, letting go of people wouldn't have made much difference because the leadership didn't know what to do with them anyway.
- pdonis 3y ago
  If the company is rudderless and unable to allocate effective work to employees, it won't be doing well. This is about companies that are doing well. At least, that's the premise of the article.
  - davesque 3y ago
    Not necessarily. Companies can be rudderless and have some kind of industry capture or brand recognition and still be doing great. In other words, at one point they had good leadership or built up during times of low regulation or economic prosperity and now are just living off those early successes. A lot of large tech companies are like this.
    - smallmancontrov 3y ago
      Yeah. The Google Graveyard really shows how far this can go. https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com The punchline is that in addition to hundreds of failed hobby projects, their stock is doing great. Monopoly rents are a helluva drug.
      - google234123 3y ago
        I never understood the complaints about this. Why shouldn’t a company try and do new things?
        thfuran 3y ago
        A company probably should try new things if they have enough extra money. A company definitely shouldn't develop a reputation for abandoning every new thing they try shortly after launch. Why would any company risk depending on a new Google offering for something they actually care about?
haswell 3y ago
> and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? A few issues to consider: 1. Many companies can continue to operate for a time purely based on momentum and existing pipelines. That does not mean that this is sustainable. 2. The lack of a visible dip does not mean the internals are healthy. Often layoffs are accompanied with an expectation to "do more with less", which generally means the conditions going south for remaining workers. 3. In an economy that is predicated on everyone having a job or enough income to spend money to support the continued existence of companies, it is not sufficient to look only at the output of the company itself. Bullshit jobs may be a real thing, but much of the system is built on "bullshit", all in service of perpetuating the ongoing success of the system. If every company could automate every function and there were no employees anywhere, this would obviously not be sustainable in the long run, and it becomes more apparent that the role of the worker is not just about the company's output, and is intrinsic to the whole system, and that's something we'll have to contend with eventually. I'm not arguing that this is a good thing, or that companies should keep people for no reason, but we're in an era where technology is increasingly disrupting core aspects of the system.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > If every company could automate every function and there were no employees anywhere, this would obviously not be sustainable in the long run Perhaps not, but I'm not sure it would be for the reason you are implying. What is this hypothetical company that automates every function and has no employess anywhere producing? And what price can that thing fetch in the market? If the marginal cost of producing additional units is basically zero, which is what the hypothetical implies, then the products should be basically free, since standard microeconomics says that price = marginal cost. Which means nobody would need jobs to afford these products. Which means this condition would be sustainable in the hypothetical as you state it: sure, there would be no employees, but there would also be no need for the jobs that no longer exist. Of course in the real world there are plenty of ways this could go sideways, but they all basically boil down to: in the real world, governments mess with markets in ways that prevent price from being driven down to marginal cost. That means many things (food, for example) cost more than they should, which means people need more income than they should need if the market were truly free. So what is really not sustainable is governments trying to mess with markets. If that stopped, we could make the necessities of life basically free. That would be a good use of technology.
ceejayoz 3y ago
“I stopped changing the oil and my car runs fine.” Sometimes problems take time to present themselves.
- google234123 3y ago
  How about “ I stopped changing my oil every 50 miles and my car runs fine”
  - ejb999 3y ago
    that is more like it. Or we fired 1/2 the scrum masters, so now each project only gets 50% of one instead of a FT one, and BTW, all of a sudden developer meetings get cut in half as a side benefit. Every large company I have ever worked for could have easily fired 1/3 the staff and ran just fine indefinitely - but only if they fired the right third.
    - p_l 3y ago
      In my experience usually the real benefit would have been if they hired the right kind of positions. No, not "hire better developers/etc". Hire for positions they don't hire because they seem superfluous. I think in every bigger project over the last 10 years I asked, in otherwise reasonably staffed companies, for a technical writer. Even part time one. Fohgeddaboutit. Sometimes the issue is, as sacrilegious as it sounds even to me, not enough managers. Because sometimes you need people whose only role is to be communication points, or people whose job is to be responsible and accountable. In most of those companies we could probably fire a lot of people too, probably mostly among executives and a lot of those invested in SAFe and the like...
      - valval 3y ago
        It could be you’ve been in the wrong all those ten years.
  - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
    Is Google doing mass layoffs every few weeks?
RankingMember 3y ago
Productivity inertia is a thing. It's common for things to keep rolling in the short term after a big layoff. Over time, though, the little things that so many faceless now-gone people were dutifully keeping going the whole time start to degrade and the cracks get bigger. It's not like these people were all working line jobs where there's an obvious productivity falloff like a now-unmanned conveyer dumping product on the floor.
- makerdiety 3y ago
  The difference is that now usually the conveyor is smart enough to stop conveying if it notices items falling off its belt. Human labor is becoming superfluous in the face of self-sustaining capital arising or whatever.
Delumine 3y ago
If only a handful of people are capturing all the profits, and everyone else is unemployed, homeless, and hungry... that's how you get a decline in society.
lp4vn 3y ago
If you have a project/company that's already running well and you fire almost everybody except a skeleton crew, you'd be amused but things don't crumble down instantly. Technical debt piles up and everything goes to maintenance mode, when you need the insight of the good people who left is when you realise that going to the previous state will cost you a lot more time and money than you might possibly predict.
- throwawayq3423 3y ago
  This is why I think X is worth maybe 1b, not more.
  - nebula8804 3y ago
    It depends. Musk has a great ability of burning his employees out to make up for mistakes he has made: (Early automation efforts at Tesla in 2017/2018 where they repeated the mistakes GM made in the 70s/80s, dumb mistakes in the early days of SpaceX when they tried to replicate what NASA had in the 50s/60s). In the end he succeeds powering through all the dumb decisions he makes and manages to pull ahead:(Tesla production and engineering is now seen as a innovation leader in the industry and not just dismissed as some dumb flash in the pan, SpaceX has no real competitors, maybe the Chinese will eventually catch them but no one else is even in the conversation). I have often wondered why so many people sign up to put themselves though this and I guess the clearest answer I got was when I interviewed some Starlink employees at DEFCON. They just want to be part of a team of excellent players and will overlook Musk's faults to be a part of that team.
    - jimbokun 3y ago
      In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, one of his employees completely burnt out and quit. Then came back years later because he was bored and wanted to be part of something cutting edge again.
      - nebula8804 3y ago
        Yeah I remember that. Honestly I wish there was some other organization that could rival the Musk companies. We need to spread out the power that he has right now but man I just don't know what the other guys are doing. Just today I saw the Rivian and Lucid financial results and they are not looking good. On the space side I'll take Bezo's Blue Origin but I hear almost nothing good.
carlosjobim 3y ago
If the people working for the company has finished making the product, then after that they would have to be tasked with making a new product. So, yes, if the product is delivered then there shouldn't be any dip in revenue if you fire the people who made it. Companies keep these productive people if they want to grow and deliver even more products. They fire these productive people if they're not aiming for more growth at the moment. I use some old software that nobody has been working on for a decade and it still works perfectly, to give an example.
kayo_20211030 3y ago
The discrepancy is time i.e. time for things to happen. All organizations have inertia and they will continue as they will until they don't - slowly, until all at once in the end. Maybe that company will retool with a new cadre of recruits, and catch up, or maybe they won't. That's the bet the mgmnt are making. Can I anticipate the next inflection, and if it's later than I expect, will I be somewhere else and outside of the blast radius?
no_wizard 3y ago
Why is anyone so quick to take the company side? For starters, productivity is a broad term, so without defining what it means in context it isn’t doing anyone any favors. You won’t feel the dip or record it until after the event happens, and often not right away. When productivity drops a year from now for example, that could be due to layoffs. It’s not always immediate in its impact. I also question this from the other side: why are executives who set the company priorities not also axed? They are the ones that ultimately messed up as they had poor strategic vision. Their ineffectual leadership is how it got there in the first place, if they aren’t gone how on earth do you know that it wasn’t their responsibility for the decrease in productivity? Logically one would think that axing the executives first and then seeing how productivity increases or decreases with new leadership would make more sense
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > why are executives who set the company priorities not also axed? They are the ones that ultimately messed up as they had poor strategic vision. Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not. And managing staff size is like 1% of their job. They're also busy running their divisions, managing roadmaps and objectives and all sorts of non-staff resource planning, etc. It's entirely reasonable to think economic and competitive conditions will probably be such that we should hire more, and then your competitive situation changes and you have to have some layoffs. That doesn't mean anybody made mistakes or the executives should be fired as well. It just means that nobody has a crystal ball. Very little future estimation that is done in the business world turns out to be perfectly correct. Sometimes executives do mess up in big ways and get fired just like anybody at any level. But that has nothing to do with layoffs in any special way.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    >Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not Yeah I think when a layoff is enacted, you made more than a mistake, you fundamentally missed something. Its outside the bounds of needing to be perfect or what have you, something went sideways in a big way, and unless you can actually simply trace it down to market forces beyond your control and you are telling me those people can't be productively moved into other parts of the business, then sure, we have some criteria for layoffs, but then we can be adults and get walked through the failures and how there wasn't anything that could be done. How many situations do you think this actually applies? I have been apart of 2 layoffs (not affected in either, thankfully) in the past 3 years. In the first situation, I and others repeatedly warned that our biggest 3rd party integration, which made the backbone of our business, was going to ban us for abusing their APIs and other business practices that we were doing, and we needed to address that. This was repeated all the way up to the highest levels, I was in the meetings with the CEO, talked about precedent etc. They didn't change anything. The ban eventually happened, and they never recovered, laid off over successive rounds, ultimately ~50% of staff is gone now, because of this very obvious strategic error. In another situation, they tried to blame it on interest rate hikes, but before interest rate hikes, we were sounding the alarm that we were on-boarding way too many iffy customers (its a fintech place for SMBs to manage AP) with out of bounds credit profiles, and that these new sign ups would dry up way too easily, we needed to re-focus on a better core ICP before we try to further expand the business, try and target customer segments with stronger business profiles etc, and this is prior to the majority of the interest rate hikes. I and several others made this case, and yet again, not headed, layoffs hit 6 months later, because all those customers either went belly up or had to downsize themselves, because they were too credit dependent. So what commonality do you think this happens? Because I have a feeling its alot more than is acknowledged.
occz 3y ago
If you cut off your leg, you'll have enough meat to last for a while. In the long run, you're going to be worse off.
asow92 3y ago
This is Price's law in action: https://nielsbohrmann.com/prices-law/ https://nielsbohrmann.com/prices-law/
- gilbetron 3y ago
  Price's law didn't really fit well even within the context in which he created it. Lotka's Law fits better. And they aren't laws, just heuristics, that the tech world likes to propagate as if they are laws, when if fact most tech people that believe they are part of the "square root people", but really just lack an appreciation for what is often really going on.
wubrr 3y ago
In many cases the company can run fine for a while... the systems that engineers already built will continue to function until a certain point. Once they start breaking/failing the company needs to hire additional people for maintenance/improvements. Often these are people who hadn't worked on the original systems and don't have a full understanding of the stack/systems involved this leads to many other issues... knowledge fragmentation, tech debt, maintenance difficulties, increased bugs, etc. I've seen this happen many times in large orgs, and the people making the decisions to cut engineers in certain areas often aren't responsible for what happens down the line and don't need to deal with the fallout. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
troupe 3y ago
Just laying off 10% of your employees is easy. If a company can identify the 10% of their workforce that isn't contributing anything, that would speak very highly of their management processes. And in any sufficiently large company, there are always 10% that are either adding nothing or are creating negative value.
datadeft 3y ago
Delayed impact is rarely taken into account. You fire people who's impact is going to show up 2-3-6 months from now. Same goes to maintenance. Stop doing maintenance you can save money in the short term. Should you stop doing maintenance? Should you fire this many people? Probably not.
brookst 3y ago
That’s one interpretation. Another is that that 10% of work is distributed to the remaining 90%, who now work harder and are more stressed, but well aware that they were lucky to keep their jobs and therefore willing to absorb an extra hour a day. Which, free market and all that, may just be smart business. But I don’t think it’s necessarily good management in the long term.
- droopyEyelids 3y ago
  This is an interesting thought experiment, because in that situation the company should cut another 10%, and so on, until they get some sort of message they can't cut anymore.
  - brookst 3y ago
    I think that’s what’s going on in some places. And the message that it can’t go on is that highly committed people who were willing to take on 10% or 20% more work just quit when it gets to 30% or 40%, leaving behind those who can’t find another job. It takes a while for that to show up on income statements though, and the quarterly results look great in the meantime, so it is by definition good management (by Wall Street standards).
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
If I went into your body and deleted all your DNA, you'd feel fine too. Chugging along. For a while. Here's another thing: the productivity that's being tracked isn't aligned with the value that the consumer is paying for. You can see this in government contracting a lot, where the consumer doesn't even see the product - they just see the paperwork. If you're really good at "producing" paperwork, you don't need anything else for a very, very, very long time.
- valval 3y ago
  Here’s one more thing: if I changed your slippers for a pair of rabid badgers, you’d feel fine. For a while. God, I wonder what kind of people are out there typing these messages.
mv4 3y ago
Productivity is a lagging indicator. Anxious, scared, overworked people can still be "productive" for weeks even months, it's just not sustainable in the long run. Similarly, many systems can continue functioning (seemingly without a hitch) when you cease all maintenance and preventive care. Eventually, they will fail.
xg15 3y ago
I guess that depends on what you believe the goal of all of this is - making a great society for companies or a great society for people.
- valval 3y ago
  What is this weird socialist take about companies being some boogeyman out there to get you I keep seeing on here? Companies are just collective endeavours of multiple humans trying to produce value to other humans.
droopyEyelids 3y ago
If your company did something that made everyone's job 10% more miserable -like maybe all salaried people need to work an extra hour every day to cover the laid off people's work- Productivity per employee would go up, and it would be impossible to really attribute any negative impact to the product to the layoff! But would that have been a wise decision for the company? If it was wise, the company should keep laying off more people, but how can you tell when it has gone too far?
dagw 3y ago
One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. A company I used to work for set up a team to develop a new product for a new market. After 3 years they were still unprofitable, the product was shut down and the entire team was fired. This obviously had no direct effect on the companies overall productivity. Was that team doing a "bullshit job"? If you fire the team doing R&D on the next generation of one of your products or the team working on launching your company into an entirely new market or the team the works on internal tooling or some of the people managing key account relationships with certain customers or suppliers or many other similar jobs then the company can absolutely keep going without a hitch, for a while.
peteradio 3y ago
Imagine there are 2 groups of people. The first group endeavors to automate and streamline their work as much as possible such that there isn't much left on their plate when the feature well runs dry. Another group has stymied every attempt at automation such that every deploy is a two day long process involving a dozen people. Who do you think management sees as replaceable?
theropost 3y ago
I think it's this is more of a real point. Honestly if someone who works in a large bureaucratic organization, the amount of people who do next to nothing is astounding. Is that a bad thing? Yes to some degree, however we do need to have jobs for people to do no matter what and if this gives them something to do everyday and they feel like they're contributing something then maybe that's all they need to do.
tehjoker 3y ago
It could mean the companies are sacrificing long term investment for short term gains. Maybe some of those employees are allocated to failing projects, but it's straight out of the MBA book to kill off stuff that maintains the company position long term or innovates in service of short term bumps in profitability. That guarantees large payouts for execs and shareholders.
stetrain 3y ago
You can make pretty significant cuts to R&D and see short term revenue and productivity stay pretty level. In fact it should improve your metrics since you are spending less and selling just as many of your existing products as you were before. Whether that is a good long term strategy is a different question.
insane_dreamer 3y ago
> that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch unless those 10% were working on things which may become important to the company in the future; a company that just "chuggs along" will eventually die
swatcoder 3y ago
> no visible dip in the productivity How did you measure that? How long are you tracking it? How are you isolating other factors? While you figure that out, what accountability does your organization have towards the hundreds of thousands of human individuals whose lives were just grossly disrupted and sent into potentially catastrophic strain? Different societies have found different answers to the accountability question. Whether or not the jobs were individually bullshit (almost all jobs are, as are almost all companies) has little to do with the conversation.
nytesky 3y ago
It’s simple. People stop taking vacations and work longer hours and make up the missing 10% of labor. You also no longer have spare capacity for sick days or people leaving, but that doesn’t all come to roost on day one.
Aurornis 3y ago
Companies reduce initiatives and headcount at the same time. It's usually approached as a budget reduction exercise: Company is reducing budgets by X%. Select which projects get cancelled. Now work with managers to identify enough employees to lay off to reduce headcount spend by X%. Now reorganize remaining employees across remaining projects, with the understanding that a few extra people will leave due to future layoff fears. The idea that companies like Twitter/X just removed a lot of employees and then operated exactly the same as before is a myth being propagated online right now, but companies must change their operations as part of layoffs. It's usually not obvious from the outside because the core product always gets attention, but side initiatives, internal tooling, new feature concepts, and even less-visible things (think bot/spam detection on X) lose attention that they may have needed. But no, the idea that companies are making 10% of their workforce disappear at no cost to the business is just fantasy. The only time I saw this happen was when a company hired so fast that they didn't have work for some people to do, but that mistake was quickly recognized.
- beambot 3y ago
  Enterprise Darwinism.
- salad-tycoon 3y ago
  Twitter shed 80% and still works, is still the go to outside of fringe empty echo chambers of the left and right divide. Not only that but they added a significant amount of features like Grok, which I know nothing about really, and Substack like payments. 80% is a lot and it works just fine. 7,500 to 1,300 in Jan 2023. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-than-550-full-time-engineers.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
  - JohnMakin 3y ago
    They effectively disabled the developer API via absurd pricing. That alone would cancel a ton of projects/teams due to the load that likely placed on their servers. The user experience is also not even close to the same, while they've not really added any new features that likely weren't already in the pipeline. Not even to mention their tanking revenue and valuation. It's not even close to a "working the same as before" company. Your definition of "working" needs work. Nothing you said contradicts the parent.
kouru225 3y ago
Or those people are doing work that takes a longer time frame to impact the company. Sure it’s fine for the next year, but once you start dealing with issues down the line you’ll wish you had been taking care of all that work.
insane_dreamer 3y ago
I'd rather those profits be spread out among additional employees (who might help the company either produce better stuff or give better service to customers) than to shareholders.
johnny_canuck 3y ago
IME (having gone through 3 layoffs), you can squeeze a lot out of fearful employees. I haven't be able to see that sustained over the course of 12+ months though.
kerkeslager 3y ago
> If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? How can you be so callous? This is why people don't like startup people. Yes, obviously it's a bad thing, because those people are now without a source of income and often without health insurance. I say "obviously" because it's pretty reasonable to expect people aren't sociopaths, and care about the well-being of others. It's only within your sick bubble where maximizing profit at the expense of human suffering is considered a reasonable option. Unfortunately, people like you have a disproportionate power in our society. I'm not saying you're a sociopath, I'm saying that the economic ideology which is commonplace on Hacker News makes normal people who believe it behave like sociopaths. Sure, in a society with a reasonable safety net where losing your job wasn't a potential death sentence, laying off some workers occasionally would be fine. But we don't live in a Keynesian fantasy-world, we live in a world where insurance companies have death panels.
- sadcodemonkey 3y ago
  thank you for saying this. the archives of HN comments are going to make a fascinating case study for the next civilization explaining why this one collapsed.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Would it also be preferable for companies to act as de-facto charities and hire an extra 10% (or an extra hundreds to thousands) of people in order to provide some of the people who are currently out of work a source of income and health insurance? If 100 fewer employees is bad; is 100 more good?
  - kerkeslager 3y ago
    > Would it also be preferable for companies to act as de-facto charities and hire an extra 10% (or an extra hundreds to thousands) of people in order to provide some of the people who are currently out of work a source of income and health insurance? No, that's a low-effort straw man argument. It would be preferable for us to stop trusting companies to provide for people's needs, and build effective systems for providing people's needs. A good start might be to stop pretending corporate actions are always morally good as long as they're profitable, and recognize that firing people causes harm to those people. That's not a difficult concept for normal people--again, its obvious--and corporations have spilled a great deal of ink to override basic human empathy on this subject. I'll agree that companies can't be made to work if they're required to act as charities, but I'll also say that if corporations can't exist without causing harm then I'm not sure why we'd want them to exist. The entire purpose of allowing corporations to exist is that they are supposed to benefit society. At the very least, if we're going to allow companies to fire at will, we need a much more effective social safety net to help workers pick up the pieces when they get fired. But of course these corporations will fight against that, because exploiting their workers' dependence is profitable, and besides, they don't want to be asked to pay to fix the harms they cause.
gordon_freeman 3y ago
How would you check for the visible dip in the productivity? and in what time frame? Sometimes it is not easy to measure the impact of layoffs on the org in the short term and it may take some time to realize it.
Spooky23 3y ago
Operations is one part of a business. Canning your development and marketing doesn’t affect that right away. Everything gets a little shittier over time. The best tech example is IBM. They descended from industry leader to desiccated husk, only sustained by legacy business and acquisitions.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
> The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here. Which part is bullshit? The part where, in order to survive, everyone* needs a job? Or the part where, because everyone* needs a job, some jobs might not be as important as others? *Y'all know what I mean.
pessimizer 3y ago
I agree. We are gradually discarding (again) all possible methods of resource allocation other than market capitalism, so we have to make up pretend jobs for people to do in order to give ourselves the excuse to feed them. For some reason, we think that companies should maintain this insane indirection as a public service. We're not paying people to dig holes and fill them up as a society, instead we're demanding that centers of production and growth willingly disdain productivity in order to subsidize people digging holes and filling them up. We'd be far better off directly subsidizing education, health care, or even customer service and scientific research than demanding that the real sources of all economic growth (and prosperity) have departments printing out reams of paper for another department to shred. Efficiency and technology lower costs and (when properly distributed) give people more time for leisure across the system. You aren't sticking it to the fat cats by telling them not to do layoffs; if you want to stick it to the fat cats, tax their profits and strip layers of economic indirection/middlemen.
eschneider 3y ago
You can cut costs and cut costs and things seem to operate just fine. Until they don't. See: Boeing.
yieldcrv 3y ago
I too rely on jobs, right now, but jobs are not something we are entitled to, especially forever jobs, and I cant stand people that act like that Accumulate capital, make it grow If you fail, your life is encumbered in ways that prevent you from doing that, there are limited programs in the US for you, but burdening corporations is a symptom
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
generally they keep chugging along (in tech) because so much of the work has been automated. As long as they can find people to educate themselves on the systems fast enough it's not an issue. I'm sure there's chafe in that 10%, but not all of it is.
corytheboyd 3y ago
Redundancy isn’t a bad thing, it’s what lets you go on vacation sometimes. It’s hard to know how much you should have, and it’s no surprise it’s one of the first things to go when companies downsize. Sure, some bullshit is going to slip in, but it’s still a bunch of human beings trying to make a living on this dumb rock. Software itself is all bullshit in the grand scheme of things.
altruios 3y ago
That people have to be employed artificially so they don't starve: is the problem. UBI has the potential to remove a lot of bullshit jobs, companies can run much leaner when they aren't responsible for a citizen's needs.
throwbadubadu 3y ago
How long do you allow for evaluating if there is a dip? And will times never change? And even if there is really none, then sure it makes sense from the company point of view and pure profit perspective. But if the company is well of, why lay off experienced, trusted and loyal workforce still? You always need slack room, like you need some money put aside. And another level, work puts meaning to our lives.. either we allow for other meaningful things supported by some UBI, or we should rethink if profiting companies really need to ultra-maximize, or how they can also do a little welfare for their employed work force.. imo it's a pity the employee owned model is not more widespread, and it is all for the few. But anyway, different end of a very wide spectrum. Certainly, struggling companies must get rid of the bloat, bullshit jobs, and evil within, if it needs that to survive and is the actual problem ;)
gumby 3y ago
What's your timescale? If you take medicine for a chronic condition you can often skip a dose without problem, maybe even two, but eventually you presumably revert back to where you were before treatment. I saw a lot of this back in the "reengineering the corporation" craze in the 90s (and then the "lean organization" and so on). They cut all the slack out of the system so in steady state everything seemed to work. But the world is not consistently in a steady state. So fire that guy doing backups, and save money by not paying for the redundant network connection you've never used. Stock goes up, prepare three envelopes, and retire!
ike2792 3y ago
As companies get bigger they tend to get more bloated and disorganized. A lot of initiatives end up not being worth continuing on, so they lay off the people working on those initiatives. Better companies will reallocate talent to new, better initiatives so they don't lose the knowledge in their workforce, but that seems rare.
derefr 3y ago
Large companies reinvest most of their profits as bets on the future — building new arms of the company, that initially do nothing but quiet R&D for months/years — but which might bring the company entirely new revenue-lines years down the line. Much of a large company's headcount at any point in time, is people hired to work on these bets on the future. You can fire all of these people, and nothing will happen to the company's day-to-day operations. But the company's stock will take a nosedive nevertheless — because the promise of future increased returns had already been factored into the share price, and that factor now has to be removed.
paulddraper 3y ago
HN: "Why do you need 1000 people for that? It's a weekend project." Also HN: "You can't have less than 1000 people for that!!"
taurath 3y ago
It’s a bad thing for everyone who depends on the company for their livelihood. The company that decided to hire them, the management that used their headcount to justify a higher valuation. People are burning out, working the jobs of 3 people and are told they’re lucky to have a job. It’s not bullshit if it’s unsustainable.
chrsw 3y ago
"these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch" That's not always true though. I've been on both sides of layoffs: laid off and remained. Sometimes the people who remain are asked to do more with less. I was even asked to do more with less pay at one point.
boringuser2 3y ago
Yes. Companies exist at the allowance of a nation-state for the benefit of the people. If the benefit is attenuated, the people, via government, can sanction the corporations. If the corporation is succeeding and paying more into the public till by providing fake jobs, what's the problem? They're not succeeding hard enough? I think the error you've made is that you've mistakenly projected your sense of "fairness" on corporations. Corporations aren't people my friend.
tyingq 3y ago
That feels reductive. Are the people left working 80 hours a week now, maybe? Are they sacrificing long-term goals to keep short-term productivity in place? Etc.
sobriquet9 3y ago
You can fire half the commercial pilots, and planes will continue to fly without a hitch. Why have two pilots, when one will do. Trucks have one driver and work just fine. Eventually some planes will crash, but it's ok as long as it happens after effective management gets their bonus and moves on to optimise another company.
- joshjje 3y ago
  And make them pay for their own diapers.
lazyasciiart 3y ago
You could probably cut every employee’s salary by 10% without noticing a visible dip in productivity. Maybe that means that visible measures of productivity are lagging indicators?
danaris 3y ago
"If hundreds or thousands of people suddenly have no income, putting them in a position of severe hardship and potential homelessness, but it doesn't have any direct negative effects on me personally, is it really a bad thing?"
tamimio 3y ago
Simply because the impact never happens instantly. Companies life span is different than humans, and just because you didn’t see it happening in the coming months right after they did, it doesn’t mean there’s no gradual decline, keep in mind this also does not account the gradual hiring after that event, they news will be reported that they terminated 10%, but who’s going to report a 1% hiring every month in the year after?
jjav 3y ago
> can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch They don't, they just stop doing some things and pile on extra unpaid work on those left.
scruple 3y ago
My productivity has been severely impacted, actually, without even going into the mental health / stress / morale effects. I've seen two rounds of layoffs at my current employer and today I am utterly and completely fucking swamped in work. New initiatives showing up in January, directly from corporate sponsors at the SVP and executive level, despite the Great Big Fucking Deal they made about us getting our 2024 "roadmap" to them in November of 2023. Bullshit jobs or not, I'm not sure why I'm expected to have to pick up the slack and do more work at the same time.
- gaws 3y ago
  Time to look for a new job.
  - scruple 3y ago
    You're not wrong but the tech job market is a dumpster fire right now, too, and, on top of that, I've got 3 young kids (twins are 4, singleton is 2) and a partially disabled spouse. I make good money and have amazing benefits, some of the best in the entire tech industry. And I've been through shitty situations like this before, so I'm hanging on for now... At least until my personal life chills out a bit.
theodric 3y ago
The global team I was in halved while I was at the bank, partly from cuts and partly from people deciding to take their various opportunities to leave and then not being replaced. By the time I departed with severe burnout, I had been consistently putting in 15-hour days for 19 months, and that as a fairly senior member of management (regarded by the business as an exec) just to keep our processes running. In Switzerland, that's not normal. But from the outside, yes, we just kept chugging along, so obviously we were finally the right size.
kaycey2022 3y ago
Bullshit job phenomenon is inevitable because the game encourages a winner takes all scenario for now. One or two market leaders keep accumulating all the capital and then instead of using their hires to move the needle of progress forward, they force most of them into some pointless hyperspecialisation or stuff like denying competitors of needed talent. All this just means that the balance of society has tilted to one unsustainable direction. Society simply needs much better antitrust (or other) laws to the point that every monopoly/duopoly is broken down and balance is restored. I will use twitter as a hypothetical example. If only twitter can raise capital to the point where it can handle enough traffic at scale and be an arbitor of global news, then it can easily use its resources and reputation to create and staff bullshit jobs without much consequence. To bring back balance: 1. other legal jurisdictions should ban or tax twitter out of existence over there and raise their own monopolies, for which they will likely need a global workforce 2. cost of investing in twitter or the cost of holding large investments in twitter should be increased so that the instead of accumulating capital in the market leader, people are incentivised to let their money be reinvested into competitors. This will be resisted by those who already have enormous sums of money invested into the market leader, which unfortunately also happens to be the people who make the rules.
hipjiveguy 3y ago
the data is the problem here - no one knows what the truth is

by matusp 3y ago

ParetoOptimal 3y ago

> If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? This presupposes a company can even somewhat accurately track productivity for the short, medium, or long term.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mankyd 3y ago

> is it a really a bad thing? It's great for the company. Not so much for the people. It's a matter of perspective. > The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here. Perhaps, but who's fault is that? Sounds like the company's problem. Who suffers from the layoffs however? Per your example, not the company.

ytx 3y ago
One relevant question is would the fired person have been better off had they not been hired or the job didn't exist in in the first place? It's far from clear to me, but admittedly doesn't soften the blow either way.

mathverse 3y ago

Yes. These companies are faceless entities, literal money printing machines where some people in charge are the gods who get to decide what to do with the money printer. They hold an insane monopolistic position. Often these companies utilize verticals which obliterate entire business segments because they are allowed to give products for free (MS Teams for example). This should not happen.

jimbob45 3y ago

Yes. Getting fired ruins lives. It causes divorces, suicides, depression, home defaults, and more. Firing and laying people off should be more painful for the company than it should be for the firees.

runjake 3y ago
> Firing and laying people off should be more painful for the company than it should be for the firees. Why? How? You start making it painful for the company to lay off people, I anticipate they stop hiring people to minimize risk, and then unemployment shoots up and presents it's own set of (some overlapping) problems.

euroderf 3y ago

Probably a good way to cultivate your garden of technical debt.

davesque 3y ago

For the sake of argument, does that mean all those employees were useless or does it mean the management isn't doing a good job of allocating them to effective work? I've been at a few companies that were rudderless and yeah, letting go of people wouldn't have made much difference because the leadership didn't know what to do with them anyway.

pdonis 3y ago
If the company is rudderless and unable to allocate effective work to employees, it won't be doing well. This is about companies that are doing well. At least, that's the premise of the article.
- davesque 3y ago
  Not necessarily. Companies can be rudderless and have some kind of industry capture or brand recognition and still be doing great. In other words, at one point they had good leadership or built up during times of low regulation or economic prosperity and now are just living off those early successes. A lot of large tech companies are like this.
  - smallmancontrov 3y ago
    Yeah. The Google Graveyard really shows how far this can go. https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com The punchline is that in addition to hundreds of failed hobby projects, their stock is doing great. Monopoly rents are a helluva drug.
    - google234123 3y ago
      I never understood the complaints about this. Why shouldn’t a company try and do new things?
      - thfuran 3y ago
        A company probably should try new things if they have enough extra money. A company definitely shouldn't develop a reputation for abandoning every new thing they try shortly after launch. Why would any company risk depending on a new Google offering for something they actually care about?

haswell 3y ago

> and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? A few issues to consider: 1. Many companies can continue to operate for a time purely based on momentum and existing pipelines. That does not mean that this is sustainable. 2. The lack of a visible dip does not mean the internals are healthy. Often layoffs are accompanied with an expectation to "do more with less", which generally means the conditions going south for remaining workers. 3. In an economy that is predicated on everyone having a job or enough income to spend money to support the continued existence of companies, it is not sufficient to look only at the output of the company itself. Bullshit jobs may be a real thing, but much of the system is built on "bullshit", all in service of perpetuating the ongoing success of the system. If every company could automate every function and there were no employees anywhere, this would obviously not be sustainable in the long run, and it becomes more apparent that the role of the worker is not just about the company's output, and is intrinsic to the whole system, and that's something we'll have to contend with eventually. I'm not arguing that this is a good thing, or that companies should keep people for no reason, but we're in an era where technology is increasingly disrupting core aspects of the system.

pdonis 3y ago
> If every company could automate every function and there were no employees anywhere, this would obviously not be sustainable in the long run Perhaps not, but I'm not sure it would be for the reason you are implying. What is this hypothetical company that automates every function and has no employess anywhere producing? And what price can that thing fetch in the market? If the marginal cost of producing additional units is basically zero, which is what the hypothetical implies, then the products should be basically free, since standard microeconomics says that price = marginal cost. Which means nobody would need jobs to afford these products. Which means this condition would be sustainable in the hypothetical as you state it: sure, there would be no employees, but there would also be no need for the jobs that no longer exist. Of course in the real world there are plenty of ways this could go sideways, but they all basically boil down to: in the real world, governments mess with markets in ways that prevent price from being driven down to marginal cost. That means many things (food, for example) cost more than they should, which means people need more income than they should need if the market were truly free. So what is really not sustainable is governments trying to mess with markets. If that stopped, we could make the necessities of life basically free. That would be a good use of technology.

ceejayoz 3y ago

“I stopped changing the oil and my car runs fine.” Sometimes problems take time to present themselves.

google234123 3y ago
How about “ I stopped changing my oil every 50 miles and my car runs fine”
- ejb999 3y ago
  that is more like it. Or we fired 1/2 the scrum masters, so now each project only gets 50% of one instead of a FT one, and BTW, all of a sudden developer meetings get cut in half as a side benefit. Every large company I have ever worked for could have easily fired 1/3 the staff and ran just fine indefinitely - but only if they fired the right third.
  - p_l 3y ago
    In my experience usually the real benefit would have been if they hired the right kind of positions. No, not "hire better developers/etc". Hire for positions they don't hire because they seem superfluous. I think in every bigger project over the last 10 years I asked, in otherwise reasonably staffed companies, for a technical writer. Even part time one. Fohgeddaboutit. Sometimes the issue is, as sacrilegious as it sounds even to me, not enough managers. Because sometimes you need people whose only role is to be communication points, or people whose job is to be responsible and accountable. In most of those companies we could probably fire a lot of people too, probably mostly among executives and a lot of those invested in SAFe and the like...
    - valval 3y ago
      It could be you’ve been in the wrong all those ten years.
- EchoChamberMan 3y ago
  Is Google doing mass layoffs every few weeks?

RankingMember 3y ago

Productivity inertia is a thing. It's common for things to keep rolling in the short term after a big layoff. Over time, though, the little things that so many faceless now-gone people were dutifully keeping going the whole time start to degrade and the cracks get bigger. It's not like these people were all working line jobs where there's an obvious productivity falloff like a now-unmanned conveyer dumping product on the floor.

makerdiety 3y ago
The difference is that now usually the conveyor is smart enough to stop conveying if it notices items falling off its belt. Human labor is becoming superfluous in the face of self-sustaining capital arising or whatever.

Delumine 3y ago

If only a handful of people are capturing all the profits, and everyone else is unemployed, homeless, and hungry... that's how you get a decline in society.

lp4vn 3y ago

If you have a project/company that's already running well and you fire almost everybody except a skeleton crew, you'd be amused but things don't crumble down instantly. Technical debt piles up and everything goes to maintenance mode, when you need the insight of the good people who left is when you realise that going to the previous state will cost you a lot more time and money than you might possibly predict.

throwawayq3423 3y ago
This is why I think X is worth maybe 1b, not more.
- nebula8804 3y ago
  It depends. Musk has a great ability of burning his employees out to make up for mistakes he has made: (Early automation efforts at Tesla in 2017/2018 where they repeated the mistakes GM made in the 70s/80s, dumb mistakes in the early days of SpaceX when they tried to replicate what NASA had in the 50s/60s). In the end he succeeds powering through all the dumb decisions he makes and manages to pull ahead:(Tesla production and engineering is now seen as a innovation leader in the industry and not just dismissed as some dumb flash in the pan, SpaceX has no real competitors, maybe the Chinese will eventually catch them but no one else is even in the conversation). I have often wondered why so many people sign up to put themselves though this and I guess the clearest answer I got was when I interviewed some Starlink employees at DEFCON. They just want to be part of a team of excellent players and will overlook Musk's faults to be a part of that team.
  - jimbokun 3y ago
    In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, one of his employees completely burnt out and quit. Then came back years later because he was bored and wanted to be part of something cutting edge again.
    - nebula8804 3y ago
      Yeah I remember that. Honestly I wish there was some other organization that could rival the Musk companies. We need to spread out the power that he has right now but man I just don't know what the other guys are doing. Just today I saw the Rivian and Lucid financial results and they are not looking good. On the space side I'll take Bezo's Blue Origin but I hear almost nothing good.

carlosjobim 3y ago

If the people working for the company has finished making the product, then after that they would have to be tasked with making a new product. So, yes, if the product is delivered then there shouldn't be any dip in revenue if you fire the people who made it. Companies keep these productive people if they want to grow and deliver even more products. They fire these productive people if they're not aiming for more growth at the moment. I use some old software that nobody has been working on for a decade and it still works perfectly, to give an example.

kayo_20211030 3y ago

The discrepancy is time i.e. time for things to happen. All organizations have inertia and they will continue as they will until they don't - slowly, until all at once in the end. Maybe that company will retool with a new cadre of recruits, and catch up, or maybe they won't. That's the bet the mgmnt are making. Can I anticipate the next inflection, and if it's later than I expect, will I be somewhere else and outside of the blast radius?

no_wizard 3y ago

Why is anyone so quick to take the company side? For starters, productivity is a broad term, so without defining what it means in context it isn’t doing anyone any favors. You won’t feel the dip or record it until after the event happens, and often not right away. When productivity drops a year from now for example, that could be due to layoffs. It’s not always immediate in its impact. I also question this from the other side: why are executives who set the company priorities not also axed? They are the ones that ultimately messed up as they had poor strategic vision. Their ineffectual leadership is how it got there in the first place, if they aren’t gone how on earth do you know that it wasn’t their responsibility for the decrease in productivity? Logically one would think that axing the executives first and then seeing how productivity increases or decreases with new leadership would make more sense

crazygringo 3y ago
> why are executives who set the company priorities not also axed? They are the ones that ultimately messed up as they had poor strategic vision. Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not. And managing staff size is like 1% of their job. They're also busy running their divisions, managing roadmaps and objectives and all sorts of non-staff resource planning, etc. It's entirely reasonable to think economic and competitive conditions will probably be such that we should hire more, and then your competitive situation changes and you have to have some layoffs. That doesn't mean anybody made mistakes or the executives should be fired as well. It just means that nobody has a crystal ball. Very little future estimation that is done in the business world turns out to be perfectly correct. Sometimes executives do mess up in big ways and get fired just like anybody at any level. But that has nothing to do with layoffs in any special way.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  >Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not Yeah I think when a layoff is enacted, you made more than a mistake, you fundamentally missed something. Its outside the bounds of needing to be perfect or what have you, something went sideways in a big way, and unless you can actually simply trace it down to market forces beyond your control and you are telling me those people can't be productively moved into other parts of the business, then sure, we have some criteria for layoffs, but then we can be adults and get walked through the failures and how there wasn't anything that could be done. How many situations do you think this actually applies? I have been apart of 2 layoffs (not affected in either, thankfully) in the past 3 years. In the first situation, I and others repeatedly warned that our biggest 3rd party integration, which made the backbone of our business, was going to ban us for abusing their APIs and other business practices that we were doing, and we needed to address that. This was repeated all the way up to the highest levels, I was in the meetings with the CEO, talked about precedent etc. They didn't change anything. The ban eventually happened, and they never recovered, laid off over successive rounds, ultimately ~50% of staff is gone now, because of this very obvious strategic error. In another situation, they tried to blame it on interest rate hikes, but before interest rate hikes, we were sounding the alarm that we were on-boarding way too many iffy customers (its a fintech place for SMBs to manage AP) with out of bounds credit profiles, and that these new sign ups would dry up way too easily, we needed to re-focus on a better core ICP before we try to further expand the business, try and target customer segments with stronger business profiles etc, and this is prior to the majority of the interest rate hikes. I and several others made this case, and yet again, not headed, layoffs hit 6 months later, because all those customers either went belly up or had to downsize themselves, because they were too credit dependent. So what commonality do you think this happens? Because I have a feeling its alot more than is acknowledged.

occz 3y ago

If you cut off your leg, you'll have enough meat to last for a while. In the long run, you're going to be worse off.

asow92 3y ago

This is Price's law in action: https://nielsbohrmann.com/prices-law/ https://nielsbohrmann.com/prices-law/

gilbetron 3y ago
Price's law didn't really fit well even within the context in which he created it. Lotka's Law fits better. And they aren't laws, just heuristics, that the tech world likes to propagate as if they are laws, when if fact most tech people that believe they are part of the "square root people", but really just lack an appreciation for what is often really going on.

wubrr 3y ago

In many cases the company can run fine for a while... the systems that engineers already built will continue to function until a certain point. Once they start breaking/failing the company needs to hire additional people for maintenance/improvements. Often these are people who hadn't worked on the original systems and don't have a full understanding of the stack/systems involved this leads to many other issues... knowledge fragmentation, tech debt, maintenance difficulties, increased bugs, etc. I've seen this happen many times in large orgs, and the people making the decisions to cut engineers in certain areas often aren't responsible for what happens down the line and don't need to deal with the fallout. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

troupe 3y ago

Just laying off 10% of your employees is easy. If a company can identify the 10% of their workforce that isn't contributing anything, that would speak very highly of their management processes. And in any sufficiently large company, there are always 10% that are either adding nothing or are creating negative value.

datadeft 3y ago

Delayed impact is rarely taken into account. You fire people who's impact is going to show up 2-3-6 months from now. Same goes to maintenance. Stop doing maintenance you can save money in the short term. Should you stop doing maintenance? Should you fire this many people? Probably not.

brookst 3y ago

That’s one interpretation. Another is that that 10% of work is distributed to the remaining 90%, who now work harder and are more stressed, but well aware that they were lucky to keep their jobs and therefore willing to absorb an extra hour a day. Which, free market and all that, may just be smart business. But I don’t think it’s necessarily good management in the long term.

droopyEyelids 3y ago
This is an interesting thought experiment, because in that situation the company should cut another 10%, and so on, until they get some sort of message they can't cut anymore.
- brookst 3y ago
  I think that’s what’s going on in some places. And the message that it can’t go on is that highly committed people who were willing to take on 10% or 20% more work just quit when it gets to 30% or 40%, leaving behind those who can’t find another job. It takes a while for that to show up on income statements though, and the quarterly results look great in the meantime, so it is by definition good management (by Wall Street standards).

MilStdJunkie 3y ago

If I went into your body and deleted all your DNA, you'd feel fine too. Chugging along. For a while. Here's another thing: the productivity that's being tracked isn't aligned with the value that the consumer is paying for. You can see this in government contracting a lot, where the consumer doesn't even see the product - they just see the paperwork. If you're really good at "producing" paperwork, you don't need anything else for a very, very, very long time.

valval 3y ago
Here’s one more thing: if I changed your slippers for a pair of rabid badgers, you’d feel fine. For a while. God, I wonder what kind of people are out there typing these messages.

mv4 3y ago

Productivity is a lagging indicator. Anxious, scared, overworked people can still be "productive" for weeks even months, it's just not sustainable in the long run. Similarly, many systems can continue functioning (seemingly without a hitch) when you cease all maintenance and preventive care. Eventually, they will fail.

xg15 3y ago

I guess that depends on what you believe the goal of all of this is - making a great society for companies or a great society for people.

valval 3y ago
What is this weird socialist take about companies being some boogeyman out there to get you I keep seeing on here? Companies are just collective endeavours of multiple humans trying to produce value to other humans.

droopyEyelids 3y ago

If your company did something that made everyone's job 10% more miserable -like maybe all salaried people need to work an extra hour every day to cover the laid off people's work- Productivity per employee would go up, and it would be impossible to really attribute any negative impact to the product to the layoff! But would that have been a wise decision for the company? If it was wise, the company should keep laying off more people, but how can you tell when it has gone too far?

dagw 3y ago

One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. A company I used to work for set up a team to develop a new product for a new market. After 3 years they were still unprofitable, the product was shut down and the entire team was fired. This obviously had no direct effect on the companies overall productivity. Was that team doing a "bullshit job"? If you fire the team doing R&D on the next generation of one of your products or the team working on launching your company into an entirely new market or the team the works on internal tooling or some of the people managing key account relationships with certain customers or suppliers or many other similar jobs then the company can absolutely keep going without a hitch, for a while.

peteradio 3y ago

Imagine there are 2 groups of people. The first group endeavors to automate and streamline their work as much as possible such that there isn't much left on their plate when the feature well runs dry. Another group has stymied every attempt at automation such that every deploy is a two day long process involving a dozen people. Who do you think management sees as replaceable?

theropost 3y ago

I think it's this is more of a real point. Honestly if someone who works in a large bureaucratic organization, the amount of people who do next to nothing is astounding. Is that a bad thing? Yes to some degree, however we do need to have jobs for people to do no matter what and if this gives them something to do everyday and they feel like they're contributing something then maybe that's all they need to do.

tehjoker 3y ago

It could mean the companies are sacrificing long term investment for short term gains. Maybe some of those employees are allocated to failing projects, but it's straight out of the MBA book to kill off stuff that maintains the company position long term or innovates in service of short term bumps in profitability. That guarantees large payouts for execs and shareholders.

stetrain 3y ago

You can make pretty significant cuts to R&D and see short term revenue and productivity stay pretty level. In fact it should improve your metrics since you are spending less and selling just as many of your existing products as you were before. Whether that is a good long term strategy is a different question.

insane_dreamer 3y ago

> that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch unless those 10% were working on things which may become important to the company in the future; a company that just "chuggs along" will eventually die

swatcoder 3y ago

> no visible dip in the productivity How did you measure that? How long are you tracking it? How are you isolating other factors? While you figure that out, what accountability does your organization have towards the hundreds of thousands of human individuals whose lives were just grossly disrupted and sent into potentially catastrophic strain? Different societies have found different answers to the accountability question. Whether or not the jobs were individually bullshit (almost all jobs are, as are almost all companies) has little to do with the conversation.

nytesky 3y ago

It’s simple. People stop taking vacations and work longer hours and make up the missing 10% of labor. You also no longer have spare capacity for sick days or people leaving, but that doesn’t all come to roost on day one.

Aurornis 3y ago

Companies reduce initiatives and headcount at the same time. It's usually approached as a budget reduction exercise: Company is reducing budgets by X%. Select which projects get cancelled. Now work with managers to identify enough employees to lay off to reduce headcount spend by X%. Now reorganize remaining employees across remaining projects, with the understanding that a few extra people will leave due to future layoff fears. The idea that companies like Twitter/X just removed a lot of employees and then operated exactly the same as before is a myth being propagated online right now, but companies must change their operations as part of layoffs. It's usually not obvious from the outside because the core product always gets attention, but side initiatives, internal tooling, new feature concepts, and even less-visible things (think bot/spam detection on X) lose attention that they may have needed. But no, the idea that companies are making 10% of their workforce disappear at no cost to the business is just fantasy. The only time I saw this happen was when a company hired so fast that they didn't have work for some people to do, but that mistake was quickly recognized.

beambot 3y ago
Enterprise Darwinism.
salad-tycoon 3y ago
Twitter shed 80% and still works, is still the go to outside of fringe empty echo chambers of the left and right divide. Not only that but they added a significant amount of features like Grok, which I know nothing about really, and Substack like payments. 80% is a lot and it works just fine. 7,500 to 1,300 in Jan 2023. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-than-550-full-time-engineers.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  They effectively disabled the developer API via absurd pricing. That alone would cancel a ton of projects/teams due to the load that likely placed on their servers. The user experience is also not even close to the same, while they've not really added any new features that likely weren't already in the pipeline. Not even to mention their tanking revenue and valuation. It's not even close to a "working the same as before" company. Your definition of "working" needs work. Nothing you said contradicts the parent.

kouru225 3y ago

Or those people are doing work that takes a longer time frame to impact the company. Sure it’s fine for the next year, but once you start dealing with issues down the line you’ll wish you had been taking care of all that work.

insane_dreamer 3y ago

I'd rather those profits be spread out among additional employees (who might help the company either produce better stuff or give better service to customers) than to shareholders.

johnny_canuck 3y ago

IME (having gone through 3 layoffs), you can squeeze a lot out of fearful employees. I haven't be able to see that sustained over the course of 12+ months though.

kerkeslager 3y ago

> If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? How can you be so callous? This is why people don't like startup people. Yes, obviously it's a bad thing, because those people are now without a source of income and often without health insurance. I say "obviously" because it's pretty reasonable to expect people aren't sociopaths, and care about the well-being of others. It's only within your sick bubble where maximizing profit at the expense of human suffering is considered a reasonable option. Unfortunately, people like you have a disproportionate power in our society. I'm not saying you're a sociopath, I'm saying that the economic ideology which is commonplace on Hacker News makes normal people who believe it behave like sociopaths. Sure, in a society with a reasonable safety net where losing your job wasn't a potential death sentence, laying off some workers occasionally would be fine. But we don't live in a Keynesian fantasy-world, we live in a world where insurance companies have death panels.

sadcodemonkey 3y ago
thank you for saying this. the archives of HN comments are going to make a fascinating case study for the next civilization explaining why this one collapsed.
sokoloff 3y ago
Would it also be preferable for companies to act as de-facto charities and hire an extra 10% (or an extra hundreds to thousands) of people in order to provide some of the people who are currently out of work a source of income and health insurance? If 100 fewer employees is bad; is 100 more good?
- kerkeslager 3y ago
  > Would it also be preferable for companies to act as de-facto charities and hire an extra 10% (or an extra hundreds to thousands) of people in order to provide some of the people who are currently out of work a source of income and health insurance? No, that's a low-effort straw man argument. It would be preferable for us to stop trusting companies to provide for people's needs, and build effective systems for providing people's needs. A good start might be to stop pretending corporate actions are always morally good as long as they're profitable, and recognize that firing people causes harm to those people. That's not a difficult concept for normal people--again, its obvious--and corporations have spilled a great deal of ink to override basic human empathy on this subject. I'll agree that companies can't be made to work if they're required to act as charities, but I'll also say that if corporations can't exist without causing harm then I'm not sure why we'd want them to exist. The entire purpose of allowing corporations to exist is that they are supposed to benefit society. At the very least, if we're going to allow companies to fire at will, we need a much more effective social safety net to help workers pick up the pieces when they get fired. But of course these corporations will fight against that, because exploiting their workers' dependence is profitable, and besides, they don't want to be asked to pay to fix the harms they cause.

gordon_freeman 3y ago

How would you check for the visible dip in the productivity? and in what time frame? Sometimes it is not easy to measure the impact of layoffs on the org in the short term and it may take some time to realize it.

Spooky23 3y ago

Operations is one part of a business. Canning your development and marketing doesn’t affect that right away. Everything gets a little shittier over time. The best tech example is IBM. They descended from industry leader to desiccated husk, only sustained by legacy business and acquisitions.

HumblyTossed 3y ago

> The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here. Which part is bullshit? The part where, in order to survive, everyone* needs a job? Or the part where, because everyone* needs a job, some jobs might not be as important as others? *Y'all know what I mean.

pessimizer 3y ago

I agree. We are gradually discarding (again) all possible methods of resource allocation other than market capitalism, so we have to make up pretend jobs for people to do in order to give ourselves the excuse to feed them. For some reason, we think that companies should maintain this insane indirection as a public service. We're not paying people to dig holes and fill them up as a society, instead we're demanding that centers of production and growth willingly disdain productivity in order to subsidize people digging holes and filling them up. We'd be far better off directly subsidizing education, health care, or even customer service and scientific research than demanding that the real sources of all economic growth (and prosperity) have departments printing out reams of paper for another department to shred. Efficiency and technology lower costs and (when properly distributed) give people more time for leisure across the system. You aren't sticking it to the fat cats by telling them not to do layoffs; if you want to stick it to the fat cats, tax their profits and strip layers of economic indirection/middlemen.

eschneider 3y ago

You can cut costs and cut costs and things seem to operate just fine. Until they don't. See: Boeing.

yieldcrv 3y ago

I too rely on jobs, right now, but jobs are not something we are entitled to, especially forever jobs, and I cant stand people that act like that Accumulate capital, make it grow If you fail, your life is encumbered in ways that prevent you from doing that, there are limited programs in the US for you, but burdening corporations is a symptom

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

generally they keep chugging along (in tech) because so much of the work has been automated. As long as they can find people to educate themselves on the systems fast enough it's not an issue. I'm sure there's chafe in that 10%, but not all of it is.

corytheboyd 3y ago

Redundancy isn’t a bad thing, it’s what lets you go on vacation sometimes. It’s hard to know how much you should have, and it’s no surprise it’s one of the first things to go when companies downsize. Sure, some bullshit is going to slip in, but it’s still a bunch of human beings trying to make a living on this dumb rock. Software itself is all bullshit in the grand scheme of things.

altruios 3y ago

That people have to be employed artificially so they don't starve: is the problem. UBI has the potential to remove a lot of bullshit jobs, companies can run much leaner when they aren't responsible for a citizen's needs.

throwbadubadu 3y ago

How long do you allow for evaluating if there is a dip? And will times never change? And even if there is really none, then sure it makes sense from the company point of view and pure profit perspective. But if the company is well of, why lay off experienced, trusted and loyal workforce still? You always need slack room, like you need some money put aside. And another level, work puts meaning to our lives.. either we allow for other meaningful things supported by some UBI, or we should rethink if profiting companies really need to ultra-maximize, or how they can also do a little welfare for their employed work force.. imo it's a pity the employee owned model is not more widespread, and it is all for the few. But anyway, different end of a very wide spectrum. Certainly, struggling companies must get rid of the bloat, bullshit jobs, and evil within, if it needs that to survive and is the actual problem ;)

gumby 3y ago

What's your timescale? If you take medicine for a chronic condition you can often skip a dose without problem, maybe even two, but eventually you presumably revert back to where you were before treatment. I saw a lot of this back in the "reengineering the corporation" craze in the 90s (and then the "lean organization" and so on). They cut all the slack out of the system so in steady state everything seemed to work. But the world is not consistently in a steady state. So fire that guy doing backups, and save money by not paying for the redundant network connection you've never used. Stock goes up, prepare three envelopes, and retire!

ike2792 3y ago

As companies get bigger they tend to get more bloated and disorganized. A lot of initiatives end up not being worth continuing on, so they lay off the people working on those initiatives. Better companies will reallocate talent to new, better initiatives so they don't lose the knowledge in their workforce, but that seems rare.

derefr 3y ago

Large companies reinvest most of their profits as bets on the future — building new arms of the company, that initially do nothing but quiet R&D for months/years — but which might bring the company entirely new revenue-lines years down the line. Much of a large company's headcount at any point in time, is people hired to work on these bets on the future. You can fire all of these people, and nothing will happen to the company's day-to-day operations. But the company's stock will take a nosedive nevertheless — because the promise of future increased returns had already been factored into the share price, and that factor now has to be removed.

paulddraper 3y ago

HN: "Why do you need 1000 people for that? It's a weekend project." Also HN: "You can't have less than 1000 people for that!!"

taurath 3y ago

It’s a bad thing for everyone who depends on the company for their livelihood. The company that decided to hire them, the management that used their headcount to justify a higher valuation. People are burning out, working the jobs of 3 people and are told they’re lucky to have a job. It’s not bullshit if it’s unsustainable.

chrsw 3y ago

"these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch" That's not always true though. I've been on both sides of layoffs: laid off and remained. Sometimes the people who remain are asked to do more with less. I was even asked to do more with less pay at one point.

boringuser2 3y ago

Yes. Companies exist at the allowance of a nation-state for the benefit of the people. If the benefit is attenuated, the people, via government, can sanction the corporations. If the corporation is succeeding and paying more into the public till by providing fake jobs, what's the problem? They're not succeeding hard enough? I think the error you've made is that you've mistakenly projected your sense of "fairness" on corporations. Corporations aren't people my friend.

tyingq 3y ago

That feels reductive. Are the people left working 80 hours a week now, maybe? Are they sacrificing long-term goals to keep short-term productivity in place? Etc.

sobriquet9 3y ago

You can fire half the commercial pilots, and planes will continue to fly without a hitch. Why have two pilots, when one will do. Trucks have one driver and work just fine. Eventually some planes will crash, but it's ok as long as it happens after effective management gets their bonus and moves on to optimise another company.

joshjje 3y ago
And make them pay for their own diapers.

lazyasciiart 3y ago

You could probably cut every employee’s salary by 10% without noticing a visible dip in productivity. Maybe that means that visible measures of productivity are lagging indicators?

danaris 3y ago

"If hundreds or thousands of people suddenly have no income, putting them in a position of severe hardship and potential homelessness, but it doesn't have any direct negative effects on me personally, is it really a bad thing?"

tamimio 3y ago

Simply because the impact never happens instantly. Companies life span is different than humans, and just because you didn’t see it happening in the coming months right after they did, it doesn’t mean there’s no gradual decline, keep in mind this also does not account the gradual hiring after that event, they news will be reported that they terminated 10%, but who’s going to report a 1% hiring every month in the year after?

jjav 3y ago

> can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch They don't, they just stop doing some things and pile on extra unpaid work on those left.

scruple 3y ago

My productivity has been severely impacted, actually, without even going into the mental health / stress / morale effects. I've seen two rounds of layoffs at my current employer and today I am utterly and completely fucking swamped in work. New initiatives showing up in January, directly from corporate sponsors at the SVP and executive level, despite the Great Big Fucking Deal they made about us getting our 2024 "roadmap" to them in November of 2023. Bullshit jobs or not, I'm not sure why I'm expected to have to pick up the slack and do more work at the same time.

gaws 3y ago
Time to look for a new job.
- scruple 3y ago
  You're not wrong but the tech job market is a dumpster fire right now, too, and, on top of that, I've got 3 young kids (twins are 4, singleton is 2) and a partially disabled spouse. I make good money and have amazing benefits, some of the best in the entire tech industry. And I've been through shitty situations like this before, so I'm hanging on for now... At least until my personal life chills out a bit.

theodric 3y ago

The global team I was in halved while I was at the bank, partly from cuts and partly from people deciding to take their various opportunities to leave and then not being replaced. By the time I departed with severe burnout, I had been consistently putting in 15-hour days for 19 months, and that as a fairly senior member of management (regarded by the business as an exec) just to keep our processes running. In Switzerland, that's not normal. But from the outside, yes, we just kept chugging along, so obviously we were finally the right size.

kaycey2022 3y ago

Bullshit job phenomenon is inevitable because the game encourages a winner takes all scenario for now. One or two market leaders keep accumulating all the capital and then instead of using their hires to move the needle of progress forward, they force most of them into some pointless hyperspecialisation or stuff like denying competitors of needed talent. All this just means that the balance of society has tilted to one unsustainable direction. Society simply needs much better antitrust (or other) laws to the point that every monopoly/duopoly is broken down and balance is restored. I will use twitter as a hypothetical example. If only twitter can raise capital to the point where it can handle enough traffic at scale and be an arbitor of global news, then it can easily use its resources and reputation to create and staff bullshit jobs without much consequence. To bring back balance: 1. other legal jurisdictions should ban or tax twitter out of existence over there and raise their own monopolies, for which they will likely need a global workforce 2. cost of investing in twitter or the cost of holding large investments in twitter should be increased so that the instead of accumulating capital in the market leader, people are incentivised to let their money be reinvested into competitors. This will be resisted by those who already have enormous sums of money invested into the market leader, which unfortunately also happens to be the people who make the rules.

hipjiveguy 3y ago

the data is the problem here - no one knows what the truth is