> The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones during the initial two years following the downsizing.
Can you think of any confounding factors in this analysis? How do you control for important factors like, say: whether the board is in enough financial trouble to downsize?
What? Next you’re going to find fault in my analysis that proves CPR kills people, as evidenced by the number of people who die after receiving CPR compared to those who just have a normal day.
I read the referenced (apparently peer reviewed) study hoping that it controlled for this obvious problem, but no. (I don't count that they measured "in a period characterised by growth" because individual organisational performance is rather noisy.) Maybe I'm the dumb one here, but when I read their results I draw the complete opposite conclusion: layoffs work but they are not a quick fix; it takes some time for the positive effects to kick in.
This is somewhat counter-intuitive to me so I suspect there are other confounders (overhiring, measuring financial performance in a complicated way, etc.) but I haven't had time to run the analysis for myself yet. Maybe the data is too sparse to support a more sophisticated model.
> How do you control for important factors like, say: whether the board is in enough financial trouble to downsize?
I'd love to see this controlled for shareholder dividends and stock buybacks. A big trend we're seeing in this round of layoffs is companies doing a lot of service for their shareholders, some posting record profits, and sacking fractions of their workforce. It doesn't tell a story of sacrifices made due to financial trouble, it looks like nothing but ruthless profiteering and class warfare.
> Can you think of any confounding factors in this analysis? How do you control for important factors like, say: whether the board is in enough financial trouble to downsize?
You're correct, obviously, on the general correlation aspect of companies having financial trouble and having to do layoffs.
The thing with many of these tech layoffs though, is these are in some cases companies with no trouble whatsoever. Companies with so many billions in the bank that they could continue to pay all salaries to everyone for a century without breaking a sweat. So they have zero need to reduce expenses.
Nobody likes getting laid off. But it's weird to see all of these think pieces implying that once someone is hired into a job, that job should exist forever.
Things change. Company growth isn't monotonically increasing. Not all positions will exist forever. Joining a company was never a guarantee that you'd have a paycheck and work to do until you decided to leave.
Also, pointing out that companies that did layoffs had worse performance than those that didn't have layoffs is an impressive example of missing the point. Layoffs usually are a result of declining performance, not the cause of it.
No one is saying you should have 100% job security, or never be let go / fired. People are saying that these mass layoffs and the way they are conducted are harmful to society and not as beneficial to the business as CEOs and investors want to believe.
Layoffs are not always a result of declining performance. We have seen several now where quarterly results point to increased performance but layoffs still occur as an opportunity to dump workers without much criticism.
> But it's weird to see all of these think pieces implying that once someone is hired into a job, that job should exist forever.
Yah, only the older generation got a chance at that. I wish I could have one lifetime job like my older family members had, but like many things that basically can’t be done now.
1) The company is struggling, losing money, etc and needs to tackle corrective action before everyone loses their jobs.
2) The company is generating record revenues, profits are high, but growth will be 4% instead of 5% so we need layoffs.
There seem to be a staggering number of layoffs from camp two.
> But it's weird to see all of these think pieces implying that once someone is hired into a job, that job should exist forever.
It's also really weird to see:
- Rescinded offers
- People hired and let go in 3 months (not for performance but because oopsie we miscalculated)
- Entire teams built in the first half of a year let go in the second half
- People with 10+ years of exemplary service dumped without even a phone call.
This is all also happening against the backdrop of low unemployment, high demand for tech labor, and a skills gap that's growing.
The analysis was of Fortune 1000 companies which typically aren't companies that would be suffering from long term declining performance which would imply the layoffs are a reaction to a short term fluctuation rather than a long term trend that needs to be corrected.
And I don't think the author is saying that laying people off won't balance the financials for that year or that quarter but that the ripple effects from a layoff can actually do more harm than the calculated returns.
- snap back attrition
- loss of knowledge
- opportunity cost
- lost productivity from demoralized workforce
Nintendo is a great example of a company that when confronted with economic hardship due to bad strategy avoided layoff and instead reduced executive compensation.
Satoru Iwata effectively stated the same conclusions this article did that such moves might resolve short-term difficulties, but always proved counter-productive in the long-term. Long term thinking versus short term thinking not surprising for a company that has been around since 1889 and has evolved constantly.
It's almost like maybe investor sentiment and stock price is not a good metric for actually running a successful business. Just look at Apple this morning...
Revenue: $117.1 billion versus $121.1 billion expected
Investors are pulling their hair out because Apple only made $117 billion. Is anyone really going to miss that $4 billion? You'll hear investors and talking heads calling for corrective layoffs when in reality nothing needs to be done. They are still ridiculously profitable and will continue to be.
I think the crappy thing here is because upper management wants to plan a layoff in extreme secrecy, they put themselves in the position of not being able to consult with the parties that have the most context. The cuts end up being crude and poorly targeted because of this secrecy. Because the assumption is that an employee who is being laid off, or thinks they may be laid off, becomes a liability immediately, no knowledge transfer or hand meetings can happen, and people may abruptly be cut off from internal systems. The company then has some extra short-term issues from the remaining staff trying to cover for their laid-off peers while missing important information and context.
The responses to this post, of "we're adults that accepted an at-will employment contract" are correct. But if we all had that attitude, and if execs could treat staff like responsible adults rather than potential saboteurs, perhaps a more targeted, less disruptive and ultimately smaller layoff could be arranged.
I think this is an ideal, and new, cheery CEOs may espouse and even practice this to an extent. But, then I have seen these same owners become cynical after 1 or 2 bad apple employees and the demeanor shifts.
Once a company grows beyond a certain threshold of employees, then the probability of having hired saboteurs increases.
This is where social safety nets could play an important role in incentivizing folks to not worry, thus reducing the likelihood that they attempt to sabotage a company on their way out.
This is not true at all in companies that know how to do layoffs. Layoffs in mature companies consult most of the management hierarchy and even many senior ICs and in addition engage the strategic planning teams to steer resources as needed.
That Google, the king of data driven, is flagrantly incompetent on this front is pretty funny, though.
Makes me wonder why employees are expected to give two weeks notice when they choose to leave, write docs detailing knowledge transfer, etc. Why can't we just "disappear", as if we were laid off?
You should never, ever consider your employer to be your family. The employer is not your friend, nor a relative. They are your employer.
I really dislike the whole "let's build the team spirit and be a great family together" approach. It's dishonest, and often done with the (explicit or implicit) intention of brainwashing.
Also, this goes both ways: I was an employer for the majority of my professional life. I had the best intentions and tried to be "good" and a friend to my employees, only to get screwed over many times in various ways by people later on. I learned that a professional relationship is different from a family relationship, and while you should try to be fair, you should never confuse the two.
> You should never, ever consider your employer to be your family. The employer is not your friend, nor a relative. They are your employer.
I will add that their interests are often in conflict with the interests of the employees, and as such, in those matters the employer is best viewed as an adversary.
First, the intro with the dog analogy. If you remotely see your relationship with your employer as you being the beloved family dog, you're the problem.
Second, the author quotes a paper on downsizing in a journal and afterwards says, "[i]n all my searching I wasn't able to find any hard data which suggests layoffs either enable a company to better compete or improve earnings in the long term." However the conclusion of the very paper he references says, "[t]he findings of this field study indicate that downsizing can improve an organization's financial performance but not in the near-term.... [R]esearch strongly suggests that it likely will take three or more years for organizations to be able to truly see the financial benefits of downsizing." If you look at all the graphs in the Results section of the paper, it shows that companies who downsize started out being weaker performers than those who weren't downsizing, but a few years after downsizing they were largely able to close that underperformance gap.
What do you read into a company that starts doing large scale layoffs even though it has a massive hoard of cash and remains massively profitable, just because some temporary trouble hits?
Given the company can easily retain the staff from a financial perspective, and employee churn is incredibly expensive - it has to mean they really, truly they can't think of anything useful to do with those staff. From that you would have to conclude that management and the board are simply out of ideas for how to grow the business.
Imagine that instead of a dog, it's an adult who makes their own choices and gets paid money, and who signed a contract where the terms of employment were spelled out very clearly..
A better analogy would be: imagine that you hired a gardener. And you were paying them every week to mow your lawn. But one day you thought, "hey I'm paying $100 for this guy to mow my lawn, but I could do it myself in an hour". And you told the gardener "your services are no longer needed" and started to mow your lawn yourself.
That’s the view of someone who is lucky to have many choices. Many people, in fact I suspect most people, pretty much have to accept what they’re offered because they don’t really have other choices.
For some of the people in these layoffs it will be accurate to say they could have made different choices, and for others it won’t be.
And imagine you told that dog how much you loved it and how important it was to you, but only paid attention to it when it was misbehaving, fed it recalled Chinese dog food and avoided taking it to the vet, then decided to put it down the second it needed any expensive care. All the while telling your friends what a dog lover you are, and what a great relationship you have with your dog.
Posting social media videos of "a day in the life of FANG" company showcasing the little amount of work people do doesn't work either.
There's a lot of people at these companies who don't do anything meaningful and are getting paid a boat load. There's people like that in almost every company.
Back from the Yahoo peak days I had multiple people tell me that all they did in a week was fix 1-2 small bugs in a day and didn't do jack shit the rest of the week and got paid handsomely. Probably explains in-part the demise of Yahoo as a tech company.
My point is, layoffs typically target workers who are not needed by the company anymore.
People do layoffs in their personal life too. Your house cleaner or landscaper gets laid off when you decide to stop using their services as you try to do the work yourself and save some money.
This ultra-left stance on layoffs being bad is ridiculous. It's part of the business cycle and economic outlook the companies are facing.
They aren't allowed to show videos of their actual work. So obviously they only show the parts that they can show like lunch or whatever. Most people at FANG companies work quite a lot in my experience.
The people posting those are usually interns...not to mention they'd probably get fired if they actually leaked videos of real work situations. So that's why all you see is the company perks like free food, gym or flexible work hours.
There is a very interesting trend among white collar and tech people (or people at tech companies) being laid off and finding this so hard. Well, time to grow up, lower skilled labor experiences that regularly, and those of us who were around during 2008 or the dot com bubble experienced it too. Now a new generation is learning life is not always all roses. Funny to see it on social media so.
I do not see myself as a dog and my employer as my owner. It's a very weird/inaccurate analogy, and a bad way of looking at an employer.
Dogs don't choose their owners. Dogs can't leave their owners and find another one if they don't like the current one. Dogs can't educate themselves on which owners are more or less likely to value their skills, and aren't over-adopting dogs because it's the trend to do so in 2021, even though they're obviously not going to want to keep all these dogs around once their absurd growth rate slows down.
The layoffs suck and I hope the people affected land on their feet, but this dog analogy is nonsense.
"In addition, nearly one-third of the executives thought their companies terminated the wrong person at least 20% of the time, and approximately an additional quarter indicated that their companies made the wrong decision 10% of the time."
Within corporate decision-making, this rate is actually "fucking genius" level. This article doesn't say what it thinks it says.
This is a completely naive view of companies and how they work.
An alternative metaphor is this: imagine you got a dog, raised him, lost your sources of income and couldn’t afford to feed him. You kept him anyway out of pride or loyalty or whatever, and watched as he withered away without adequate resources to make him thrive. At the same time, others were looking for dogs and were fully willing to feed them and support them.
When companies don’t do thoughtful adjustments like layoffs, they end up instead in a cycle of slow withering, where the best resources leave and aren’t replaced, and the quality of the workforce slowly decays.
Layoffs may not be “fun” but they’re a necessary part of operating a successful company… and much better than the alternative.
This place isn't your home, these people aren't your friends and your executive leadership would run you over with their cars if you stood between them and revenue growth. Your relationship to work changes forever. You will never again believe that you are "critical" to the company or that the company is interested in you as a person.
I think you're being a bit uncharitable and jaded here. For many, events like these are actually the catalyst that causes one to "grow up", which is what the author is conveying.
While I agree with this perspective, these companies go out of their way to market to their employees to make the job their whole identity. They are not blameless.
This is true, but I think it's misplaced to bitterly place this on the individual.
I have worked at multiple companies than have disingenously referred to themselves as "family," always talking about "supporting your growth here," etc. It's just outright dishonest and for whatever reason it's the industry standard. Can't blame people for taking it at face value for a few years.
And honestly, one generation ago (and in certain fields like police), your work is a permanent group of supporters. It's not like such a thing is impossible.
Deriding the need to belong and do meaningful work is quite cynical and… immature.
Not everyone is in a situation where the only option is to harden their shell and submit to a corporation. Some will find a family or great friends at work. It might mean limiting your career choices, but it is not a character flaw.
Agreed. This is a naive point of view. The company and worker agree on some terms and if the terms stop working for either one, that's the end of the line. It sucks when that comes to be but we have to realize that we as workers in any capacity are only useful when our input aligns with the goals of the company. There is leeway, but that diminishes when time gets tough.
Blue collar workers, union or no union, always understood this. It's white collar workers who feel blindsided because they believed the company propaganda. The propaganda is not itself a bad thing but workers need to understand the use of propaganda and why it's used.
If you've ever worked with blue collar workers you know they never believe in any of the sunshine management talk and instead deride it with contempt. White collar workers would be well advised to learn from their blue collar brethren.
> your executive leadership would run you over with their cars if you stood between them and revenue growth.
This is ridiculous. I’m sure such sociopaths exist but there’s literally 30MM+ companies in the US. If only 1MM have an executive team this proposes there are millions of near murderers about. Pretty sure there’d be more murders.
It’s stupidly hyperbolic and actually implicitly assumes that which it purports to reject. Namely, it conflates job loss with death, giving companies more agency over your life than they actually have; the phrasing ignores its own first statement, in pursuit of clickbait nonsense.
Grew up with parents working in startups/small tech companies in Santa Cruz from the late seventies through the 2000s. No, it has not always been the case. It's sad you are happy to accept it as both acceptable and the norm. Grownups realize they have the agency to choose the environment they place themselves in and choose to spend the majority of their day somewhere not adversarial.
It may have always been the case but it's often cleverly disguised intentionally by companies so they can exploit workers (especially in more white-collar environments and even more so in tech startups), so it's not exactly surprising that at least people would be caught unaware.
Layoffs work, I just think companies tend to layoff the wrong folks.
I had 7 layers of management between myself (IC) and the CEO at my last job with just a couple thousand people. How much of a “multiplier effect” can those people truly have? What ended up happening was feature creep ran too large, the company scrambled to hire engineers to keep up with pace of development, then the debt caught up with them once interest rates blew up.
Honestly, layers between ICs and CEOs should be logarithmic. 0 layers for 10 employees, 1 layer for 100, 2 layers for 1000, etc. IMO the “multiplier effect” ends with line managers
This is obviously false. Layoffs do work. 2003 - 2007 is not a sufficiently long enough period to assess layoff impacts on a company.
For example:
>Apple Computer Inc. said late Friday it was slashing its work force by 4,100 in a last-ditch effort to save the troubled computer maker.
> Out of the total number affected, about 2,700 are full-time workers. The remainder are part-time and contract employees. The cuts will affect about 30 percent of Apple's work force. Fifty-five percent of the job cuts will be in the United States.
This is from 1997 in the pre-Steve Jobs era when Gil Amelio was CEO.
You can call it what you want, but if that action didn't occur at that time, Apple as we know today may not have existed.
I am picking Apple as a deliberate example because they are the the only big-tech company that hasn't announced a large scale layoff (yet). So, many people may be quick to jump to point out, "Look Ma! No layoffs at Apple".
For a large corporation, business cycles are a reality and layoffs become part of the tactic. It is very unpleasant for the people involved. But, that doesn't mean it doesn't work (in the long run).
None of the large tech companies conducting layoffs have had their back against the wall.
They are mostly just purging after their irrational pandemic hiring as well as doing galaxy-brained copycat layoffs. Isn’t it remarkable that “economic conditions” lead dozens of companies to need to cut the same 5-7% of staff?
I feel what you're putting out and hopefully one day we will be a better species. I worked for a company in 2013 which will always be the benchmark that I compare other companies against. They treated me like a person that mattered and the members of my team were definitely my family. The company cared enough to give everyone catered breakfast and lunch, massages twice a week, a game room, and the freedom to work on projects that mattered to us. I had to complete a briggs myers personality test in the beginning, came back as ENTJ. HR brought in a coach to talk about how I can apply my strengths internally to make the company a better place and how I can personally grow. It was a great experience and I doubt another company like this exists. I spent 3 years there as a linux sys admin (it became devsecops towards the end). I grew more in this job than I did in any previous position I held. When I was laid off, I started questioning my self identity and went thru some serious depression of missing my co-workers.
Having a single source of income is becoming more and more problematic in current times. If you are married you have at least two sources of income, that may be the biggest _economic_ advantage of the marriage. Those layoffs make me realise why so many people are interested in FIRE movement and passive income. Either you have savings (but fiat currency discourages that) or some source of extra cash flow (be it minimum that allows you to survive) or you are at the mercy of current economy climate (be it FED printing or FED tightening or stock market frenzy). Maybe the universal basic income will be come the solution to this problem in the future?
With more automation and unstable world economy we will probably see more layoffs. Entire industries may go extinct.
Yes I am on more pessimistic side, but the last decade was great for software engineers and as the Bible says after 7 good years there may be 7 bad years coming.
As long as we continue digitizing the economy, there will be a demand for software engineers. What might change is the kind of software engineers. Luckily, software engineers can certainly cross train and quickly pick up new skills much more quickly than workers in other industries, and for massive payoffs.
I do think its somewhat unreasonable to be in a position where you do similar work year after year though (similar to e.g. what doctors or lawyers do) and expect to keep getting the same income. That's the deal with Software (or really, any creative field): you get paid really well but you can't stagnate.
> Coming up with a scientific way of determining who is doing a good job and who is doing a bad job is extremely hard.
In fact, it's probably impossible.
On the other hand, everyone knows who the deadwood is on their team.
> Cruel
I know multiple instances of coworkers getting laid off, and being very angry about it. But a year later, they'd ruefully admit the company was right to lay them off, and they had been pushed off-center and decided to do what they really wanted to do - like start a business. More than one was laid off for coming to work high, and as a result got clean. They were, after a year or two, all better off and happier than before they were laid off.
When I had to get rid of her I ended up in the VA mental health ward for ten days because I tried to shoot myself in the head, not completely because of the dog (becoming homeless helped a lot) but I’m pretty sure it was a significant contribution.
To top it off if you take “a dog” to the pound it’s free but if you take “your dog” down there it costs $80 so the poor little thing lost her name because I didn’t have $80 so she was “this dog wandering around the neighborhood I found”.
One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was get rid of that dog and I’ve done some pretty hard things in my life.
Tell me more about your coworkers being out of work for a couple months before finding that next job.
I think Amazon, Google, and Meta workers should band together and get funding to start competitors to these companies. If there were some smart investors, that would be a great way to start a new company.
I've worked for Amazon and have friends that work for Meta. As much as it pains me to say it, I don't think that as a whole those who were laid off would make a very good company. There are exceptions, like I think Amazon made such heavy reductions in the Alexa org that there were probably some very competent engineers let go. But mostly the layoffs affected (1) HR and product, (2) low performers, and (3) people with very little political savvy. This doesn't sound like it would make a good company.
That’s a great idea! We just need to write a design doc for the company, get comments, write up resource usage tickets, pass it by ux, contact sales for input, iterate on a new design doc because the old one used an outdated framework for business organization, get the final business plan doc through our autolinters, and setup 6 automated tools to track our progress - then we should be ready to contact some VCs.
Should only be a handful of quarters - if you don’t count time for retrospectives and writing packets about how complicated and impressive the process was ;)
I suppose if there were backers who would issue loans instead of investing in equity, the workers could form a cooperative. I don't think that would fully eliminate the risk of them getting fired (by each other), but perhaps it would be a start?
The thing is they kept everyone from the 2-5 main teams that actually run these companies.
And what sucks even more is those people don't know that they are so critical and worth millions if not billions each.
Disclaimer: I am NOT advocating for layoffs, I do agree with their cruel nature.
However, this comment in the article is ignorant:"Sure, except presumably at-will employers could have done that at any time if they had hard data that suggested this pool of employees weren't working out."
Here is why. Just because someone is at-will doesnt mean the manager has the power to fire someone without any repercussions. Management can be a political house of cards and "layoffs" is a safe blanket to wipe these people out.
case 1:
Another deadweight case is to rip through the relational bias. Fred is a very nice guy and he does an OK job, but could the market provide someone else cheaper and/or better than fred? since hes not excelling lets roll the dice and find out. Fred wouldnt normally get let go because hes doing just the bare minimum to get by and there is no case for such a thing.
case 2:
manager is incompetent(say it aint so!) and is hiring the wrong people. What a mess! how do you deal with that?! Time to clean up the whole department and start fresh.
The obvious downside of layoffs is that all too often, talented, loyal, and undeserving people get caught up in the mix, but at least management "feels terrible about it"
I find it serves one better to deal with feelings directly. Going on such a long roundabout is a distraction. Do we really care about how large companies deal with their problems? Are we running one, do they depend on our judgment? I think not.
So, the more straightforward way is to realize that one has been fucked over. At first it doesn't matter who's responsible for that, just the fact that one feels that it happened, and that it feels like shit. Talking to people about that helps. It someone is worth their salt, they'll tell that this has always been the case - the one that cares about a person the most, and especially the one that can do the most, is the person themselves. And another important realization is that most of the time, this doesn't happen because of specific cruelty - most of the time, it's ignorance. The other party didn't care to consider the impact of their act, and that is normal. There's not enough energy to care about all. And even if we care, sometimes things must be done. Or we need to take part, even if we know the impact and don't want that.
I do believe that this all doesn't need to make one jaded and cynical all the time, about life and people. In fact I believe the opposite: that one needs to find a way to love all this, in spite of all of these things working in such a way. After all, to love, one needs to know. Because if one doesn't know, they don't know what they love in the first place.
> A common argument I've heard is "well ok, maybe layoffs don't help the company directly, but it is an opportunity to get rid of dead weight". Sure, except presumably at-will employers could have done that at any time if they had hard data that suggested this pool of employees weren't working out.
I'm guessing letting an individual go carries higher risk of a wrongful termination suit than a bulk layoff, so there is still an incentive to mask performance-based decisions with economic justifications.
I think the way they’re structured in most orgs is dumb for the org.
Layoffs should be an opportunity to embrace and accept the Peter Principle and lower a series of people down a rung until you layoff the least valuable person.
Of course that only works if managers/directors/seniors/whatever can do the job immediately below them. I think they should but many places think “a manager is a manager and can manage any kind of team” which I think is bunk.
There isa logical conclusion of this: The quality of an individual's work is irrelevant in a bigco.
1) It is generally accepted that the best people leave first in this kind of layoff. But 3 years later, the corporation is doing as well as the others. Hence, removing the best people does no damage to a bigcorp.
2) A post in this thread describes how regular aggressive layoffs turn the culture toxic, setting people against each other. But one common response in nature is cooperation: people form a clique, and exclude colleagues who could damage them. They make nonmembers perform badly by e.g. witholding information. This sers outsiders up for being laid off. An evolutionary pressure selects for people having the political prowess to survive layoffs, and against good performers which endanger the status quo.
So a bigco's level of performance does not depend on having good workers. Instead, all this points to the work performed by the worst workers to be the major determinating factor for success.
Companies don't care if layoffs work. They are confident that when the time comes, they will replace the dismissed with other employees. Whether the new hires will be as efficient and skilled as their predecessors is, of course, a question mark. But they don't care. Please stop thinking of companies as emotional creatures. The only thing companies care about is money. Who cares people.
But decision-makers at companies frequently make irrational decisions, or at least decisions that are irrational based on their stated objectives. "Only caring about money" doesn't necessarily mean you make the best decisions to earn more money. Look at how many sports franchises have desperately wanted a win and then made a lot of atrocious decisions that did not achieve that -- why would we think that's the only field of human endeavor where that happens?
Whether it’s good or bad for business, the practice of layoffs is becoming more widely accepted. This can serve as a reminder to employees not to become complacent, which is one reason that companies do it. An unfortunate consequence is that employees become more likely to game the system to keep their jobs. Gaming the system can take many forms : avoiding risky assignments, covering up chronic problems, and blaming others. Once people see that these approaches result in greater job security then the incentives for doing the right thing become obscured. At my last job, a cyber-security startup that had a large layoff, this process of gaming the system ruined the software engineering culture. No one wanted to fix a bug, or talk to a customer, or implement a new process, without first checking to see how it would affect their job security.
Layoffs are like going on a diet: in the short term companies are able to maintain discipline through a mixture of execs getting their feet held to the fire by shareholders and employee panic. In the long term, execs are gonna do the same old shit that they always do.
The execs will never stop doing the same old shit. They will still fly business class and have concerts with Sting (ht Satya). The only change is that they will temporarily work everyone else harder.
Sometimes products, services, teams and organizations are not aligned with the business strategy, and have to be restructured.
Sometimes there are locations with a high cost of life, but the value generated at those locations are not proportionally higher.
Sometimes you have outliers in the compensation distribution that no longer meet productivity expectations. Some individuals make key contributions and then stop making them while enjoying the same benefits.
And sometimes you have pseudoscience like "Vitality curve" style layoffs which are proven to make things worse.
It seems to me that many tech workers are experiencing, for the first time, the hard reality that:
a) Companies may be formed, operated, and controlled by people, but they are complex systems that do not have feelings and do not care about individuals no matter how much the culture warriors say otherwise. They are systems designed to survive, with or without you.
b) We are not defined by our jobs
I'm not making a case one way or another for capitalism, or layoffs, or the meaning of life, rather pointing out that this is the reality in which we live and once you realize these two points, things will make more sense.
The default state for a company is to produce a yearly layoff. This has been dramatically reduced since gen y hit the work market because they were leave the company instead of stressing and they were important as they were bringing the tech power to the industry
Now they are getting old and there is no short of people to work on tech so the cycle restarts.
Honestly if I do get in a company that practices this I will quit.
It has done horrors to people close to me and they will never recover.
It had nothing to do with genY tech acumen, which is lower the previous crops on average due to weakening curriculum standards and a lack of experience with technology in any deep way, it was the firehouse of free capital and a “starve the competition” model employed by the FAANG constituents that it helped fund.
Clearly the only good answer here is that tech companies should never have employed so many people to begin with. These tens of thousands of people were paid massive salaries and equity only to have that cruelly taken away when the company realized years later it can’t sustain all those projects.
I implore these corporations: Please stop hiring so many people if you can’t guarantee lifetime employment!
It was always going to be either layoffs/comp cuts or no big bubble in salaries and hiring to begin with.
Surely there's much worse to come? Look at how much compensation came down in investment banks since the 00s. It's not conceivable that these large firms require tens of thousands of geniuses to function.
Crazy seeing some of the comments in here supporting the layoffs when just a few decades ago people were up in arms about IBMs layoffs because working for one company for a significant portion of your career was seen as the norm.
> In general, the study found that both downsized and nondownsized companies reported positive financial outcomes during this period. The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones during the initial two years following the downsizing. By the third year, these differences became statistically nonsignificant.
But in the absence of layoffs perhaps those companies would have done worse. Therefore we could easily argue that this does not contradict the claim that layoffs do work. In particular layoffs are not meant to make a company grow faster than other companies, they are meant to prevent extreme bloat and inefficiency and get back to a normal baseline. So if we assume that context the data makes more sense.
If your employer is a corporation and you are loyal to them, I'm sorry to inform you but you are very gullible and naive.
Be loyal to people and be loyal to principles instead.
It is really hard to say if they work or not since there is no consistent reason why they are done and picking some external measure doesn't prove much.
This is dumb. Dogs don't cost $100k per year to keep in the house. Dogs don't cause the owners of the house to risk loosing the house due to the dogs expenses.
Exactly. Since reality has now hit them in the face after the VC fuelled tech bubble utopia that finally popped with the cheap money disappearing afterwards.
So what of the conditioning of employees by telling them: 'We're all a family', 'Sticking together in the long term!' and 'Everyone wins, yay!'. I don't think 'families' do abrupt layoffs en mass to their own in the morning.
The era of cruising on cheap money is over. It is time to learn to adapt with AI.
We are all workers, we are the working class whether we are educated or not.
The capital owners want the working class to fight amongst themselves because it allows them to continue enriching themselves off the backs of the working class.
Even if you own some stocks or have a 401k, if you depend on a salary to pay your bills then you are a worker
> The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones
I think this misses a piece of logic. A reason companies downsize because their growth plans didn't come through. Like at the moment where tech companies scaled up for the pandemic imagining growth would continue at that rate.
So now we are saying that companies that made a sound strategic plan perform better than companies that had to rip their plan up and start again. Layoffs are the effect, not the cause.
It is childish to say that layoffs don't work. When a company runs out of cash it dies. Losing staff is hard, but if you can't afford them you can't afford them. Most managers hate layoffs too, even a psychopathic manager would see it as a failure.
So whilst layoffs may set back your plan, at least the company survives.
For clarity, there is no excuse for being shitty to staff during layoffs. US labour laws seem particularly weak in this area.
Let's grant the argument. Layoffs can still serve employers' purposes in other ways. Have you heard of a lot of climate walkouts at big tech companies recently?
Companies need flexibility, markets are more free and efficient allocators than central control, and people don't all deserve the same wealth because some people are really doing more useful things than others, but we have the capability to provide everyone healthcare and enough money to live simply and comfortably no matter how productive they are as individuals simply because it improves the condition of life and we don't have to become communist to do it.
I think it's a huge mistake. The great labor shortage is just beginning. You can thank the retiring boomers for that. (And I hope they enjoy their retirement!)
There is no way to make a mistake here because there are essentially no consequences -- entities of this scale can rehire as easily as they fire.
At a lower average compensation rate too, most likely. These companies are basically refinancing their labor force using cruelty and fear. It is working because they're all doing it, because we let them. System working as intended.
How many tech employees are boomers though? The youngest boomers today are 59 and IME 99% of tech employees are <55. Indeed I'd be surprised if boomers retiring had any significant effect on tech given most of them have already retired.
I think layoffs are a social contagion in a lot of cases, an excuse to overcorrect for overcorrections and all of that but...
the cruelty is the point.
eta: if the economy at large is adding 500,000 jobs as reported today this makes the laying off companies look either foolish or somehow specially in a downturn.
If they don't work, it's probably because they are too late. Every company I've worked at has had a bunch of people who don't actually work.
One example:
I was talking to someone at a social event and they was complaining that her company had laid off so many people they was doing the work of 3.
They then went on to say that they was running two fantasy football leagues.
I asked them what kind of computer they had at home and they looked at me confused and said "oh no, I don't have a computer at home. If I did then they would expect me to work some there too"
From that I realize that they (singular) was doing the work of three people and running two fantasy football leagues in their eight hour work day.
This may be exceptional, but with all the talk of quiet quitting, and all the other observations of people not working at work, I don't think it's all that rare.
oconnore|3 years ago
> The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones during the initial two years following the downsizing.
Can you think of any confounding factors in this analysis? How do you control for important factors like, say: whether the board is in enough financial trouble to downsize?
brookst|3 years ago
tomnipotent|3 years ago
kqr|3 years ago
This is somewhat counter-intuitive to me so I suspect there are other confounders (overhiring, measuring financial performance in a complicated way, etc.) but I haven't had time to run the analysis for myself yet. Maybe the data is too sparse to support a more sophisticated model.
If someone else would like to give it a shot, it looks like these people have compiled the data in a convenient format, for at least the past two years: https://fueled.com/blog/2022-fortune-1000-companies-spreadsh...
klyrs|3 years ago
I'd love to see this controlled for shareholder dividends and stock buybacks. A big trend we're seeing in this round of layoffs is companies doing a lot of service for their shareholders, some posting record profits, and sacking fractions of their workforce. It doesn't tell a story of sacrifices made due to financial trouble, it looks like nothing but ruthless profiteering and class warfare.
jjav|3 years ago
You're correct, obviously, on the general correlation aspect of companies having financial trouble and having to do layoffs.
The thing with many of these tech layoffs though, is these are in some cases companies with no trouble whatsoever. Companies with so many billions in the bank that they could continue to pay all salaries to everyone for a century without breaking a sweat. So they have zero need to reduce expenses.
ricardobeat|3 years ago
anothernewdude|3 years ago
langsoul-com|3 years ago
Joeri|3 years ago
PragmaticPulp|3 years ago
Things change. Company growth isn't monotonically increasing. Not all positions will exist forever. Joining a company was never a guarantee that you'd have a paycheck and work to do until you decided to leave.
Also, pointing out that companies that did layoffs had worse performance than those that didn't have layoffs is an impressive example of missing the point. Layoffs usually are a result of declining performance, not the cause of it.
fsociety|3 years ago
Layoffs are not always a result of declining performance. We have seen several now where quarterly results point to increased performance but layoffs still occur as an opportunity to dump workers without much criticism.
tikhonj|3 years ago
commandlinefan|3 years ago
Much better than being fired for poor performance, too - "laid off because the company wasn't doing well" doesn't look that terrible on a resume.
BizarreByte|3 years ago
Yah, only the older generation got a chance at that. I wish I could have one lifetime job like my older family members had, but like many things that basically can’t be done now.
jeffwask|3 years ago
1) The company is struggling, losing money, etc and needs to tackle corrective action before everyone loses their jobs. 2) The company is generating record revenues, profits are high, but growth will be 4% instead of 5% so we need layoffs.
There seem to be a staggering number of layoffs from camp two.
> But it's weird to see all of these think pieces implying that once someone is hired into a job, that job should exist forever.
It's also really weird to see:
- Rescinded offers - People hired and let go in 3 months (not for performance but because oopsie we miscalculated) - Entire teams built in the first half of a year let go in the second half - People with 10+ years of exemplary service dumped without even a phone call.
This is all also happening against the backdrop of low unemployment, high demand for tech labor, and a skills gap that's growing.
The analysis was of Fortune 1000 companies which typically aren't companies that would be suffering from long term declining performance which would imply the layoffs are a reaction to a short term fluctuation rather than a long term trend that needs to be corrected.
And I don't think the author is saying that laying people off won't balance the financials for that year or that quarter but that the ripple effects from a layoff can actually do more harm than the calculated returns.
- snap back attrition - loss of knowledge - opportunity cost - lost productivity from demoralized workforce
Nintendo is a great example of a company that when confronted with economic hardship due to bad strategy avoided layoff and instead reduced executive compensation.
https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/5/4496512/why-nintendos-sator...
Satoru Iwata effectively stated the same conclusions this article did that such moves might resolve short-term difficulties, but always proved counter-productive in the long-term. Long term thinking versus short term thinking not surprising for a company that has been around since 1889 and has evolved constantly.
It's almost like maybe investor sentiment and stock price is not a good metric for actually running a successful business. Just look at Apple this morning...
Revenue: $117.1 billion versus $121.1 billion expected
Investors are pulling their hair out because Apple only made $117 billion. Is anyone really going to miss that $4 billion? You'll hear investors and talking heads calling for corrective layoffs when in reality nothing needs to be done. They are still ridiculously profitable and will continue to be.
abeppu|3 years ago
The responses to this post, of "we're adults that accepted an at-will employment contract" are correct. But if we all had that attitude, and if execs could treat staff like responsible adults rather than potential saboteurs, perhaps a more targeted, less disruptive and ultimately smaller layoff could be arranged.
(updated for typos)
itchyouch|3 years ago
Once a company grows beyond a certain threshold of employees, then the probability of having hired saboteurs increases.
This is where social safety nets could play an important role in incentivizing folks to not worry, thus reducing the likelihood that they attempt to sabotage a company on their way out.
foobiekr|3 years ago
That Google, the king of data driven, is flagrantly incompetent on this front is pretty funny, though.
jonny_eh|3 years ago
jwr|3 years ago
You should never, ever consider your employer to be your family. The employer is not your friend, nor a relative. They are your employer.
I really dislike the whole "let's build the team spirit and be a great family together" approach. It's dishonest, and often done with the (explicit or implicit) intention of brainwashing.
Also, this goes both ways: I was an employer for the majority of my professional life. I had the best intentions and tried to be "good" and a friend to my employees, only to get screwed over many times in various ways by people later on. I learned that a professional relationship is different from a family relationship, and while you should try to be fair, you should never confuse the two.
nextaccountic|3 years ago
I will add that their interests are often in conflict with the interests of the employees, and as such, in those matters the employer is best viewed as an adversary.
uxcolumbo|3 years ago
Can you give some examples, ie how did you do things before getting screwed and what have you changed after?
What are your top lessons you learned?
amitkgupta84|3 years ago
First, the intro with the dog analogy. If you remotely see your relationship with your employer as you being the beloved family dog, you're the problem.
Second, the author quotes a paper on downsizing in a journal and afterwards says, "[i]n all my searching I wasn't able to find any hard data which suggests layoffs either enable a company to better compete or improve earnings in the long term." However the conclusion of the very paper he references says, "[t]he findings of this field study indicate that downsizing can improve an organization's financial performance but not in the near-term.... [R]esearch strongly suggests that it likely will take three or more years for organizations to be able to truly see the financial benefits of downsizing." If you look at all the graphs in the Results section of the paper, it shows that companies who downsize started out being weaker performers than those who weren't downsizing, but a few years after downsizing they were largely able to close that underperformance gap.
unknown|3 years ago
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georgewsinger|3 years ago
zmmmmm|3 years ago
What do you read into a company that starts doing large scale layoffs even though it has a massive hoard of cash and remains massively profitable, just because some temporary trouble hits?
Given the company can easily retain the staff from a financial perspective, and employee churn is incredibly expensive - it has to mean they really, truly they can't think of anything useful to do with those staff. From that you would have to conclude that management and the board are simply out of ideas for how to grow the business.
karaterobot|3 years ago
Imagine that instead of a dog, it's an adult who makes their own choices and gets paid money, and who signed a contract where the terms of employment were spelled out very clearly..
zeroonetwothree|3 years ago
drewcoo|3 years ago
I was with you until that part. Do people exist who can imagine that?
outside1234|3 years ago
Joeri|3 years ago
For some of the people in these layoffs it will be accurate to say they could have made different choices, and for others it won’t be.
kashkhan|3 years ago
Companies respond to consequences.
CuriouslyC|3 years ago
gt565k|3 years ago
There's a lot of people at these companies who don't do anything meaningful and are getting paid a boat load. There's people like that in almost every company.
Back from the Yahoo peak days I had multiple people tell me that all they did in a week was fix 1-2 small bugs in a day and didn't do jack shit the rest of the week and got paid handsomely. Probably explains in-part the demise of Yahoo as a tech company.
My point is, layoffs typically target workers who are not needed by the company anymore.
People do layoffs in their personal life too. Your house cleaner or landscaper gets laid off when you decide to stop using their services as you try to do the work yourself and save some money.
This ultra-left stance on layoffs being bad is ridiculous. It's part of the business cycle and economic outlook the companies are facing.
zeroonetwothree|3 years ago
askafriend|3 years ago
hef19898|3 years ago
mac3n|3 years ago
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-01-30...
unknown|3 years ago
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unknown|3 years ago
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hbn|3 years ago
Dogs don't choose their owners. Dogs can't leave their owners and find another one if they don't like the current one. Dogs can't educate themselves on which owners are more or less likely to value their skills, and aren't over-adopting dogs because it's the trend to do so in 2021, even though they're obviously not going to want to keep all these dogs around once their absurd growth rate slows down.
The layoffs suck and I hope the people affected land on their feet, but this dog analogy is nonsense.
YuriNiyazov|3 years ago
Within corporate decision-making, this rate is actually "fucking genius" level. This article doesn't say what it thinks it says.
zeroonetwothree|3 years ago
jmclnx|3 years ago
I get the point, but we are in the 21st Century. Very few people stay a Company (assuming stats are true) as they did before the 1990's.
In this case, the dog would have expected to stay in that home forever, where people in a company would probably move on after a few years.
lgsilver|3 years ago
An alternative metaphor is this: imagine you got a dog, raised him, lost your sources of income and couldn’t afford to feed him. You kept him anyway out of pride or loyalty or whatever, and watched as he withered away without adequate resources to make him thrive. At the same time, others were looking for dogs and were fully willing to feed them and support them.
When companies don’t do thoughtful adjustments like layoffs, they end up instead in a cycle of slow withering, where the best resources leave and aren’t replaced, and the quality of the workforce slowly decays.
Layoffs may not be “fun” but they’re a necessary part of operating a successful company… and much better than the alternative.
uxcolumbo|3 years ago
During the pandemic lots of ppl got pets… acting on impulse. Now they realise a pet is a lot of work and it’s not for them.
bradleyjg|3 years ago
This has always always been the case. Grow up.
mattikus|3 years ago
ok_coo|3 years ago
zug_zug|3 years ago
I have worked at multiple companies than have disingenously referred to themselves as "family," always talking about "supporting your growth here," etc. It's just outright dishonest and for whatever reason it's the industry standard. Can't blame people for taking it at face value for a few years.
And honestly, one generation ago (and in certain fields like police), your work is a permanent group of supporters. It's not like such a thing is impossible.
ricardobeat|3 years ago
Not everyone is in a situation where the only option is to harden their shell and submit to a corporation. Some will find a family or great friends at work. It might mean limiting your career choices, but it is not a character flaw.
cebert|3 years ago
mc32|3 years ago
Blue collar workers, union or no union, always understood this. It's white collar workers who feel blindsided because they believed the company propaganda. The propaganda is not itself a bad thing but workers need to understand the use of propaganda and why it's used.
If you've ever worked with blue collar workers you know they never believe in any of the sunshine management talk and instead deride it with contempt. White collar workers would be well advised to learn from their blue collar brethren.
stumblindrunk|3 years ago
This is ridiculous. I’m sure such sociopaths exist but there’s literally 30MM+ companies in the US. If only 1MM have an executive team this proposes there are millions of near murderers about. Pretty sure there’d be more murders.
It’s stupidly hyperbolic and actually implicitly assumes that which it purports to reject. Namely, it conflates job loss with death, giving companies more agency over your life than they actually have; the phrasing ignores its own first statement, in pursuit of clickbait nonsense.
ROTMetro|3 years ago
NegativeLatency|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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likeabbas|3 years ago
I had 7 layers of management between myself (IC) and the CEO at my last job with just a couple thousand people. How much of a “multiplier effect” can those people truly have? What ended up happening was feature creep ran too large, the company scrambled to hire engineers to keep up with pace of development, then the debt caught up with them once interest rates blew up.
Honestly, layers between ICs and CEOs should be logarithmic. 0 layers for 10 employees, 1 layer for 100, 2 layers for 1000, etc. IMO the “multiplier effect” ends with line managers
itchyouch|3 years ago
zeroonetwothree|3 years ago
bryanlarsen|3 years ago
Hopefully the payoff for Apple is significant and obvious so that at least some learn the lesson in the article.
vivegi|3 years ago
For example:
>Apple Computer Inc. said late Friday it was slashing its work force by 4,100 in a last-ditch effort to save the troubled computer maker.
> Out of the total number affected, about 2,700 are full-time workers. The remainder are part-time and contract employees. The cuts will affect about 30 percent of Apple's work force. Fifty-five percent of the job cuts will be in the United States.
(Source: https://money.cnn.com/1997/03/14/technology/apple/)
This is from 1997 in the pre-Steve Jobs era when Gil Amelio was CEO.
You can call it what you want, but if that action didn't occur at that time, Apple as we know today may not have existed.
I am picking Apple as a deliberate example because they are the the only big-tech company that hasn't announced a large scale layoff (yet). So, many people may be quick to jump to point out, "Look Ma! No layoffs at Apple".
For a large corporation, business cycles are a reality and layoffs become part of the tactic. It is very unpleasant for the people involved. But, that doesn't mean it doesn't work (in the long run).
anon7725|3 years ago
They are mostly just purging after their irrational pandemic hiring as well as doing galaxy-brained copycat layoffs. Isn’t it remarkable that “economic conditions” lead dozens of companies to need to cut the same 5-7% of staff?
technick|3 years ago
foobiekr|3 years ago
0xmarcin|3 years ago
With more automation and unstable world economy we will probably see more layoffs. Entire industries may go extinct.
Yes I am on more pessimistic side, but the last decade was great for software engineers and as the Bible says after 7 good years there may be 7 bad years coming.
pm90|3 years ago
I do think its somewhat unreasonable to be in a position where you do similar work year after year though (similar to e.g. what doctors or lawyers do) and expect to keep getting the same income. That's the deal with Software (or really, any creative field): you get paid really well but you can't stagnate.
WalterBright|3 years ago
In fact, it's probably impossible.
On the other hand, everyone knows who the deadwood is on their team.
> Cruel
I know multiple instances of coworkers getting laid off, and being very angry about it. But a year later, they'd ruefully admit the company was right to lay them off, and they had been pushed off-center and decided to do what they really wanted to do - like start a business. More than one was laid off for coming to work high, and as a result got clean. They were, after a year or two, all better off and happier than before they were laid off.
UncleEntity|3 years ago
I used to have a dog.
When I had to get rid of her I ended up in the VA mental health ward for ten days because I tried to shoot myself in the head, not completely because of the dog (becoming homeless helped a lot) but I’m pretty sure it was a significant contribution.
To top it off if you take “a dog” to the pound it’s free but if you take “your dog” down there it costs $80 so the poor little thing lost her name because I didn’t have $80 so she was “this dog wandering around the neighborhood I found”.
One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was get rid of that dog and I’ve done some pretty hard things in my life.
Tell me more about your coworkers being out of work for a couple months before finding that next job.
unknown|3 years ago
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coliveira|3 years ago
zwkrt|3 years ago
bbor|3 years ago
Should only be a handful of quarters - if you don’t count time for retrospectives and writing packets about how complicated and impressive the process was ;)
stuntkite|3 years ago
wonks|3 years ago
adave|3 years ago
spokeonawheel|3 years ago
Here is why. Just because someone is at-will doesnt mean the manager has the power to fire someone without any repercussions. Management can be a political house of cards and "layoffs" is a safe blanket to wipe these people out.
case 1: Another deadweight case is to rip through the relational bias. Fred is a very nice guy and he does an OK job, but could the market provide someone else cheaper and/or better than fred? since hes not excelling lets roll the dice and find out. Fred wouldnt normally get let go because hes doing just the bare minimum to get by and there is no case for such a thing.
case 2: manager is incompetent(say it aint so!) and is hiring the wrong people. What a mess! how do you deal with that?! Time to clean up the whole department and start fresh.
The obvious downside of layoffs is that all too often, talented, loyal, and undeserving people get caught up in the mix, but at least management "feels terrible about it"
npteljes|3 years ago
So, the more straightforward way is to realize that one has been fucked over. At first it doesn't matter who's responsible for that, just the fact that one feels that it happened, and that it feels like shit. Talking to people about that helps. It someone is worth their salt, they'll tell that this has always been the case - the one that cares about a person the most, and especially the one that can do the most, is the person themselves. And another important realization is that most of the time, this doesn't happen because of specific cruelty - most of the time, it's ignorance. The other party didn't care to consider the impact of their act, and that is normal. There's not enough energy to care about all. And even if we care, sometimes things must be done. Or we need to take part, even if we know the impact and don't want that.
I do believe that this all doesn't need to make one jaded and cynical all the time, about life and people. In fact I believe the opposite: that one needs to find a way to love all this, in spite of all of these things working in such a way. After all, to love, one needs to know. Because if one doesn't know, they don't know what they love in the first place.
pkghost|3 years ago
I'm guessing letting an individual go carries higher risk of a wrongful termination suit than a bulk layoff, so there is still an incentive to mask performance-based decisions with economic justifications.
Scoundreller|3 years ago
Layoffs should be an opportunity to embrace and accept the Peter Principle and lower a series of people down a rung until you layoff the least valuable person.
Of course that only works if managers/directors/seniors/whatever can do the job immediately below them. I think they should but many places think “a manager is a manager and can manage any kind of team” which I think is bunk.
hyperman1|3 years ago
1) It is generally accepted that the best people leave first in this kind of layoff. But 3 years later, the corporation is doing as well as the others. Hence, removing the best people does no damage to a bigcorp.
2) A post in this thread describes how regular aggressive layoffs turn the culture toxic, setting people against each other. But one common response in nature is cooperation: people form a clique, and exclude colleagues who could damage them. They make nonmembers perform badly by e.g. witholding information. This sers outsiders up for being laid off. An evolutionary pressure selects for people having the political prowess to survive layoffs, and against good performers which endanger the status quo.
So a bigco's level of performance does not depend on having good workers. Instead, all this points to the work performed by the worst workers to be the major determinating factor for success.
pictur|3 years ago
emodendroket|3 years ago
chester_the_dog|3 years ago
MisterBastahrd|3 years ago
outside1234|3 years ago
29athrowaway|3 years ago
It depends on what goals you have.
Sometimes products, services, teams and organizations are not aligned with the business strategy, and have to be restructured.
Sometimes there are locations with a high cost of life, but the value generated at those locations are not proportionally higher.
Sometimes you have outliers in the compensation distribution that no longer meet productivity expectations. Some individuals make key contributions and then stop making them while enjoying the same benefits.
And sometimes you have pseudoscience like "Vitality curve" style layoffs which are proven to make things worse.
ccn0p|3 years ago
a) Companies may be formed, operated, and controlled by people, but they are complex systems that do not have feelings and do not care about individuals no matter how much the culture warriors say otherwise. They are systems designed to survive, with or without you.
b) We are not defined by our jobs
I'm not making a case one way or another for capitalism, or layoffs, or the meaning of life, rather pointing out that this is the reality in which we live and once you realize these two points, things will make more sense.
motbus3|3 years ago
Now they are getting old and there is no short of people to work on tech so the cycle restarts.
Honestly if I do get in a company that practices this I will quit. It has done horrors to people close to me and they will never recover.
foobiekr|3 years ago
khazhoux|3 years ago
I implore these corporations: Please stop hiring so many people if you can’t guarantee lifetime employment!
majikaja|3 years ago
Surely there's much worse to come? Look at how much compensation came down in investment banks since the 00s. It's not conceivable that these large firms require tens of thousands of geniuses to function.
whatever1|3 years ago
It seems that nowadays software companies mostly work on modularized toy problems that new grads can solve effectively.
If you go to the chemical industry that is not the case. Layoffs in senior personnel will bite you within months.
foobiekr|3 years ago
Ancalagon|3 years ago
zeroonetwothree|3 years ago
olliecornelia|3 years ago
zeroonetwothree|3 years ago
But in the absence of layoffs perhaps those companies would have done worse. Therefore we could easily argue that this does not contradict the claim that layoffs do work. In particular layoffs are not meant to make a company grow faster than other companies, they are meant to prevent extreme bloat and inefficiency and get back to a normal baseline. So if we assume that context the data makes more sense.
jdmoreira|3 years ago
lasereyes136|3 years ago
It is really hard to say if they work or not since there is no consistent reason why they are done and picking some external measure doesn't prove much.
pcdoodle|3 years ago
friend_and_foe|3 years ago
manv1|3 years ago
skee8383|3 years ago
rvz|3 years ago
So what of the conditioning of employees by telling them: 'We're all a family', 'Sticking together in the long term!' and 'Everyone wins, yay!'. I don't think 'families' do abrupt layoffs en mass to their own in the morning.
The era of cruising on cheap money is over. It is time to learn to adapt with AI.
boringg|3 years ago
refurb|3 years ago
ilostmyshoes|3 years ago
The capital owners want the working class to fight amongst themselves because it allows them to continue enriching themselves off the backs of the working class.
Even if you own some stocks or have a 401k, if you depend on a salary to pay your bills then you are a worker
jimnotgym|3 years ago
I think this misses a piece of logic. A reason companies downsize because their growth plans didn't come through. Like at the moment where tech companies scaled up for the pandemic imagining growth would continue at that rate.
So now we are saying that companies that made a sound strategic plan perform better than companies that had to rip their plan up and start again. Layoffs are the effect, not the cause.
It is childish to say that layoffs don't work. When a company runs out of cash it dies. Losing staff is hard, but if you can't afford them you can't afford them. Most managers hate layoffs too, even a psychopathic manager would see it as a failure.
So whilst layoffs may set back your plan, at least the company survives.
For clarity, there is no excuse for being shitty to staff during layoffs. US labour laws seem particularly weak in this area.
TurkishPoptart|3 years ago
karmasimida|3 years ago
emodendroket|3 years ago
tracerbulletx|3 years ago
anm89|3 years ago
beebmam|3 years ago
blamazon|3 years ago
At a lower average compensation rate too, most likely. These companies are basically refinancing their labor force using cruelty and fear. It is working because they're all doing it, because we let them. System working as intended.
vikingerik|3 years ago
npteljes|3 years ago
zeroonetwothree|3 years ago
foolinaround|3 years ago
garbagecoder|3 years ago
the cruelty is the point.
eta: if the economy at large is adding 500,000 jobs as reported today this makes the laying off companies look either foolish or somehow specially in a downturn.
readthenotes1|3 years ago
One example: I was talking to someone at a social event and they was complaining that her company had laid off so many people they was doing the work of 3.
They then went on to say that they was running two fantasy football leagues.
I asked them what kind of computer they had at home and they looked at me confused and said "oh no, I don't have a computer at home. If I did then they would expect me to work some there too"
From that I realize that they (singular) was doing the work of three people and running two fantasy football leagues in their eight hour work day.
This may be exceptional, but with all the talk of quiet quitting, and all the other observations of people not working at work, I don't think it's all that rare.
luckylion|3 years ago