[marto1]

> But everyone knows that's not what killed them.

Another addition I'd like to add here is more often then not wrong people get booted while the "dead weight" tends to stick around and becomes even deader due to a motivation fall from the layoff. So maybe it doesn't kill, but for sure exacerbates an already bad situation.

[fx1994]

We are a small team in big company, and management that made wrong decisions is still somewhere there but not my direct management, still getting same paycheck, car, cards and benefits but new managers (that accepted to take over and got brand new car for 100k€, cards and bonuses, bells and whistles) started to layoff workers so we know this is the end for my team, and of course they will do whatever it takes to "save the product", but not fix the the real issue... lack of good developers to fix terrible bugs in our product.

[acdha]

That’s really the key part: if the managers who created the problem are still there, layoffs will just make it worse. There are cases where getting out of a dubious business line can lead to long-term benefit but I’ve seen that a handful of times compared to losing useful people while the bad managers failed upwards.

[dylan604]

If your small team in a big company does not directly generate money, then you’d definitely be ripe for elimination. Time and time again we’ve seen examples of trams that are critical to supporting various revenue generating parts of the company while not directly making money themselves get cut as an “obvious” way to save money when only looking at the books. Been there.

[ellisv]

Even if mostly the “right” people are laid off, laying off a wrong person can have a cascading effect.

Good people like to stick together. Get rid of a couple and the rest will start to leave.

[cratermoon]

Even if, from the company's perspective, if lays off all the "right" people, some of those people will be "wrong" from the point of view of other people on the team. Maybe the company didn't value a certain person, for corporate or HR reasons, but there's always a chance that person was a valued team member for human reasons.

Layoffs will lead to people leaving, regardless of how surgical or random they are.

[silisili]

Unfortunately, optimizing for not getting yourself laid off is not the same as optimizing for max productivity. In many ways, they're quite opposite.

[3eb7988a1663]

Indeed. Like everyone from Lake Wobegon, I think that I am effective at my job. One of the most productive things I can do is to strangle bad ideas in the crib. This is not a popular role. Killing someone's pet initiative can make enemies. Yet, it can save countless weeks/months/years on doomed-to-fail efforts.

Working to not be laid off usually means just keeping your head down and going with the flow.

[bigtimesink]

This happened to me. There was a layoff, I got overwhelmed with work that had to get picked up, lost motivation, and burned out.