I agree. I've been part of teams in which the person who was clearly most productive and most critical to the team's short-term and medium-term success was laid off. The organization was going through a "restructuring" which just meant that anyone making over a certain threshold in salary was fired and "replaced" with someone half as expensive but a thousand times less capable.
The bosses probably didn't enjoy doing this (the ones who had to actually break the news) but they also didn't care too much either. If firing the most experienced people really had an impact on productivity, then the team would just be reassigned to do different work, clients would be cut, budgets would shrink, whatever it required to ensure that whichever personnel you happened to have were acceptable for whatever work your team did.
I think a lot of people don't realize this. The company exists solely to service and enhance the lifestyle of executives. If the executives see a way to maintain the same lifestyle for less business cost, even if it means terminating an entire business line and upsetting many happy customers & laying people off who are doing great at their jobs, so be it.
They utterly don't care. It has literally nothing to do with productivity except as a totally unintended side effect of how to service the lifestyle of some executive.
As companies succeed and grow, they start investing in wargaming scenarios for effectively having total bargaining power over their staff. When HR types meet with executives in these kinds of firms to talk about strategies for hiring, a high priority is how to structure the business so that it is never "dependent" on employees.
If it means ending an otherwise profitable business line, so be it. It just depends on whether ending that business line is going to have any serious impact on the lifestyles of executives or not.
You see a lot of job advice that advocates working really hard to "become necessary" to your employer. It's just wishful thinking, though. Rule number one is: no employee is necessary. If we ever discover that an employee is necessary, then we simply restructure the business, changing as much as is needed, to make sure that property is no longer true.
The best you can hope for is to be "necessary" for a short period of time as the business recognizes that this is the case and immediately begins plotting about how to restructure so as to ensure no one in your position can possibly be necessary.
It comes down to a question of degrees I think. No employee can be allowed to be so necessary as to become a single point of failure. However I think it's all possible for an employee to be reasonable "necessary" without the employer actively trying to make that position replaceable.
I was arguing against the below statements specifically, which I don't think are accurate based on my experience. I've been at companies that let slide non-productivity because it's easier than firing, until times are tight. Then, since they have to layoff someone, they layoff the unproductive since they don't hurt their departments that way.
"You may argue that this doesn't take into account productivity, but I believe that's irrelevant. If you're at a company that values productivity, then everyone will be productive; the idea that there's a 10x difference between top and bottom is a myth"
I think he's arguing that if you think you're productive, chances are everybody is productive on the team, at least in the boss's eyes.
If you're not productive, you certainly do have to worry about getting laid off (or fired). But when I've known folks who were fired for non-productivity, they didn't really care all that much. In fact, they were fired because they didn't care. These folks often get let go before an official round of layoffs, although in some companies they accumulate until the first round of layoffs.
The fact that you're worrying about your place on the layoff list at all is an indication that you won't be laid off for productivity reasons, only for salary/strategic reasons.
The bosses probably didn't enjoy doing this (the ones who had to actually break the news) but they also didn't care too much either. If firing the most experienced people really had an impact on productivity, then the team would just be reassigned to do different work, clients would be cut, budgets would shrink, whatever it required to ensure that whichever personnel you happened to have were acceptable for whatever work your team did.
I think a lot of people don't realize this. The company exists solely to service and enhance the lifestyle of executives. If the executives see a way to maintain the same lifestyle for less business cost, even if it means terminating an entire business line and upsetting many happy customers & laying people off who are doing great at their jobs, so be it.
They utterly don't care. It has literally nothing to do with productivity except as a totally unintended side effect of how to service the lifestyle of some executive.
As companies succeed and grow, they start investing in wargaming scenarios for effectively having total bargaining power over their staff. When HR types meet with executives in these kinds of firms to talk about strategies for hiring, a high priority is how to structure the business so that it is never "dependent" on employees.
If it means ending an otherwise profitable business line, so be it. It just depends on whether ending that business line is going to have any serious impact on the lifestyles of executives or not.
You see a lot of job advice that advocates working really hard to "become necessary" to your employer. It's just wishful thinking, though. Rule number one is: no employee is necessary. If we ever discover that an employee is necessary, then we simply restructure the business, changing as much as is needed, to make sure that property is no longer true.
The best you can hope for is to be "necessary" for a short period of time as the business recognizes that this is the case and immediately begins plotting about how to restructure so as to ensure no one in your position can possibly be necessary.