[buf]

People keep talking about laying off half the company like it's a bad thing.

Don't get me wrong, there are lots of negative factors to laying off staff and I'm not denying those.

But anyone who has worked in a large org, especially a public one, knows that there is excessive bloat. Many people at large orgs do nothing. They go to great lengths to ensure it looks like they're doing something, which I guess is something itself.

PS - I'm neither for nor against the layoffs at Twitter.

[Doddler]

I think even if he was correct that Twitter has a lot bloat that needs to be cut, I really struggle to believe you could accurately judge who or what needs to be cut when slashing your 7000 employee business in half within 5-6 days of walking in the door. The chance of making big mistakes and cutting critical staff and teams is very high.

[watwut]

I think that even worst is that it does not look fair or transparent at all. Which means, remaining employees are going to be demotivated and resentful. It is going to be chaos organizational, competences will be unclear etc. Which will make organization as a whole more dysfunctional then it needs to be.

[low_tech_love]

Exactly. It smells very strongly of the same kind of overgeneralized superficial thinking that leads people to believe that less moderation is always good. You can’t possibly expect that everyone in your company will be 150% invested work-any-time business evangelists. Maybe the 50% who are left now have to work double? Are they so incredibly enthusiastic about the job to take the hit silently?

[andsoitis]

> The chance of making big mistakes and cutting critical staff and teams is very high.

It turns out that in the big picture, there are fewer people who are truly critical than most people think.

Especially individual contributors. There are rare exceptions but those, who truly make a difference, stand out.