[OJFord]

It's not at all uncommon in restructuring to be both (doing a lot of) hiring & firing - the current filled roles are out of whack with where you want to be, and not things you can transition people between because the skills/qualifications are different or whatever.

E.g. if Microsoft decided to sunset its incredible GitHub journey, it would probably find itself with too many web developers. If it got out of Xboxes, too many embedded. If it went full remote, too many office managers and IT.

[orra]

Of course developers can be transitioned to do other types of development.

Occam's Razor says: or the companies just want to rehire new people at lower pay.

[OJFord]

Many of these headline grabbing layoffs are primarily back office roles.

And what you say simply isn't true anyway - I even studied EE, but all my professional experience is on the web, I would have a long ramp up to be productive on an embedded team. I probably shouldn't even be hired for a grad position on such a team, a fresh graduate would have better memory of domain-specific stuff.

What Occam's razor actually says is that in the face of multiple possible explanations, the simpler one is the more likely one. Your suggested explanation seems a more complicated conspiracy than simply not needing/being able to afford people to me.

[gruez]

>Occam's Razor says: or the companies just want to rehire new people at lower pay.

Do you have any idea how much it costs to recruit replacement developers? Between the cost for recruiters, the amount of time spent on interviews, and ramp-up time for new hires, you'd need to lower wages by a significant amount (eg. 30%) for you to be able to get payback in a reasonable amount of time. Not to mention, if you're a startup, the loss of institutional knowledge will greatly hamper your ability to execute.

[erik_seaberg]

Salary cuts are strongly resented, so I think employers prefer to use turnover as an opportunity to hire at the market rate when it has gone down (due to competitors no longer making better offers).

[ljm]

Depends on the laws in your country. In the UK for example, if you make a position redundant and then immediately rehire for it, the laid off employee can take you to an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal, as the redundancy wasn’t genuine.

Given that redundancy is a more complicated legal process it’s unlikely you’d use it for this purpose.

[orra]

P&O famously fired a lot of people in the UK, a year ago, and immediately replaced them with agency staff.

This was widely considered to be fire and rehire, although the government position was that it was “just fire”. So companies are willing to skirt the intention of the law.

[pigtailgirl]

-- you're comparing apple to orange - this is 150 person - pre revenue startup - not Microsoft --

[OJFord]

A 150 person start-up is significantly more likely to 'pivot' in a way that makes a lot of roles or business lines redundant than Microsoft is.

The size of company doesn't matter to the point anyway - I used Microsoft as a well-known example so I could say 'imagine if they stopped doing GitHub' et al. I can't do that if I pick some random small start-up that I'm familiar with. (Maybe I could have said 'if Notion went all-in on AI' or something? But I wouldn't have had multiple examples.)

[pigtailgirl]

-- microsoft pivots - makes sense they still hire while laying off - if 150 person venture funded startup pivots - it does not - look at Prisma career page - they have 1 open job open - point i was making is - for ceo of small company - having this on linkedin - is tone deaf --

https://www.prisma.io/careers