[bananapub]

>It's very naive to think these huge orgs don't have dead weight which is much bigger than 6%. If you start figuring some of your moonshot ideas aren't hitting their OKR's, you have a few options:

there's been so many versions of this low quality comment on every tech-company-mass-firing article. why is so little thought put into it? if the company feels it can save on salaries then:

1. close down projects that aren't effective/profitable/whatever

1. fire people who aren't effective/profitable/whatever

mass broad spectrum layoffs like these are not that, they're "oh, let's just randomly put holes in the org chart to save X% of salary and see how it goes". would you suggest saving data storage costs by deleting 6% of files? would you suggest reducing compute by turning off 6% of jobs?

edit: and presumably a counter argument to the above is "firing people in an optimal way is hard", to which I say lol of course it is? work harder, then, before firing people. "it's hard" isn't an excuse to do some random unrelated and useless thing instead.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Why do you think that mass broad spectrum layoffs are random holes? From what I've seen they follow exactly the structure you're describing - there's a company-wide search for projects that aren't pulling their weight, those projects are shut down, and the employees whose roles no longer make sense without the projects that will be shut down get laid off.

> would you suggest saving data storage costs by deleting 6% of files? would you suggest reducing compute by turning off 6% of jobs?

I would, and I've seen mandates like this achieve good results multiple times in my career. It's very rare to have a team that can't make do with 94% of their data storage footprint, but it's very common to have a team who would find it temporarily inconvenient or would rather prioritize other work over reducing it.

[elijaht]

> Why do you think that mass broad spectrum layoffs are random holes? From what I've seen they follow exactly the structure you're describing - there's a company-wide search for projects that aren't pulling their weight, those projects are shut down, and the employees whose roles no longer make sense without the projects that will be shut down get laid off.

I’ve been through 2 companies with layoffs in the past year. What you describe is not how either worked. There were some targeted shutdowns, but many teams also just lost a member or two. In both cases my teams lost important people which have a really bad impact on the rest of the team.

[bananapub]

> Why do you think that mass broad spectrum layoffs are random holes? From what I've seen they follow exactly the structure you're describing - there's a company-wide search for projects that aren't pulling their weight, those projects are shut down, and the employees whose roles no longer make sense without the projects that will be shut down get laid off.

? what are you talking about? The Google layoffs weren't like that, nor the Meta ones nor the Amazon, and I'm pretty sure the Spotify ones this article is about aren't either, though the post is very short.

[deelowe]

I know quite a few people who were laid off at this point. I'm not seeing what you are. It's quite random.