[austin-cheney]

In my experience there are two things that bring layoffs: poor sales and bad product management.

When I was at Travelocity they had by far the best brand awareness and marketing. They also had the best pricing algorithms resulting in massive profit margins compared to the competition. Nonetheless they were destroyed in the marketplace. The biggest killer is that Expedia invested heavily in sales to the sacrifice of everything else eventually resulting in inventory relations teams 3-5x greater than what Travelocity could dream of affording. That was enough to achieve market dominance for Expedia.

Then to make that worse Travelocity only understood growth which was a colossal strategic failure executives would repeat over and over. When it became clear to the original executive team they simply left the company. There was a later executive that doubled down on this and in one year converted a $100 million business to a $60 million business. That guy is still a travel industry executive.

The final nail in the coffin is poor product. It would fail at checkout thereby dropping sales and those customers would never come back. It costs too much to maintain because of poor decisions about software execution. They would also make bad decisions about new initiatives until they doubled down on A/B testing. Then to compensate for all these product failures they would over invest in advertising which drove more customers off the site.

Poor software execution resulted in my layoff from my previous job. The thing that has saved me from layoffs in the past was having a skill that was both essential and difficult to replace just by hiring. The thing that resulted in my layoff from the last job was a fragile product and the unwillingness to fix that product. This is why I have abandoned any kind of web related work. More often than not terrible decisions are intentionally made on the basis of immediate people replacement or immediate feature delivery without regard for how shitty or expensive the new feature is. So much of the time it feels like children are running the daycare because people with inadequate experience want to visibility and nobody wants to clean up their messes.

[lazyasciiart]

Salesforce layoffs had no internal cause - just "investors want us to cut costs". They selected people at random, and we lost tons of people who were essential and difficult to replace. Then they said "we can't guarantee there won't be more, and we can't tell you any way to avoid being hit". And then they said stuff about productivity going down but I didn't care, surprise!

[dangus]

I think this example is way more common than the situation your parent commenter described. Most corporations don’t seem to be identifiably strategic about layoffs. They don’t make a coherent plan until the shit hits the fan and the board dictates that a certain percentage must go.

I’ve been laid off three times and not once was my layoff a result of a coherent strategy or reflective of my utility/value to the team.

The first time, I was an accounting mistake. The company quite literally hired me and numerous other contractors by accident. The bean counters in corporate simply weren’t talking to each other and hiring managers somehow got their reqs through.

The second time, I along with my new hire cohort was laid off a month after my start date. I’m not even sure how a company is so disorganized that they can go from approving new hires to laying off those same new hires within a time period that couldn’t have been longer than 3 months.

The third time was similar except that it took place in a slightly longer timespan, still less than a year. Company management handled growth immaturely and irresponsibly, choosing to bulk hire then lay off the cohort rather than growing more conservatively. Paying 5 employees for almost a year could have paid for one employee for over 3 years, no layoff necessary.

[WorldMaker]

Relatedly:

- Layoff to hopefully bump stock price prior to M&A negotiations

- Layoff to "streamline" before new CTO start date whether or not the CTO was expected to change directions and before incoming CTO even evaluated the existing teams. Further simplified: layoff to hopefully bump stock price due to speculation about CTO transfer being theoretically messy on paper.

There's definitely a common thread in my layoffs of some dull ideas to please some form of stock investor's short-term, single Quarter thinking, maybe influenced by actual stock investors. That's also something that there seems to be some data on in 2022/2023 layoff cycles in general how much of them have been "activist" shareholder lead, as much or more than board strategy (though the Venn Diagrams between boards and "activist" shareholders is sometimes quite close to a circle, go figure).

[abirch]

Peter Drucker called random firing amputation without diagnosis.

[gtirloni]

Same situation at a different company, except they kept telling us "we made sure this won't keep happening". Of course few people believed and we lost many good engineers that simply left because they couldn't have a major source of income coming from such unstable place.

I like to believe executives know their workforce will shrink more than the layoff numbers. They must know this. They also must know it will be harder to hire new people. They know this, right? Please someone tell me so.

[mlrtime]

>They must know this. They also must know it will be harder to hire new people. They know this, right? Please someone tell me so.

What time horizon are you thinking? People will forget '22/'23 layoffs very quickly. This is especially true if you made it through these last years, the market picks up and you want to move.

[gtirloni]

I have no doubt people will forget in time (<5 years).

But anyone looking for a job ought to do due dilligence when things pick up again and at least set the correct expectations about how long their relationship with the company could last if the market turns bad again.

[geodel]

Why? If anyone frequented this or many other forums they'd know employers can terminate employee any time without any reason whatsoever. Leave the job with as little notice as possible because employers absolutely do not care for you. And when last year it did happen people here are feeling hurt as if forever job promise is broken.

[lazyasciiart]

"As little notice as possible" as in send an email 3am Wednesday that you have left the job and as of sending this email you are no longer able to be contacted? I would have a very negative opinion of that person, just as I do of the employer who conducted layoffs that way.

[WorldMaker]

In a world where Glassdoor and LinkedIn exists?

I've got an employer that I've held a grudge against for nearly two decades now and another that friends of mine have held grudges against since at least two corporate rebrandings ago, all just off the top of my head. We'll all happily talk dirt in a LinkedIn DM or over beers and who is to say how many of us all posted some anonymous strongly worded letter to something like Glassdoor.

Labor is still a market, for now, and while it isn't as liquid or as free of a market (in terms of open price [wage/salary] information, in terms of too many near monopsonies and/or trust-like behavior) as it should be in America, and companies should stop treating it like a one-way street. Bad labor relations hurts brands and eventually the market uses that information. It's not always efficient at using that information especially because it isn't liquid/free enough, but it uses that information.

[marcosdumay]

> Salesforce layoffs had no internal cause

This is the shared theme of most of the recent layoffs.

I don't know where the GP is coming from. Layoffs with clear and local causes seem to be a tiny minority.

[austin-cheney]

Nobody wants to believe that they are easy to replace... as they are laid off and replaced. So, comment redacted.

[lazyasciiart]

Some of my former coworkers are lucky enough to now know that they were irreplaceable, or close to it, as they were hired back after being laid off. There are more former coworkers who have been gone almost a year now and wouldn't dream of coming back, but have not been replaced and are still regretted by their former colleagues.