[matrix_overload]

People fundamentally misunderstand how this works.

For a large enough product company there's always a years-long queue of feature requests, fixes, optimizations, and other things to do. All of it will never get done! The doable amount of highest-priority items will get picked through a combination of pressures from different people and departments, and will get more or less implemented.

If you cut the workforce by 50%, instead of doing 30% of the infinitely growing backlog, you'll do 15%. Since most of the completed work gets obsoleted or thrown away due to various inefficiencies, there will be some effect, but it will be far from dramatic.

As for the individual workload, you'll carry as much as you let the company put on your back. And that mostly depends on your negotiating skill, and somewhat on the supply/demand dynamics of the current labour market. The latter will tough for the couple of years, but the former is up to you to level up.

[aaomidi]

That is true for some teams, not true for others.

I've never seen a layoff actually care about what team they're removing from when it comes to ENG.

In this case it's probably 500 across twitch, which for some teams is going to be devastating.

[refulgentis]

The problem is people misunderstand how this works, so none of that happens. Instead the competition goes to 11 while work is cut by upper managers, leading to "non-business decisions" made by lower managers to cling to their bit, leading to less productivity both in absolute & unit terms.

Also, I think A) is a little bit of red herring designed to create agency and opportunity where there is none. If we mean "negotiate" in an airy high-minded vague sense of "negotiate but don't", sure. At the end of the day these moves, whether intended to or not, leave less room for negotiation.

[itsdrewmiller]

This comment is pretty hard to understand, but it's disagreeing with a comment that I think is 100% spot on about how layoffs actually work.

[softwaredoug]

There's also the coordination overhead of trying to do all this, without stepping on each others toes, which is substantial.