[hinkley]

I’ll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men. A company that doesn’t know what’s broken is doomed to mediocrity.

But some people want to play music while the ship sinks. So they arrange for the most pleasant rest of the voyage they can, instead of saving as many people as they can.

[klabb3]

> I’ll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men

I’m pretty cynical and assumed this was how layoffs worked but at least in faang and even smaller (maybe 500 people) SV companies, I actually don’t think this is the case anymore. Most I’ve seen have been extremely random – it seems like they cut teams/orgs very differently but on an individual level it seems random. I got the impression it’s some lawsuit thing, because they never leak the info beforehand so managers and other seniors can chime in, so it appears they’re cutting blindly from the exec level. There’s probably some politics going on in the higher echelons and maybe they force individuals out but with managers (including decorated ones) and regular employees it has not looked like a surgical political - not performance - play. From what I’ve seen.

[lazyasciiart]

That’s how salesforce did it. One way you can tell how terribly uninformed the layoff choices were is that there were people who were actually rehired immediately.

[hinkley]

I charge 3x my hourly rate and a two hour minimum to talk to anyone who laid me off.

If I worked somewhere that I loved that much that I’d even entertain the idea of coming back, I’d probably be too gutted to talk to them about it.

[jbm]

When I got laid off at SFDC, I found out that they wanted to get rid of certain localities. Heroku was always a remote friendly place, which apparently irritated some of the new Microsoft-derived management; the story I heard was they wanted to consolidate Canada's talent in my branch in Toronto and Vancouver.

I'm glad I left as I got a large pay raise and didn't have to move to Toronto; but I wouldn't say it was random, just based on metrics unrelated to the individual's contribution.

[lazyasciiart]

> but I wouldn't say it was random, just based on metrics unrelated to the individual's contribution.

You're right, it could have been based on the number of letters in their name, or the last digit on the clock when their name came up for a decision. It could have been every employee who hit a certain ratio of salary/years of experience. For the purposes of many employees being laid off, it was completely random. We had a lot of farewell drinks in Seattle, but the offices there aren't going anywhere.

[jbm]

I can see how it could be seen as random after reading that. It certainly wasn't a "fair" layoff in that there was literally nothing an employee could do to keep their current job from a performance standpoint.

Incidentally, did they do the "2 months to find a new job" thing for you too? I remember the whole process of looking for internal jobs to have been a bit chaotic and not very well planned at all. In retrospect, it made more sense to not apply anywhere, and just take it as a vacation, since they didn't pay out my vacation days. (I wonder if that wound up as an extra boat for someone)

-edit- I have absolutely no idea why your post is being downvoted, and I have started seeing this random downvoting everywhere.

[lazyasciiart]

I didn't actually get laid off, I was one of the people still there trying to figure out who was gone. Part of what makes the random nature so memorable is the refusal to tell us who had been laid off, so everyone spent days pinging others and building lists (when someone tried sharing a list of laid-off people in a public slack channel they were told to take it down). I got the bonus bizarre experience of eventually hearing that my direct manager was gone.

[Rustwerks]

This is a legal thing. If you do a layoff it's for business reasons and you can avoid all of the PIP and such. But if you do it that way you can't select based upon performance.

[hinkley]

Isn’t this why some people are so into performative work? In a layoff the people they suspect might be underperforming go onto the list. They keep the people who look good on paper, the ones who play the game.

Not the “untapped” people the author is talking about.

[rixthefox]

That's exactly it. The untapped people are actually getting bunched into the "underperforming" category because in the eyes of the beancounter they are not meeting some benign performance metric that the company wants to see.

Say I'm a phone support company. I have a script I want my employees to follow and the average support time per phone call should be anywhere between 15-30 minutes. Sally Sue is on the phone for the full 8 hours and handles 16 calls a day. Billy Brass is on the phone for 4 hours of the day but handles double the amount of calls a day.

To the bean counters Billy is underperforming because he only spends 4 hours time on the phone and the company only makes money for the amount of time they can keep people on the phone. In this example it doesn't matter that Billy is an all-star because he completed more calls, he's underperforming because he's not following the script that should keep people on the phone for as long as possible.

The point is that Billy will feel resentful because even though he's able to help more people in less time he's getting penalized so Billy has less incentive to go above and beyond and in fact needs to degrade his workflow to fit someone else's metrics. So Billy becomes "untapped" because the company has restricted his autonomy. He "CAN" do more but that's not what the company wants from him so he will choose not to do it even if it's to the benefit of the company.

[8ytecoder]

That's how I see it as well. In a layoff, the role is being eliminated as opposed to a person being fired. So they cut entire teams working on "unprofitable" products or certain roles deemed "redundant" within the product. You typically have the option to take a severance or apply for another role internally.

This is my understanding based purely on my experience getting laid off once - so take it with a huge grain of salt. The product I was working on was shutdown. I got paid a retainer to stay until the product can be properly wound down. Then got hired into a different role in a different team with a pay bump within a month. I got to keep the retainer as well - as long as I support the wind down efforts.

[ghaff]

I wrote a comment on some other thread but there's just a lot of wrong place/wrong time at an individual level. If a company is doing a substantial layoff there just isn't the time, energy, or resources to train and fit people who may be generically "better" at some level into roles that already have people presumably doing adequate jobs filling them.

People are not fungible. Someone can be in a role where they're really valuable. But the company evolves and roles evolve and the needs are different. Sure, they might be able to excel in a new role eventually--but maybe it's not optimal to try to make them fit especially at a senior level.

[mulmen]

Ok then why do we still have recruiters and HR? If their job is impossible why do we pay them to pretend otherwise? If people aren’t fungible why do we force them into fungible roles?

If the reality is that people are fungible and leadership is just out of touch and made bad decisions then they’re the ones that should be canned.

Hiring people is expensive. Firing people is expensive. Reorganizing people requires competent leadership.

[giantg2]

"Ok then why do we still have recruiters and HR? If their job is impossible why do we pay them to pretend otherwise?"

The same reason many devs exist - people convinced them it's better or more convenient to have an expert. The number of systems that could be an excel sheet...

[ghaff]

And even if you mostly just have temps and contractors, you still need some HR/recruiters at any sort of scale. And you do still have costs associated with, especially, onboarding new people.

[ghaff]

You're cutting a division. You're cutting a project. Yeah, if you were hiring into a new position, you might hire some of the people you're cutting. But you probably aren't. So, yeah, you might try to retain some specific people but you mostly aren't interested in doing a large-scal rewizzle which will probably disrupt things even more than the layoff is already going to do.

[mulmen]

Then why hire at all? If it’s all a project or disposable division just hire temps and contractors.

[ghaff]

That's the case with many roles in many industries. Films are largely made on a project basis today rather than stars being tied to a studio.

In US tech, companies today generally prefer some degree of continuity/culture of employees and many employees prefer some degree of stability but it's hard to argue that there isn't less of both than in the past.

[godelski]

The part I'm confused at is it doesn't seem that they are doomed, and end up being very successful companies. But I think this is likely due to lack of competition.

I recently did an internship at one of these big companies, doing ML. I'm a researcher but had a production role. Coming in everything was really weird to me from how they setup their machines to training and evaluation. I brought up that the way they were measuring their performance was wrong and could tell they overfit their data. They didn't believe me. But then it came to be affecting my role. So I fixed it, showed them, and then they were like "oh thanks, but we're moving on to transformers now." Main part of what I did is actually make their model robust and actually work on their customer data! (I constantly hear that "industry is better because we have customers so it has to work" but I'm waiting to see things work like promised...) Of course, their transformer model took way more to train and had all the same problems, but were hidden a few levels deeper due to them dramatically scaling data and model size.

I knew the ML research community had been overly focused on benchmarks but didn't realize how much worse it was in production environments. It just seems that metric hacking is the explicitly stated goal here. But I can't trust anyone to make ML models that themselves are metric hackers. The part that got me though is that I've always been told by industry people that if I added value to the company and made products better that the work (and thus I) would be valued. I did in an uncontestable manner, and I did not in an uncontestable way. I just thought we could make cool products AND make money at the same time. Didn't realize there was far more weight to the latter than the former. I know, I'm naive.

[riskable]

> due to lack of competition.

So let's compete! What are they selling? What prevents competitors from springing up?

[epicureanideal]

Regulatory capture, regulations in general, patents that shouldn’t have been granted, lawfare, access to capital..

[karmakurtisaani]

No connection to OP, but user base and network effect if I know modern online giants at all.

[godelski]

Yeah this is part of the issue with that particular product, the other is the initial capital. But also, the project itself was a bit too authoritarian style creepy so I'd rather not. But I've seen the exact same issues in MANY other products (I mean I could have told you rabbit or humane pin would be shit. In fact, I believe I even stated that on HN if not joked about it in person. I happily shit on plenty of papers too, and do so here)

I think what a lot of people don't understand is that there's criticism and dismissing. I'm an ML researcher, I criticize works because I want our field to be better and because I believe in ML, not because I'm against it. I think people confuse this. I'll criticize GPT all day, while also using it every day.

[godelski]

Mostly capital? Honestly, I have no idea how to get initial capital. Yeah, I know what site we're on lol. But I'm not from a top university and honestly I'd like to focus on actual AGI not this LLM stuff (LLMs are great, but lol they won't scale to AGI). Which arguably, if someone is wanting to compete in that space, why throw more money at a method that is prolific and so many have a head start? But they're momentum limited, throw me a few million and we can try new things. Don't even need half of what some of these companies are getting to produce shit that we all should know is shit and going to be shit from the get go.

[chipdart]

> I'll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men. A company that doesn’t know what’s broken is doomed to mediocrity.

I used to have that attitude, but since then I've grown to learn that people who bring back news are also creating the problems without providing any solution whereas the "yes-men" excuse is a coping mechanism to rationalize why those who try to actually tackle problems and are smart enough to not raise them before they actually exist ir have solutions are indeed an asset to the team.

No one wants to deal with a pain-in-the-ass who creates problems for everyone out of thin air. That's what gets you fired. Everyone has to deal with real problems, and they don't need the distraction of having to deal with artificial ones.

[vkou]

Unless they are given meaningful equity, it's not their ship, and regardless of whether it is or isn't, unlike the shareholders and creditors, they won't be sinking with it.

If you want worker interests to be even a little aligned with owner interests, the correct corporate structure is not an S corp, or a C corp, it is some flavor of worker co-op.

And even then, it can't grow too big.

[hinkley]

People get invested in their work. And there are a lot of software people who make their work part of their identity, and so when they are accused of doing bad work they take is as a personal attack.

[Retric]

Getting invested doesn’t mean your interests align. What’s best for your or the product can be different than what’s good for your boss, your company, your customers, or your teammates.

I used to document things in a way that would quickly get people up to speed, but was generally useless to current team members. Very useful if you where new or hadn’t touched the project in 3+ years, but no so helpful if you’ve been working on it for the last few months.

[erikerikson]

A co-op only attenuates to employees. There are better options. Example: FairShares Commons

[hinkley]

Don’t you have the same problem illustrated by this author? My perspective is the “untapped” people get diminished rewards for their inputs because they are being outplayed by politicos who inflate their importance to the process at the expense of others. For some people it is less work to make the system unfair than to excel on a fair system.

[erikerikson]

I agree that this structure has incentive problems and have so far avoided it. That said, I think it does better than a co-op. This fits the saying "the opposite of stupid is not smart". Standard corporations [frequently] used to serve only owners have a problematic incentive structure for everyone else. A co-op that serves only employees has a different bad incentive structure. Of course there are instances of improvements over the base incentive. The FairShares Commons attempts to be explicit about the balance between the stakeholders of the corporation. You can read more on Boyd's site [0] but really chapters 15 and 16 of his book Rebuild that seems to be linked there.

[0] https://graham-boyd.biz/fairshare-commons/

[7789123]

>A co-op only attenuates to employees. There are better options. Example: FairShares Commons

I am very interested in learning about these types of models.

I don't know what search terms would get me there, and/or any lists of these types of models that have been curated.

Could you suggest anything that would expedite researching this?

[erikerikson]

I'm sorry that I don't have a good index or personal awareness to share. Boyd's book linked in a peer response is a source but otherwise I can only offer that B-Corps [0] or Benefit Corps are the formally/legally recognized entry into space. A structure like the FairShares Common is a sophistication, based on the articles of incorporation above and beyond establishing legal obligations to a purpose (as is part of B-Corp incorporation). It is, itself, based on the FairShares [1] and Commons ideas [2].

[0] https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/ [1] https://www.fairshares.coop/fairshares-model/ [2] https://p2pfoundation.net/the-p2p-foundation/about-the-p2p-f...

[7789123]

That is helpful.

I previously had no idea of any existing frameworks.

I will undoubtedly gain a lot of insights through learning about them.

Thank you.

[cyanydeez]

Peoplw conceptualize businesses likr some super organism that should try to maximize the quality of its products.

In reality, it most.often maximizes its executives lives while minimizing all other forms of frictions.

Everyone whose worked with small businesses will rscognize this pattern easily. Uts only when you get a few e?tra executives that the equation itself gets comolicated, but its still typically about maximizing the executives livlihood.