[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.