A lesson I learned at my first programming gig. I worked with a lot of really smart people, one might describe as 'rock stars' or 10x or whatever. The company was flush with government contracts and it showed.
Apparently one of the largest contracts wasn't renewed, and there was a couple rounds of back to back layoffs. Though none of them were affected, every single one was gone within a year. The only people that remained were those who couldn't get a job elsewhere, and those super comfortable who weren't necessarily bad but not setting the world on fire. The company was pretty much a zombie until it was bought out years later.
Last year GM offered Voluntary Separation Package. Those who had 5 or more years of experience would get 1 month of pay + prorated bonus + health insurance compensation.
You can guess who took the offer. 5000 of your experienced employees who have the ability to pursue other opportunities.
Absolutely. The good engineers are always the first to leave a smelly ship. Then you're just left with engineers whose chief skill is kissing their manager's ass.
This seems like a great
Reason to avoid hiring as much as possible , and use contractors for any work that could potentially be lost by non-renewal of contracts or program cancellations.
Agreed on your first point, not on your second point. Lots of tech companies did over-hire during the pandemic in a way that had entirely foreseeable results, but everyone simply got caught up in the FOMO.
On the contractor front though, you aren't going to remotely get the best and brightest by going that way, not unless you're actually contracting with industry leaders who are going to be charging way more than FTEs will cost you (and there aren't that many industry leaders). There are so many good tech companies out there offering FTE positions, so a company offering a lower-paid, lower-benefits contracting positions is simply not going to be competitive in the labor marketplace.
Apparently one of the largest contracts wasn't renewed, and there was a couple rounds of back to back layoffs. Though none of them were affected, every single one was gone within a year. The only people that remained were those who couldn't get a job elsewhere, and those super comfortable who weren't necessarily bad but not setting the world on fire. The company was pretty much a zombie until it was bought out years later.