[hankman86]

The uncomfortable truth is that pretty much any business can cut staff by 20% without impacting overall performance. Provided that you manage to weed out the tail end of the performance bell curve that is.

Most of the time, reducing staff is a healthy move for the business and the impacted employees. The company will not only save cost, but strengthen its culture of high performance. And under-achieving employees are often fundamentally unhappy in their role. While the short term impact of being made redundant can cause some distress, these people can still use the occasion to reset their careers.

So all in all, no reason for grief.

[whatshisface]

They don't know which 20% needs to be cut. That's why they wait until something unrelated to their business internals (market downturn, other companies are cutting) happens to try.

[jordanb]

I remember seeing somewhere an analysis that layoffs do not improve medium or long-term stock performance for companies performing layoffs. But if layoffs are coordinated sector-wide they can have a big impact on employee compensation in the sector by creating a reserve army of unemployed.

[whatshisface]

Yes, it's justified on the same economic basis as pricefixing, and unionization with coordinated strikes if you interchange the parties.

[VirusNewbie]

I was originally a huge fan of dropbox, and still a customer, though reluctantly these days.

Dropbox has fallen so far behind many other companies. Google photos search is amazing, it merges people even if they don't have contacts, it has really good image recognition, it has some sorting/ordering amongst many various dimensions.

Why can't I make small edits to text files in dropbox? Why haven't they added any useful apps?

Why are they not the best photo organizer/searching system?

[rsanek]

Keep in mind that knowledge work isn't really a bell curve, it's more of a power law. https://www.hermanaguinis.com/pdf/PPsych2012.pdf

[cjblomqvist]

Du you have sources for this? Now I'm not much better but I actually think there are several studies that show correlation between layoffs and worse than average performance.

[johnnyanmac]

It absolutely affects morale for the "suvivors". you don't just cull a fifth of your company like cattle and expect the remainers to be blissfully ignorant. Also, top performers seeing this, even if they survive, will definitely start shopping around. It's an awful move for companies in the middle-long term. T

The titanic was warned over a day in advance. It then took 3 hours to sink. You can absolutely be sinking but look to be productive for a while. Especially if the company just wants to tread water instead of grow. And I hope they have enough lifeboats ready when that time comes.

[adamc]

Evidence, please. From what I've seen in person, it doesn't work this way at all. Companies don't have a great fix on whom to cut, and it usually just makes the other employees feel stressed (and start looking at other jobs), while the unemployed suffer very significant life stress.

[insane_dreamer]

> The uncomfortable truth is that pretty much any business can cut staff by 20% without impacting overall performance.

Sorry, but I call BS on this

[formerlurker]

So, reduce people to numbers and accept the suicides?

[hn_throwaway_99]

Perhaps the better lesson is that tying your self-worth to your corporate employment is a really, really bad idea.

I realize that's difficult in today's performative world, where an quick perusal of LinkedIn shows loads of people that are "passionate" about banking compliance or insurance claims or whatever. Many companies have also have fostered this false idea that companies are a "family". That is always false. The best companies are more like a team, and when things start to go south, sometimes people on that team are cut.

Ironically, I think the professions where people really are passionate and see it as a "dream job" (think professional sports teams, actors, musicians, artists, etc.) generally have a much healthier view of their employment in the first place because they realize how tenuous it is to begin with. Point being, if you're considering suicide if you lose your job, you should be in therapy long, long before it gets to that point.

One final note: before I get the pushback of "that's all nice to say until you have no income and are living on the streets!", let's get real for a moment. First, I have a ton of sympathy for people who are laid off - it sucks and can be very destabilizing. But lets also get real - people were laid off from Dropbox with a very generous severance package and they are in a highly paid industry to begin with. None of these people are going to starve, and nearly all of them will be able to eventually find employment (if perhaps not at the same exact high salary as Dropbox). Any mental health issues folks have after getting laid off is nearly always the result of tying one's self-worth to one's job, and that's the link that should be broken.

[formerlurker]

The only thing we would agree on is that disconnecting self worth from a job is, in general, a good idea.

I have spoken with professionals in ballet and they actually feel mental strain from having to file for unemployment when off season. Even though it’s considered normal practice it doesn’t mean it’s right to treat people like that.

Dropbox gave a generous severance? Maybe, but is that is the case everywhere? I can tell you, the start up I worked for before, Aurora Innovation, only gave people one week for every year worked and they were doing silent layoffs in groups of five. One of those people was a young father on H1B who had been there less than a year.

Saying you should be in therapy long before it happens is rather callous. How was that father, or any of the other people, know they would need therapy beforehand for something they have no control over? It’s like saying you need therapy before an earthquake destroys your home.

[johnnyanmac]

>tying your self-worth to your corporate employment is a really, really bad idea.

We can talk philosophy all day long. I just want to pay rent, respecfully. People telling me to "upskill" seem tonedeaf to this.

And this isn't some thing unique to tech. All jobs dried up. I wouldn't be worried otherwise if I could find ANY work right now.

>But lets also get real - people were laid off from Dropbox with a very generous severance package and they are in a highly paid industry to begin with.

okay. Other companies don't. I got a month of severance and saved up 6 months.

It's been 13 months. What now? I'm not starving but only by dumb luck.

>Any mental health issues folks have after getting laid off is nearly always the result of tying one's self-worth to one's job, and that's the link that should be broken.

No it results from peopel stresse on how to survive. Maybe be real and look outside the FAANG bubble every once in a while. I'm not worried about Dropbox, but everything else in this BS economy that pretends to be soaring.

I don't belive you have any sympathy given this comment. You just want blame anything except the environment and people not magically being prepared for 6, 12, 18+ months of unemployment in what was very recently a "hot market".

[Der_Einzige]

You think that people who are doing nothing all day are unhappy?

Protestant work ethic got you by the gizzards.

We call it "rest and vest" here in the tech retirement homes of companies known for being "chill" like Microsoft, Linkedin, Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, Intel (historically), etc