[marto1]

> But everyone knows that's not what killed them.

Another addition I'd like to add here is more often then not wrong people get booted while the "dead weight" tends to stick around and becomes even deader due to a motivation fall from the layoff. So maybe it doesn't kill, but for sure exacerbates an already bad situation.

[fx1994]

We are a small team in big company, and management that made wrong decisions is still somewhere there but not my direct management, still getting same paycheck, car, cards and benefits but new managers (that accepted to take over and got brand new car for 100k€, cards and bonuses, bells and whistles) started to layoff workers so we know this is the end for my team, and of course they will do whatever it takes to "save the product", but not fix the the real issue... lack of good developers to fix terrible bugs in our product.

[acdha]

That’s really the key part: if the managers who created the problem are still there, layoffs will just make it worse. There are cases where getting out of a dubious business line can lead to long-term benefit but I’ve seen that a handful of times compared to losing useful people while the bad managers failed upwards.

[AlotOfReading]

That's basically the story of Philips. They go through a tough period and choose to divest a "dubious" line of business to focus on higher margin products. The new company, freed of Philips management, goes on to surpass the revenues of the parent. That's how ASML and NXP were born. Signify (Philips lighting) is getting reasonably close.

[dylan604]

If your small team in a big company does not directly generate money, then you’d definitely be ripe for elimination. Time and time again we’ve seen examples of trams that are critical to supporting various revenue generating parts of the company while not directly making money themselves get cut as an “obvious” way to save money when only looking at the books. Been there.

[da_chicken]

The thing is, ending a product that's not making money shouldn't mean eliminating the workers. Those were people you picked, brought in, and have adapted to your culture.

It always strikes me as weird when a product fails and the decision is to eliminate everyone from the product manager down... and then make no other changes. Then they bring in completely new people for whatever the new product line is. Sometimes, sure, an individual or group might cause a product to fail that should otherwise succeed. But it's weird to default to the production team. Is it a design problem? A maintenance problem? A product price problem? A sales and marketing problem? A management problem?

Like, the Pontiac Aztek did not do badly because one welder from Mexico screwed it up. It failed because it was ugly. It was ugly because the styling didn't survive the requirements to use the same parts as the Buick Rendezvous and the same basic platform as the Pontiac Montana. The process of making that vehicle fit into GM at that time killed the product. Today the Chevrolet Equinox, a direct descendent, is one of the best selling vehicles on the road at a time when there's a lot more competition.

[e12e]

> Time and time again we’ve seen examples of trams that are critical to supporting various revenue generating parts of the company while not directly making money themselves get cut as an “obvious” way to save money when only looking at the books.

Love how your typo turned into a beautiful metaphor for infrastructure being cut.

Save the trams!

[Boldened15]

Some are kind to eng ICs, you’re not laid off from the company just given time to join another team. As you can still be a high-performer with context on company culture/tech stack while on a non-revenue-generating team.

[ellisv]

Even if mostly the “right” people are laid off, laying off a wrong person can have a cascading effect.

Good people like to stick together. Get rid of a couple and the rest will start to leave.

[cratermoon]

Even if, from the company's perspective, if lays off all the "right" people, some of those people will be "wrong" from the point of view of other people on the team. Maybe the company didn't value a certain person, for corporate or HR reasons, but there's always a chance that person was a valued team member for human reasons.

Layoffs will lead to people leaving, regardless of how surgical or random they are.

[karparov]

Exactly. Somebody who is universally hated by their co-workers should just be let go. Nothing to do with a layoff. So everybody who is around has some reason for actually being there. In a well-managed place, that is.

[cratermoon]

> Somebody who is universally hated by their co-workers

How many times have we seen a company fire whoever they consider "dead weight" but keep the universally hated guy because he's a 10x rockstar whatever?

[guappa]

I've seen the opposite happen: fire the unsocial guys and keep the social guys that do absolutely nothing but flame and troll on slack.

[karparov]

A 10x person who brings down 20 others to a small fraction of their potential and causes other rockstars to leave is still net-negative. Good management understands this.

(And I'm not sure why I'm downvoted for this. Nothing about that should be controversial?)

[shagie]

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/we-fired-our-top-talent-be...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474893 (2017) (133 points | 130 comments)

[cratermoon]

Exactly. So the company keeps the guy everyone hates after laying off people that get along. The next people to leave the company are the ones disgusted by the move.

[silisili]

Unfortunately, optimizing for not getting yourself laid off is not the same as optimizing for max productivity. In many ways, they're quite opposite.

[3eb7988a1663]

Indeed. Like everyone from Lake Wobegon, I think that I am effective at my job. One of the most productive things I can do is to strangle bad ideas in the crib. This is not a popular role. Killing someone's pet initiative can make enemies. Yet, it can save countless weeks/months/years on doomed-to-fail efforts.

Working to not be laid off usually means just keeping your head down and going with the flow.

[bigtimesink]

This happened to me. There was a layoff, I got overwhelmed with work that had to get picked up, lost motivation, and burned out.