[bigfatkitten]

Layoffs in US companies are a BCP event. It's like an earthquake or a tsunami. Weeks of chaos while you figure out who survived, and who's now doing the work previously done by a team that no longer exists.

I watched a layoff take out half the security team during an incident. That was fun.

[Y_Y]

> A business continuity plan (BCP) is a system of prevention and recovery from potential threats to a company.

I feel like global acronym bankruptcy is overdue.

[Squeeze2664]

GAB, you mean?

[shagie]

I'm reminded of the last part of 'TLA' form the Jargon File (I had a hard copy back in college that I read cover to cover).

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TLA.html

...

The self-effacing phrase “TDM TLA” (Too Damn Many...) is often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin “What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 90s?” Paul's straight-faced response: “There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms.” (To be exact, there are 26^3 = 17,576.) There is probably some karmic justice in the fact that Paul Boutin subsequently became a journalist.

[trelane]

Now I want to use the dictionary file to figure the actual probability of a letter appearing in a TLA. It's not nearly 1/26.

[shagie]

There's likely a good bit of analysis that could be done on TLAs. Consider TLA itself is {Adjective : Count} {Noun} {Noun}. Meanwhile, DUI is {Gerund} {Preposition} {Noun} with the stop word 'the' removed.

It might be interesting to take a sample of TLAs used and look what words can be used in those spots. If the third position is 90% likely to be a noun, that could change the distribution... guessing not in a significant way itself but it could be interesting to see.

[OrsonSmelles]

This is the best work I know on the topic (admittedly having done no literature review): https://gwern.net/tla

[siavosh]

BCP events. This makes so much sense. At a previous mega corp I was always confused why such emphasis was made on BCPs for war or natural disaster scenarios which are so rare compared to how much time was spent on the plans. Literally months later we had massive layoffs. The layoff was the (un)natural disaster they were preparing for!