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Comment by diego | Hacker News Reader

Quality engineers and dead weight are not exclusive. Great people who are burnt out and unmotivated become dead weight to a company. When planning layoffs, it's normal to put people who are checked out, coasting, and/or clearly planning their next move at the top of the list. That doesn't mean they are not high quality professionals.

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And at some places, the people who get laid off are the people who aren't friends with the right people in management. It has nothing to do with dead weight.

I have seen this exact thing happen in a company I used to work for. It was the catalyst that made me look for another job.

I'm not saying this is the case with Twitter, I don't know anything about Twitter as a company.

I doubt Twitter is making deep cuts so they can keep their friends. But it does help to like the people you work with.

Part of being a good software engineer is being tolerable to other software engineers. ;)

I think you misunderstood what I meant, people are less capable technically, but more capable from a "relationship building" standpoint will often spend as much time becoming friends with management so they are not laid off.

This probably doesn't happen in smaller startups, but I've worked in several medium and large size companies and have seen it happen.

It doesn't matter if you're getting along with your coworkers, they aren't the ones making the layoff decisions.

This is dead on. I think the biggest reason quality engineers turn unproductive is that they feel their efforts are wasted (pointless meetings, org policy requiring some inferior tooling/platform/language, etc.)

Those engineers are usually fairly vocal about obstacles. Managers should learn to interpret this signal, suss out the root cause (usually easy) and eliminate it (usually hard).

Twitter might actually be better served by promoting some set of the folks that landed on the cut list.

> suss out the root cause (usually easy) and eliminate it (usually hard).

Well in this case it maybe what happened. They are eliminating the root cause -- the actors ;-)

Basically always think twice and watch your back. HR is not your friend to confide in, being disgruntled and pointing to issues need to be done carefully. In an irrational organization it will backfire -- you are labeled as a disgruntled trouble-maker.

Or hell, great people who work on projects that get axed may not have been as visible from outside the project.

They might have written some of the best code in a feature that management doesn't want anymore (Twitter API anyone?) but that doesn't necessarily translate in being part of those that are kept.

Maybe the dev lived in a town where they are closing the whole office and relocation is too much $$$ compared to a package. Maybe she just hasn't been with Twitter long enough to shine outside of her immediate team (who're all being cut). Maybe the folks drawing up lists had to make some concessions to keep some of their friends employed (consciously or otherwise.)

Similarly I was laid off once as they decided to get rid of the whole department. This was a very large company so a department was quite a few people. No one survived, there was no judgement on if you were a start contributor or not. I feel no shame in talking about being laid off in that case as there was literally no indicator of my personal quality wrapped up in that.

Not really its the ones who wont make a fuss and the easy targets they tend to target - this is from experience at British Telecom

I'm always surprised people can never seem to see these things coming. If I was working there, I would've started looking two or three months ago.

Maybe they had some stock options or something they were holding onto??

Maybe they have families and don't want to upset the status quo until it's absolutely necessary.

I wonder if there are any risk metrics for one's primary employment. We apply sophisticated risk models to our investments, but I've never heard of anyone doing the same to their employer.

As a logical exercise, if we assign some risk to your employer terminating you (I imagine especially for publicly traded companies one could come up with some more-accurate-than-guess-formula), then there would be a point at which the risk of your current employer would outweigh the risk of leaving to find another job. Or, another way, the risk-reward between two different jobs could be measured (e.g. working at risky Startup X vs stable Retail Bank Y).

Links welcome!

Someone posted an algorithm to determine the likelihood of bankruptcy on here a while ago, you could modify that I guess.

http://www.stern.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/assets/document... "Estimating the Probability of Bankruptcy"

One of the things companies do when growth stops and they want to increase profits is lay people off (it's kinda a classic MBA move).

Most people don't apply the even the crudest risk model to their investments nor their primary source of liquid capital, their job.

Which then in most cases is too late, and you're left in the lurch behind the 8-ball.

Case in point - Target's acquisition of the Zellers leases on their locations.

I had over a dozen people I know who were offered pretty lucrative jobs there. I know another half dozen who balked at their offers (including myself). The people who went were only there about 6 months. Right away, there were signs this was doomed.

For several months all I heard and read was stories about how this was not going very well at all. Two of my friends who took jobs started looking as rumors swept through their departments. They both found employment in short order, right before the roof collapsed and Target announced over 1,700 layoffs.

If you decided to wait it out, you were now entering a market were you had a lot of competition for your same job at any number of businesses in the area. Thus, reducing the likelihood of finding something quickly. I have several friends who still haven't found a job six months later.

I went through the first dot com bust with two startups. Because of that scary experience, I've always been leery of my continuing employment anywhere. I'm become somewhat adept at reading signs and realizing when something is about to go tits up. As such, I interview constantly, and always have an exit strategy for any position I take, whether its a perm gig or a contract gig. I constantly look over my shoulder and its served me well.

All of the engineers laid off could have job offers this week if they wanted, so this is not exactly like that situation. There may be people whose skills aren't in as high demand, but these are the folks that are often the last to see the writing on the wall.

Since the stealth layoffs last year at the same time, Twitter has been bleeding engineers left and right. The writing has been on the wall since August 2014.

Of the people I knew well when I worked there, the more talented ambitious has been gone for 6 months already.

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