Where are you in your company's layoff list? | Hacker News Reader

Where are you in your company's layoff list?

blog.kdgregory.com

111 pointspietrofmaggi59 comments

I've been a sys admin and/or coder professionally since 1996. I've been a manager and an individual contributor. I've worked for big companies (HP, Yahoo), and small (in the first dozen employees). I've been through a company growing from 100 employees to nearly 1000 and back down to 100 again. I've been through two acquisitions, and probably a dozen layoffs.

I've never been let go. No doubt I've been lucky. But there's a saying: luck favors the prepared. I consistently get shit done, and have a reputation for doing so.

Do your job. Do your job well. Make sure you're not invisible. The rest is out of your control, but it's worked for me.

Knock on wood.

The way I've seen it play out time and time again is the most expensive staff are let go first when money starts to run low. If you've never been let go, have you considered you simply might be undercharging?

I disagree pretty highly. I've seen it in this order:

1. First are the flight risks. They're likely to split soon after a layoff event anyway, so might as well factor them in.

2. Second are functions that would be otherwise crippled or left unable to do their job well (eg: if you fire a flight risk manager and her team is working on a project that will no longer be needed, might as well cut the rest). Smart companies do the whole layoff this way.

3. Performance based. Highly paid employees are generally highly paid for a reason, and their value in terms of revenue impact generally exceeds their pay. Judgement calls will be made about performance; if the company is old school and still doing performance reviews, they'll be taken into account, but they're most likely incorrect anyway.

Politics will always come into play, but people tend to take layoffs more seriously than either hiring or promotion, and make a huge effort to make the best decisions they can to leave the company with a team that they believe works.

Why do you lay off someone who is expected to quit soon anyways? Doesn't that just add severance pay to your expenses?

If they're "expected to quit soon" because they seem bored with the place and they've been planning to move on to advance their career, they'll probably go without a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Of course, if they're "expected to quit soon" because they're seething with rage and angry about everything, the reaction might be quite the opposite!

As to why lay off instead of waiting for them to quit, probably because you've been told to reduce headcount now, not at some indeterminate future date.

Most layoffs are absolute in numbers (you must lay off %10 of your org). So if you don't lay them off, you have to lay off someone else.

Which is to say, if you use the layoff list as a measure of "value received" and you the company gets some value from keeping you employed, and you get some value by being employed. Then being at the top of the layoff list means you are getting way more value out of being employed than the company is, and being at the bottom of the list means the company is getting way more value out of you being employed. So if you are aggressive shoot for the top, if you are defensive shoot for the bottom :-)

This comment pretty much nails it. I've definitely seen a pattern of highly compensated people getting sacked.

If someone does play the aggressive pattern I'd highly recommend saving up a lot of cash so you can weather longer spells of unemployment. This is especially true if you intend to be selective in who you work for after getting laid off.

I like to shoot for the spot on the list that's one below the last guy that gets laid off.

There is an effective upper limit on what you can be paid because of peer issues (companies can't always pay what they should to a high performer because of the effect on other employees), but there is no upper limit to the value you can provide to a company. This can create the situation where an employee is paid the most possible, but they are contributing far more value than they cost. These are the sort of employees that employers will move heaven and earth to retain in any layoff scenario.

I don't think so. I think I've contributed value that justifies my salary. But I've also had managers willing to fight for me during layoffs. And I've been fortunate, I suppose, to work for generally decent employers, and never really had a bad manager.

Full disclosure: at my first job, I went from 50K to mid-100's in less than 4 years. My current total compensation is in the high 2xx as an individual contributor. I would be surprised if that were under-market.

>I've been fortunate, I suppose, to work for generally decent employers

Perhaps you've worked for employers when they could afford to be decent - which is not quite the same thing.

Being fired for being too expensive is a very real thing. Ask anyone laid off by IBM recently, or who was put on a PIP and fired for non-performance a few months before qualifying for retirement and a company pension payout.

Tangentially, talk of non-productive employees always reminds me of this:

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/DEC/dec.be...

High 200s as an individual contributor? That's north of what directors at iBanks make in many cases here in NYC (and salaries here are already higher than most other places for tech workers).

My guess is that you're working contract at a very lucrative rate? Or perhaps you're at some kind of financial firm that offers a hefty bonus :-D

Not at all - see senior dev engineer salaries at Google [1]. High 2xx seems reasonable. I may have missed GP's comment about being in finance, otherwise I don't see the relation to finance salaries.

1. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Software-Engi...

On Blind (yet another anonymous app for employees at BigCos) there have been dozens of people reporting 300k+ salaries at Google/Facebook/etc. Most recently was a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix with a $420k base (Netflix doesn't really do stock as a significant part of comp).

I'd love for this to be common knowledge.

I find that memo very odd. It's been my experience people involved in a 21 member "sewing circle" aren't there by choice - they've been directed to attend the meeting by their boss. Where I work sometimes people go to these kinds of BS meetings and then stay late to do their actual work.

Aren't most of the expensive staff those who contribute the most to a company's success? So why would you cull there? I mean what's the thought process behind firing those and keeping those who contribute less?

This will not be true if a long service worker accumulated a huge seniority based increments. Even past high performers who has taken their foot off the pedal would be in this group.

It's really more about perceived tactical value than cost.

with the same rational, I could say "I've been never hit by a train because I always do my job well".

Being part of a layoff has nothing to do with how well you perform in the company. Sometimes, decisions are taken at a higher level, and you excellent performance is not enough to "stop the train".

Yes, productivity is important, but is not enough to stop a layoff.

First, I try not to play near the train tracks. Second, when you are known for doing your job well, you often get advance notice that a train is coming and are given an opportunity to get away from the tracks.

Sometimes, the train takes a shortcut. I was (actually quite recently) laid off from a startup that had just closed a major round of funding and moved to a larger office, making layoffs the last thing on anyone's mind. Nearly everyone who got cut was a highly visible contributor, including a very well-liked manager: I could only conclude that the cuts were purely salary-based.

Sometimes. Other times not at all, I was in the room when one team was cut over another even though every metric said they were better. The difference? Lease terms on their office.

Its possible you just are dealing with small sample size right?

Ah, the risk reduction strategy of never trying hard things. I had a roommate who had a 4.0 GPA doing the same thing; if a class looked like too much effort, he'd drop it. And then because he had a 4.0, the deans would give him permission to enroll in "overload" classes.

It's not a bad way to live, but a few career coaches I've heard talk on the matter suggest that managing a team through a corporate downturn is valuable experience for climbing up the ladders.

That is not at all what I said. In fact it's the opposite. I take on plenty challenging projects. What I don't work on is projects that are useless to the company. Geez.

As a corollary to this, I was laid off from the first "real" software development job I ever worked, when I was an intern (though, I was finishing off the summer with a full time offer in hand).

I was interning for a recently acquired ~10 person startup that basically operated like it had before the acquisition. The parent company lost confidence in the product we were building (and a few other things). As a result, they came in one Friday and laid off everyone in one fell swoop, including intern me.

It was a humbling experience at 19 to be handing my company provided laptop to an HR person and signing away the offer letter I had only gotten a few weeks prior. Definitely a good lesson in job permanence in this industry.

Sometimes, it probably doesn't matter how good you are, shit happens.

I was let go once (been full time dev since 2004). It was when a company was getting ready for a buyout and closed 3 satellite offices one day. Our office was around 50 people and most people were let go indiscriminately.

This same company 2 years prior laid off a friend because his manager didn't like him (his manager was laid off a year after this because he was generally bad at his job). A bunch of people realized this mistake within a two days and they offered him 2 options (termination here was immediate, so he was already gone from the office). He could just leave as was the current course, or they would keep him on for 6 months so he could do some critical work that he was best to handle. He decided to stay for the 6 months and still got the severance package initially offered.

I saved myself at one company for almost two years, because nobody could do my job. I was the only developer and I ran their entire e-commerce store. Pretty much every department was slowly let go and for the last year, I moved all of their systems from an expensive and bloated shipping system and our own hosted/custom cart to Excel and a $100/month hosted e-commerce platform.

At this point, they didn't need me anymore and I was let go (which I knew was going to happen, but I enjoyed the relatively easy paycheck).

I also used that extra free time during work to start the company I am still running today.

Keep your resume always up to date? That is the kind of risk free but pointless advice you see here and there, but what is the point?

Are you going to forget the highlights of the work you have done? Not really.

Does it take a lot of work to update a resume, such that upon being laid off you have to delay your job search for a significant amount of time because you have to go into full time 'resume updating' mode for a month? Not at all.

Updating a resume takes like 4 hours. If you've been at the same job for 20 years, it might take 8 hours. There is just no reason to 'always keep your resume up to date'. Not a real reason not to do it, but no reason to do it either.

It's like advising people to always wash the bottoms of their running shoes with an old toothbrush after every run. Will it hurt? Not really. Will it help? Nope. Should you do it? If you feel like it or enjoy it, shit, go for it, but it's also a waste of time.

Sometimes when people say "keep your resume up to date" what they actually mean is job change preparation more generally.

Keep your resume up to date; give some thought to what you'd like your next job to be; do that learning/practice/professional development you've been putting off because it wasn't needed for your last job but might be for your next; make sure you're still in touch with your friends at other companies whom you've been meaning to catch up with but you've both been busy; consider whether there are any company perks or equipment you've become reliant on and decide what you'll do if you lose them; and look over your finances to make sure your arrangements reflect your expectations for the future.

> Are you going to forget the highlights of the work you have done? Not really.

I do.

I implemented a specific kind of distributed calculation in the financial industry before it was a thing. We (I didn't design the calculation) literally invented something that hadn't been done.

Totally forgot about it. It just got patented 15 years later. It's not on my resume.

Right now, I'm applying machine learning to a domain that hasn't yet had it applied and it feels similar: it's going to be awesome, going to do great things, and I probably won't remember it when I need to update my resume.

If I were to start all over, I would write down every single thing I ever did in the resume and when it came time to send that resume out, I'd whittle it down to the things that apply just for that job.

Here's to hoping I never need to send out a resume again, otherwise I'm screwed.

I refuse to have a resume that is more than the front of one piece of paper. I generally get complimented on it. When I add something new, it means something else comes off. I can update it in about 5 minutes if I need to, which is rare, because who uses resumes anymore? They are ridiculous.

The jobs that ask for a resume are the same ones I don't ever want to have again.

I just went through a round of interviews with a few companies and I didn't use a resume. They only asked for one the day before the scheduled onsite, so interviewers could have something in hand going in. I told them to just use my LinkedIn.

While you might say my LinkedIn is my resume, every single interview was the result of a referral or me reaching out to the company directly. I didn't submit a single job application. Nobody looked at my resume and made a snap judgement about whether to pursue me as a candidate.

Out of curiosity, does this mean you drop older positions completely off the resume? Doesn't this make employers question the time periods not accounted for?

BTW, I've needed a resume a few times even when not looking for a job -- e.g. a potential investor or acquirer wants to see resumes of all key personnel.

> Doesn't this make employers question the time periods not accounted for?

At a certain point, you take the date of your degree off the resume, and if they want a full history, they can ask for it.

The best plan is to have two documents: a career tracking document that covers everything you did, and how well you did it, and then your resume is simply a summary of the most important parts of that career document.

Maybe you're thinking on a different timescale then me, but I don't find it that easy to remember all the highlights when I need to update my resume after a couple years.

I also think it would be useful to keep notes on the hard problems you've faced. I find that line of questioning difficult to answer for a couple reasons: first, most of the problems don't seem that difficult once solved, and second, the interviewer is likely to probe for details which I've likely forgotten after a few months.

With average tenure in the valley at less than 2 years, most people naturally update their resume every year or so.

> Are you going to forget the highlights of the work you have done? Not really.

It's less about the highlights and more about the numbers. I found (when I worked FT) that if I spent a little time every month or two--and I mean a little time, maybe ten minutes--reviewing my LinkedIn and my resume and updating anything that might be useful. Like--oh, hey, I was using Ruby now, and I'd like to keep using Ruby, I'd better update those. Or I might have gotten hard numbers about the outcome of a project I worked on--HR and prospective employers love hard numbers--and could go back and update a bullet point from before.

In addition, it made me think more about the story that my resume is going to tell a future employer, and made me think about what I wanted out of my career in general. Because I was doing it on a regular basis every so often, and it became a habitual thing.

So, personally, I wouldn't be so dismissive of something that helps you be prepared and helps you be mindful.

> Will it help?

Absolutely, because you always need to be your own best advocate, even as your current job evolves. By taking a very small amount of time here and there to note down accomplishments, skills, etc. you're also taking time out to think about and shape the ongoing story of your career. Beyond job hopping, this awareness can help you realize that you should maybe push for more recognition and reward in your current job; now you have notes in-hand to start your pitch. Alternatively, maybe you realize sooner rather than later that you're stagnating and need to change things up.

I have a friend who works for a big aerospace conpany, and he keeps an eye on his team members. One in particular is "the buffer". This person is apparently not that good at tasks.

If "the buffer" ever gets laid off, my friend has to be concerned. Until then, "the buffer" is a source of comfort to my friend.

It's horrible to say, but almost every manager at the tactical to low-operational level keeps people around in good times specifically to act as ablative shielding in the bad. Sometimes they're low performers who can still be useful as tape-monkey equivalents, or perhaps they're "nice to haves" who aren't of any use when everyone has buckets out and are bailing, but in either case they exist to protect everyone else from layoffs or forced-ranking herd culling. This isn't a workable strategy in eat-what-you-kill environments, but you see it all the time in midsized and large companies.

HillRat, you made my day---"ablative shielding"---thank you for that phrase.

More likely, they'll lay off the whole team.

Or the whole location. But having someone of questionable competence helps my friend's peace of mind. Don't know how much it slows down the team, though.

The mere existence of this "buffer" increases the likelihood of a layoff ... oh "aerospace", might be a while.

I loved this article, but I do have to disagree on one point: your productivity matters.

Lots of teams have someone who is not pulling their weight but the boss doesn't want to have to fire them.

I agree. I've been part of teams in which the person who was clearly most productive and most critical to the team's short-term and medium-term success was laid off. The organization was going through a "restructuring" which just meant that anyone making over a certain threshold in salary was fired and "replaced" with someone half as expensive but a thousand times less capable.

The bosses probably didn't enjoy doing this (the ones who had to actually break the news) but they also didn't care too much either. If firing the most experienced people really had an impact on productivity, then the team would just be reassigned to do different work, clients would be cut, budgets would shrink, whatever it required to ensure that whichever personnel you happened to have were acceptable for whatever work your team did.

I think a lot of people don't realize this. The company exists solely to service and enhance the lifestyle of executives. If the executives see a way to maintain the same lifestyle for less business cost, even if it means terminating an entire business line and upsetting many happy customers & laying people off who are doing great at their jobs, so be it.

They utterly don't care. It has literally nothing to do with productivity except as a totally unintended side effect of how to service the lifestyle of some executive.

As companies succeed and grow, they start investing in wargaming scenarios for effectively having total bargaining power over their staff. When HR types meet with executives in these kinds of firms to talk about strategies for hiring, a high priority is how to structure the business so that it is never "dependent" on employees.

If it means ending an otherwise profitable business line, so be it. It just depends on whether ending that business line is going to have any serious impact on the lifestyles of executives or not.

You see a lot of job advice that advocates working really hard to "become necessary" to your employer. It's just wishful thinking, though. Rule number one is: no employee is necessary. If we ever discover that an employee is necessary, then we simply restructure the business, changing as much as is needed, to make sure that property is no longer true.

The best you can hope for is to be "necessary" for a short period of time as the business recognizes that this is the case and immediately begins plotting about how to restructure so as to ensure no one in your position can possibly be necessary.

It comes down to a question of degrees I think. No employee can be allowed to be so necessary as to become a single point of failure. However I think it's all possible for an employee to be reasonable "necessary" without the employer actively trying to make that position replaceable.

Isn't that what he was getting at though, even if someone is NOT productive, the boss has a list, figure out where you stand and act accordingly.

I was arguing against the below statements specifically, which I don't think are accurate based on my experience. I've been at companies that let slide non-productivity because it's easier than firing, until times are tight. Then, since they have to layoff someone, they layoff the unproductive since they don't hurt their departments that way.

"You may argue that this doesn't take into account productivity, but I believe that's irrelevant. If you're at a company that values productivity, then everyone will be productive; the idea that there's a 10x difference between top and bottom is a myth"

I think he's arguing that if you think you're productive, chances are everybody is productive on the team, at least in the boss's eyes.

If you're not productive, you certainly do have to worry about getting laid off (or fired). But when I've known folks who were fired for non-productivity, they didn't really care all that much. In fact, they were fired because they didn't care. These folks often get let go before an official round of layoffs, although in some companies they accumulate until the first round of layoffs.

The fact that you're worrying about your place on the layoff list at all is an indication that you won't be laid off for productivity reasons, only for salary/strategic reasons.

While the article is a nice run down, honestly there's not a whole lot you can do when "your number is up".

You may be told that you are low on the list or think you have a "buffer", but honestly if push comes to shove you will be laid off. It doesn't matter where you may be positioned.

While we're doling out life pro tips, mine wold be to "never make it so your value of self is dependent on your job." E.g. you can believe that you never having been laid off is a testament to your great skill and awesomeness, but that will only make the fall much harder when you are laid off. I mean that in a positive way.

This way of thinking feels a bit toxic. I don't do my job with the objective of not being laid off.

A business relationship such as employment works as long as it works for both parties. Pretty much like other relationships, when it stops working for one party, it's time to move on.

I can relate to this article. While in UK, back in 2008/9, I was a senior developer (C/C++). The favourite topic during lunch times was who will be gone or who will be retained. One guy, who everyone thought would be safe was a Team Lead (of a system written in COBOL). This guy had been awarded topmost grade in recent appraisal cycle.

He was layed-off and I got the charge of handling his system, in addition to mine, with no promotion. Apparently the only thing mattered was how much "value-for-money" an employee is bringing to the table. I came to know later that almost all team leads were layed-off because the systems in question were in existence for last 10 yrs and were stable.

Pretty far down - got key knowledge and experience on a key project. Definitely replaceable but would be painful for the company so I'm betting they'd rather not. My employer doesn't really do layoffs anyway or rather something pretty cataclysmic would have to happen to trigger it.

Its also not a big deal for me - employers are replaceable too. ;)

M&A is also another interesting case for layoffs, in this case it might not follow this traditional format as it could be redundancies that are eliminated because of political reasons and not necessarily performance/salary.

It feels like the reasons for layoffs boil down to:

- Money (Run rate/market/shareholders)

- Strategy (Company decides to go in a new/different direction)

- Politics (Internal to the company/executives/board)

I'd like to think I'm safe, since I'm sleeping with the CEO - my wife, but since I'm the only other employee I guess I'm the first to go.

But my last job...

All of my product code, even stuff I'd inherited, had been stabilized, documented, and had decent test coverage. Strike one.

I was given a manager title but had no direct reports. Strike two.

I was moved to an architect role on a struggling cross-product effort. Strike three.

As a Yahoo employee, I can say with certainty that I'm not in the bottom 15%.

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