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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much my experience. Once one useful person gets laid off, everyone can't help but think they're the next useful person to get laid off.

And in small groups it feels personal. So now you're playing CYA instead of taking the good kinds of risks with big payoffs.

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In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds?

I've only seen the later happen, and personally I think I'd prefer the first one. If you know that after that large layoff round the rest of the company is safe, I'd venture that might be better for the morale of the remaining employees.

It requires a certain kind of attitude that only a small minority of all people have to keep morale high in a situation where you can be fired any second without warning instead of going through the office looking like a kid who just shat his diapers.

> In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds?

Both hurt morale.

I've seen many rounds of redundancy and layoffs in UK companies and both the huge layoff rounds and the slowly trimming back everywhere.

With the big rounds, the "We'll only do this once so we'll do it big and won't do it again" is never true. The whole company knows it's just time but at least you can prepare.

The axe is on a pendulum and if you give it a lot of momentum and swing from a great height it will swing back in good time and take off another chunk of the company.

With the small rounds of denying there is an issue and trimming a person from each team, it feels like you are being hunted and it's easy to walk around and see that the company isn't doing enough to address whatever the issues are, it's too cautious.

The axe is on a pendulum and if you only swing it a little the cadence is much higher and it will swing often and constantly slice of a little.

The axe is on a pendulum, once it starts swinging it will swing again. It never swings just once.

If I'm understanding this correctly, does this mean no company can recover from a situation where they had to let go of people?

Companies are too cautious, too much in denial. The first cut is like a surgeon trainee making his first incision: too little, too late. Then comes the bigger cut, but its still not enough. Of course its not enough; by now the executives (who don't know what to do, who caused the mess and should be the first to go) have latched on to layoffs as the panacea to bring back the good times, the fruits of which they enjoyed but never understood. Layoffs can be necessary in a company, but they only work in conjunction with other actions, carefully managed together by leadership with vision and courage. I've watched executives argue over laying off a man that was costing them $5.00 per hour (and cleaning their bathrooms), but ignore everyone around the management meeting table.

The companies may survive, departments may survive. They'll need time to recover, rebuild, find new confidence and morale.

But... in the short-term, once cuts start they don't stop.

It's always too little too late. The big cuts are indicative of how bad things already are, the small cuts are indicative of how bag things are yet to get (but it is coming down the line and aimed at you).

Once the axe starts swinging, be in control of your situation and look elsewhere. Don't wait to let the situation dictate to you.

That's not _necessarily_ true. I've worked at a company that expanded far too fast, and laid off a sizeable number of people. They then got some serious focus on the areas that they could do well, made good money and grew more sustainably. By the time I left they were substantially bigger than they had been, sustainably profitable and had been acquired.

On the other hand, I've also been places where the cuts just kept on coming.

The small layoffs are not usually done for morale reasons; they're done to avoid having to give a WARN notice [1].

Even in cases where a WARN notice is not legally required, it is a PR problem to be admitting that you're laying staff off. People gossip, they think your products must not be good, new candidates have second thoughts, etc. But if you're just firing 1-2 people a week, then (you hope) nobody notices and you can keep putting on a happy public face.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

I worked at a place, where I was not laid off, but my friend was, on his birthday.

For me, this was a real eye-opener.

It would not have been a big deal for HR to wait another day, and then lay him off.

Another employee, also laid off, 2 days after moving out of his aunt's house and had put a deposit down on an apartment and DSL connection.

I think I left a month later right before the company imploded.

>but my friend was, on his birthday.

I've had this happen

good 20th.

I've had it happen too. Granted, it was kind of a bullshit zeroth job where it happened and the company folded a month later, but it still sucked. I almost brought in cupcakes to share with the company...

Happened to a friend of mine while he was on his honeymoon. Through a slip by management people knew it was coming. He wanted to know before he left, but they wouldn't tell him. So he ended up checking his voicemail everyday while he was on his final vacation.

Happened to a colleague of mine while he was on leave after the birth of his first child.

He was allowed to come into the office one weekend (escorted by security) to collect his things.

Welcome to fatherhood.

At banks I worked at, they did it once a year, HARD. Lots of loss of morale for two weeks after that...after which things stabilized again.

During crises, it hit in waves. That was another kind of drawn out hell: people wondering "am I next?" aren't terribly productive.

"Cut deep and cut once". Multiple rounds of layoffs is going to seed paranoia as well as hurt morale, so it's often better to over-do-it a little than end up with some of your best employees quitting because they're tired of wondering if they're next.

I've seen both in action, and while the large layoff is really nasty, the company can immediately start to look forwards into rebuilding rather than sitting in the "was it enough, who's next?" purgatory.

As an ex-cisco employee I can say with absolute certainty that I will view any large company which "cuts deep and cuts once" with deep suspicion and paranoia, and with bad memories.

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