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Comment by jcroll | Hacker News Reader

what is the less cruel way to lay off 10% of your workforce

Tell the affected ones immediately. Don't tell the other 90% that they're potentially getting fired tomorrow. Treat people with respect and be transparent when you hold power over them.

Well, rather than a "Don't come Monday" email on a weekend, which effectively gives them 0 working days notice, giving those employees say, 2 weeks notice that they will be terminated at least gives them a chance to re-train for another position or get their resumes together to try and find another job while still getting an income to pay for rent, food etc.

FAR less 'cruel' to give them an opportunity to plan their exit and give them the psychological space to get used to the fact.

EDIT: In light of the 'read the article' responses and downvotes, I wanted to clarify that my comment here is directly addressing the question "what is a less cruel way of laying people off" against the purported scenario above of people being told on Friday to go home and check their emails to see if they still have a job on Monday.

This rarely happens because of liability and security. It’s pretty common to be walked out by security after packing up your stuff when you are laid off.

AKA the first 10 minutes of the movie Margin Call.

Heh, a hedge fund I worked at didn't even let you back to your desk. You were immediately escorted out by security. "Your personal effects at your desk will be mailed to you." Suppose there were exceptions to say grab keys, wallet or a purse, but you weren't packing up everything.

From the article: "SpaceX is offering a minimum of eight weeks’ pay and other benefits to laid-off workers, according to Shotwell’s email. The company will also provide assistance with career coaching, resume help and job searches."

So SpaceX is giving employees two months to focus their full efforts on finding their next job. This seems less cruel than telling them they will lose their jobs and then expecting them to keep working.

That is FAR less cruel, and more in line with how most companies handle a genuine redundancy.

My response above was to do with the fact that employees who were NOT terminated were also subjected to the psychological trauma of spending the weekend guessing whether they had a job come Monday. Not the best way to keep morale high.

That need not just be charity on SpaceX's part. The circumstances of the layoff sounds like it would trigger the WARN act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini.... If so, 60 days notice is a legal requirement, not beneficence on SpaceX's part.

The notice is a requirement.

Not requiring them to do any work whatsoever for that time is beneficence.

They already get 8 weeks severance. Keeping them around for 2 weeks to mope doesn’t help anything.

Except keeping people around for two weeks longer allows people to say goodbye to their coworkers and people they might've worked with for years. It allows them to impart their knowledge to anyone else that might need it, document things that need documenting and more importantly: It means the company treats you like an actual human being.

Acting like people are just gonna sit around and mope is not only highly disingenuous but is also a good way to fuck over the people having to fill in the knowledge gaps.

It's also a good way to get a disgruntled worker who still has system privileges or physical access to cause all kinds of havoc. Not worth the risk, even if you think it's more humane.

Not worth the risk? Disgruntled workers only generally arise if you treat your employees like shit and do shit like say, telling employees 'hey you might not have a job on monday but we're not telling you! we're gonna give you a weekend to think about your possible jobloss'.

I honestly hope you never work in HR because your sort of attitude is genuinely disastrous to this industry. Acting like treating your employees with respect is a 'risk' is terrible.

I agree the mail thing is not great... but you’re saying that of the 600 employees who were laid off, not a single one of them will become disgruntled if they had a good work environment? I too despise HR practices in some instances, but I’d consider them extremely incompetent if they believed in collective goodwill of 600 people who just lost their jobs. Keeping their access to sensitive systems (in a rocket company, no less!) would be opening the company up to sabotage, and HR would be fully (and rightfully) blamed for it.

Also, if I were laid off, why would I want to continue working for them for two more weeks? I don’t care about the company’s success at that point. I’m already getting two months severance; it’s much better to focus entirely on finding a job as quickly as possible. Half a month’s paycheck is not worth the emotional pain of seeing your non-laid-off colleagues continue to live their normal life, but act all awkward around you.

In fact, I’ll go ahead and say: I think your attitude that requests laid-off employees to keep working is disastrous. Nothing about making them come to work is respectful or beneficial to them.

They launch giant multi million dollar missiles into space. Allowing an employee that knows they are terminated and is most likely distracted to continue working on a project like that is not worth the risk. If someone was genuinely upset and wanted revenge, a good portion of them are literally rocket scientists, they could probably figure out a way to do it if given a couple weeks.

Better just to cut ties as quickly as possible. They were given 8 weeks of severance and if they are really friends with the people, they can call them on the way home. They are not banned from communicating with their past co-workers.

I know it sounds harsh but there is no nice way to find out you were fired. This way mitigates the companies risk, provides decent (not great) severance for the employees and time to find a new job while being paid.

The only winners in a layoff are the shareholders.

I used to work for a government contractor and during lay-offs they rarely did the whole plug-pulling nonsense on their employees when they needed to restructure or lay people off.

So I suppose you can consider me highly skeptical when a commercial company makes the excuse that they're doing it for security reasons. Because to me, that sounds like pure bullshit designed to cover for shitty practices.

It's easy for me to take a pragmatic approach from the outside looking in but if I was the one getting laid off, I would probably share your sentiment.

I don't know why companies do the "escort you out by security" thing, but I doubt there is a great deal of logic to it, as I have observed that even at a given company, some people are treated like that and some aren't, and there's no sense to it. It's never happened to me, but a former boss of mine was laid off that way, and nobody admitted to knowing why. Yes, he could have destroyed a lot if he'd wanted to, but so could a less senior employee.

Do it progressively rather than telling everyone "go home and start guessing whether you'll come back." Hack and slash will always have casualties, and you'll lose good people. If you go down the chain asking people confidentially whether there's anyone they feel the team would be better off without, then you can work on removing the weakest links without making the entire company feel like they can't trust you.

To tell people face to face, to have the courage instead of hiding behind the impersonal email. Basic etiquette.

I've been laid off face to face. It's not enjoyable. The logistics of safely laying off 10% of a workforce really prohibits this anyway.

It's not enjoyable, but it's still the right thing to do.

As for the logistics, each member of staff can be talked to by their immediate manager, making it scale easily. Matter of fact, this once happened to me, and my boss was as clearly upset to let me go as I was to leave. But everyone being let go was informed and given their notice as soon as the workday started, so there was no uncertainty or delay.

What if the managers are fired too? Should they be kept on just long enough to fire their reports? Is that somehow more humane?

Employment is a business deal. If you consider your relationship with your manager to be personal then you have an unhealthy view of your job.

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