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Comment by pavelrub | Hacker News Reader

What would be the rationale behind that? This clearly places limitations on a company's ability to optimize for achieving its goals, and ultimately stifles innovation. At the very least the long term impact of those downsides needs to be incorporated into any sort of social calculus. Would you prefer to live in a world without Teslas or SpaceXs, as long as employees are "taken care" of by their companies? This isn't necessarily even a false dilemma - it's entirely conceivable that certain ventures would require some kind of a layoffs strategy in order to be successful. Nor is it indicative of anything being wrong with "the state of the company" as you claim, unless you define it as such.

I find it entirely unconvincing that optimizing for "employee care" is overall more beneficial to humanity, including for the long term well being of the exact same employees and their families, than the alternative.

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Well, there are social contracts, and if you violate them, there are repercussions.

There are many social contracts tied to the word 'employee'. Expectation of livable vage. Expectation of stability. I liked the way patio11 once explained it (I think, and definitely am paraphrasing): "If you employ people and business is good, you get all of the profits and only owe them their wage. If business is bad, you still owe them their wage."

I am concerned that many companies are trying to weasel out of this unspoken contract. I remember McDonalds document specifying that they assume their employees have second jobs. Or that many game companies fire their QA teams every time a game is shipped.

Like, I get the incentive, I just don't like it.

To be honest, I wouldn't miss Tesla or Space X if it turns out they can't manage their employees.

You absolutely owe them their wage for the time they worked. You don't owe them their job and wage for an indefinite amount of time going forward.

> There are many social contracts tied to the word 'employee'. Expectation of livable vage. Expectation of stability.

If you fire 10% of your staff every 3 or 4 years, plus 1% the other years, that means the average employee has decades of job stability. That's probably enough.

SpaceX could quickly shrink by 10% via attrition and not highering new people. They can get rid of dead weight by firing people.

This kind of small scale lay-off is mostly a stunt, or just sign of incompetence.

What's the current SpaceX attrition rate like, and how does that change across different organizations? It could be a response to their attempt to gain additional funding, and something they heard or agreed to for said funding. Speculation, but wouldn't surprise me.

SpaceX does not make that public. Best number I saw was 50% of new employees made it to 18 months suggesting rather high annual turnover. Long hours + low pay really add up.

Downsizing via attrition means your losses are focused on those with both desire and ability to work elsewhere, and so you keep those who can’t or don’t want to.

“Don’t want to leave” is good, “can’t get hired anywhere else” is bad, and the presence of the latter makes it more desirable to leave even places which used to be fun.

That’s another way of saying incompetence.

If you want to roll the dice on a new employee then fire the old one. This kind of 10% cut results in losing your best who don’t wait around and just start looking on day one. Worse, they often leave after your round of cuts as getting an offer is outside of your timeframe.

Why would it "stifle innovation"? Having to run a company sustainably should promote innovation.

It may stifle impractical get-rich-quick strategies and customer scamming, but that's not a bad thing.

This is very true - a huge amount of 'business strategy innovation' centers not around how to find better product-market fit or how to efficiently produce excellent products but on how best to game predictable trends to funnel benefits of resource collection/human effort at scale into a smaller number of hands (owners, management and the biggest/earliest investors).

The idea that upside potential of an organization's efforts can/should never make it into the workforce and the effort to ensure that it remain this way is extremely sad and corrupting and makes for a world where misaligned incentives and exploitation are much more likely than they 'should' be.

Because it removes degrees of freedom. If there are N ways to achieve goal X, and some of those ways include layoffs, then removing those ways from the space of possible strategies will reduce the probability of companies achieving X.

Your analysis is incomplete.

Some of the ways to achieve goal X are via layoffs, some aren't. You cut some possible routes to X, but you add more routes.

Not all routes are equal. Cutting a particular employee might mean that a vital convergent point is no longer possible to enter, meaning all routes now lead to failure.

Some of the optimal routes to X may require that management get paid a fair wage (rather than 40+ times the median), and that they reconfigure the company to enable them to keep all employees - everyone gets hours cut by half-a-day, say.

TL;DR - in short you're committing petitio principii, assuming the best way is layoffs, and thus concluding the best way can't be taken without layoffs.

Not at all. The only observation I'm making is that {ways without layoffs} ⊆ {ways without layoffs} U {ways with layoffs}. Everything you can do in a universe where layoffs are outlawed you can also do in a universe where they aren't. The difference is that in the former universe you have less options, and therefore less paths to success. None of that means or implies that layoffs are always the "best" option.

>Everything you can do [...] //

It's not necessary that the number of actual paths available is reduced by the imposition of "no layoffs", it can actually be increased. It seems counter logical. A restriction can lead to greater innovation that is stimulated by the restriction, there were I'd warrant far more places to get an alcoholic drink under prohibition than prior to its institution.

>you have less options, and therefore less paths to success //

A priori it seems right, but the successful paths aren't randomly distributed; perhaps there is a key employee who leaves under layoffs and the business fails (another business succeeding).

You can apply basic set theory to chaotic and complex psycho-temporal interactions.

But I agree, as I think you surmise, that we can't simplistically mathematically impute the "best" route will be with(|out) layoffs.

>> Would you prefer to live in a world without Teslas or SpaceXs...

Such world exists and can be found in most socialist countries. It's not bad per see but not that exciting either. I personally believe the workers should be given more opportunities(i.e advance notice so that they can find another job in a timely manner) rather than social care.

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