Just a note, but this is a perfect time for companies to lay off low performers without getting a lot of flak. This is usually the case when you see companies lay off people while continuing to hire as well.
Now in bad times, it's considered "prudent," because everyone is under financial pressure. Laying off people preemptively wins in both ways in that in can look like you're eliminating financial pressure when everyone is worried about it (as opposed to the good times, where you will be singled out), as well as being able to get rid of the lowest performers and reducing pay of everyone else while avoiding bad PR, and even being considered good because you're still employing the rest. As long as the business remains solvent it's a win-win for the company.
Not saying this is good or bad for the economy or the employees, but just reflecting on some of the game theory of this.
The comment above yours is basically saying: #2 might not be the case, especially with only 8% being laid off"
Evidence against this is the fact that they also laid off lidar engineering staff in Pasadena; I don't know Cruise's business, but this also seems like the kind of consolidation you'd expect a relatively healthy company to do (though "healthy" is a weird word for a pre-product R&D co).
Source: https://electrek.co/2020/05/14/gm-cruise-lays-off-8-of-staff...
Such a crisis is a good moment to slim down the workforce since it is a legitimate restructuring and it avoids any image harm. and it's not just low performers that suffer sometimes. An average performer might get caught in the net if the pay/performance ratio is not good. Many good performers also do just because the area they worked in is not deemed profitable or necessary anymore.
1. Whether the company might cut deeper later
2. Whether other companies will be forced to follow suit
3. Because of 1 and 2, whether the average HN reader should worry about their livelihood.
(HN readers are, of course, 100% high performers their employers are lucky to have)
A broader economic crisis offers good cover for such an action. If everyone is laying employees off, it's not as bad if you do it too.
This is a confusing question, seems the answer seems embedded in the question...the former signals that there's "financial pressure" on the company over and above the reasonable baseline that every company faces, while the latter doesn't. A 100% financially healthy and secure company may choose to pay the ongoing cost of restructuring during good economic times, since layoffs in good times may have PR costs (for recruitment, for example) that outweigh the carrying costs of the low performers (or unbalanced departments, or whatever). If a downturn lowers this cost, then you'd expect companies to take advantage of it.
My curiosity is with, how does a company totally change their culture and do a complete 180%? From having workers completely hating their current company to completely not seeing themselves in moving to a different company. As some companies used to have employees mentioning it is the worst tech company in the bay area to one of the best in the bay area
There are a lot of FAANG and ex-FAANG employees on this board, and you can find lots of people who love their job and feel like they are well-treated, compensated and respected and doing a meaningful impactful job, and there are plenty who felt ignored, underpaid and disrespected while working as a cog in an machine designed to sell ads.
Laying off these people allowed them to satisfy their budget cuts while laying off relatively few people.
Continuing to hire sounds strange, but if the offers are lower the company will still save money. Pausing the recruiting pipeline would also hurt them once things start picking up again.
Now this may not be possible at smaller companies but at a company the size of AirBnB or Lyft certainly has enough problems that could still be better automated to help reduce costs further.
For a highly-paid employee, you sometimes just can't create sufficient other work for them to do if you eliminate the work they were originally doing and other people are already doing the work they could putatively have been assigned to.
And quite honestly, a person's understanding of non-engineering functions would have to be extremely limited to think that more than a fraction of them could be automated away. Software has been the "it" industry for decades now. Jobs that haven't been automated by now are hard for software/robotics to take over.
From layoffs I saw as a contractor, layoffs of this size are often not based on individual performance. Usually it's whole departments or functions that get laid off. If you have a good network you may be able to jump somewhere else.