However callous it is, roles on the margin get cut when prospects for growth dim.
Microsoft has historically been pretty ruthless about annual culls. It used to be in the GE mode of cutting the bottom 5-10% each year. More recently it’s more quiet.
I don’t begrudge companies this. They need to move resources where they’re most needed.
Meanwhile the careerists at Microsoft seem pretty happy, fwiw. My closest friend there seems content to work there for the rest of his life and he seems to be producing good quality work, even if they are pushing him into management.
Hasn't it been demonstrated that GE under Jack Welch was basically a massive fraud?
GE’s breathtaking growth under Welch was fueled in large part by its transformation into a financial services superpower. By 2000, nearly half of the company’s revenue—$96 billion—came from GE Capital
GE’s exposure to finance proved to be an enormous vulnerability after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and particularly during the financial crisis of 2008. While Welch’s successor, Jeff Immelt, tried to diminish GE’s reliance on finance, his efforts came too late.
Basically, Jack Welch was in the right place at the right time, probably (almost definitely) played semi-legal accounting games to beat analyst estimates (a practice which later led to accounting fraud charges [2]), and pretty much mortgaged the company's future in exchange for short-term boosts by selling off many of its business units and focusing on GE Capital, which basically got annihilated a few years after Jack left. So he was also a master of leaving other people holding the bag. Also, the man was apparently (according to many people who worked with him) a massive asshole with a huge ego problem and would epitomize every negative stereotype of white male executives if he were still alive today [3].
[1] https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/leaders/jack-welch-infl...
[2] https://www.cfo.com/accounting-tax/2009/08/ge-settles-accoun...
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-jack-welch-wont-be-missed/
I've read "At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric, and the Pursuit of Profit" and I consider him a con man. Stack ranking was just a nice veener to justify layoffs whose primary motivation were to inflate the valuation of GE and increase its perceived profitability.
To be fair, Welch gave what the investors wanted, but he corrupted everything in pursuit of that. If the primary proof of stack ranking's "wisdom" was that GE's stock went up then that is a sad indictment of the state of business culture in the West.
In one, the company cuts an entire business unit, or a company shuts down, or something else cataclysmic happens. This is where you have dozens/hundreds of people let go. Outside of small startups, this seems pretty rare. I think selling/divesting a failing business unit is more common than outright shutdown in tech.
In the second, the employee does something really egregious and gets straight-up terminated for cause (fired). Absenteeism, theft of company property, sexual harassment, something so bad it's borderline illegal and potentially a legal risk for the employer if they don't do something about it.
The third, which is what we're seeing here, is a general reduction in bloat done under the guise of "the economy". In my experience, great people don't tend to get let go in situations like this--it's political cover to remove the bottom 10%. Companies, at least in tech, don't make a routine practice of doing this without "a reason".
Being in the bottom 10% can happen for a lot of reasons. Maybe you just lost interest in the work. Perhaps you don't get along with your manager, or something's going on in your personal life, or the role was never a good fit in the first place. I used to think some people were just "bad", and some indeed are, but it also seems like peoples' performance really does change over their careers. Provided there's good unemployment insurance, probably best for both parties to part ways. Not only does it give the employee a kick in the pants, but it also improves the morale of the rest of the team, because it doesn't feel like someone isn't "pulling their weight".
I'm actually surprised how slowly most tech companies shed staff. In general, it seems the industry is pretty hit-driven, and if you're attached to a good product that's still making money, there's rarely much attrition, even when perhaps there should be. Conversely, a lot of great people get let go when a product isn't working (misses the market or no sales). It all seems kind of arbitrary and random. It's a lot different than, say, a restaurant with really tight margins where you're a day away from getting fired if you aren't perceived to be pulling your weight.
Thought 2: if you’re getting let go for performance reasons in a bad time for the company, often they really don’t have performance gripes, but they don’t want to put up with unemployment or file a lay-off, so they let go people that can possibly be fired for performance.
So, almost literally decimate in the classical sense? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)
That is a 10% reduction. Killing nine out of ten would be a 90% reduction but 'in the classical sense' it would also mean that the lucky guy would have to kill the 9 remaining people.
> dec·i·mate /ˈdesəˌmāt/ verb 1. kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of. "the project would decimate the fragile wetland wilderness" 2. HISTORICAL kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group.
There are many words and phrases that have changed in meaning over time through popular (mis)use.
What is often overlooked is not just that it was "one in ten" executed, but that they were executed by being clubbed to death by the other nine men who were not chosen to die.
So "decimation" spread from the literal procedure to "worst outcome imaginable". Much as "literal" no longer means literal.
To be clear, "literally" still means the original definition, but now there is an additional colloquial definition which can be used as the opposite of the original meaning[1].
From what I've read, this was standard practice at Microsoft for over a decade.
I think this makes sense during a downturn, but probably wears on morale if it happens every year.
This is the kind of situation where it would be good to have a union. In the tech industry, it might have to be a different kind of union than exists elsewhere (for instance, I think most of us wouldn't want to do technical work in an environment where people who aren't good at their job can only be fired in reverse order of seniority).
The way I see it, people aren't entitled to good jobs for life from private companies, but neither are companies entitled to a cheap and disposable workforce. There's probably some place we could meet in the middle that has stronger protections for workers than are currently in place in the U.S. (I don't know enough about what protections exist in other countries to comment.)
My first reaction to the headline was mild shock that 960 people even worked for LinkedIn. What do 10,000 do at Linked? Netflix has 8,600 and Twitter has less than 5,000 for comparison
And if employees quit voluntarily, the company doesn’t need to pay severance, may reclaim hiring bonus or RSU’s, and it helps them politically/reputationally in aggregate (by being able to claim low lay-off numbers). Of course then you might wind up with those other than your worst performers leaving, so it’s not great in the long term.
Plus the lower jobs posting overall.
I've seen so many jobs that send leetcode tests instead as the initial filter and use job boards to find candidates.
What does this mean? What issue is this?
8 rounds of interviewing with the company virtually later, I was hired. The interviews involved a mix of live coding, system design, and general questions about commonly used programming languages and frameworks.
I personally feel like the recruitment firm was beneficial to the process in getting my foot in the door and accelerating everything. I've seen many people have much worse experiences, but mostly from companies that aren't serious about hiring.
If you got an onsite interview, you probably didn’t even notice the first few filters that the recruiter applied to you. Those early filters eliminate at least 90% of applicants.