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Comment by kettro | Hacker News Reader

One big point that would be useful is to help the fired engineer find another job. A lot of this is, as Aqua mentioned, an exercise for their conscience. The best way to alleviate it is to "do right" by the fired engineer and help them find another position. Likely would have been about as much work as this whole spiel.

Of course, OP has no requirement to do anything for them, but the easiest way to make yourself feel less bad is to make the results less bad for the person affected. Doing all of this did nothing for the person fired, except get them fired.

This would only really be feasible for a small team, such as this.

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> One big point that would be useful is to help the fired engineer find another job.

If you actually have a likely other job, sure. Otherwise the old "I know guy at Google who can look at your CV" is just a way to make yourself feel good, and it will be seen that way too.

The problem is veterans will see right through you and discount your efforts, unless you have that amazing job. And juniors will think you're helping until they realize you aren't, and they'll be disappointed in you.

This is not impossible to pull off. Especially if you have some networks in tech, who may find the idea of hiring performing engineers from you but just junior or too much of role, to be valuable.

> A lot of this is, as Aqua mentioned, an exercise for their conscience.

Just as important to build (some...) trust and preserve culture among remaining employees.

Imagine this from the lens of remaining employees: A) The new big boss wrote an algorithm to fire our friends B) The new big boss had to make a tough decision to fire our friends but went out of his way to do right by them

Which one sounds better? I think the algorithm was a good idea to explore possibilities, but I'm not sure about the subsequent blog post.

There are recent examples of these layoffs among tech companies who had to make a pivot due to Covid and took approach B. Ritual is the one that immediately comes to mind for me.

> Just as important to build (some...) trust and preserve culture among remaining employees.

This reminds me of how Toyota did it: they calculated roughly how many workers they'd need in a plant (counting expected future optimisations), then they went ahead and just said, "This is how many we think are needed to do the job. As you can see, we have been forced to fire 25% of you. The rest of you have a lifetime guarantee of employment with us."

And, critically, they didn't back down on that guarantee. That always struck me as really understanding how important it is to build trust among the ones that remain.

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