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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing something? It strikes me that 4% isn't exactly a large layoff; it's more within the realm of regular turnover and corporate strategy realignment.

> “As part of a continued planning process where we regularly assess our resourcing levels against our company priorities,” said the company in a statement to Waypoint, “we decided to realign some of our resources to better drive focus and support our long-term growth. This resulted in some hard decisions that impacted approximately 4% of all Unity workforce. We are grateful for the contributions of those leaving Unity and we are supporting them through this difficult transition.”

It's unfortunate, but normal. Is the discussion that it should not be normal?

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Yes, you're missing something. Namely this:

> That number is roughly 4 percent of the company’s total employees. It comes just weeks after Riccitiello told explicitly employees in an all-hands meeting that layoffs weren’t coming.

So if the "top minds" at the company decides layoffs aren't on the table, but does them anyways, something is seriously wrong. If they knew layoffs are coming but told people they are not, something is seriously wrong.

No matter how you turn and twist it, that quote makes it clear that something is seriously wrong in the management at the company. If I was working there, I would also be stressed out at this point, especially since my first thought would be that 4% wouldn't be enough, and I'm next.

Every time I lived through layoffs, they were absolutely not going to happen.

No manager wants the fire in building attitude with everyone running away.

I think you hit the nail on the head there.

Eh it's also a polite way of saying that they're getting rid of the worst performers. There's a balance. Firing bad employees can improve productivity and morale of those that remain. I'd say at most of the companies I've worked for there's been at least 4% of employees that we'd have been better off firing and rolling the dice finding a replacement.

Sure, I have nothing against companies doing so, at long as they are up front about it. That's not what happened here. It would be like they are saying "We're not gonna fire people for poor performance" and then some weeks later announce "We're gonna start firing people for poor performance". It just looks really bad on management.

Running a business isn't easy. And the right decision last week can be the wrong one today. I gag when I hear about employees wanting to share in the ownership of a company that didn't structure itself that way, especially when they only want to share the gains, not the losses.

I've been in companies that did layoffs. I've expressed to colleagues that I'd rather take a pay cut and keep everyone onboard. Most companies are not democracies. Execs make the hard decisions. Some are jerks, most aren't. I used to be friends with someone who was HR director for a women's beauty products company. He showed up for a sporting activity telling us he'd shut down a line of products and laid off nearly a hundred people. And he got a $60k bonus. i asked him how he felt about the folks laid off. He said "nothing he could do, it was happening with or without him". He didn't like my comment about it'd be nice if he donated that bonus to be spread across those former employees. He bought a bigger boat. We... aren't friends anymore.

Layoffs should never be unexpected—at least not without some massive external (or otherwise unpredictable) shock.

It doesn't sound like these layoffs were unexpected to the C-suite. They just didn't want to let people know they were coming, because that would panic people/drop the stock price/make them look bad/etc.

From the point of view of the manager/executive, layoffs should almost always be unexpected to the workforce. You have nothing to gain otherwise and potentially something to lose. Such as morale (contrary to stated 'preference', workers that haven't been fired during a layoff aren't unhappy, and those who were fired no longer matter) and potential sabotage - some subset of to-be-fired workers know they will be fired during a layoff.

Yes, I recognize this view (that corporate policy should be organized for maximum benefit to the corporation, and the actual workers be damned); however, I reject it entirely, because it's inhumane and is part of what is destroying our society.

We need to get past this childish "maximum profit and cut everything else" philosophy and start acting like responsible adults in a society.

In that case I would advice you to read a book about game theory, lest you be cursed to live your life in perpetual confusion about why the world is the way that it is. Cloaking this confusion in "We need to get past this childish philosophy" and "start acting like responsible adults in a society" etc.

That 4% turnover is already 'priced in' and these layoffs are in addition to the regular management out, etc. they plan. If these were just rolled into the regular attrition they wouldn't even mention it or make news about it.

It's hard to say without knowing what projects they cut as part of the process.

If you want to cancel a larger project you can either gut it, and do the work to relocate everyone only to lay them off slowly, or you can do a larger layoff and only relocate people you plan to keep.

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