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> Does management pay zero attention?

You may have seen many posts about bad management. Here's just another example why those posts are abound.

Notice how the vast majority of workers laid off will not be the same managers who made those bad choices.

Why is it "bad management" to eliminate unproductive employees or departments? If you hired an accountant who promised to find tax deductions, but he charged you $1000 to save $500 on taxes, you'd fire him. Likewise, if Wal-Mart has an expensive "corporate analytics" or "data science" team that isn't net positive, why keep them around? If Wal-Mart has an expensive in-house creative agency generating ads and branding, perhaps getting rid of it and going with an external agency is what is needed? Maybe all their digital initiatives have been slow to roll out or underperformed projections, and they decide to stop throwing good money after bad.

When I hire an accountant who promised to find tax deductions, but he didn't, I am firing them for not fulfilling a promise.

A new hire, especially at lower levels, has not promised anything except an exchange of skills for money.

I would even say that the hiring manager promised the company that hiring more headcount will give some benefits. But those benefits never materialized for the company. So by your own logic, a company should first fire the manager who did not fulfil their promise.

> I am firing them for not fulfilling a promise

I believe what OP meant was that they fulfilled the promise by finding tax deductions, just not enough to justify the cost of their bill. Likewise firing employees has nothing to do with promises: it's just unprofitable to keep them on. If there is no short to medium-term need for the employees, they have to go. The decision may be unpopular, but necessary.

I understand the necessity from a business perspective. People will have to go if there's no money to pay.

The real question is, who is let go first? The bad decision maker or the skilled workforce that could continue to produce goods with a better decision maker?

Your comment assumes it was a bad decision at the time, or that they might make bad future decisions that a new person would not.

It is entirely possible when budgets were available certain initiative made sense to fund. If budgets dry up you start cutting the least harmful thing even if it was still a good idea. It may just not be better than the thing over here that is more profitable or cost effective.

The higher up the ladder you go, the more important your skill of "foresight" is.

If the hiring decisions are made on simple heuristics such as budget in so hire more, budget gone so fire more - it's not surprising that most engineers don't like their managers, which was my original post.

We can argue all day long about what management could have done but ultimately the bad decision was made by the management chain, not by the employee. In a fairer system, the expectation is that the bad decision makers go first.

> Notice how the vast majority of workers laid off will not be the same managers who made those bad choices.

You've been working off these assumptions -- that low-level people will be fired first, and that some group of people clearly made "bad decisions" -- since your original comment, and keep repeating them in some form in all subsequent comments, without a single shred of evidence for either.

They are getting rid of 200 people, not very many at Wal-Mart's size, and are still hiring in multiple key areas. Maybe they just decided, with business contracting, it was the right time to eliminate the slackers, the less-skilled, the I'd-never-shop-at-Wal-Marts, the morale-draggers.

> the more important your skill of "foresight" is

Nobody foresaw a global pandemic shutting down economies and freezing major trade routes from Asia, to be followed by massive inflation and huge increases in borrowing costs.

Last in first out. That's how I've seen it happen.

a) and plenty of new hires don't actually have the skills they claimed to have, but, regardless, more importantly

b) Yes, using my examples above, the company should fire the head of the corp analytics department, and the in-house creative agency, and the head of some digital initiatives. But the entire dept has to go too. Sorry if you just got hired, or you're low-level, that's life.

c) "fulfill a promise" doesn't fly in corporate world. There are no "promises". Companies try things, some work and some don't. They make good decisions and bad ones. Sometimes a thing works great, then the economy changes, a competitor comes in, or new tech is developed. I'm sure that President of 35mm film at Kodak was a prestigious job for decades. Now it isn't. It's not because someone failed to deliver on a "promise".

Headcount changes take time. If you need more workers next week, you need to be hiring a month or more in advance.

And hiring/onboarding costs money.

So to answer your question, headcount changes have a very long lead time.

If you update your forecast and realize you’ll need fewer people 6 months from now, you start laying off people today.

Companies put money into projects when prospects are looking good. They can cut back to just maintenance when things are looking bad.

Maybe these will help:

[1] Amazon layoffs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32338354

[2] Walmart's strategy vs. Amazon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx_XGfGB2VE

[3] Ad industry slowdown: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32338444

Hypothesis: Ecommerce and ads boomed during the pandemic, and this fueled Walmart to aggressively compete with Amazon. The extra money during covid was invested in these riskier, more "innovative" efforts.

Now that consumer spending and the ad industry is slowing down, the growth prospects on these sectors and the corporate workforce behind them is no longer sustainable. Maybe they over hired and now need to be more conservative.

> Hypothesis: Ecommerce and ads...Maybe they over hired

Article indicates otherwise:

> Walmart is still hiring in parts of its business that are growing, including supply chain, e-commerce, health and wellness, and advertising sales.

Good catch, maybe getting rid of old business model appendices

Downturns cure prosperity-induced blindness very quickly.

> Walmart will put that work on remaining employees to save a dime. If this is true, why wasn't it being done before?

You ever make a personal budget, decide you don't need the daily coffee shop trip, cut out buying the newest ____, etc?

Why weren't you doing that before?

It's pretty much human nature to cut expenses when income or revenue drops. If you lost your job, or just half your income, I bet you'd find a few things to stop spending on.

Yes, I'd stop spending on luxuries. Do corporations ever tout this new department or new project as a luxury? Isn't it always: "this new thing is vital to our continued success and growth!"

"Opportunity for growth" is the corporate equivalent of "luxury". They can't pursue every possible opportunity for growth, they have to pick and choose. When times are good, they pursue more; when times are bad, they pursue less.

a) life tip: don't take anything a corporation, or its executives, says literally. Use your own brain.

b) congratulations if you could lose 50-100% of your income and only need to drop luxuries. for the majority of the population, it would require sacrificing housing, clothing, healthcare or food to some extent.