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Comment by ethagknight | Hacker News Reader

If you need to halve your workforce for some unknown reason, what is the correct/best way to do it?

EDIT “you shouldn’t have to cut your workforce and a half” is not relevant discussion to this question. Say your market implodes, the Fed triples your interest rates and no one can afford to buy your stock of spec homes. nobody wants your buggy whips anymore, Apple won’t let you target people across the globe anymore, the FDA unexpectedly blocks your promising drug under development. I can come up with reasons on a long where this might happen, however it may be. I would include “bad management made bad decisions, and we are having to right the ship” as one of those items.

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Well, provide 60 days notice for one:

https://nypost.com/2022/11/04/twitter-sued-over-elon-musks-p...

If I remember the law correctly, you can also announce without notice and pay a severance that covers 60 days.

60 day pay, sure, but No way would I lay off that many people and let them back in the building. Mob mentality is a bizarre thing. Imagine the emotional burden or hostility between the retained staff and the terminated staff?

I think I would’ve taken a “slowly thin the herd” approach, but may be ripping the Band-Aid off is more emotionally acceptable. Also, your best employees, the ones who also have the highest opportunity elsewhere, will leave rather than wait to find out if they pass the mysterious retention test.

Generally, slowly thinning the heard is bad for moral. Employees will start to notice and then wonder if they are next.

In layoff situations it is almost universally better to do it all at once. This was you can assure the remaining staff their positions are safe.

The messaging and timing of course are all debatable.

At that scale, this is probably the best way to do it, but you will never come out of such an action as "the good guy"

You should never have to halve your workforce.

What sort of situation would lead to you thinking on 1 day that you don’t need to fire anyone, and thinking on the next that you need to halve your company size? It’s just not practical.

In a situation where you think a certain product has to go completely, you will likely spin it off to someone else. Even if you don’t get paid for it.

Of course, maybe if leadership changes. But if you think a company is being run so poorly that you think it can actually get by at half the workforce, you would never buy that company in the first place.

Which is exactly why Musk didn’t want to buy Twitter. But he ran his mouth too soon and so was trapped into doing so at a premium to an already inflated stock price.

What do you think Elon actually purchased when he bought Twitter? Why did he buy it? Elon was never looking for blue chip dividends, he’s buying it because he thought he could improve on operational efficiency and delete a lot of the BS (his view) occurring at the company.

I assume many companies will be doing the same in the incoming months with this economy. Elon just took the chance to get some free publicity from it from a lot of people who hate the media.

He bought Twitter because the SEC and court systems forced him to.

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