Why is every layoff 10-15%?
blog.eladgil.com
blog.eladgil.com
> Anticipate more mid-size and smaller companies will go back more fully into the office as times get tougher. This will not be one size fits all, but will be an increasing trend.
Up to this point in the article, whether you agree or disagree with the points, the author offers some arguments and reasoning supporting each. Here, they simply assert that small and mid-size companies will go into the office, with no supporting argument. Why? Won't many small and mid-size companies have come up under covid and not have an office lease in the liabilities column? Why would they pay (insert large city) rents to save money? How does it help?
Were they started during Covid? Office leases are typically at least 5 years, so most existing companies will still have them, hence return.
Edit: removed assertion assertion
Companies that understand remote work have done a really good job of netting talent that is not in the Bay or New York, and I'm very happy to be working for one.
In lots of tv shows the high-social-value characters have very nice offices (ie, it has a door and a couch). I'd go in-person for one of those.
I am no fan of that. If I come to the office I want to see real people.
As the job market is changing, I am worried about my work-from-home status despite having started over a year before the pandemic. I just think there is going to be a mass get your butt in the office email that will include everyone.
As CEO now is your opportunity to rethink remote work. You may decide you want to continue as is, or you may want to make changes. You have an opportunity to act.
Not that returning to the office will necessarily result in better results, but many CEOs will tend to believe that things will go better with everyone back in the office.
Many of us SWEs believe the same!
I haven't observed any advantages to an office beyond overexposing the company to real estate (not really an advantage) - there is nothing I could do in person that I haven't been able to do faster in MS Teams (and better - now I have a written record and recording of everything). Another advantage of remote is that nobody ruins my train of thought by tapping me on the shoulder and asking stupid questions like "hey did you get that email." Best of all, no stupid pressure to go to lunch with anyone
Of course teams work better in person. So many factors that impact that though.
However, in my experience that is maybe 30-90% of software engineering, depending on environment, role and seniority. There are lots of relevant activities that are more challenging remotely, such as 1-on-1 mentoring, pairing for debugging or programming, or designing and collaborating a project or interface across-teams. Maybe you are "lucky" enough to never have to bother with that.
I find these quite easy or even better remote. I just fire up a screen share or even better a Visual Studio Live Share and both of us can see the same thing while we have our own developer environment.
Delivery works great remotely, probably better for me and many.
If you adopt a written RFC based slower decision making where people have time to fully articulate their thoughts and have time to respond to those comments then it not worst, just different.
If the house is burning and we need to come up with a solution now the first works way better. There is a reason why the military have war rooms. But for long term changes the second can be as good if not better.
I also know other teams in our organization in the same boat. Sooner or later leadership is going to realize it and the gravy train will end.
Most software engineers find themselves most effective in work from home. This breaks in favor at 3:4 or higher.
The software engineers that want to work in office are the odd-balls.
I am interested in the break down when one factors in whatever concept of '10x developers' -- which do the most productive of us prefer?
> the generality; the common herd
GP was countering the possibility that GGP meant the above.
But on that day all of those people might've chosen to work from home so you sit all alone in the office.
The hybrid solution only really works well if the office days are the same for everyone.
If the staff actually find this face-to-face time valuable, they'll organize and go into the office themselves, personally I've had zero requests from anyone to do that outside of explicit team-building activities.
My enthusiasm for RTO is not about changing the venue from which we take our Zoom calls, but about changing our relationship with Zoom to something like its pre-pandemic state. To have some conversations naturally again. But there's no getting around that the WFHers would have to either show up or be excluded from them.
I personally find Zoom excruciating, and I blame the transition to remote meetings for all communication for turning a once optimistic and joyful career experience into a miserable slog.
We used to have so that every Thursday was "come to the office if you can" -day, but switched to the poll system.
Edit: Clearly not so your assertion is bull.
But when compared to the modern nearly-universal open office plan... yeah there's no doubt I'd much rather work from home as often as possible, and based on my experience in both environments I'll be far more productive doing the job from home. Everyone's mileage may vary.
Indeed. Give me a proper office with a door, like I had for the first 18 years of my career, and I'll happily go to the office every day.
But open office? Nope, nope, nope. Work from home or nothing.
We have a remote of you want policy and the only two guys who use it also live in the nieghboring towns.
I also claim that I'm more productive but it's obviously a lie in order to continue WFH.
For my first few years of WFH, my office was my bedroom, so I just threw a KVM between my home PC and the work laptop and shared monitors and input devices. I eventually set up a standalone office.
It is a strawman argument to claim that people who want to go to the office have no social life. It is in fact easier to claim that "only antisocial people want to hide at home like a hermit with their webcam shut off."
I've seen too many buy into that just to lose their entire social lives over a job change, and also have horrible life satisfaction over the long term.
So yes and no. Depends on how you define work.
I think the more common issue would be lack of collaboration and ties to the company and colleagues when working fully remote.
Working full remote - everyone at home, communicating via slack and zoom, working hours roughly the same.
Vs 9-6 ish hours, some flexibility, where they all come into an office. That office is a small, modern, comfortable office in a workspace. The office has a closed door, and only the team are allowed in the office. The team chat amongst themselves as needed during the day. They take breaks alone or in small groups outside of the office in the kitchen space or on the sofas in the workspace. They chat with folks from other companies. But no one from outside the team ever enters the inner office. It’s their space.
Do you think remote will be more productive for the team as a whole? Do you think the startup will do better with the small office or the remote scenario?
You can add an hour extra at the computer for remote (saved from commuting), but you’ll need to surrender quite a bit of that to interruptions when remote - realistically, delivery men (in the office scenario, deliveries go to a reception), families or pets, a bit of domestic chores, making lunch alone where no work discussions take place.
And I find it very hard to believe. When I started working in the 1980s, everybody got a cubicle, we didn't even like cubicles!, but you had walls and it was quieter and people treated it like your personal space.
In my last job, I could've stood up and put my hand on seven different people's shoulders without moving my feet.
So your quiet shielded office doesn't sound like anything an actual company does.
> you’ll need to surrender quite a bit of that to interruptions when remote -
No, you get a lot fewer interruptions when working remotely than in an office. Deliveries do not take an hour a day, particularly when there are two adults who can split the task.
Pet interruptions take basically zero time per day because they aren't actually an interruption: I don't have to stop thinking about my problem for one second, but if I have to answer a single question about some other technical thing, I blow away my whole thought process and have to build it up again.
- no deliveries (i only order to a dropoff or buy in person)
- no pets
- able to exercise and clear my mind during small breaks
- able to have a homecooked meal or go to my favourite places for lunch
- __not__ talking about work on breaks is actually a huge plus for me
I want a private space where I can close the door and have minimal visual and auditory disruptions. It does not have to be large, enough space for my monitors + chair. If I need to talk to someone else, we can do it in a different location.
A small company is then going to have to lose the flexibility of hiring from anywhere in the country and have to compete for local talent. On top of that, one competitive advantage could be over larger better paying companies (especially now that hopefully most people have wises up enough to know that “equity” in a private company is statistically meaningless)
> The office has a closed door, and only the team are allowed in the office. The team chat amongst themselves as needed during the day.
That doesn’t alleviate the chief complaint about in office work - loud open offices - if I still have to listen to other people talk while I’m doing deep work.
Especially since right now that lack of leverage was literally manufactured on purpose by the fed.
As was the leverage. They artificially drove the economy in the other direction in an unsustainable manner for a number of years before that.
To a certain extent, as an employee I'm happy to trade off some 'democracy' for more money in that package.
As an employer, I would be happy to give people more 'democracy' if that's cheaper to provide than more money.
Do you not hear yourself? For the average American, your employer has more control over your individual liberty than your government and we look at like that’s somehow a good thing. Like sure, if you land a cushy office job then you can forget the abuses the rest of the job market has to suffer. The railroad strike that happened this year was fought over fucking sick days and the government almost stepped in to force the workers to accept whatever their owners gave them.
I don't want my working life to be governed by what a bunch of other people vote for. I get plenty of that from the real government.
I'd rather have strong and competent management that can make credible commitments. And the mechanism to get there is not ballot boxes, but my ability to walk away from any workplace I don't like. The ability to vote with my feet.
Just like I don't want to eat at a burger place where the other customers get to vote. I just want to be able to eat at Burger King, if I don't like what McDonald's has to offer.
Worker cooperatives are already legal in most countries. Including worker cooperatives that are run on whatever theory of democracy you prefer.
Class A office space outside of super expensive cities runs about $35/sqft on average. Employees need about 175 square feet each. So every employee is $6125 more expensive -- but that's only assuming you're renting someplace turnkey, which you probably aren't, so even if you cheap out at an additional $100/sqft ($17,500 per employee) for a custom build-out (one-time cost, but still).
Where is all this money coming from? If your business is perfectly functional remote, with capital costs being what they are, why would you do this?
/s
If the place feels dingy or like the owners don't care to make it look nice, I doubt it has a positive effect on productivity and employee retention.
I wouldn't really care, I have never felt inspired by something on the walls. But I would legitimately laugh and feel better every day if the old companies name was still on the wall.
In London, the cost per employee I’ve used is £15k pa. That includes office space and maintenance, taxes, plus IT costs, entertainment, HR, etc.
The cost for fully remote employees is £9k pa. That is, the cost of the office is £6K per employee.
There are additional costs for remote employees, like remote support. But these balance against not having to buy office furniture, pay for cleaning, etc.
I'm really surprised by such high figure. How was this clalculated?
* Laptop
* Accounts like email, Slack
* Entertainment (e.g. Christmas party)
* HR (this covered specific HR services like payroll, not the whole thing)
* IT support
* Travel expenses
* Home working budget
* Training
The £9K figure _doesn't_ include taxes on individuals, such as NI and pension contributions. That comes from a different budget, and is typically an extra 25% on top of salary.
Employer NI contributions are ~1/2 that. What other taxes do employers inccur?
I really can't see it being worth it in massive, overpriced cities.
If you only hire within the pool of people who are willing and able to commute to your office, you'll both need to pay more and have less choice. Workers are more tired as they spend hours commuting every day.
On the other hand, it's harder to develop juniors if all your seniors are working from home. Written communication lacks context that helps difficult conversations move forward. Silos build up as people in different teams never see each other.
In the long-term, I believe the broader benefits to society and the planet mean fully remote working will become almost universal. In the meantime, a hybrid model of mostly remote with broadly-attended meetups is the best combination. But some companies will decide that everybody being in the office all the time is right for them, and they can perhaps leverage some benefits of doing so.
How often do you feel is enough?
Assuming the "typical" company made up mostly of people who've been there for more than a year, and where commuting is easy, maybe every 3 months is enough. New teams (even within such a company) should aim to meet weekly while they're in the forming stage. Small companies made up of very experienced ICs perhaps never need to meet at all.
I guess the best way of working it out is to ask people, and review what works.
This is still a bit of an open question. Productivity can be a weird metric because it doesn't capture if you're making the right thing, just that you're making something. WFH productivity was also measured at a pretty weird time, so there wasn't a good control. What you'll see is a lot CEOs pick policies by which model they prefer, and in a poor labor market, they'll have the leverage to do it.
For a CEO, productivity is at a first order is operating margins. 99% of HNers have no clue how to calculate that (nor have the necessary data).
This is just plain wrong. In big organizations it's the front line worker and not the CEO that can confidently gauge productivity changes simply because C level bean counters always try to quantify productivity with flawed metrics likes lines of code when most people know it's nonsensical.
There you go. A lot of companies that were forced to WFH -don't actually want it- and so haven't invested in changing their culture to actually be effective at it. Some companies that -have- embraced it...also haven't changed their culture to actually be effective at it. But some want it, and have, and, oddly, I think they're in the majority, since studies keep showing an increase in productivity and employee happiness https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivi... .
Also consider that productivity might be best with employees choosing their office schedule. Some might be more productive in the office five days a week, others zero... and the majority will probably be somewhere in between, spending some days at home and some days in the office.
Bottom line, though: the pandemic is not a good time to measure productivity for any reason, and consider it representative of the norm.
Currently working for company where we our team gets together once a week and that part works well, but management is mostly stuck in old ways so sometimes it's weird.
Then that means your company doesn’t have a proper onboarding procedure. I was hired at $BigTech in June 2020 and didn’t meet any of my coworkers in person until 9/2021. I had a complete organized onboarding experience including all of the prerequisite indoctrination.
Ironically enough, I was just at a team meeting in the SFO financial district. They would have to pay me at least $100K more for me to even consider moving to San Francisco - and that’s only because my kids are grown and we could give up our nice big house in the burbs in a much lower cost area.
It's not as expensive as you might first expect.
To the people who actually go into the office, it's probably well worth it.
Open plan is only cheap on the books. It costs a lot in decimating the focus of people working there.
Now I work from home 2 (two) jobs, one full time that used to be the office and one contract. I make 2x what the single office job pays me and only so I'm close to a decent pay while still below US average for developers (I live in EU).
No ducking way I'm going back to half pay plus wasting half a day in traffic for free.
On you working 2 jobs: I knew people who were working remotely 2 full-time jobs at the same time. I think their employers wouldn't be thrilled if they somehow found out about it
There are way more small and medium sized companies which are older than 3 years.
Like in sales, you're much more likely to close the deal if you meet in-person than over a Zoom call. If your competitors are flying out salespeople to meet clients, but you're still stuck on Zoom, you won't catch a bid.
https://blog.eladgil.com/p/back-to-office
But reading between the lines, he seems to consider remote workers being the lowest performers and a danger to the company culture and mission.
If fell he is also deliberately missing the point of remote work even when it hits him in the face, for example
> a few companies anecdotally see more employees going back in NYC offices than SF. This probably has more to do with local work culture
Re: printing money and money drops, that seems to entirely ignore that was happening while unemployment was in the double digits.
Re: drivers on inflation, Karie Porter has some really interesting presentations that input costs are not increasing proportionally to profit increases (regardless what you think of her, the data presented stands on its own). That evidence suggests simple price gauging is a significant factor (citation: https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart/corporate-pr...)
Those are just some examples of yet more statements given as assertions, which seem somewhat foundational to the remaining conclusions. These flaws really gives me pause for any of the analysis presented.
This kind of generic armchair general "advice"[1] is everywhere when you run a company and is basically completely useless because every company is a complex and unique special case and if you're in charge you don't have to make the decision that would on average be the right decision for companies of your type, you have to make the best decision you can for your specific situation. This goes double for people decisions because they have a huge impact on those affected so it behooves you to take the time to really do your utmost to do it right.
[1] By which I mean the kind of phoned-in powerpoint analysis that would be produced by someone with a career at a 2nd tier wannabe McKinsey consultancy
In general with any of the management consultants, you're going to get people with very little actual experience telling you how to run your company.
Whilst some of the stuff, usually more accountancy / factual based, doesn't require experience, and thus may be delivered to a high standard, you're also going to got a bunch of hot takes that don't make sense in reality.
Outsourcing, the Spotify model, and not really agile Agile are all sold by the top tier consultants, even though you basically can't name successful examples.
All the other workstreams continued for a while with them burning our investors' money and also all ended with a big nothingburger.
Basically the team we worked with had one guy who was genuinely brilliant - razor sharp, really knew his stuff etc just great - and like 8 people there whose function was to pad the billable hours, make slides, carry printouts and drink the free coffee.
It might true that some companies are extremely bloated and their competitors may be demonstrating a similar level of productivity with 30%~50% of people but different companies have different history and contexts; path dependency is the thing. For that level of productivity loss, the root problem is more likely deeply ingrained in the structure (especially management and decision making) so cutting more and more people usually won't help.
More than 15% often means a change in the business model.
But, as an employer, I've been given the advice "cut once, cut deep" many times. The theory (which I understand) is that employees get skittish once you get to a second or third cut.
The author suggests some companies could stand a 50% cut if that is what is needed.
This month though we've seen twitter cull 50% and twitter users, and customers (advertisers) became equally skittish.
Do twitter employees feel safe? Does the "cut once, cut deep" have the desired effect here? Are customers reassured [1]?
Maybe twitter is a unique case because of other factors - Elon? The fact that people can make their opinions heard on, well, twitter? The fact that other media are reliant on twitter traffic and buzz?
My guess is that employ confidence after a round of layoffs is dependant on their faith in management to begin with, and the clarity of communication between management and staff. Perhaps a transparent financial reality helps employees understand that what they do affects the bottom line, and that line pays their salaries.
Now Elon is ending a policy literally called "Work From Home Forever" and with no flexibility -- back to the office 5 days a week.
Why would an employee feel safe when literally everything about Twitter changed overnight?
But I really don't care either way; to your point - even Musk didn't want to acquire Twitter once he sobered up to the fact he was in too deeply to pull out. It's just his brilliant business acumen meant he went into it waiving due diligence. Which, yes, this random HN commenter knows better than to do, for any company, let alone a social media company.
Including pre-musk twitter as a directionless and weird company imo.
It will take significantly more than just liquidating Twitter's assets for him to succeed, he essentially needs to turn Twitter into successful company.
With Twitter Blue steadily and exclusively rolling out new features like edit functionality that might've begun contributing more to the bottom line in time too. It was still too new and too geographically limited to be certain.
None of this was necessary.
In general, if a company is worth more when chopped up than alive, it deserves to be chopped up.
But why would we want employees to feel safe? They should feel like they need to produce value, or they'll get cut.
Employees need to feel safe because that improves their ability to focus on the job at hand.
Employees that do not feel safe spend time updating their resume, playing office-politics games to make others look worse, spend time with other employees (detracting them) to either spread rumours or get gossip.
In an unsafe environment, where the unsafty is internal, people don't "work harder" they work much less.
If the risk is external, then yes, people can pull together for the common good. When covid started our staff accepted huge pay cuts so that all jobs could bd preserved. They did a fantastic job, and all ultimately got back-pay, and all jobs were preserved. But that was "us against the world" - cuts included management, and salaries returned from the bottom to the top, not the other way around.
I only have anecdotal data but from recent discussions with friends who got laid off, they all lost trust in their company's leadership and losing arbitrary team mates has made them unhappy and reduced morale. I don't know if it's something special this time but if great teammates you worked with since before the pandemic are cut off while ones joining after and never having achieved or released anything remained (paraphrasing) does that. These layoffs seem haphazard.
But whoever has that visibility, they would have already taken steps to get rid of underperformers and replace them with good performers. Therefore good managers have disproportionately good people.
So when the senior management says "everyone lay 10% off", the good managers lay off good and bad people, and the poor managers lay off random people. The result is lots of good people get laid off, even if everyone is trying to avoid that.
Putting a lot of faith in management to cull weak performers. Depending on the organization, it can take a lot of effort and political capital to get rid of someone ("What do you mean you want to fire the guy you just hired?"). Significantly easier to just coast and let them hang around without any boat rocking.
really, you think that a rapid change of leadership preceded by an extended legal battle is MAYBE a unique situation? Elon is very clearly one of the most erratic ceos of a 10b+ public company right now
customers and employees are uncertain about the future because the ceo and controlling shareholder seems to change his mind every day about twitter's product, company culture, and general philosophy every single day. if he laid off nobody it would still be mayhem.
In general the cut once advice is not to make people less skittish immediately, it's to avoid the long term mistrust that comes from cutting repeatedly. When you do that, the message is you are either incompetent or you hid information from them the first time. A bigger one time cut is more shocking, but things settle down after and you have an opportunity to start building trust back up and put the company on an upward trajectory people will want to stay on.
It seems like our standard of working has transformed and will not revert back.
When COVID more or less "left" corporate culture, a lot of US businesses wanted to go fully back to work or to make remote work a benefit, i.e., you'd take cuts elsewhere for the privilege to work remotely/from home.
While some of it is likely power-tripping on the part of managers, I suspect some of it is more complex involving expensive building leases and trying to justify costs, fear of "what happens if the culture shifts again and we need to find office space", which I do think is a reasonable concern, but not to the point that it should shut down remote work entirely.
Anecdotally, I do know quite a few higher management ones who were very upset by remote work; they liked the idea of having "their" employees in a single spot so they could check it at any time for various projects; some relented when after an honest talk they conceded they never really checked in person and did everything by chat/call/email anyways, but there were a few sticklers that just honestly believed "butts in chairs or we lose all productivity", even though 2 years of data from COVID times shattered this belief entirely.
Part of why I think the position was so predominant in the US was that the job market power was so vastly different there; in European countries, it was far more competitive for a company seeking candidates and this gave a lot more negotiating power for employees I think since there was certainly a job lined up for them, whereas in the US it was a bit more uncertain that you could get a position since there were so many more candidates than positions in many cases, so businesses had the ability to be far more exclusive and demanding.
The quality of the data senior leaders typically use to make business decisions like this are usually either very poor and would never pass any kind of statistical or scientific bar, or non-existent. It's usually just a gut feeling and they roll with it. Managers just usually have no idea how to manage a remote team and go about replicating the physical office in digital form.
This is also why employees should be nervous about firms that sync a hiring cycle with Q2/May.
In the US, a CEO must make the profitable decision, or face direct legal peril. It often has nothing to do with the character of those on the board. ;)
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
The CEO might still get complaints, but legally there is no obligation.
I think this is overthinking it or looking for a conspiracy theory. Layoffs aren't deeply calculated or hand-wrung over in advance. They're somewhat arbitrary and ambiguous but purposeful: to stop the hemorrhaging of cash. There's no clean or perfect way to do a layoff precisely in limited time, so they happen in discrete units of reduction in particular areas. They're rarely pleasant and never perfect.
It was pretty straightforward and un-conspiranoic: The CEO got us all execs together and showed us the P&L which showed that we had 10 month runway. It also showed that (as in most companies) the highest burn rate was from payroll. Then he mentioned that we had to expand our runway to 18 months. Which meant cutting in various places (including no free sodas). Finally we agreed to cut payroll in 10%-15% , which would have a strong impact on the runway.
And that was it... pretty straightforward.
It’s a number big enough to reduce cost and create fear but not enough to cause panic.
And so — presuming at least some hiring managers in each bigcorp are unethical and lazy or able to be manipulated — 10–15% dead-weight becomes an equilibrium point: the number of dead-weight employees asymptotically approaches 10–15%, where firing one means being able to hire one more, and hiring one means being unable to hire one more.
(Which isn't to suggest that there's top-down awareness in all these companies of these employees being dead-weight; rather the opposite — they survive because the structure of these companies has no continuous visibility into employee productivity. But when they consider layoffs, that's the time to do a point-in-time productivity audit... and that's when they find that this dead-weight has been accruing, and set out to burn it off. And, if they're smart, to also "burn off" the people who were willing to commit malfeasance by hiring/endorsing them.)
Later, that zeitgeist comes, and your boss's boss's boss asks your boss's boss, who asks you, to have the hard conversation with those direct reports you've been suspecting — and with their peers — to find out if they're actually making any progress in learning what's required to become productive, or whether they've just been bullshitting you. So you have that conversation, find out the ugly truth, and report it.
At any given moment, most companies can probably justify cutting 10-15% of dead weight. But when you cross that line, that's a much different smell. The most talented get a whiff, update their CVs and head for the door.
The goal is to cut the bottom and leave the top. Take off too much bottom and your top will leave "voluntarily".
The next step is to discuss the usefulness and your own perspective, not to mock.
Most people don't find that such a terrible idea.
The 10-15% percent aren't necessarily all bad performers but might just be people working on teams that are to be disbanded entirely.
Team that managed to hire good people and fire bad performers already ? You're basically taking productivity out.
Ops team that every other software team is dependent on and already overloaded ? Now every other team will feel delay in dealing with their stuff.
> 10-15% seems to be the number that reflects “big enough that I can tell myself and my investors or board I am doing it, but not so big that it causes truly uncomfortable conversations for the team”
I guess the fear seems to be that it will lead to uncontrolled attrition of good people. But I would assume hiring freezes in the industry would still prevent this. Also, you will retain the truly "loyal" employees that are willing to suffer a bit for future growth.
It also addresses the wasteful folks in a fair way. I've definitely observed shifts in company cultures of new hires not being attached to the overall mission, demanding more and more benefits (e.g. business class flights) without "giving back" in equal amounts by working hard.
> I guess the fear seems to be that it will lead to uncontrolled attrition of good people. But I would assume hiring freezes in the industry would still prevent this.
The best are near-immune to that. It's the average worker that will have problems finding next job, not the best one.
> Also, you will retain the truly "loyal" employees that are willing to suffer a bit for future growth.
That doesn't mean productivity
> It also addresses the wasteful folks in a fair way. I've definitely observed shifts in company cultures of new hires not being attached to the overall mission, demanding more and more benefits (e.g. business class flights) without "giving back" in equal amounts by working hard.
It's a job for money, not charity, and you're competing with other companies. New hire have no reason to be attached to the company either. It's fine to like where you work, but people don't live with their work.
They have family and hobbies, that's why they work, to fund that, not to "have a mission", in job where someone on top is earning way more than what they put in effort.
Is it healthy? No. Is it needed? Not always/necessarily. But a company that's laying off members to save costs should likely try to retain those that do go the extra mile.
Also, I mean you can argue all you want that those people aren't productive but in my experience that's just not true. People who live and breathe the company tend to care a whole lot about quality and thinking through user experience. The typical "it's just a job, I can quit any time and find something better" folks just don't stick around long enough to suffer from their decision or care about the company's image / their coworkers.
I mean I've been there. A bunch of folks get hired because they were at Google or Meta before and they must know their stuff, and get elevated to somewhat high positions, but they never deliver on their promise and I cannot say they were particularly productive and they generally also do their "I only work as much as I need" or "Sorry I won't join this one time meeting that needs to happen at odd hours to accommodate time zone issues, it's 30 mins past my end of day" routine. Then after a year or so they leave for greener pastures, probably getting paid more.
Again, I think for a company where it's the norm that people protect their time it might not matter and I'm not saying it's an issue. But if you take a company full of heavily invested employees that see it as their family, and you add, simply because there's a bubble, equal the amount of people who just see it as another job and the company tanks in an economic downturn, retaining more of the latter portion (at all cost) does not seem wise.
The people who don't see the company that way / care are still likely to leave the sinking ship soon, but the damage to the laid off as well as remaining loyal employees has already been done.
And no, if companies were able to accurately identify low performers they could have dealt with them before. I've seen many good folks lose their jobs in the last few months and folks who never released a single thing or provide other tangible output (design docs) be retained.
Side note: if staff took better to getting their pay cut, they'd get more frequent (faster) raises. When a company is suddenly more profitable, compensation increases lag far behind, as they have to first feel very secure of the higher profit level. After all, if it falls back to normal, they can't cut salaries...
Note: my personal experience is limited to managing a few dozen people and there are surely plenty of exceptions to the advice above.
What? You can. Many companies even do it every year with some arbitrary bonus system.
Your best employees can leave and you are left with the “Dead Sea Effect”
I would have left anyway over the next year. By the time the paycut came, I had already basically purposely “put myself out of job”. I trained other coworkers. Put processes in place and I had nothing left to do but normal CRUD development.
They were pivoting to selling various microservices to large health care providers and he wanted to move away from VMs to Fargate (serverless Docker) and Lambda along with some other projects.
He was a great mentor and he was very straightforward and unapologetically blunt (after we got to know each other).
3 months after I left, they gave everyone additional equity to make up for the paycut and they restored everything a month later.
When they got bought out six months later for 10x, everyone made a decent amount of money from $50K - $200K (we aren’t talking a tech hub), the founders gave everyone bonuses and they reached out to someone who had been there for years and who had left and gave them an extra “thank you” bonus.
I would have stayed, but a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE position. I didn’t want to be an SWE at any large company, I didn’t want to relocate, and I wasn’t about to spend months “grinding LeetCode”.
We kept talking and she suggested I apply for a fully remote position at AWS ProServe as a consultant specializing in enterprise app dev + “devOps”.
It was too good of opportunity to pass up.
The rest of the story with the startup. Soon after it got acquired, the CTO left and most of the best employees went with him to a new startup in the same space.
If I were working anywhere else and he could afford me, I would definitely work with him again. I still give him free advice from time to time when he calls and we meet for lunch every now and then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
> The vitality model of former General Electric chairman and CEO Jack Welch has been described as a "20-70-10" system. The "top 20" percent of the workforce is most productive, and 70% (the "vital 70") work adequately. The other 10% ("bottom 10") are nonproducers and should be fired.
10% layoff means you are being ranked.
>> The dual purpose intended was to stiffen discipline amongst the army at large and to demoralise the enemy
Though one notable difference is that with layoffs it's an excuse to drop so-called poor performers, but I believe decimation was more or less random i.e. drawing straws.
Way too much friendship and "office politics" involved in who to pick anyways to be better than random.
Last in first out is probably good too.
This is such a lost opportunity for MAGMA (Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple)
And it is easier for corporations to discharge the bottom feeders if and when they need to improve their bottom line.
Anything larger is desperate.
Anything smaller doesn’t really move the needle that much beyond normal churn.
Is there any common tooling to do that kind of financial modeling other than spreadsheets?
What does this even mean? How would "activist" employees change the company directions and its finances?
Apart from completely illegal stuff, all of these platforms more or less just let whatever fly until the Trump era began.
nobody's firing productive workers.
Remind me why Twitter is trying to rehire workers they let go, within a week?
https://mobile.twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/15911538663...
Second, even if those recommendations were followed...that's an argument -against- your initial statement that "nobody's firing productive workers." I.e., if they were fired for reasons other than merit, than -somebody fired productive workers-.
I assume you got terrified when you heard, say, "Jeffrey Dahmer ate people", and started to question your own existence since obviously if he ate ALL the people you couldn't be here?
Good luck. If you think CEO's give a damn about success you really don't know what the job of executives is for.