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Comment by 14u2c | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I've ever seen a company leave a question of "possible" layoffs up in the air like that. If they happen the announcement is made the same day, otherwise you have people questioning their employment for months.

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Musk came in saying he wanted to get rid of 75% of the employees:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/10/20/musk...

Then a week later took it back:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musk-tells-twitter-employees-...

I think every single person at Twitter should be contemplating their employment right now.

But the problem is where do they go? Yes, Twitter laid off 3750 people, but Meta just laid off 11000, so the job market -- at least for that pool -- is saturated right now, and I'm not sure if anyone wants to voluntarily walk off their job in today's economy.

Did meta lay off productive ICs or just recruiters and similar?

Corporate america is literally millions of positive, and unemployment is very low.

Number I saw this morning showed meta had added 15k workers since Jan 2022. Laying off 11k still has a higher headcount than a year ago. The question of who those 11k were May be more interesting, but this doesn’t seem like some end of the world bloodbath.

This is nothing. The NYC developer market was completely saturated in 2008 when Lehman brothers went under and AIG made huge cuts to their IT organization. I recall the number being 60-80k developers looking for jobs all at once.

If you have employable skills you will find work

Might find work, but is it at the same comp level? I'm unemployed, I'm worried I'll have to take less then pay then I was making before (270-320k based on the stock price)

I’m also in BigTech and have seen my compensation drop (unless there is a major uptick before my next vest in a month).

But, seriously, I’ve got the worlds smallest fiddle for someone who is worried that they may not make 270K+ going forward.

Yes my stock has dropped by 50% from its 52 week high. It stings. But it doesn’t affect my life at all. I made sure that I could live off of my base pay - and still max out my 401K.

Rising interest, rent house prices all increasing. There's no stability. With pay decreasing it's further out of reach

Welcome to a recession. You either wait it out or take less pay if you are desperate. Better to have some job than no job, yeh?

Surely you saved during those years of 270k tc

Also now your skills and experience are more relevant to your salary.

Back to measly $200k for you!!

Seems like most (if not all) of the top tech companies are also on hiring freezes.

It’s a drop in the ocean. There are millions of programming jobs out there.

The 75% number was a trial balloon to make the real number (50%) less shocking.

I was at a medium-sized company (~100 employees) that laid off ~60% of their employees. Including 95% of the dev team. Everyone could see just how much of a bad move it was, and that was only the first bad move.

Most of the remaining skilled employees started looking for new jobs immediately. They could see the writing on the wall. Others just checked out and stopped caring about their work, doing just the bare minimum. The bulk of the remaining experienced employees were gone within two months. The people who remained were the lower-level employees, without the experience to keep the company working.

Coincidentally, the company fell apart and went into liquidation 6 months later.

“Coincidentally”

In this case, actually coincidental. It was externally trigged event 3 months later that ended up killing the company. Even a healthy company would struggle to navigate such a scenario.

But it was absolutely on a fatal path before that event, just a question of how long.

No executives lay off 60% of their employees for fun. Typically, this course of action is reserved for when the company believes they have a 95% chance of failing and that doing the layoff will mean they now have an 80% chance of failing.

That the company later failed is not proof positive that the layoffs were a bad idea.

But it is proof that it was a good idea for those that weren't laid off to jump ship asap.

Yeah, when a company is going to crash, it's better not to stay around until the end. Quite often, the last month(s) of work is unpaid.

With all the upheaval at Twitter, I doubt it's going to survive. Well, the name will remain, and as long as servers keep running, some people will keep using it, so as long as Musk can hire enough people to keep the servers running, Twitter might be able to continue in some form, but it will never be the company it once was.

I think it's worth mentioning that 75% was what was pitched to investors and wasn't intentionally publicized.

"Musk came in saying he wanted to get rid of 75% of the employees:"

Well known tactics, usually employed by politicians. Want to raise taxes by 5%? Don't tell that, just announce previously that the country needs a 10% taxes raise, then for pretend for a while you're struggling to lower them because you care for the people and finally settle to 5%.

thats just another way of "price anchoring". When you go to the department store, and that $40 shirt is 'on-sale' for $15, they never expect to get $40 for it. (in fact, many never actually sell that at that price) but it does make you suddenly look at it as a $40 shirt, that your saving money on, instead of comparing it to other $15 shirts.

Exactly. That shirt might have cost like $10 the day before, but if priced $15 near a barred $40 sign is perceived as a better bargain.

That may become the case in the US, but in places like Sweden you have to announce long before the actual layoffs to give the unions a chance to negotiate.

I went through a layoff where they announced they had to make major reductions in headcount (it ended up being about 30% but I'm not sure that number was announced). There was then several months of discussions with the unions before they announced who had to leave.

If you were not impacted they didn't tell you anything until the announcement. The people who were impacted had been briefed beforehand. As I was staying on I didn't know anything, which was stressful, but I guess that if I had known about the process it would have been less so.

There are reasons unions exist and if things get harsh enough in tech they’ll appear. Whenever the employers bite too hard.

That is the law in the US. In California specifically they needed 60 days public notice before a large layoff. That’s why employees have already sued Twitter.

The poster is talking about something more protective. in Spain before a massive layoff a company has to submit a plan to the government and get approval, as well as negotiating it with unions. Nothing like this can happen suddenly. That's on top of obligations to pay severance and give individual notice in some timeframe.

I’ve recently been through the WeWork layoff, and it was in the air for 3 months. Meta’s layoff from 2 days ago was also “possible” for at least 2 quarters, with comments from leadership and q&a responses that made everyone’s life even more miserable than usual. So in my personal experience at least, it’s pretty much how layoffs go

You’d be surprised. I’m currently in the “questioning my employment phase”, with 15% salary deferment.

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