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Comment by joshribakoff | Hacker News Reader

Some low performing employees just wont leave on their own. Sometimes its the higher performers who feel they deserve more compensation and leave. With your proposal the company could end up with only the low performers which is the opposite intent of a layoff

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Commonly called the Dead Sea Effect. You evaporate out your water and you're just left with salt.

How does that analogy work? Traditionally salt is very valuable. It was even used as payment/money at times (worth your salt). You can preserve food with it. It gives food flavor (if you've ever accidentally omitted salt from baked goods, like bread and cookies, you know how terrible things taste without salt).

Have you ever been really, terribly thirsty, and just thought, "I could use some salt?"

No analogy is a perfect match, that's what makes it an analogy. The water here is the precious resource.

There is plenty of salt in the world but not enough water.

It's not necessarily for performance, more often these layoffs are a way to get rid entire teams and you can't do that through natural attrition.

Maybe some of them can add some expertise to help ReactOS[0]. :-)

(Yes, I know about copyright law and taint, but there is an awful lot to be done which isn't specifically commiting code to the main project. Unit tests, debugging, porting other software, create a startup for embedded "Windows" deployed with ReactOS with free licensing etc.)

0: http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/read.php?19,154431

Whereas with firing everyone's success is now tied to how well they can lie to higher management.

THE Recipe for success, that is.

It doesn't even make sense. They're going to fire 10k people. The result? A 1.2 BILLION charge. Firing these people costs them 120000$ per person. And with that, their personnel cost won't drop until end of Q3 + let's say 2 months, so let's call it 2024. They could have let each of these employees do nothing until 2025 for the same amount of money!

They will definitely hire 20k people by 2025 too. It just seems to awkward and stupid.

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