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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to hear about the layoffs there, and everywhere off.

> we were just cut off with 10000 people by random selection algorithm.

Can you (or anyone) elaborate on how that works? Someone wrote something that does "select empolyee_id from employees limit 10000 order by random" and that's who got laid off? It's a layoff lottery and the winners got laid off?

I don't know how layoffs at huge companies work, maybe that's how it works everywhere?

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Of course that is not how it works. The actual process depends on the company and how many levels of management are notified in advance. Usually it is some combination of bottom-up stack ranking and rolling down the quota to the individual teams. The process is - by design - very opaque, and there are so many variables to it that at the end it may seem like a random process to someone who is not privy to the decision process of the decision makers (and there may be anywhere from ten to few thousand decision makers in this process).

My guess, a little bit of everything. Recent performance, cost, location, team/project...

In my huge company, we've seen all sort of cases. Very recent employees (which weren't even evaluated yet), "low performers" (but I think it's a misnomer, some "low performers" are productive employees who recently didn't meet some arbitrary expectations). Some entire teams were fired, in some instances they tried to reassign some high performers within these teams.

Also managers weren't consulted, and everything was kept secret.

Edit: some countries have additional legal constraints too and the process may be more transparent than in the US.

Doesn't make sense at all. Maybe they identified a larger pool of employees and then applied random selection algorithm to that pool. No way they are laying off superstars.

> No way they are laying off superstars.

Shrug. Superstars cost more. Besides, companies don't love superstars do they? They want replaceable commodities.

They'll settle for commodities, but they want results. "Superstars" are great, because they'll get you results. You don't want to rely on having someone do the work of a whole team, but you certainly won't fire them, even if they cost three times as much as one of the ten people they replace.

From my experience (as a team lead who had to do that a few times unfortunately):

First, each department is usually allocated a number of employees they should layoff (based on high management priority).

Then, each department has to decide how to allocate it internally (cut-off teams entirely, or layoff a number of employees per team).

Then it goes to mid level management and lower management which has to choose specific employees (based on a number of criterias but usually based on performance).

It's not how it works everywhere. In fact it's likely not how it works anywhere at all.

No competent business operator works this way. It's very much about improving a financial metric (say, sales efficiency) and understanding either where low performers are or which teams are supporting initiatives that may suddenly be deprioritized.

But more importantly than any of this, I'm sorry to hear people have lost their jobs. Better days are ahead.

Probably a mix of getting the “lowest performing” people based upon yearly performance reviews, and then just randomly cutting people based on employee id. Maybe cut a specific amount of people from each department/organization.

This was the speculation, I am sure they would have constraints like, fire recently joined people, or those ones who were not promoted last X years, etc. etc. I was hired last year, so it makes a bit sense for me.

That has a chance of returning employees with very low IDs. So that'd be fun.

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