So Good They Can't Lay You Off
yafetn.github.io
yafetn.github.io
It seems like few to no people in any of their managerial chains were consulted.
I'm curious to hear from HNers if any of you were in the room that got to decide who got to stay and who had to go.
From a worker perspective, line and middle managers look like bosses.
From an executive perspective, they look like workers. They are usually also cut in layoffs (often disproportionately, even: increasing management span of control in layoffs is common.) If you consult with them on coming layoffs they’ll either try to protect themselves and the employees they see as key (regardless of the corporate objectives of the layoffs) – or they’ll bolt and try to get the best staff out safe with them before the layoffs hit and they are competing with others for limited opportunities.
So, no, they aren’t consulted.
THIS.
I used to think that managers had some sort of secret knowledge they hold close among themselves. Then I became a manager.
FYI: Your manager is often just as much in the dark as you.
A former employer had layoffs this week. Of the people I knew who were laid off, at least 60% were management. Many of them were at the Director level and up to VP and even an SVP.
You assume a lot. Or maybe project. In the cases where I've been close enough to see, the managers were maintaining empathy and professionalism toward their team members even as they were facing uncertainty themselves. That's still hard. Whether they were staying for the money doesn't change that. Managers are people too, and not everyone is motivated solely by money.
- entire business unit or team
- everyone hired after date X
- everyone in geography Y
- everyone with some level and at or below a certain perf threshold
Being really good can save you from that last bullet points but not the other. It can also help you find a new job that much faster.
- employee_id % 10In one case of layoffs this week, I know of people who were laid off that were in the first ~100 employees. I speculate that this specific layoff was purely financially motivated.
I asked which factors led to being let go. First round, it was underperformers, then tenure. Second was purely tenure. Now I'm the most recent eng hire on the team. My tech lead insists I'm far too valuable to lose, and wouldn't be on the list for any future layoffs. But how could his boss know? Perhaps they care. Other teams got wildly upset when similarly critical people got let go, though, and I don't recall that being undone.
I have little information about my employer, my own future, or how these decisions will be made. That information would be valuable to me. I'm curious if there are employers who would prefer to make the change of more honor for less base pay. I might accept, depends on details.
I've been told things like this in the past. Each time it triggered my Spidey-Sense. I've yet to get hit by a layoff, but 75% of the tech companies I've worked for have experienced layoffs in the '00s, '10s, and now '20s.
The last time a manager told me this I took it as a sign of incoming trouble and found a new employer. That former manager, a VP, was laid off this week. As another HN user commented in this thread, most management are also just workers. As such, they don't have really have the pull to say these things. IMO, they're trying to stop the bleeding.
My boss asked me to select one person to be laid off, as we have been chosen to be reduced by a single headcount (sales saw much blood). I picked our newest guy; our ROI per person was a bit long, so it was an easy choice.
The upper management bargained about keeping some extraordinary people, but I was not in that meeting. I was in another discussion on votes about top performers, and that one got contentious as some personal preferences (favouritism) arose between managers.
Good grief, that sounds horrible.
We truly don’t have the metrics when we are asked for laying off large amounts of people. Any metric we might find would just be gamed so it comes down to how liked you are.
However the point of being "liked" is as good s proxy measure as any other. People like working with people they like. Things that get you liked are often related to either overall usefulness (I like, and thus protect, the people who make my day easier).
Like any measure it can be gamed, but it's certainly a measure that doesn't hurt to optimize. (no one was chosen to be cut because "they are well liked")
Conversely being disliked can certainly bump you up the queue.
The point is I make each VP / director fight for budget, then once that’s decided, I wait and see what the results are. They may keep a very expensive person or they may keep more cheaper people. Up to them to know who to keep and who to lose.
I do stick my hand in the process occasionally to save someone I like, or have a history with. That’s my prerogative as a leader. But in general I defer to the process.
Maybe it’s even simpler. We all complain about the interview process, but it doesn’t end there does it? The management kinda knows what you’re doing but at a very high level. The management has no idea how productive John is vs how productive jack is, unless jack is actively unpleasant to work with. Maybe it just turns into another kind of social popularity contest.
Things leak too fast otherwise.
But also there are people who are just barely productive enough to not get fired at these companies. Layoffs are a great time to get rid of them without going through all the effort of documenting that they are just barely not doing enough to keep the job. Large companies are afraid to fire people without good documentation of the person doing a bad job or something wrong because they could be sued for wrongful termination.
When I had to do layoffs, who got picked to be laid off was almost entirely random.
I say "almost" because before picking who would go, we first selected teams with redundant roles. For example, if a team had two mid-level backend engineers, they had redundant roles, and one of those two roles would be eliminated at random.
That was literally the only "thought" put into who got cut or not. Where we didn't have redundant roles, it was random. Directors got laid off, QA testers, facilities people. It was one of the worst experiences of my life.
Today I'm convinced that the only people safe when it comes to layoffs is the board of directors.
It doesn't go a long way to help people feel better, but if you're laid off, it's nearly 100% likely that it had nothing to do with your performance, whether or not you were "liked", tenure/seniority, or how much you got paid.
Counterintuitively, trying to be irreplaceable will hamper your ability to share information, power, and credit. It’s much better to just be as generous as you can.
Trying to be irreplaceable is bad enough, but imagine if you actually succeed in carving a niche out.
Being irreplaceable in a specific project often means that you get "left behind" in it while new projects get started elsewhere and gain more relevance in the company.
If you've made 3 pivots across different teams, it is much more likely you'll be absorbed into something new in the company than staying on a deserted island with dwindling budgets as the years go by.
What you need to do is make yourself as valuable to the company as you are willing to do (avoid burning yourself out though). Make sure you have a deep enough emergency fund, and enough expenses that you can cut to survive an extended unemployment. Chances are that if you are part of a mass layoff, that won't reflect as badly on you as if you got fired for other reasons. And if there is a severance package, don't panic right away -- you have time to address the situation properly.
Oh, and if you have enough time off before you land your next position, make sure you take care of yourself. The lack of work stress will do wonders to re-energize you, making you perform at a higher level at the next gig and hopefully exceed expectations (thereby setting you up for promotions etc).
I know two people at Google who were slotted for T (transformative) and O (outstanding) GRAD ratings who were laid off, along with their entire teams. There's only so much you can do.
There's only so much you can do, but developers and other ICs often turn a blind eye to the actual wider business. Sometimes it's exceedingly obvious that the business unit, company, or even wider industry as a whole that you're working in is on a downward spiral, but people won't or can't recognize it.
The writing was on the wall for Twitter for many years. Alexa and Echo were clearly massive busts for many years. If you're still at a crypto company in 2023, you pretty much have to have resigned to just coasting until the inevitable layoff or company bankruptcy. If you're at Meta working on Metaverse/VR, don't say I didn't warn you when you get your layoff notice in a year or two.
If you want to avoid being laid off, join a company that makes money, and make sure you're in the part of the company that actually makes money. The crazy new tech and R&D groups might be the most fun, but they're also going to be the first to get slashed.
But, yeah: all other factors being equal, it's always better to join a company that's making money in the org that makes the most money.
Your last example is the opposite of this, if there's a clear path between work and outcome, either for the company and/or yourself, then make a call that works for you.
Part of my argument sometimes -- to handle objections about job security from keeping info in one's head -- has been that people shouldn't worry about it hurtig job security, because the people who are conscientious about documenting will be recognized as too good of engineers to lose.
But when we're seeing a frenzy of layoffs across the industry (even by companies making huge profits), it's harder to say that job security isn't a concern.
(I'll still push on documentation, because it's important good practice for the team's success, and we're doomed if individuals start thinking they need to hoard the company's knowledge. But I'll have to be thinking of better ways that people's livelihood interests can be covered.)
We can start with the obvious part, everyone, literally EVERYONE, from the part time intern janitorial contractor, to the demigod CEO are completely replaceable.
If you dropped dead today, the team you’re on will have already divided up your tasks and recovered by the end of the week. Your division, let alone the company, will never even notice you’re gone.
That’s just the honest truth.
The second hard truth is, getting laid off is not your fault or a reflection of your abilities. It’s about an edict that came down from the c-suite. This is why entire teams are laid off. There’s very little rhyme or reason to these things. Don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s inevitable that you’ll eventually get hit.
If anything, it reflects on the incompetence of upper management. Microsoft admits to hiring 10,000 too many people? Whose fault is that, Jake in SRE? No! It’s Satya Nadella’s fault.
I'm assuming top tier talent isn't going to want to work for you if you're gonna be randomly laid off, not to mention people on work visas who need to maintain a job to stay.
This kind of move comes from a business that instead has grown fat and lazy. The best companies remain hungry and nimble.
The problem is being essential isn't the same as job security. You can wind up with new leadership that dislikes the old guard, or entire divisions or businesses being wiped out by a small circle of executives and accountants that don't actually understand how anything get done in practice.
Job security is the ability to go get another one. I suppose that's a place where being really good and someone people like working with can be extremely helpful.
Another silver lining is the junior devs not asking "Why are you still working at your age? I'll be retired by 35" :-)
It is not about being good. Good people (exceptional people even) get laid off and fired too. Rather, be "So Prepared You Head To The Pub and DGAF, The New Gig Starts Monday." Low burn rate, substantial emergency fund, robust retirement and investment accounts, being able to negotiate from a position of power, professional network to rely on, etc.
Watched way too many people suffer who thought otherwise, I'm not going to make that same mistake.
Agree with you that it's a bad idea to axe liaisons while deals are going through, but at the same time clients agreeing to deals at that stage will probably still see them through despite their sales contacts leaving.
That being said, I did leave my previous company for a better opportunity and am on occasion reached out to from that company or even that company's own customers for assistance on specific items. Still replaceable, but there is learned knowledge that can be a deficit for a while or even forever, especially if it is simply not profitable to have someone learn it or it exists without maintenance for so long that no one remembers or knows how to fix/remedy if it ever does need maintenance.
It’s always humbling to be in a position where you think “there’s no way this place will survive without me” but it seems like the show goes on, no matter what.
Though when the replacement requires a civil war, it may be a step too far for most companies (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberators%27_civil_war)...
- Charles de Gaulle
One of the curiosities of this is that the rockstar engineers often want to go and build something incredible and new. But those are the exact types of places where management will turn around and say "Yo! Why do we have 50 extremely expensive engineers working on this weird project bringing in no money". So you can go where the interesting work is, but often that's the most precarious position. Do you think the mediocre engineer working on Facebook's timeline is more or less at risk than the Rockstar building a new UI for Meta's next headset? I know who shareholders would want to keep.
Maybe that's why I don't work at any of these places. I'm sure many of these folks are dependent on their very high salaries to maintain their lifestyle, but seems like a golden opportunity for some temporary freedom that we're not often afforded in the USA.
Also, you can maybe build something people want today but we can’t predict what the future will bring.
It is comforting to think we have some influence on our fate. But also comforting (more comforting, I think) to let go of the illusion that we have control.
On the flip side you need to reduce your alpha to maximize your own personal compensation.
This ends up in a balancing act. Don’t play it too safe.
Employee B: withholds information, accumulates information, excludes others, exploits information asymmetry, selfish fuck, thrives in obscurity
Who is more likely to be laid off? Employee A
This is why frequent layoffs create companies of parasitic unethical toxic jerks.
So a lot of people not being laid off are not "good", but rather just unethical parasites.
Employee B would have probably been dealt with way before layoffs, as well. Relying on an oracle is a roadblock that will have, at the very least, annoyed anyone who had to work with them. That oracle is an easily recognizable bottleneck.
No one is safe from layoffs.
it isn’t personal that it gave people a job and then took it away
they don’t owe it to anybody to sacrifice their profit so others can have a job
Never. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, losing homes, filling prisons. The majority stockholders are of the CEO class. They aren't in any danger of life-impacting loss if they have a lick of financial sense. Dividends to the cronies and axe to the peasants is never going to be popular with anybody but cronies and bootlickers.
No one owes a company good will.
It's always interesting that some focus more on those who speak their minds about something than the actual actions taken that are being criticized, as if the real problem is people having opinions and speaking freely about them. It feels like the root sentiment is "X can do whatever they want, but you're not allowed to do the same by saying anything about it."
M$FT has been quietly doing this for eons. It's just that they are good at doing this without laying off a massive number of people at a time. So for M$FT this layoff seems like it's about posturing and being "in line" with the market, which makes it even crappier than it really is.
Look at it as a narrative of how someone’s journey in their mind progressed after a major event. There’s no such thing as “so good they can’t lay you off” - that’s the point. The authors conclusion is that focusing on what you offer versus what you can lose, you’re never lost.
You can be so good that the business will fail without you[1], but you cannot be so good that the business cannot lay you off.
[1]though that itself should be a firing offense; It's impossible to tell that from "job security through code obscurity" and the latter should be assumed.