How is FAANG deciding on layoffs?

7 pointshipjiveguy1 comment

There have been huge layoffs at many huge tech companies, as of late.

How are they choosing the initial rounds of layoffs? Often, it's by email, and if you don't read every email, you wouldn't even know. You'd go to work, and your accounts would be disabled.

Any thoughts or knowledge on how this is going down?

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The email thing is company by company (Google seemed particular bad). Every company is doing it differently but from what I’ve seen/heard I’d say there are a few factors and the weight and use of these factors is based on company and even sometimes director/vp org. 1) performance, drop the low performers who were marked as such at some point recently, this won’t get you enough but it’s a start. 2) cut product lines/orgs that have no current impact and low future likelihood. 3) cut headcount to low profit/high burn product units. For 2 and 3 whole teams might be cut regardless of perf or directors are left to their approach for figuring out how to slim down by an amount. 4) cut specific roles that are not needed as much right now (ex: recruiting).

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