Hacker News Reader

Comment by bedhead | Hacker News Reader

Folks, if it wasn't shareholders accelerating this process, it was gonna be the inevitable economic realities of mismanagement and losses. Shareholders are doing not only other shareholders but also these companies a favor by telling them to fix their problems before they get really bad. The cold reality is that the people getting laid off never should've been hired in the first place, the amount of waste at these companies is unfathomable...all the result of the bubble of dysfunctional managerial cultures (ie "Not making money is super awesome, yay!") and way too much money floating around. A dose of reality is much deserved and was gonna happen eventually anyway.

View on HN

>>the people getting laid off never should've been hired in the first place

This is a bullshit take. I've seen enough LinkedIn posts from people getting shit-canned after doing excellent work at X company for the past >5 years. They shouldn't have been hired 6 years ago? They shouldn't have been given good performance reviews for the past 6 cycles? Fire Sundar Pichai if you must, but avoid making sweeping generalizations that unfairly disparage a lot of people who did great work.

Well said. From my LinkedIn feed anecdata the Google layoffs seemed especially capricious. People that had been there 5+ to 10+ years. Seems likely tied to high comp though I saw recent hires as well. AFAIK no managers were consulted either.

In one way that's good vs. some of the CEOs that publicly said "these folks are the fat and we're trimming it" which is especially cruel.

If you hire 30k people that you shouldn't have hired, when you let 30k people go it will probably not be the exact group of 30k that you hired, some will be folks that have been there for a while.

And to anyone complaining I just say: "welcome to the tech industry?". Layoffs are a very normal part of our industry and it happens all the time. And as former Google engineers, I'm sure none of those laid off will have trouble finding work again.

it doesn't happen all the time. for Google, this is the first time they've ever done a large set of layoffs in their 25 year history.

Ehh... Kinda. They used to focus more on cutting orgs/teams. Google was pretty notorious for doing the whole "your teams has been shut down, you have X days to find a new role or you can take this package and leave now."

Sounds like a regression.

Doing excellent work doesn't automatically mean you earn the company any money. It's one of the harsh realities of capitalism that you can do an absolutely shitty job and still earn your company a ton of money (and have job security) and vice versa: Working your ass off without adding anything in terms of revenue - not even by proxy.

The OP didn't disparage them, because they're referring not to the skills of those employees but to the economic case for hiring them. He's disparaging the analytical skills of the people who hired them. Given the difficulty of economic prognostication, I take that with some reserve too.

Surely, it would be better for talented people to work at a thriving business that can bring their qualities to the market. Shifting those people from less to more successful services is the Schumpeterian-creative-destruction upside of layoffs.

You've bought the company line. I'm sure they'd be proud of you. It's nonsense, but keep shoveling it.

People are being laid off who've worked there for 5-10 years, and the company is still incredibly profitable. There is no need to let go of anybody, and the people they are getting rid of are profitable in the long-term to the company.

The long-term part of that is key, though, since shareholders are focused on this quarter, after which they'll seell the stock and move on, while people's careers have been destroyed.

The amount of waste may be unfathomable, but is layoffs really going to correct it?

Instead a culture shift to be more frugal might work better.

The criticism is that most of these companies will go right back to hiring tomorrow.

How do you accomplish that culture shift? It’s easily said that cultures can just be shifted, but layoffs are the way to send the message and get that rolling.

You start by not doubling down on the status quo.

Why not both? Companies are large complex systems that require pruning over time just like any other complex system. Sure you can move a few people around or ask them to spend a little less, but ultimately it would become nearly impossible to respond to market conditions, or even just your own business changes/learnings, without laying people off.

There are plenty of ways to respond to market conditions without kicking people to the curb. Most companies have performance reviews to do exactly this.

Performance reviews are precisely what you would NOT use to respond to market conditions, since they are about individual performance

completely different mechanism.

> Folks, if it wasn't shareholders accelerating this process, it was gonna be the inevitable economic realities of mismanagement and losses.

Do you have any proof?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK397YwduhQ

Strong disagree. Shareholders, especially hedge funds, sole goal is to increase return to shareholders. The long-term outcome of the company is very much secondary.

So instead of hiring all these engineers and paying them higher salaries (raising the bar all around), Google/Msft/Meta should have been giving billions to extremely wealthy investors?

Shouldn't the shareholders be held responsible for initiating the overhearing in the first place, chasing short-term gains without any regard for the unusually irrational exuberance fueled by the unprecedented pandemic situation? If you're going to excuse them calling for firings now, then you should at least chastise them for hiring earlier.

shareholders always bear responsibility through their exposure to stock price changes.

Yes, but it still seems disproportionate to the losses those going through layoffs must suffer. Especially when it was shareholder agitation that led to the overhiring policies that put those workers in that position.

This might’ve been true in an era of a normal population pyramid and demographic expansion.

We are in completely unprecedented times where populations are teetering will start shrinking while being dominated by the elderly.

That is to say, we don’t have models to predict how the economy will react.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com