I've been told (many times) that “the good employees never get laid off” | Hacker News Reader

I've been told (many times) that “the good employees never get laid off”

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78 pointsmooreds98 comments

I was once an early employee of a successful startup (got some founder's stock) that grew to several hundred employees. I designed and implemented products and features that were instrumental in driving tens of millions of dollars in sales. Even though they paid me pretty well, I generated at least $25 for every dollar they paid me.

They eventually brought in a new management team who did not have a clue about which engineers actually got the company to its current state. They eventually had a big round of layoffs as they tried to get the company ready for an acquisition. I was thrown into the mix because I had complained to a few of the new business guys that the company had stopped innovating.

Did they do better or worse after firing you?

They sold the company about a year later. I held onto my stock (they couldn't take that away) so I did fairly well with the buyout.

The company that bought it had no clue what to do with its products. They just put them in 'maintenance mode' and tried to extract as much cash from existing customers until they all left because nothing new was being introduced.

Hard to say if the situation became better or worse after the layoff. I was convinced that we could have kept the momentum going if the good engineers were allowed to keep innovating, but since that never happened who knows what the outcome would have been otherwise.

Hey that's every big-company-buys-little-one story ever. The product is bought essentially to control it or kill it. Because it's a threat or is cannibalizing some product BigCo already sells.

'Every..story ever' seems a bit of a stretch. I agree that many acquisitions are done for the purpose of killing off the competition; but there have been quite a few that significantly strengthen and expanded the offerings of the acquiring company.

But that takes real vision in the management teams of both companies, which is often sorely lacking.

I guess I've never been lucky enough for that to happen to the companies I'm part of, when they get bought.

Nor my brothers. Nor my son.

It may happen somewhere, that the managers at a big company welcome strangers with open arms that threaten their hegemony and budget. It's gotta be rare.

It's not just development that stalled when the company was acquired and management changed, but sales and support stalling too, preventing new customer onboarding and current customer retention.

Do you really believe anyone has the time to weigh individual performance when told to lay off 10,000 employees? I've been on both sides of layoffs. I've seen functions, groups, orgs, and offices eliminated. Individual low performers are either managed out or fired with cause.

They wouldn't have time, but that's also why nobody fires 10k people. They delegate the decision to various managers below them.

This sometimes happen but is not the norm. The problem with this approach is the long uncertainty for EVERYONE while the decision is made, and if many managers are involved it's basically the same as it being public information. In a lot of recent layoffs everything was decided in small committees so that it can go really quick between announcement and effect.

Also evaluating employees is really really hard when it is creative / intellectual work and most of the time personal affinities override any decision from managers so that is not ideal.

Especially because the managers they'd delegate this too are also potentially on the chopping block. In my experience the larger the layoff the more likely it's a small committee of upper level management and HR figuring out who goes.

> They delegate the decision to various managers below them

From causal reading about the Big Tech layoffs, own/second hand experience etc, large layoffs are decided at the Director level at least (VPs in the case of Google iirc), as in line managers or team managers have no say in it and are kept in the dark.

My experience as a manager is that I have been consulted when a small number of people have needed to be laid off to reduce costs on a specific project but not for large company wide layoffs. For the 2 large scale layoffs I have been involved in while in a management position I learned who was being laid off at the same time those being laid off learned. My only prior notice was the head count I was losing.

I assume that when large scale layoffs happen they terminate whole teams at once, letting everyone in that team go without trying to relocate the high performers to another team

Many of those managers are kept in the dark because they too will be laid off

Never heard "the good employees never get laid off" before but it's naive and not so subtle victim blaming for employees who do get fired without cause. Companies hired too fast during pandemic and are needing to adjust to deal with current economy.

People must have a lot of faith in management to assume they have any idea who the good employees are

Exactly!

They have no idea. If you average someone into a crowd of average people, who interfere, take credit, undercut, etc.

You will have absolutely no idea who is good or bad if you are slightly removed.

A good test is to ask how good you think someone from a neighboring group is who you have never worked with directly.

Is that guy really a qualified “strategist?” No fucking idea never seen him do anything directly.

I’d put it somewhat differently. I think you can have an adequate interpretation of quality for say the closest 100 colleagues if you have enough interactions. However, the skills you’ll be basing your judgement on will be different for different groups And will probably not be the same skills as their manager would be scoring them on. Communication skills will tend to dominate harder skills if the organizational distance increases. I don’t think that’s false per se, I do think that there is a risk views get unbalanced.

Some managers are so focused on micromanagement, they literally can’t tell who the top performers who work for them are. All they see is the attitudes, number of check ins, clock in times, and completely ignore the results

I’ve been around the bush enough to know the basic truth of layoffs:

Layoffs are only about performance when considering /business/ performance, almost never about individual performance. At the individual level they are arbitrary to the point of seeming random.

Business units which are profitable, even the bedrock of the business, can and will undergo layoffs if they’re not showing growth. Payroll is an expense tied to growth, especially for technical roles that get booked as R&D CapEx.

The best way to avoid layoffs is to always work for a part of the business that is showing strong revenue growth, good fundamentals, and is a focus area for top leadership.

In the US anybody can be laid off at any time without explanation or appeal. IBM is legendary for firing long time employees to get out of paying retirement benefits. The big banks and brokerages like to fire people in December so they don't have to pay bonuses in January. Amazon is notorious for terminating people for the slightest dip in performance regardless of position. Walmart is notorious for closing stores at the slightest murmur of labor organizing. Tony Soprano once said "Your only as good as your last envelope" and I think that sums it perfectly.

Yes I think using Tony Soprano as a model for human resource makes perfect sense in so many ways. Being laid off sucks but you can feel revenge / schadenfreude by having such a large package that you can go on vacation for at least 6 months / later smile as the company runs out of money, gets acquired and gutted, you start a competitor that ruins their business. You get the idea.

    The big banks and brokerages like to fire people in December so they don't have to pay bonuses in January

Maybe this used to be the case but I think now they just don't pay a bonus and hope you take the hint. Also, all of the pending bank layoffs I hear about in the news are going to happen in February (after bonus payout).

Source: work in bank

When I worked I finance my compensation plan was always in writing as percentage of base compensation and commissions. If I was there on Jan 15th I got all of it. If I left anytime before Jan 15th I got none of it. So typically in December the brokerages lay off or fire anyone they don’t want to pay bonus to. In January everyone switches jobs after they get their bonus.

As a contractor, the very first thing that happens when a company wants to restructure or prepare to be bought (cut costs to pump the apparent value), contractors are let go. All of them regardless of their contribution, ability or importance to keeping the schedule on track.

If you're patient, you get a call in a few weeks or a month, and its back to business as usual.

I heard from people who worked at Klarna, whenever they get any financial dips to their stock they just mass-let-go of their IT consultants (what contractors are called in Sweden)

It happened this year alongside all the major layoffs, but also 4 years ago when they got into problems with the tax agency due to trying to use some loop-holes and had to pay a huge lump sum of tax

Oh no we got to pay taxes! Let go of all the consultants so the stock prices doesn't dip!

>Microsoft literally laid off the co-creator of DOM who had been with the company 28 years.

"But what have they done recently?"

Presumably the person was a "partner", a term involving shadowy details, heavy cloaks, and, I'm only guessing here but - opera masks. Before "partner" comes "bench," which involves paddling and cross-dressing (but not in a fun way), I hear.

https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-mean-to-be-a-Partner-at-M...

Laying off a partner would be very strange.

If you really think about it, the ones that don't get laid-off are those that help towards improving profits at the least cost. I'm sure the accountants did the calculations along with possible replacements and they decided he was costing too much for the work he did.

I'm sure he did well. The company's stock has ballooned over the years and IT pay at that level is high. He'll be fine. Even if he decides to retire.

This.

Just because someone invented something, and worked somewhere a long time doesn’t make them good.

I dont remember who said it first. I have heard it from more than one good scientists, "You are as good as last year."

Reduced to "you are as good as next quarter" these days

Honestly that would have been my guess if it was anything other than random: The most recent performance reviews should all be on file, pick the worst X. Or worst X per department, or whatever. Previous accomplishments wouldn't matter when done like that.

"What have you done for me lately ?"

Truer words have never been spoken.

You want loyalty? Get a dog.

Plenty of examples where only low performers are targeted.

Salesforce asked some managers to rank their lowest 10% of employees https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-rank-employees-mo...

Amazon recently instructed managers to identify low performers to push out https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-layoffs-managers-told...

Sounds like a great way to settle old scores while appearing "impartial".

“Which of your subordinates do you like least?”

Right, the Jack Welch (General Electric) school of management.

This is a strategy best done as a regular ongoing culling of the "worst" employees. This way, you are always a better workforce.

When you have a mass layoff due to massively missing revenue goals, you have to start wholesale hacking of people to get rid of payroll. Payroll is the biggest cost to a company, so you have to shed employees fast, before the end of this quarter. There is no time to fire that many people at once, even with delegation. You have to chop all the non-performing or underperforming units/product lines/etc and everyone in them, be they the bottom 10% of the top 10%. If you have 750 people working in a product line that is losing money, they're zapped.

I was laid off 7 years ago. I wasn't a great employee. It gave me a kick in my pants that eventually made me a much better employee. So I think there is some truth that many laid off people were the lower end of performance, but it also can mean that these people are actually good people to hire.

It also makes you think a lot more about your environment and skillset and where and how you are positioned in an organization.

Who ever thought good employees don't get laid off? I've never spoken to anyone who believed that.

Look through any comment thread about layoffs here on HN and you’ll see multiple comments suggesting that layoffs only hit “low performers”.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34563311

Yea most of the morons that say that kinda stuff are probably "low performers" themselves lol. HN has this weird complex of people who insist they're "10x" or "high performers" or whatever that want toxic culture because they think they're getting paid more than their peers. But they're probably not, and getting the "hank hill special" (shhhh don't tell your coworkers what a good deal I'm giving you here!)

The layoff version of the just world fallacy is rampant on hacker news. Just search for one of the many layoff threads over the last six months and you'll see plenty of people saying that.

Most of us early in our careers. Then we learn the hard way.

It will be interesting to see if work culture changes after these last few months and if it does how. Hopefully for the better for the worker.

I believe it. Obviously there are exceptions, when a whole function is dropped for example. And the biggest caveat is that "low performer" in the eyes of a company is does not equate to any kind of objective judgement about a person's intelligence or competency, it's heavily situation dependent.

That aside, it's common sense that the people laid off are skewed towards those that the company doesn't want, so people at the bottom of what the company defines as performance. Companies don't just arbitrarily dump those who are making great contribution to what the company considers important, whatever they may tell you

You are assuming a lot of competence on the behalf of management which seems naive to me.

No, I'm trying to explicitly say that performance is subjective, and the judge of it is your bosses, the management.

I understand that point but I think you’re probably off base in your assumption (that businesses will not lay off the people that they have subjectively evaluated as “best”). In my experience these things are handled poorly from start to finish because management in big companies is extremely dysfunctional.

Layoffs are to save money. Many companies will rather layoff 1 person making above market rate than 2 making below market rate. Performance is obviously a factor, but not the only one.

If you have aggressively negotiated your cash compensation very high based on high performance during an economic boom you are at a high risk of getting laid off when the economy turns around. Imagine a graph with performance and compensation as axises, anyone below some slope is a layoff candidate.

Well yes, performance is always relative to comp. The expectations for someone making 400k per year are higher than for someone making 100k. If you're not living up to the expected value for someone making your comp, you're underperforming.

> Well yes, performance is always relative to comp

This is transparently false. Expectations are relative to comp.

Fair enough. Maybe that's the reason "good employees" get laid off. They are good from a coworkers perspective, but just not good enough for their pay. (assuming all measurements were meaningful and objective)

You need to speak to some CEOs then

Since when are CEOs good judges of quality of low level workers?

They're not. Pretty much my point. They do, however, have an outsize effect on the outcomes of firings, and whether or not layoffs will take place.

I've never heard this idea before either. I was at Microsoft when they did layoffs in 2008 (either that or 2009). I remember it was communicated that it was the job itself that was being removed, for business reasons, and they weren't targeting individuals for performance reasons.

Now maybe behind the scenes there were discussions about which devs were "worth more", but I wasn't a manager, so wasn't privy to any of that.

Depending on the scope of the layoffs, the event might also be a secret from the direct manager who is best positioned to rank employees. Which turns it into a game of musical chairs where an HR algorithm picks the loser.

> the event might also be a secret from the direct manager

Oftentimes explicitly became managers look like rank-and-file employees to the executives above them just the same way that developers look like rank-and-file workers to their managers.

A former employer was hit with ~10% layoffs during January. A shockingly high number of people that were let go were middle and senior management, up to VPs and even an SVP that I'm aware of.

Virtually any thread on layoffs on Hacker News, including this one, has lots of people who apparently think this.

If you are not in danger of being laid off, you are underpaid.

Underpaid by enough to be palatable can still equate to being paid quite a bit.

If you are paid enough to be in danger to be laid off right now, can you afford to be laid off right now? Stress is expensive, and costs more than just money. The math differs from person to person.

"The 40 hour work week and 40 year career is dead. The brain (culture) knows it -- but the heart (economy) hasn't caught up yet."

It's interesting how naive people are with 1) how economic markets work, 2) how businesses work, and 3) life as an employee today.

Who has ever said that? I've only ever hear management are morons and layoffs are bullshit.

You are not your job.

I’m not sure who ever believed this. Mass layoffs have never been about getting rid of just the low performers.

Yes you get rid of the low performers, but you also have cover to mass layoff the high income earners. That lets an executive claim to cutting costs, helping their bonuses and stock value, while also suppressing employee wages.

When it’s a collective action by executives across multiple companies it should be clear why they’re opposed to employees having the same collective power.

Depends.

If you have a large Fortune 1000, or 5000 corporation and they have a horrible quarter and need to lay off people, they will cut departments, groups, willy-nilly. They will see if a group of 1000 people is really necessary to the main strategic goals of the firm, and if they are not, they will slash everyone, good or not. There's nothing that you can do about it unless you are the CEO's son or daughter.

When you get down to mid-size or smaller companies, where they look at individuals, the reality is that "the employee that has good relations with the people in charge of layoffs never get laid off."

This is a theme I've mentioned many times - at any company, you should find the people who have the power and develop strong relations with them. Make them happy.

And be easy to get along with - don't whine and complain. Smile and be genuinely friendly (do not be unctuous).

Nothing at all will 100% guarantee you never get laid off, but that's the best way to maximize your not being laid off.

Also, be in the revenue generating part of the company if you can.

If you want to ride one accomplishment for decades, you need to get a tenured academic position.

More like, if you want your accomplishments to matter at all.

Or if you'd like to ride your subordinates' accomplishments.

Or be an early investor!

If "one accomplishment" is years of near-slave labor.

The Marines break you and remake you ("Once a Marine, always a Marine"). Is academia much different ?

(Asking for a friend.)

Innocent people get capital punishment and get killed.

Why would anyone think employers are always correct?

Good employees working on bad, irrelevant, unprofitable or otherwise doomed projects will totally get laid off as collateral damage.

Like others, I am similarly perplexed as to who would believe something like this who isn't extremely inexperienced[0] with regard to how many businesses operate[1].

I have reviewed resumes for decades and a few gaps in employment due to being laid off -- even if they indicate an employee did a terrible job at the company. And maybe the problem is my interpretation of the statement. I'm interpreting it as the inverse "Only bad employees, specifically people who would make bad employees anywhere in the capacity of what they were doing, get laid off."

I have been laid off, once, but I won't speak for myself. The best boss I have ever had -- and within his department and to his direct manager (a VP), he was considered a top performer got excellent reviews, had been with the company for a decade with a track record that was all sunny. To give you an example, during a very serious outage -- with enthusiasm at 1:00 AM on a Friday, this Director volunteered to drive an extremely expensive piece of equipment about 12 hours, alone, to another data center to keep one of his guys/gals from having to make the trip (in a place he, and few others, would be interested in visiting for fun). He was laid off for political reasons involving one individual -- a co-worker who was disliked as much as this guy was liked, was a constant road blocker, bike-shedder and, honestly -- I have no idea how he lasted as long as he did[2].

I've known people who were laid off because of bait-and-switch scenarios. In one case, a company was purchased (by a private equity owned competitor) a month after the new hire started. This new hire had negotiated employment terms that sacrificed some pay for additional time off, included a very flexible IP agreement and explicitly did not include a non-compete. After purchase, time off was standardized which caused him to lose two weeks. All of the agreements were replaced with an employee handbook that was mandatory to sign. There were no options for altering the agreements. This wasn't an "acqui-hire" (almost the opposite, the large business was in a legacy market, the smaller was "shiny/new" and rapidly expanding/making money -- they were hoping to integrate some of the old into all of the new). They laid off my buddy and several of his co-workers due to their decision not to sign the new terms -- especially at the salary offer -- which defeated the purpose of the acquisition, for the most part.

I've known one person laid off because the company (lender) went under. Over a period of 14 months, he watched 1,500 employees get let go. He was "a grunt" at the time, but ended up being one of the final 5 people laid off. There were endless "organize these files/move these things" tasks and he did them 10X faster than anyone else. Besides him, there were 1,500 people and a few thousand before that who were laid off because "the company was rapidly failing."

There are countless stories of companies expanding into a local market and receding, entering a new market and exiting after failure, being purchased by a large competitor who "already has twice as many people as the other company doing that thing" or "does that thing so differently that they don't have anyone in that role." And especially in companies where "software development isn't everything they do", when they merge with another company, some of the projects that Company A does will be cut. Some of those developers -- sometimes (often?) the most technically capable ones[3] -- are let go.

Despite how it is often used -- at least in principal, being laid off is supposed to be a simple matter of: We don't have a need for this person ... "It's not them, It's Us(tm)", we're an "at will" employer, "these things happen" and we'll pay higher unemployment rates for our mistake in hiring someone we did not properly prepare to put to work. Cold, simple, and shouldn't really say anything about the employee unless it's a pattern of their employment (and they're not intentionally taking jobs at startups/other places with high-risk to employment status).

Good employees get laid off all the time.

[0] Not implying "worked too few years", but maybe worked too few jobs or not in varied enough sectors (from an economic standpoint), or company sizes/ages.

[1] ... I can only speak for "the US" and for the company's I've worked for and those that others I know have worked for -- small sample size but near-universal behavior.

[2] It sounds like I have a vendetta against the guy but he and I barely crossed paths. When we merged with a competitor, he lasted about a week. I was present at the new HQ when the incoming CIO walked into our room, "The Guy"'s name came up, he said "oh, yeah, I forgot to handle something." He was 15 minutes late to an all-staff meeting about 30 minutes later. He needed the time to tell "The Guy" that his service would no longer be needed.

[3] Sometimes because "they know the old systems so well they are resistant to moving to the new systems" but sometimes because "they're really popular with people who are resistant" and getting rid of that person will cause others to fall in line (I have one specific case that I know took place this way because I tried to convince the person who made the decision that it would blow up in his face).

I've always thought that employees that I had to the bottom line don't get laid off. It's a popularity contest for sure, but if the person makes money and adds to the bottom line of the company, it would seem rather foolish to let that person go, unless they are disruptive.

At Microsoft, it is an empirical but widely-held belief that if you are an important part of a profitable division, you are a lot less likely to be RIFF'd. That said, I do know—what I considered to be—a valuable 31-year dev of MS Office who got laid off in the recent RIFF. I was very surprised.

Remember something about Microsoft. They have countless competing projects internally to keep the bloodlust going. What’s profitable? MS will let the most successful team live and kill the other two

I’m not surprised they had to get rid legacy folks in the office team. The person must have refused to move onto another team and Office is a completely different product than it was before

The only employees that are above the gross profit line are in sales. Everyone else is an expense. When I was pre-career, I figured that was true. And then early career I believed companies must follow some sort of "keeping this person at $100,000 saves $1,000,000" rule. And now I believe the naive line again: nobody really knows what they're doing. Salespeople claim their revenue, everyone else has to argue themselves into the value of what they sold.

If you think about it, every dollar of value is spoken for so many times. The salesperson sold it. The executive brought it to be sold. The system person made it a part of the deal. The line employee made it. The marketing people brought the customer to it. The support people made the customer trust it. The accounting people made sure it didn't walk out the door on its own, and HR hired them all that did it.

I imagine in countries or union situations where you have to hire people back when the jobs open back up, you don't get this idea. In fact, a union tells you who goes first and last. If you have cause to fire someone, it's better to fire them with cause.

This reminds me of a certain instructive joke, that I won't repeat here because a significant fraction of readers would find it offensive, but the punchline kind of says it all: "30 years old and you still believe in leprechauns?"

Good employees certainly do get laid off. The difference is that good employees get rehired.

These kinds of layoffs almost always nuke somebody that's vital, and those people walk back in on Monday as a contractor alongside a pay bump.

The difficulty in that sentence is the word "good" which might mean hugely different things depending on the situation and on who's reading.

I still think it's mostly true. The people let go in the last round of layoffs where I work were the OGs who were coasting on their reputation. The people I know who lost their jobs for no fault of their own are the people who were laid off because an entire product/service was shut down--but usually even then they'd cherrypick the high performers out and move them to another team.

I've been told many times that strawmen make effective arguments.

This and some of the anecdotes in the replies to the tweet honestly just sound like someone judging a decision without sufficient context. It's easy to point at a difficult to understand example to get internet points.

If you've ever worked someplace with periodic waves of layoffs, you'll know that there is a certain amount of randomness to it all.

Wrong role at the wrong time. Wrong team at the wrong time.

The decision makers are frequently several steps removed from those being laid off. Sometimes this is done because the layoffs are going through many layers and they don't want middle management aware of the cuts in advance. Other times its because they assume line managers will protect their people too much / be emotional / whatever.

Anyway, this means that once you trim the obvious PIP/officially low rated in reviews people.. the cutters don't really know the precise value the people they are cutting bring to their team/org. They just need to cut 5%/10%/whatever out of an org of 1000s or 10000s, and get on with their day job, golf, etc.

I once worked at a big stupid bank, and the most eye opening experiences were around the randomness of compensation. A senior manager who really shouldn't have been managing people, one day confided to me the process was that HR basically set peoples raises, and he would go in and tweak the top 5-10% of people he knew. This is in an org of 100s of people. Professionally it wasn't a great year for me, but I ended up with my biggest raise there in 5 years. On comp day, my direct manager said, almost verbatim "HR made adjustments to title bands based on market rates, which is why you are seeing this rase". It has been the year after my promotion, so I was for obvious reasons at the bottom end of the band.

So a reminder that a lot of this is arbitrary, stupid, and don't take it too seriously or personally.

> So a reminder that a lot of this is arbitrary, stupid, and don't take it too seriously or personally.

I 100% agree with that.

Also in banking. Even if you make simplifying assumptions that managers are rational and objective performance management is possible, this is still entirely true.

Large scale layoffs are executed via cascaded headcount targets that affect departments, not people. Usually this entirely disregards relative performance between groups/teams, and forces managers to make local decisions that might be globally poor.

Has this just not been a factor in big tech due to growth? I'm struggling to understand why recent threads like this generate so much commentary.

I think, they truly haven't. Look at some of the FAANG headcount numbers 2009 (GFC) -> 2019 (pre-COVID) ->2022 (COVID hiring peak)

* GOOG went 20k->120k->150k. That is, GOOG added more 150% of their total 2009 staffing level during COVID.

* MSFT went 90k->144k->221k. So both companies added over 100K from GFC to today!

* Netflix 2k->9k->13k. Small absolute numbers, but 6x their 2009 size?

Compare to Wall St.

* Bank of America went 284k->208k->208k apparently. So down from GFC and flat during COVID.

* Morgan Stanley 61k->60k->75k. So down, then +25%.

* JPM went 222k->256k->271k. As a %, much smaller growth, and even in absolute terms, smaller growth.

* Goldman 33k->38k->44k. Their growth across the whole firm is roughly the size of what, Amazons Alexa division?!?? LOL.

The numbers leave the impression that theres plenty more room to shrink.. If the end of ZIRP is Tech's GFC, then these reductions have only just begun.

Companies lay off employees who are less valuable. What did Microsoft need Dr. DOM for?

*good young employees

Lol... If you believe that then demand an employment agreement that states that. Almost all of society functions through agreements. If your employment agreement states employment is at will then you better believe that they mean it.

Unless someone is quite high up in the company or in some type of special position (in house consul for example) almost no one will have an employment agreement.

I've had an employment agreement for literally every job I've held in my career, from the very first when I was still wet behind the ears.

You have to sign agreements to work at pretty much anywhere in the US... From Wendys all the way to the White House.

>Microsoft literally laid off the co-creator of DOM who had been with the company 28 years.

How does creating a tree data structure decades ago mean that you are a "good employee"?

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