Comment by flappyeagle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flappyeagle | Hacker News Reader

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At almost every place I've ever worked, there were about 10-20% of employees who were unproductive. Sometimes it's because they were bad hires, or they were just working on projects that added no value.

I was at a series B startup that did 15% layoffs during the first pandemic wave. The result: we moved faster, code quality went up, morale increased over time. Some layoffs are driven by necessity, and some are opportunistic ways for companies to retool and mass-fire low performers.

This applies at higher levels of abstractions too. When google did their layoffs, multiple entire unprofitable teams and business units were eliminated. It doesn't matter if "they could pay for it". They had an opportune excuse to remove some ugly looking lines from the balance sheet all at once and they took it.

It's impractical for them to try to differentiate high and low individual performers at that scale. No matter how talented you are, you were contributing to a loss-making part of the company.

Apple seems to have been better at not having useless teams and divisions. Tim Cook is a disciplined guy, so I'm not surprised.

This is assuming that layoffs affect the correct group of people, in which case the obvious question is why couldn't those people be informed earlier and been given a choice to find a different position or to improve their performance? At Google specifically, many high performers were laid off without explanation. When entire programs were cut, many general-purpose programmers were lost simply due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time rather than having the wrong skills or having low performance.

Given that the evaluation of who to cut is made by outside groups, in a short period of time, without appeal, it seems more likely that layoffs in these cases are less about cutting low performers and more about getting rid of people the company is mismanaging, or people that the company is overpaying. Without changing that mismanagement, the result won't be a better environment. The message to employees is rough also: "don't trust our performance evaluations".

It's not "don't trust out performance evaluations". The point of perf evals is rarely to fire people, it's primary use is to manage expectations of promotion.

> This is assuming that layoffs affect the correct group of people

Layoffs often don't target the right group of people when it comes to perf. There's error in human judgement abound. But it's 100% accurate when it comes to which business units are bringing in revenue, or costing a lot.

> why couldn't those people be informed earlier and been given a choice to find a different position or to improve their performance

Human attention is a scarce resource. Executives will tolerate inefficiency during up markets because it's more valuable to try to capture growth vs become efficient. When there's no growth to be had, then they turn their attention towards cutting costs.

> it seems more likely that layoffs in these cases are less about cutting low performers and more about getting rid of people the company is mismanaging, or people that the company is overpaying

The larger a company gets, the more these are effectively the same thing. Money in, value out. Too much money, too little value, you're just changing two sides of a ratio.

You have a laughable over estimation of executives ability to value risk/reward ratios.

I’m half expecting you start quoting atlas shrugged here.

You should consider reading more carefully before being so dismissive.

You’ve mistaken my statement about executive incentives for one about their competence.

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