Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by iamflimflam1 | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

iamflimflam1

We always used to joke that layoffs always come in threes.

The first one never cuts deep enough. People do the bare minimum.

The second one comes when everyone realises that the business actually is in trouble and does need saving.

The third one is needed as the business has been so badly damaged by the layoffs and is now bleeding cash.

View on HN

And the corollary of this is how to do layoffs right (allegedly Toyota does this):

1. Cut out whatever else you can first, like executive bonuses and salaries.

2. Calculate the bare minimum staff you need, through good times and bad times.

3. Lay off the rest.

4. Tell those that got stuck behind that it was an extraordinary event and that they have tenure for life should they want it.

5. Stick to your promise.

Wouldn’t that lead to a roughly 75% staff reduction for some of these companies ? Just like what happened at Twitter.

Would be fun to witness the aftermath on programmer salaries after this.

might take a while to adjust given how generous and long lasting recent severance packages have been.

I bet we'll see less impact on base pay and more impact on equity comp. Cautious engineers will get burned by unrealized comp (unvested shares) and insist on a distribution favoring base pay. I expect this will flatten engineer pay across the industry, because the big outliers in total comp were outliers because of stocks.

I think there are simpler effects at work here, like less competition and optimistic calculations of the expected future value of grants.

Assuming management who actually care about their people (a tiny minority), I've seen companies allow employees to vote whether the company should have layoffs or temporarily reduce everyone's salaries by various means (e.g. furloughs). This approach requires some things that are rare, like competent senior management who care about the well being of their people.

Often true but Facebook is not bleeding cash though. They are printing money. They are just very bloated.

Isn’t Facebook the company of $300k-a-year developers? These jobs practically didn’t exist before Facebook-Google.

Are we in a situation where we might see the previous normal come back, ie $150k when you’re a manager slaving away and that’s it?

It's actually really difficult to run a business that is hugely profitable and to keep wages under control. This is less of a "Facebook" thing and more of a "highly profitable company" thing.

The reason wages at FAANG are high is because they make a shit tonne of money, and since they've got that much money they can just pay top engineers more than competitors. There's a limit to that - which is how much money are they making.

But if Meta decide they're just going to pay everyone less, what happens? Everyone leaves and goes to Google. What happens if Google decides to pay less? They go off to Microsoft or Amazon. So they can all afford these high salaries - because the company makes a tonne of money, and they have a clear downside to not paying these salaries- they lose top talent.

The cases where other companies are paying less are entirely down to actual hardnosed business, they pay less because they expect to hire less good people and that's a good trade off in a business that isn't reliant on engineering talent. Intel coasted for about a decade not competing for the best talent, why? Because their sales strategy was what dominated the profitability of the company. Eventually they lost their engineering edge and now the company is in the toilet, but that wasn't really a mistake, it was a deliberate choice by management to control costs rather than invest to innovate.

“Everyone leaves and goes to Google. What happens if Google decides to pay less? They go off to Microsoft or Amazon.”

Problem is that Google, Amazon and Microsoft aren’t hiring right now.

They are if you are good enough.

Of course, but why work for someone else, especially a huge corp, if your good enough?

It's more difficult than it was, but it's not impossible, and the second you drop down into the second tier of pay - as the GP was suggesting, suddenly you've got thousands of companys that you could be going to.

A company that multi-billion profit on top of multi billion stock buyback cannot be "bloated" by any definition of the word that's not uttered by a sociopath.

https://drthad.substack.com/p/the-stupidity-of-stock-buyback...

They've just announced $40B stock buyback. This is purely sociopathic decision.

Sociopathic? Are the laid off $300k/y developpers going to struggle getting food on their plates?

Probably not, but they might have to go back to ramen.

Perhaps if they have a million plus mortgage on their house in SF, a couple car loans, a new health insurance payment, cash flowing a kid in college or private school, child support / alimony payments, vacation home, etc.

Roughly 30% of the Americans earning > 250k / year are living Paycheck to Paycheck.

Of course one can hope that having to rely on food stamps/charity after earning multiples of the median income will improve people ability to budget, but I somehow doubt that will be the case in a country revolving around credits cards being the main payment method.

It's technically "paycheck to paycheck", but it's on a different level than "if my paycheck is a week late, I don't eat or my electricity is shut off or I'm going to be evicted". It's cash-flow optimized leveraged wealth.

Last time that claim was made, the stock part of compensation was not included.

Of course, people have this habit of spending every dollar they earn and more, no matter how much they earn. But I struggle to see the tragedy in them having to downsize their life as a result of their overhired job getting cut and even less to pity them if they didn't build some nest egg with those salaries. It's not like Meta employees are some bottom shelf developpers anyway, they'll find more work I'm not scared for them.

> Sociopathic? Are the laid off $300k/y developpers going to struggle getting food on their plates?

Laid off people (of any profession) are making $0/year.

If company thought it's excessive they could not hire them. If company could not afford them, they would not do stock buyback. Non-performance related layoffs should be a decision that comes with heavy corporate penalties, such as ban of dividends or buybacks for a number of years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com