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Comment by 88913527 | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a good way to drive unregrettable attrition. The next question is, will this cause too many people to leave or stay? Tough to grok in advance how employees will respond, and how many people might take the chance the policy has no teeth.

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why unregrettable, I think it is quite the opposite - regrettable attrition because it is the people who have the most in-demand skills on the job market can/will leave for full remote/better hybrid schedules.

FWIW, it's also possible that the folks you describe have indicated a preference for more in-person/hybrid work.

It's unregrettable if the company intentionally desires to downsize. Regrettable means when don't you want someone to leave, but they do. Unregrettable is the opposite: someone leaves, but you wanted them to.

The best people will leave though

its more like only the best people will be able to interview and get jobs elsewhere for better wording conditions, and low performers will cling to their jobs and accept RTO happily where they can compensate lack of impact for facetime

is it unregrettable if your experienced people run to competitor for better working conditions, fix their product, build feature parity and simply outexecute you?

Sometimes you do this to force attrition so you dont have to do more layoffs.

This pretty much sums up a lot of the layoffs going on.

I can't vouch for all the random Google results but for US tech voluntary attrition seemed to be somewhere around 15% per year pre pandemic. It went even higher during the 'great resignation'. Companies hiring strategies were based off 15% or 20% of people leaving by surprise. They had to hire accordingly

Now big employers are freezing or significantly slowing hiring down, some are afraid as new employees they'd be targeted in layoffs (or maybe their offers would be cancelled an hour before starting), so everyone ends up with more employees than they planned for

> US tech voluntary attrition seemed to be somewhere around 15% per year pre pandemic.

Source?

By doing this you are most likely to atrophy from your most senior and experienced staff who can readily find another remote job, this leads to brain drain in the organization and sets you up worse long term for perceived short term benefits which are dubious at best. I think management has doubted the degree to which people would make remote work their hill to die on in terms of job benefits.

Losing some key staff might be better than a 2nd, 3rd, Nth round of layoffs which could cause an increasing crisis in confidence, which would lead to proportionally more senior staff leaving.

Honestly layoffs seem like a really fraught way to save money. They always trim at a nice even number like 10%, so you know they didn't run any analysis to suggest what an appropriate amount would be , and just did what number seemed right in the guts of boardmembers, probably just being a lemming doing a similar cut as a competitor to not spook shareholders too much. How much could payroll be, 30% of revenue? You cut 10% of payroll you are only saving 3% of revenue and stoking a lot of fear among your troops in the process. How much is an office lease obligation on the other hand versus the savings from these layoffs weighed against the potential revenue that labor could have generated had you kept them employed?

Why would you assume payroll is 30% of revenue? For companies dealing with limited runway there is a good chance payroll is >100% revenue, and in general for software companies payroll is the single highest expense.

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