Ask HN: If you were not laid off, how are your 1:1 meetings going? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If you were not laid off, how are your 1:1 meetings going?

50 pointsgtirloni83 comments

Do you have any important questions someone not laid off should be asking to their managers?

More importantly, do you expect real answers?

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Your managers know nothing. There are 3 things you can do if you are paranoid about being laid off.

- work on something that’s central to the business

- ship software frequently, such that git blame makes it obvious

- form a relationship with your manager and their manager

Everything else is out of your control.

I'd even go as far as saying the relationship building (#3) to be on top of that list. The first two are important but the last is paramount. Infact the last will even get you more resources for #1 and better opportunities for #2.

Relationship building is certainly useful, but how useful depends on context: in the recent layoffs at my company, the only person who might have been able to influence whether I was cut or not was four levels above me on the org chart. My manager, my manager's manager, and my manager's manager's manager were not even aware that layoffs were coming until after decisions had been made.

For various reasons I don't think measures of my own performance would have made any difference, so I conclude that my project, however non-central to the company's business, was central enough.

> Relationship building is certainly useful, but how useful depends on context: in the recent layoffs at my company, the only person who might have been able to influence whether I was cut or not was four levels above me on the org chart. My manager, my manager's manager, and my manager's manager's manager were not even aware that layoffs were coming until after decisions had been made.

Aye. There is, in large companies, hidden away in a dark room far from most operations, an accounting department. And in that dept. there is an accountant, maybe an CPA or MBA, whose job it is to cut people. They're kept isolated so they have no connections to teams or staff -- no feelings, just numbers.

Your boss and boss's boss may love you, but that accountant is there to make decisions without feelings. And when the decision is made, your boss may not know 'till the day of. Hell, their boss might not know.

Actually this job isn't the accountants. The accountants job is to give the CFO a "number". The CFO then gives this number to the different vps with an edict "cut said numbers from your org in x weeks". VPs typically have a (long running) process of building up lists for a rainy day such as this - eg, bottom performers (this usually includes those have given managers the stinkeye), projects without good numbers, some randomness, those with high comp to level ratios etc.

Oh and often one of the factors the "accountants" have to consider is a guidance that comes after the CFO has lunches with their wall st buddies!

I'd say the exact opposite applies to layoffs. Most of the people who got surprised by them here were very popular with others. Relationships might matter more in peaceful times, though.

It looks like the main advantage of doing large scale layoffs is that it allows you to fire popular people who have contributed a lot and done nothing wrong, only committing the crime of being overpaid or being less valuable in the current market situation.

Someone who is the opposite - an asshole who gets shit done, has high odds of being fired-replaced during peace time, but may make the cut during a layoff.

Popular with others is a bit different than popular with your manager's managers, which is what the OP suggested. But one good way to get noticed up the management chain is a combination of high impact deliverables and self promotion so getting shit done is always a great recommendation.

> Your managers know nothing. There are 3 things you can do if you are paranoid about being laid off.

Work at a small company. My manager was the CTO for 7+ years, it was great. It was quite a shock moving to a big company where my manager really doesn't have any more information than I do.

The problem with small companies is that sometimes, instead of (or in addition to) layoffs, the whole company just go kaput. There was more transparency that the end is near, but it might not have helped.

The same is also true of small teams inside large companies. It's a fractal of transparencies.

Smaller companies also are exempt from some laws that protect employees. e.g. the WARN act (requiring 60 day notice of layoffs) doesn't kick in until you have 75 employees. I've been involved in a company that made sure not to cross that line because it was always teetering on the brink, and that kind of requirement would have been catastrophic.

#4 - if you are in an environment that’s causing layoff paranoia, look for another job.

- keep your resume up to date and maintain a list of contacts (for referrals) just in case. It's important to realize that you can do everything right at your company for decades and some invisible hand can still put you on a layoffs list. The only thing you can really do is be prepared for that eventuality.

I need to stop squashing my commits

Your manager may not know if or when but they might have been asked to make a short list along with all other managers. Everyone has to do it so which teams isn't leaked early.

Also be careful about asking. What if they tell you the truth? You might learn things you can never unlearn. What do you think it's like knowing who the sacrificial lamb is going to be for the next round of layoffs? Someone who's married with young kids at home? It sucks.

As much as I hate to admit it, being friends with the right people can get you places.

completely untrue, humans are naturally objective and the hardest, most capable and morally just people always rise to the top to make the best of the decisions for rest of us

Careful, the sharp edges of your brittle smile are cutting me from here.

I wasn't recently laid off, but I quit. In retrospect, my manager handled 1:1 meetings extremely poorly. He always asked me to lay out any aspects that I could improve. I confided in him that I wish I could be more organized, but the amount of work I had made it hard to focus on improvement task rather than problem solving in the code base.

When I quit (due to stress, in a high work load phase of a project), he included my phrases verbatim in my written job reference (these are common in Germany). He literally wrote that I was unfocused and easily overworked. When I complained, he made sure to let me know that the stated issues were just what I told him in our 1:1 meetings. I can only assume malice, since they were really unhappy about me quitting and they expected the project deadline to be missed because of it.

I hope you fought back on that. That is a personal attack and nothing more.

You should have insisted on a corrected job reference and in the extreme case gone to court. According to German regulations a job reference must comply with the principles of "clarity", "truthfulness", "completeness" and "goodwill".[1]

[1] See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeitszeugnis#Zeugnisgrunds%C... (in German).

> You should have insisted on a corrected job reference and in the extreme case gone to court

I did. The court couldn't do anything for me, because the company had my own evaluation on paper and used those words verbatim. It's genius really, but also pretty damn petty.

Good to know. Tx for sharing

Wow, a lesson in not speaking the full truth to our managers. Thanks for sharing.

If they reacted like this when you quit I can only say: congratulations for quitting that job.

This sounds like the HR version of "don't talk to the police"... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

That is insane. In my experience explicitly negative job references are unheard of and I think they may even be illegal (or at least legally risky) - a bad job reference would be something like "I confirm he worked here" without more.

As first line manager, I don't know shit, because when I know it my team knows it too. We are all in the same boat.

As a manager the hardest thing for me is "selling company loyalty". I understand selling vision and coolness of projects (they are somewhat tangible?). A large part of selling loyalty is values and having people's back during rough times - same thing expected from managers. With the layoffs being a clear Kowtow to wall street (and fed's desire to manage up unemployment) how do I not come across as gullible or worse as an outright liar? I can't say that in a 1/1 as then I'd just look incompetent!

Yes this is all after we are keeping our heads down and doing our jobs!

Don't sell company loyalty if you don't believe in it. Sell mutual self interest. Why should your directs be excited to be there, or at least not actively looking elsewhere? Cool projects, etc., all help -- but the directly experienced "the company is currently and actively treating you well and rewarding you appropriately for your contributions" is point number one. And yes, the implicit message here is that, if the company stops doing its part, your directs should consider looking elsewhere. So should you.

As a manager, you kind of have to be functionally clueless. If you're honest, you're not a good manager for the company. If you're dishonest, you're not a good manager for the employee.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Oh man this is a classic. Ive read this 3 teams (and watched office e2e after each reading) and new ah-ha moments come up from this to me!

I'm a manager and I refuse to sell loyalty. This is a business arrangement, loyalty has no place in it, but integrity does. I tell it straight and when I can't share some details I'm honest that there are things I can't share.

Same here. The hard line to walk is presenting a front to upper management so you dont across as a non-beleiver to them. Big companies have systems in place to catch the non-beleivers. Sometimes I do wonder if we are in the corporate version of the man from the high castle!

> Big companies have systems in place to catch the non-beleivers

This is an interesting comment. Any examples of such systems?

I'm open skeptical of corporate speak but I don't know how my company would catch on it except for the snarky comment here and there.

Honestly, I don't front to upper management either. I ask what the strategy they want to try is and if they ask me if I think the strategy is correct or not I give my honest answer. If they don't get honest feedback from us then why would we think they could make wise decisions?

If the teams is good but the company is shit it is better to sell team loyalty (as in us lot could move as a team to a better company). That might involve being frank, becoming friends and so on.

Last round of layoff my manager got fired and I kept my job. He was just as surprised by the layoffs as everybody else.

Compensation based layoffs. fire the 1/3 of the highest paid positions.

Now is the time to sell to your manager, so they can sell to their manager, why you and your team are mission critical, and are working to keep the lights on.

This. Not sure how possible it is for large companies, but I spend a lot of time making sure we deliver VISIBLE features every sprint.

The time to sell to your manager was six months ago or earlier.

I recognized that this was going to be happen last year, pulled my manager aside and explained how dire the situation and how we needed more visibility in the company. He thought I was being paranoid, but agreed with the general benefits of improving things. We've made some promising changes, but layoffs haven't happened yet so no idea if it worked.

If layoffs are happening leadership and the board are already drawing up plans for layoffs and nobody is thinking about you they're thinking of an org chart and a list of compensation to figure out what makes the most sense from a big picture perspective. They're thinking of a product road map and who is needed to make their current strategy work. Nothing you can do now will change that.

The time to convince leadership you were mission critical is well before you realize that layoffs are coming.

All that said, layoffs are more arbitrary that most would like to believe. Don't stress yourself out too much thinking about what you can do to safe your self/team. You never had much control over this situation.

As a manager I feel responsible for knowing this at all times. I don't want to be sold to. Just give me consistent work at the expected quality at whatever pace you can sustain.

Perhaps I'm fooling myself, but I think I can definitely tell when people are burning the candle at both ends to compensate for any perceived shortcomings. That doesn't really impress me. In fact, it worries me, as I want consistency and sustainability. Don't burn out or begin making lots of mistakes.

From the other side of the table, that is insightful: thank you.

I can't promise this is how all managers think. And there's definitely companies that are perfectly happy for you to work 60 hours when being paid for 40. Either they don't care, or are ignorant of the qualitative cost of that.

I'm very fortunate to work somewhere that gives me a reasonable amount of autonomy for how to ensure my team delivers quality work on-time. One of the main reasons is that the company doesn't MBA us to death by doing things like, "they're on-time! Give them 20% more work next time!"

Groveling to keep your job when you know you're doing critical work is such a slap in the face.

Not proposing to grovel, but to make sure the value is being conveyed with data to back it up. Hopefully this already being done, and it doesn't hurt to continue doing so.

I mean if they get rid of value-adding roles the company will eventually fail.

Ahh, the weekly paycheck justification meeting. So demoralizing. Treat me like a adult that can get things done.

This sounds like a bad translation of an ancient Chinese proverb.

First level managers are usually kept in the dark just like leaf node employees. I know my manager doesn't know shit, and when he knows, it's because he'll need to tell me in a few days.

Indeed. I work at a company that had massive layoffs recently. A very higher up friend assured my I'm going to be okay but my direct manager knew nothing until the day itself and I couldn't tell them anything.

They're always meh. The middle managers have no real power or insight. I get very little out of them.

Yeah it's frustrating but good to remember this (middle management not having much sway)

I had a middle management job where I could have had ChatGPT replace 99% of the work I did spinning emails or making bad news sound positive.

When covid started and companies all over the world were laying people off (or furloughing them), I asked my manager if there were going to be layoffs at our company. He said, "I'm not allowed to say one way or the other."

I assumed that the reason he wasn't allowed was because we were a public company and if something he said made it into the media, there would be legal implications, especially if the stock price was affected.

My current company is saying, "Nope. No layoffs. We have plenty of money. We won't have to even think about layoffs for quite a while. Go back to work." Not a public company. Big difference.

It is very possible for a private company to say "everything is fine, no one is getting laid off" and then have layoffs happen weeks later. I've seen it happen. Be skeptical and have a backup plan.

"Nope. No layoffs" is to companies about to do layoffs as "It's against the constitution to lie about being a police officer" is to undercover cops doing drug busts.

Companies generally try very hard to limit the warnings that layoffs will be coming. Every time I've seen layoffs it's a week or so after the "macro is tough, but we're still strong" meeting.

Ultimately this is the hardest part of layoffs: the uncertainty and lack of control.

You can't really know layoffs are coming until the day you get that email, and you also can't really do anything to save your job no matter how much you would like to believe you can.

It's a stressful season in tech to be sure.

Not layoff-specific, but here are questions [1] you should be asking your manager at every 1:1 meeting:

How is your week going?

What are some of your priorities for this week?

What challenges have you been having?

How can I help you?

What feedback do you have for me?

You will get more information from the answers to these questions than if you were to directly ask your manager "Am I expendable in the next layoff?".

[1] https://workweek.com/2022/09/26/performance-reviews-dont-act...

I'm not particularly fond of regular 1:1 meetings, my manager had one each week, and I thought it bordered on micromanagement. Much preferring to bring up my concerns / problems as they arise, and be otherwise left alone as much as possible.

Front line managers (and usually second-line managers and directors) are almost always not looped in to these decisions. These are company-impacting decisions made by executives. A VP here or there might be in the know depending on the size of the company, but the vast majority of management has no idea what's going to happen.

This isn’t answering your question, but I thought worth mentioning based on the concerns in the comments.

One way to know if you might be getting laid off is when your 1:1s stop happening. Your manager might make excuses for skipping that week, then the next and the next. They also seem to have a change in personality.

Another way is if you feel the goal has changed and the new goal is ambiguous.

I’m currently drawing illustrations for a course to help employees navigate layoffs. It suggests ways to get visibility into what’s happening at the org, factors that impact lay off decisions, and how you can place yourself in a position of strength.

Basically get as much info as you can like an investor would about the company’s performance overall. Understand how your specific team impacts the bottom line. Make sure you’re performing well and it’s viewed that way. When it’s time for layoffs, your manager is looking for reasons to justify letting you go. When they have that lens on, anything can be misinterpreted.

If you feel you may be getting let go, it’s better for your mental health and your ability to get the next job, to leave on your own terms.

They won't know anything definite. If they've been at the company for a long time and have been through layoffs before ask them what their gut feeling is. Another thing to ask, which they may know, is how it will go down if layoffs happen. You could also reach out to HR and see if you get a "No, nothing like that is planned" vs a scripted response like "please refer to policy x,y,z that states HR will not discuss".

edit: years ago, i was at a company that laid off a group of about 20 people very close to me. I remember my boss having a box of kleenex on his desk where there was never any before. Lots of people left his office crying. Things like that could be an indicator too.

They were weird the first couple of weeks, but now it's back to how it was. I had spent the last ~4 months or so going through the acceptance phase of being laid off, and now that I haven't, I sort of wish I was? I could have used the time off.

Not really, the place I work in hasn't announced layoffs... YET!

So each and every new meeting that gets put in the calendar is immediately scrutinized to see what is "really" about.

Got one just now with a VP and six other folks I don't work too closely with, and we're all immediately on Slack trying to figure out why it's been called. Nerve wracking to say the least.

"you should try not to worry about what you can't control" appears to be the industry standard

That should apply to life in general. The only point of worrying about something is to do something about it, and if there's nothing to do, then there's no point wasting cycles.

I had an annual review on Friday and got my highest marks ever with the company. I've built a reputation for myself as the go-to guy for troubleshooting deep problems with the system and I'm on a first-name basis with people outside of my department because of this, so I'm not really overly concerned about layoffs because we're profitable and stable. It's also why I haven't concerned myself with moving on to another company as of late. Yeah, I could definitely make more elsewhere, but I'd go from being wanted and needed to merely being wanted.

I have impromptu 1:1s with my manager all the time, though, simply because I've got the best handle of what's going on with our platform at any particular time.

It's a sad sort of funny that I expected this to end with "and I got laid off today".

Unfortunately there are literal hordes of people who went through exactly that. I know smart people who were working on profitable output that got laid off because entire business units evaporated.

At the end of the day you're not "needed" unless the company would have to close up shop if you got hit by a bus tomorrow. And if one IC is all that stands between a company and insolvency, said IC should probably start looking for an escape hatch...

I was in the exact same boat when I got promoted 6 months ago, and then I got laid off in January while out on bonding leave. Sometimes the politics of the VPs can change things instantly. Just keep improving on yourself and your skills and don't let fear get in the way (a little paranoia is healthy in small doses).

1:1 meetings? what's that?

1 on 1 meetings, typically with a manager.

was joke

If you're in the US and they're with a software engineer, I think you should be talking about unionizing.

[0]: https://code-cwa.org/

Director-level here. The chances of your manager knowing ahead of time about layoffs is pretty low, and having been in leadership during a few rounds of layoffs, I can confirm that middle- and lower-management often only find out about the layoffs maybe a handful of days in advance. The C-suite and HR know about it for weeks, and _maybe_ a VP might be looped in, depending on the size of the company.

Should you expect real answers? If your boss is cool, yes. You should expect them to be honest. Just don't expect them to have any useful information. If your boss is not cool, then... that's another problem entirely. :)

The best thing you can do to ensure you have a job is to provide value to the business. That means shipping things on time, that means fixing bugs, that means being proactive, that means spending time on less sexy stuff that makes money instead of shiny new things that are fun. And honestly, it's really, really difficult to do that when you think you might be facing a round of layoffs -- or have already gone through them!

What questions should you be asking your manager _now_, post-layoffs? "How can I help" is one. How can you help the company be more successful so they don't need more layoffs. Great question to ask. Your manager may not know, but it's a good question.

Personally? I'd brush up your resume, suck up to your manager, be as friendly as you can with as many people as you can, and pump yourself up as an awesome colleague, because the day will come when they will lay _you_ off, and you'll want a network that you can rely upon.

TL;DR: In this environment, build value to keep your job, but also build relationships with your colleagues (boss, peers, reports, indirect team members), and keep your eyes open for other opportunities where you can leverage those now-more-solid relationships to get references or referrals.

Hope that helps.

Depending on the company, layoffs are usually only known about ahead of time in HR and at VP+ levels. Your team manager is just as worried as you are.

Manager got fired so I don't really have 1:1s - the skip-level guy is the interim manager and doesn't have time for that.

No, because I know my manager doesn't know more than I do.

I don't expect any answer nor peace of mind because nothing in life is certain.

So I try to block out the external world and continue doing my job.

I don't have 1:1 meetings, nor do I ever get reviews of my work, but I get things done and I'm still tasked with stuff, so I must be doing something right?

I assume my manager doesn’t know anything

What information would be useful to me ? I still have my job, got to keep executing

I haven’t had a manager in three or four months so I don’t have 1-on-1s.

My anxiety is sky high, I can assure you of that.

They've become infrequent

I don't have any.

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