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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a company where the VPs loved to write long company wide emails. One time HR wrote "Why working at <insert this company name> is great Part 1". (If you write part 1 and part 2 corporate emails you're already doing email wrong.) They did a layoff between the time Part 1 was sent and Part 2 was sent. The scale of absurdity was difficult to measure with that one.

I was so happy when that company got acquired and the new company CEO showed up and announced that first level managers and below were all safe from layoffs, everyone above that was on a case by case basis, and "all executive staff were let go this morning, I saw no reason to keep those jokers around".

He was so right. Scored a lot of points there, never heard an executive of a large company say that so bluntly before.

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> The scale of absurdity was difficult to measure with that one.

I have been told that one FANG which recently underwent a firing round barely took a break from their hiring rounds, and already started sending emails asking for volunteers for interviews even to teams which have just been decimated.

One more story for the absurdity bucket.

Not too surprising as the hiring people industrial complex that exists some places seem to exist / operate for it's own purposes sometimes.

It's not that way everywhere but man when you run into it, crazy.

They did that to me themselves. They have festered the "hiring industrial complex" to outcompete for talent. Now this whole thing has to stay alive. They have to fire. Maybe the news about it will be enough, cause we also plan on hiring back.

Can you just be on “fired leave”? Seems unnecessary to deprovision all the systems. I’m sure SAP can create a workflow for that and upsell it to the hiring industrial complex.

It makes sense when you view it not as a strict immediate cost cutting measure but just a way to scare & threaten workers.

It makes sense if you think of this as pruning dead weight while also getting in fresh inflow of talented people (some of whom will inevitably not work out later).

Why is management hiring people who turn out to be "dead weight"? Particularly with the ludicrous interview cycle employed by big tech companies these days?

It's a failure of management to hire correctly and/or manage and develop people. Management is broken and incompetent and relentlessly scapegoats those below them.

Hiring is really hard. I try to be very selective, use work-like assessments and wait until it's painful to add headcount, but I also need to go fast enough to keep devs interested and not waste their time, and interviews at best are only a very rough proxy-indicator of what the future looks like. Firing is even harder.

If you have a method for hiring exactly the right people, that those people will put up with (ie a process that filters out "dead weight" but does not filter out high performers), then that is a startup right there. But overall, no one has magical hiring process that doesn't involve finding out actual performance after they start.

Yep, google published a bunch of research about their hiring processes and it basically said "we've tried everything and nothing works... anybody else have any ideas?"

Yet they continue their leetcode interview process...

If you have a method for hiring exactly the right people, that those people will put up with

Yeah, hire and then show actual managerial skill. If you still can't get the performance you need, then fire them. Tech hiring culture has become completely bananas and it wastes insane amounts of resources.

Tech management in the US 1) can't hire competently, 2) can't lead, 3) can't develop those under them and 4) can't man up and fire the employees they mistakenly hired and failed to lead.

That's not just tech. It's everywhere.

It's _really_ hard to hire good people consistently.

Griggs vs Duke Power might like a word.

Plenty of terrible employees interview well. Many potentially great employees don't interview well.

Terrible employees have lots of practice

So fire them. It's bizarre that companies appear to think that you should do cargo cult interviewing, sometimes multiple rounds with months of waiting around, then hire people, fail to lead or develop them, then just dump them en masse.

Hire them and if you can't get the performance you need, then you due them. Alternatively, hire them as contract-to-hire if your head of HR has conditioned you to be terrified of doing what you're allowed to do in the US.

>>Why is management hiring people who turn out to be "dead weight"?

People are rarely ever dead weight. Products and services most certainly are. Products/Projects etc fail for a variety of reasons, and it can often be hard to anticipate if they will. When you are building them you need the top people to build it for you. If the product fails, you now have people you have to pay for running the product that doesn't earn you money. Now you make a loss.

While you did hire the top people, the product failed and now you don't need them. Keeping them around costs lots of money and, their work, even if high quality hasn't given much profits.

It is then you have to let go people.

If the product fails, you now have people you have to pay for product that doesn't earn you money. Now you make a loss.

Sounds like capitalism to me. Better get to work developing new projects and products to stem that loss.

>>Better get to work developing new projects and products to stem that loss.

Yes.

The road to progress in any system involves being known as someone who initiates new order of things. And always remember this. Its the new projects, and initiatives that get most of the resources because people want to see them win.

Hiring is not a perfectly solved problem, so you should cut whoever you're accusing some slack. Also, making the relationship work is a two-way responsibility, not just that of the management.

> pruning dead weight

That wasn't my experience with the current layoffs at big tech. There was no effort to find positions for the engineers who performed well in the previous year(s). They just cut some orgs by the hundreds (I was in a call with 350+ other devs, many of whom are far smarter and more experienced devs than myself).

They just started cutting "weight" at some point, the "dead" adjective was dropped during the previous rounds of layoffs.

Smart + experienced != productive and valuable. It's possible to be good at your job and also dead weight. Motivation matters.

Last week, I was contacted by recruiters from two separate high-profile companies that have recently fired people. Like I would even entertain joining them only to be first in line to the chopping block.

Maybe the thinking is "they just got rid of a bunch of people, so they are not going to do that again soon."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

What makes you believe you’re not 1st on the chopping block at your existing company? There are no guarantees either way.

No guarantees, but the chances are different.

Say you’ve been working somewhere for 5 years and have the opportunity to move to a company - and you know both companies are laying people off at some point soon.

In your current company, maintaining your position requires no training and negligible HR resource. The question of your capability to perform the job you’re given would hopefully not be under question (otherwise good going for keeping that gig up for 5 years). Your team is not a blue sky project (otherwise shame on management for keeping that gig up for 5 years). Making you redundant will cost the company severance, and if it’s a structural issue you could be moved into another team. Dropping you would be a genuinely hard decision.

The new company barely know you and have to expend resources just to integrate you, and expend nothing to drop you.

I know which one I’d pick.

Granted, it’s a false premise: perhaps the new company is more resilient than your current company, for example. However, if the odds are unknown - and in most cases they aren’t known in any reliable way - then I may as well treat them as if the odds are balanced.

If the firing was on the basis of cutting out top paid employees, it absolutely makes sense to now fill those positions with newer ones whom you can pay less.

Nothing absurd here.

Does such things happen? Thinking about all knowledge that is lost

Maybe top paid management is simpler to replace?

I wonder if the managers who will become individual contributors again, will be paid the same or less

I was once contacted for an interview by the company I was leaving during my notice period :)

At a company I worked for I told the incoming manager that he would have to remove the entire management team he had inherited.

Needless to say that didn't go over well.

A year later they were all gone. And him as well.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So were you the "last guy standing." or did you go elsewhere?

> "last guy standing".?

Ahh, no. As I mentioned it didn't go over well. They had been mobbing me before and it intensified after. They were also blissfully unaware of what is legal and what is not, so pushing me out proved to be rather expensive.

That sounds bad (mobbing). I hope you're ok. Can I ask were you a manager as well or an IC

To be fair, unless the execs are also forgoing salary or bonuses, like Nintendo execs a few years ago for example, you can't really win with these layoff emails.

If the emails are succinctly composed then people would complain that the announcements were too curt and don't try to assuage people enough.

So they might as well write what they want.

> If the emails are succinctly composed then people would complain that the announcements were too curt and don't try to assuage people enough.

Ive never heard that and I’ve seen short emails and nothing at all.

even this one hints to this "people wanted more visibility and notice". You'll never make everyone happy, so it's a mistake to seek the "perfect communique"

Shocker that management taking away the livelihood of tens of thousands of individuals due to management failures can not be reduced to a positive email.

You mean blathering on with an email that was obviously micromanaged by someone that noone is willing to break out a red pen for? Only yes-men remain.

>I was so happy when that company got acquired and the new company CEO showed up and announced that first level managers and below were all safe from layoffs, everyone above that was on a case by case basis, and "all executive staff were let go this morning, I saw no reason to keep those jokers around".

Didn't the executives employ any anti-takeover measures?

A good skill execs have is to negotiate extremely lucrative severance terms and have it written in their employment agreements.

In the US a material perquisite of senior management roles are negotiable severance terms. Sad really.

So, if you are fired from enough workplaces for not working enough you get rich and don't have to work. :)

"If they are good at being ruthlessly selfish for themselves they might be good at being ruthlessly selfish for the company as well."

Makes me wonder if the opposite could become fashionable: "I trust myself to fly without the golden parachute, you might want to make that part of your consideration". At first glance that sounds quite compelling to me, but on the other hand, would I feel safer or would I feel less safe with a Taxi driver who does not bother putting on the seat belt? I think my answer would be less safe, event though a part of me wishes to be one who'd feel safer.

Speaking from personal experience, execs (most of them) are anything but risk takers. They are good wheeler-dealers, know how to navigate the land-mine filled org-chart to get things done. Not too different from civil servants. Those who develop risk appetite won't stay at such big orgs, they either go work at a startup or start on their own.

So over a period (FB has been around for like 15 years now) an org accumulates extremely risk averse execs.

"No one ever gets fired for buying IBM"

Let's extend the metaphor:

if the execs are pilots, and the employees are passengers, then having parachutes for the pilots but not the employees constitutes a moral hazard.

It's only a moral hazard if the execs are working for, and are accountable to the employees.

They don't, and they aren't. They work for, and answer to the owners.

footnote: for certain values of "moral"

(you are right though, the term "moral hazard" is surprisingly well defined and basically has nothing to do at all with the sum of its parts)

In that case, having parachutes for the execs is a moral hazard.

Yeah, but that's a problem for the owners. Who are big boys, and can probably navigate this conflict of interest out without us.

Or if they want to keep pissing away their money, they can keep hiring clowns that ruin their companies, and then pull the ripcord. It's their money on the line, not mine.

I believe they all got paid good. I was a bit surprised at the animosity but the old CEO certainly seemed to burn bridges (I note how in another post) and I also suspect the old CEO took it really personal that he got beat by our main competitor.

I assumed something like that happened behind the scenes but I never knew any facts. It was a publicly traded company and it was a good offer based on the stock price so I doubt any efforts to resist the purchase would have succeeded.

I think more likely the new CEO's comment stemmed from that fact that 1. The old executive staff were in fact horrible at face value. 2. In between the time of the offer to buy the company and the closing the old CEO visited several locations presumably under the idea that he was there to keep everyone around / soothe the typical nerves about being acquired. But something else happened:

Instead he took snide shots at the acquiring CEO. He noted that he was surprised the new CEO hadn't visited our site yet.... when at that point the deal hadn't closed, they were still technically competitors. New CEO straight up couldn't visit.

I think old CEO was just a horrible person and salty he lost (mostly due to his own missteps) to his competitor.

But that was par for the course with old company executives. They seemed to operate thinking they were so smart and really were as transparent as could be, almost childish.

I generally feel disconnected / suspicious of executive staff... but these guys, they were human garbage as far as I was concerned, and I don't use that term lightly.

My Fav examples:

HR at one point sent out a series of long emails about a big change upcoming, but they didn't / would not say what the change was, it put a lot of people on edge. Then finally after the 5th or so email they announced that after HR spent thousands of hours in meetings and off site meetings ... they were renaming HR... that was it... it was like a joke, but they were serious. CEO and all the other executives of course had to reply all to congratulate them.

One of the last meetings with the OLD CEO had an open forum where people could ask questions about the acquisition. Old CEO seemed to give the impression he had some idea what he combined company would look like / could do. Someone asked where he saw the new company in six months/ what it might look like. He responded "I'll be in Banff sking." That was it, that was his response....

Wow, you’ve got some stories from this company. This could make for a really entertaining blog!

> HR at one point sent out a series of long emails about a big change upcoming, but they didn't / would not say what the change was, it put a lot of people on edge. Then finally after the 5th or so email they announced that after HR spent thousands of hours in meetings and off site meetings ... they were renaming HR... that was it... it was like a joke, but they were serious. CEO and all the other executives of course had to reply all to congratulate them.

Sounds like something else was planned, and they pulled out last minute.

Or they were trying to spook 5% into leaving -- and did -- so they make some trivial change that means nothing and can be undone later.

> and "all executive staff were let go this morning, I saw no reason to keep those jokers around".

Or you can do the opposite, like Boeing did: import all the managers of the firm you acquired (McDonnell-Douglas) into your own organization.

In this case the acquiring company made the right call, the acquired company executives were trash.

So were McDonnell Douglas's.

I've heard aerospace companies have standing checks in place to ensure that they never go above being composed of more than Y% ex-Boeing employees be it management/design/floor workers so that they don't end up with the Boeing 'culture' creeping in.

I had a CEO like that. He came in, hired media people to interview him in 4k things to send to the employees. He kept trying to host talks to talk about his great vision. Did a lot of shake ups, and tried to force product changes. Ultimately his vision lost a lot of money, the product he tried to will in to existance got canceled, and they had nothing but layoffs after layoffs.

> I saw no reason to keep those jokers around

New CEO was Australian?

Nope, US, based out of CA, but he was from the Midwest.

It was funny as when I met him a few times he responded the same way.

"You're from Minnesota? Can I talk to you about hunting? They told me I shouldn't do that in California ..."

I didn't hunt but I let the man tell his story ;)

I usually feel pretty disconnected from executive types and so on but I liked that guy. I liked him so much I was suspicious all over again as that's not how I feel about those guys usually. He was actually fun to be around.

I had an exec at my last job that came in like that. He was so transparent and likable that I immediately became suspicious. He had tons of stories so I assumed he was a bullshitter, but nope, it seems he had just been there and done that. I basically owe my career to that dude, he took a chance on me (I was about as low on the org chart as it gets) and it was the break I needed to show what I could do.

Sometimes there are actually great leaders in the sea of self-serving assholes that populate the business world.

As someone in tech from the rural Midwest who loves hunting, I can appreciate this little fact a lot. In my 10 year career I've worked for some well known larger tech companies and meeting people with this interest is somewhat rare.

"I was so happy when that company got acquired and the new company CEO showed up and announced that first level managers and below were all safe from layoffs, everyone above that was on a case by case basis, and "all executive staff were let go this morning, I saw no reason to keep those jokers around"."

You are being manipulated. No. The previous executives are not "jokers" - they made massive profits selling shares. They are being let go because, after taking their massive profits, the new company will soon fire the rest of staff - and that is hard.

I'm sure they made money.

I didn't call them jokers, someone else did.

I called them human garbage.

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