Layoffs may be needed. But there should be a healthy dose of executives included for making those hiring decisions. And they should do it all at once. Doing it in waves is absolutely brutal.
One of the lessons that companies learned, is that you should do it all in one wave and be done with it (until the next recession), rather than hoping that a small one is all you will need, and realizing a few months later that you were wrong and need to do it again.
The reason the big layoffs are newsworthy is that they impact most or all of the company at once. The big layoffs are usually associated with company-wide hiring slowdowns. The individual org/department layoffs are often not really noteworthy in the context of the entire company.
Whats with HN and sealioning in every freaking comment lately?
Also, not trusting everything you're told without evidence of some kind isn't sealioning, and nobody is required to trust randoms when they make sourceless claims.
Maybe keep your outrage to yourself because you becoming toxic when people don't accept sourceless claims doesn't do anything but show the world you're having trouble being civil in response to...a request for some kind of evidence of a claim by anonymous people. Just relax and move on instead of being outraged.
There's also a big risk of cutting too deep. If you try to downsize the company to hit some gloomy economic outlook that turns out to be too pessimistic, you might have to rapidly rehire. It can be better to make a few incremental changes to the company with some time to reassess in between.
So yes: One, single, perfect layoff is ideal. But the real world isn't ideal. The real ideal would have been to not overhire in the first place, but everyone is trying to hit a moving target with the economy and the job market.
Rolling layoffs are terrible, though. My last company would do seemingly random layoffs every other week for months on end. Orgs would change, spend a few weeks trying to get things back on track with whoever was left, then layoffs would rearrange the company again. Meta is at least being precise about implementations and timing.
This sounds like my current company. Only a few truly announced layoffs, but every few weeks we quietly lose another round of people, usually entire teams. The rest of us are split between hoping to be in the next round, and just jumping ship.
When I was last laid off, the meeting was concurrent with my friend on another team.
I was not laid off by my manager but my 2x skip; other members of my team were laid off, presumably at the same time, by someone else in our CoC.
So based on these observations, I think for security etc reasons you need to lay people off all at once in batches. Too easy for lag to create ‘insider/outsider threat’ situations.
Obviously my points are redundant if you just do it over email.