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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Balancing the books (books which are, mind you, awash in black ink) using people's livelihoods. How very dystopian.

Normal attrition rates, which are about 3% per month† for our industry, should be enough to manage even the worst hiring imbalances in a matter of months. Perfectly reasonable for a healthy and growing company like Facebook.

Specifically, a 3% monthly attrition rate would take Facebook from ~85k to ~60k in under a year. Maybe a bit longer to replace positions which they couldn't afford to downsize. Voluntary layoffs would help speed that up if necessary.

There's little reason for a healthy company to do layoffs unless their goal is sudden spikes in stock prices.

† https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t11.htm

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In a downturn your natural attrition rate falls very quickly.

Data:

https://i.imgur.com/SwqhZX0.png

Falls very quickly to levels higher than any period 2000-2021?

The data in my link is from Feb '23. Pretty recent - and relevant since we are in a downturn - values.

Probably also a bit dystopian to assume that normal attrition happens in a way that's favourable to business operations. You are defending personal attachments of individuals (livelihoods), while simultaneously referring to them as commodities (bodies in seats).

It's not an enviable position to be in, but it's naive to believe you can build a functional organization around natural turnover. If you were told you had to lose 36% of your body mass in a year I bet you'd want to pick where it came from over a random 3% per month extraction.

> You are defending personal attachments of individuals (livelihoods), while simultaneously referring to them as commodities (bodies in seats).

Not at all. Voluntary quitting on your own terms is very different from involuntary firing. And it's a fact that people quit a company regularly. There are ebbs and flows, but using natural attrition to your advantage as a company is a lot more humane an action than axing people in waves of layoffs to the same effect.

> If you were told you had to lose 36% of your body mass in a year I bet you'd want to pick where it came from over a random 3% per month extraction.

This assumes they are making highly considered choices for what talent they let go. Everything points to "they're not". Regardless, we're talking about a healthy, growing company with a good profit margin and outlook. There's likely no need to set such explicit numbers or timeframes unless you're looking to manipulate your market value.

> If you were told you had to lose 36% of your body mass in a year I bet you'd want to pick where it came from over a random 3% per month extraction.

Anecdotal story, but the CEO of a company I worked for in the past told department managers to fire one person (exactly one, from each department) because they needed to reduce head count. That strategy sounds pretty random to me.

Arbitrary, yes, but almost the exact opposite of random.

Well, it is always 2-way street. Employees can leave employers and Employers can ask employees to leave. Not sure, how only one party has ethical obligations.

The power imbalance between an employee and an employer means that no, it's absolutely not a 2-way street.

An employee (especially in the US) depends upon the employer for the money required for food, shelter, transportation, entertainment, etc. The employee depends on the employer to get health care. An average employee is 3-6 months of unemployment away from being homeless.

An employer does not, with very few exceptions, give a single fuck about any individual employee. They view those employees as expenses grudgingly accepted as necessary at the best of times, and expenses to be eliminated at the worst.

They are not equals. Contracts between them were not made with the consideration of equal parties.

I disagree. I have a lot of options as an employee, as do most people. Health care is tough but cobra is helpful and ideally you'd find another job before you give notice.

Even lengthy interview processes are relatively cheap for me. Many companies have to pay recruiters 5 figure amounts to get someone. I can just reply to the dozen recruiters that hit me up on LinkedIn every month.

People have options. Even low wage employees. The people in these jobs jump around a lot and are notoriously unreliable or likely to not give notice when they leave. That's why you see the manager behind the counter so often. If you don't believe me ask anyone working a service job how long they've been there and how many jobs they've had over the last 5 years. People jump around a lot. And training is a huge cost. Most employees aren't productive immediately, meaning that the company spends a lot of time and money training them with the expectation that they'll get some of that money invested back and you won't jump ship for a better job once you've been trained.

Finally most firms (esp Meta) give generous severance. Imagine you'd have to work for free for 3 months if you wanted to do something else.

> I can just reply to the dozen recruiters that hit me up on LinkedIn every month.

Congratulations, you're an outlier. I sincerely hope you enjoy your position while it lasts!

Yeah I used to have a constant stream of recruiters hitting me up. Never spent more than 3 months on a job search, even when I was trying to get my first “real” job as a 18-19 year old kid.

Then, around mid-December last year, it just stopped. I get an occasional recruiter every now and then but at this point I think I’m fucked.

> People have options. Even low wage employees.

How disconnected from reality can one be?

Do you hang out with low wage employees? The ones that need to keep a salary to feed their families, to shelter them, and to keep a bare minimum of life quality?

If you had friends with families in any low wage job you'd know that reality isn't that simple, it's such an absurd reduction of what it is to be employed in fields that aren't sexy, or where promotions don't exist as we expect in tech.

> The people in these jobs jump around a lot and are notoriously unreliable or likely to not give notice when they leave.

Yeah, they jump a lot because low wage jobs are usually the most toxic ones, with low wage abusive managers, because low wage is not conducive to hiring the best and brightest. If you ever had a bad manager, imagine that 10x worse: no psychologically safe, no trust environments are not conducive to long tenure. People are people, we feel when something isn't right for us, deciding to leave is not because there is a much better option somewhere else but there's a chance of a less bad option than the toxic environment they find themselves in.

Coupled that a well performing low wage employee might have to work with disengaged ones, the toxicity of the environment can only increase...

Get out of your bubble, it might help you to have solidarity with other human beings.

I've worked low pay jobs. Restaurant, lifeguard and data entry. Nothing too hard but I have some sense. It doesn't sound like you have much experience and you're going off antidotes you hear on Reddit. Correct me if I'm wrong

But with businesses that rely on low wage jobs the edge of running the business is being an effective manager. Open a McDonald's franchise. They'll set you up such that it's basically turnkey. So what makes one McDonald's manager successful and another not? Managing low wage employees. That means not creating a toxic environment and treating them fairly so they don't leave so quickly. Managers spend hours training new employees. There's no benefit to being toxic or unreasonable because like you admitted, they'll leave. If someone leaves mid shift it means you're stuck working the register and their entire shift for the next few weeks till you find a train a replacement. It's also more paperwork to fill out to hire someone and get them setup in the system. You're delusional if you think managers don't care

People who think you can treat low wage workers poorly obv never been around low wage workers

Your argument is inconsistent. People don't leave because they need the job. But they leave jobs a lot because toxic managers. And managers are fine with being toxic because it costs them nothing to hire people and there's no distribution when people walk off.

I have solidarity with other people. The difference is I don't look down on them and remove their autonomy.

I have worked on low paid jobs, in a developing country, when I wasn't even 16 years old yet, so I believe I have a bit more perspective of what toxicity exists in these environments. You lived through cushioned jobs (lifeguards, restaurants, data entry), not really a place where your co-workers are constantly abused by a manager that didn't even attend high school in a place where education is already pretty dire.

I feel our experiences are from vastly different worlds, McDonald's in my home country is one of the most abusive and toxic places to work for. As well as call centres, or any kind of low wage service job. Or working in the fields. All of those are low wage, toxic places to work at.

Your worldview is coloured by living in a developed country, most of humanity does not have that experience.

You're right. I don't know how the rest of the world operates. I have some idea of low wage jobs in the US which is a free and prosperous first world country. It's really the land of opportunity for the most vulnerable and im blessed to be here.

I should have prefaced my answer by stating that

> Not sure, how only one party has ethical obligations.

I'm not sure that only one has ethical obligations. But one party is a human being and the other is a legal fiction, and so I think most people would support the notion that the human being's needs are paramount.

The company is made up of human beings, who this argument dehumanizes.

A company is made of human beings but it's not the human beings, the human beings can all shift around, leave, new ones come, but the company as it is still exist and is not driven by human values but by profit. Profit motive dehumanises anything it touches.

The company is owned by humans.

What is your point? Yes, it's owned by humans.

Well, you wrote:

> and is not driven by human values but by profit. Profit motive dehumanises anything it touches

As a shareholder, I expect the company to be steered for long term profitability.

As do all the other shareholders, which also includes pension funds who in turn are there to provide security in retirement for millions of people.

I expect my hard earned money that I have invested not to be squandered, not to be unnecessarily paid to engineers who make hundreds of thousands of dollars if their work doesn't contribute meaningfully to the company's long term business.

I make separate charitable contributions for people in need. But a company is not the vehicle for that. Besides, the engineers who make hundreds of thousands of dollars at Meta do not need charity.

"Corporations are people my friend". Thank you Mr. Romney.

“We have to hurt people, otherwise how would we return profits to our investors” is the cardinal sin of the modern world. We’ve tied basic things like retirement to ever growing stock prices and cannot do anything to stand in the way of corporations sucking the world dry anymore.

In the case of layoffs, should a company instead invent work juts to keep people busy even if the company doesn’t consider that a good space to spend time on? Or if the workers don’t like it or find it pointless?

If so, would you think we should compel companies to aim for (near) zero profit and in the process create jobs / work even if that work isn’t important (e.g. putting luggage upright when it falls over on an airport carousel)?

Sure, why not? IMO an employer should have a greater responsibility to its employees and its customers than to its investors.

There is a differences between "not important" and "not the most efficient way to increase shareholder value." Corporations regularly refuse to do work that I'd consider important as a customer because their investors don't see it as important.

> Not sure, how only one party has ethical obligations.

Companies use humans to get profits. Humans are developed by society, at the expense of society, a company has social obligations to that society as it's exploiting a resource we all deem quite valuable: a life.

A company depends on the society it decided to build upon, for its market, for its human resources, if we completely extract a company from any social obligation what you have is an amoral corpus of people with no incentive at all to care for the people it exploits...

And there's no 2-way street in a massive power imbalance like that, a company might not depend on a single employee for its survival, an employee definitely depend on a company and job for its survival. Being aware and recognising this power imbalance is a pretty good step for you to learn about solidarity.

Attrition for a company that pays in the 95% percentile is going to be much lower than the industry average, especially when most of the other companies in that pay tier have also stopped hiring.

That's OK, they have time. Excellent revenue, billions of dollars of pure profit post-tax... Yeah, their growth in 2022 left much to be desired, but every year prior was pretty much exponential - the trend is still positive.

They can clearly afford to take the time to downsize naturally.

And attrition reduces the number of underpaid people, while you'd want to reduce the number of overpaid people.

And let's not forget social contagion: https://www.businessinsider.com/stanford-professor-mass-layo...

And shareholder pressure.

But as far as I have seen, it's been meaningless pressure, since the shareholders did nothing to companies who did not do mass layoffs at their behest.

The company is run for and by shareholders, it’s not a charity so all of this is pretty understandable

Not all public companies who were prompted by shareholders to lay off employees did so.

And do you know what the shareholders did?

Nothing.

Can you give a good example that illustrates your point?

Fwiw I think you're less likely to see that rate of attrition when everyone's doing layoffs.

Check the link - it's up to Feb '23, well within our mass tech layoff window.

> Normal attrition rates, which are about 3% per month† for our industry

How did you get the 3% from that link? If software falls under "information", then the the attrition rate indicated in the link is about 1.3%.

Attrition at Meta is currently far below those rates.

Not every industry can be as utopic as UAW jobs.

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