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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

Nice, round number. I wonder if that was a carefully thought out coincidence, or they fiddled with the numbers a bit until they got the right payroll savings then rounded it to the nearest 100. I suspect the latter - when I see a nice, round number of people being fired it makes me think that they decided "how many people do we need to sacrifice to appease the finance gods" rather than "how many of these roles are really needed to achieve the goals we set ourselves".

Anyway, good luck to the former Dropboxers, I hope they land on their feet.

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Yes, I feel especially sorry for fired_employees[498] and fired_employees[499] who were just added to make the round number!

Or maybe happy for employees 501 through 504 who were on the chopping block, but because Round Numbers Are Nice(tm), got to keep their jobs!

But they went from comfortable but low performers, to literally the worst 5 employees in the company.

There is a number N for each employee where considering the top N employees, they are the worst.

So I wouldn't feel bad about having a "low" rank in deliberately selective sample of humanity.

180 jobs would have been saved if we counted in base 8!

Counterpoint is that there is nothing wrong with a round number and it is perfectly compatible with setting appropriate resource targets for corporate goals.

The idea that some sort of complex algorithm should be used indicates a misunderstanding of what business management actually consists of.

It is much more social science than engineering.

>Counterpoint is that there is nothing wrong with a round number and it is perfectly compatible with setting appropriate resource targets for corporate goals.

Yes, in this case the corporate goal is to fire 500 people as a sacrifice to the finance gods.

If the goal was 'refocus strategy', you'd probably want to actually assess your business and determine who is no longer necessary, and you would doubtfully end up at a nice round number

I think you are still trying to treat it as an engineering analysis.

The question isn't "who is no longer necessary".

The question is "do we think we can cut 500 roles (Y/N)"

The 2nd question is a reasonable and useful business assessment. The first question is not relevant and has no real answer.

1st is optimizing your org, 2nd is a financial decision.

yeah, and even for the 1st, it isn't a matter of calculation. Every employee in the org will have a different answer to the question and opinion.

That can't be right. If you think you can cut 500 roles you then have to answer the first question.

It isn't a driver of the decision. Who gets fired is a detail that gets worked out after the fact.

Leadership, based on their understanding and information make the decision to cut 500 and create a mandate to make it so. Then management is forced to decide who gets the axe.

It would basically be impossible to drive the decision the other way. You can't asses every individual for necessity. What would the threshold even be? The threshold depends on the number of people you want to fire.

There is no super computer that can calculate the outcome from firing \ 499 workers vs 500

There’s also a high chance they just rounded the number for the press release and it doesn’t reflect an exact amount.

There is a threshold of number of employees let go (maybe at location or total, I dunno) where they have to do certain things, called the WARN act. Companies aren't putting out press releases about layoffs because they want to.

What makes you think that 500 is the actual, exact number? It's probably just an approximation used in that PR piece.

Layoff numbers are imprecise and somewhat arbitrary, so any number that isn't divisible by 10 is probably intentionally chosen to seem less arbitrary.

The article says “about 16%”. I don’t think the number in the article should be taken as an exact count.

> it makes me think that they decided "how many people do we need to sacrifice to appease the finance gods" rather than "how many of these roles are really needed to achieve the goals we set ourselves".

Any big layoff involves, or is possibly the result of, shifting goals. Company goals change, especially as changing economics makes them more or less possible.

When one number is given as exact, and the other prefixed with "about", your intuition is that the exact number is not in fact an exact count? That is very odd.

Because it said "about 16%, or 500 employees" - the "about" prefixes both things. I understand how you can read it otherwise, but it is how I read it.

What were you expecting? Scientific notation with error margins? "We fired 5×10²±5 employees"?

> "how many people do we need to sacrifice to appease the finance gods"

Specially important since company was founded and grown to employ thousands of dropboxers without any money from finance gods.

> Nice, round number.

500 is also a businessy-salesy round number, compared to 512 which is what an engineer would have considered a round number. Gives some clues as to where the number came from.

Round number (whichever base is rounded off to) also shows it wasn't some company-wide movement to cut some fat but someone come up with the number beforehand and told underlings to make it happen

Come on. I've worked with engineers of all stripes and virtually none of them consider 512 a 'rounder' number than 500.

I've worked with lots of engineers too and virtually none would consider 111110100 rounder than 1000000000.

Of course you decide on a number first. Do you think the CEO has any idea what the names of all their peons are? Much less which ones would be reasonsble to get rid of.

Exactly this. Unless the sum of payroll cut roughly equals the increase of interest payments in their debt load, I call absolute BS on the "challenging market dynamics".

They're just following the trend, or listening to the ridiculous demands of investors following the trend.

> They wondered if it could be possible to fire 500,000?

> I thought from one of the smaller companies no one would notice.

> Like one of the cab companies.

>> Fire one million.

> But 500,000...

> One million. Fine, sir.

> Sorry to have disturbed you.

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