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Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

I thought Apple finally floated or at least talked about layoffs. Is there any tech company (or any other than Apple) that hasn't whacked a slug of people right now? Does this indicate their management can't really plan properly and over-hires or just hires people to keep them off the street? Or that they can't count and over-fire/layoff? Or it's just me-too to satisfy Wall Streets short-term fixation?

How many people are really required to keep the lights on and even create new things vs. how many people have been hired and now laid off to drive the stock price?

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Looking from employees' side I don't see it is specially worse that someone got job for few years and then laid off vs never got hired because all companies are super cautious about any economic slowdown that may happen in future.

I understand it takes some mystique of brilliance off of CEOs, CFOs and founders and make them seem rather ordinary. However I'd say this is a fact known to most who have given few thoughts about how real world works and how luck / random fluctuation can play a major part in outsize success in life.

Of course media can't really put in such plain language as it would just blow up million narrations about man and woman came up on top when all the odds were stacked against them.

Young, single and renting, yeah, not so bad. Older, married, mortgaged and possibly kids, well, having to uproot and possibly sell a house in a down market and also possibly live apart for a while, sucks. People bet a portion of their lives on their employer and there’s a lot of hassle recovering from unplanned changes.

And in the states, cobra can be expensive. Not everybody can run barefoot.

Edit: forgot, might have to scramble re immigration upon layoff.

> People bet a portion of their lives on their employer and there’s a lot of hassle recovering from unplanned changes.

Based on whatever laws protect you as an employee, I don't see why people bet such a large portion of their lives on their employer.

My spouse died recently and I was left to care for a toddler by myself. It was rough. I could not work anymore and after some period of unpaid leave, my employer proposed to end our cooperation. I think it was fair. They had paid me well for my work and I was smart enough not to blow it all on big cars and other useless things.

Highly paid specialists complaining about the big tech layoffs are either in a better position than me (usually they either have no dependents or have a spouse to help with either the mortgage or the kids), or their bad situation is entirely self-inflicted by their reckless spending.

Sure, I have lived well bellow my means to basically self insure my whole life.. It's at best rather pointless and depressing to live at a set quality of life in that version of a low trust poorly developed society. The whole point of insurance was to pool for emergencies.

If you have to keep enough money for two things insurers are adept at not covering in a row you may as well save all your premiums to get there faster.

I don’t even think this about over hiring. That was certainly part of it in the beginning, but why wouldn’t you fire people now? The tech labor market is very soft. You could rehire people a few months down the line for similar roles at a fraction of the price.

> but why wouldn’t you fire people now?

Trust. If you want people to want to work for you, you shouldn't be seen getting rid of people for no reason at all.

This isn’t the 60s. Trust hasn’t been part of the employment equation for a long time.

It was in this sector. It’s now lost in this sector.

It hasn't, but this is a bad thing and it's right to call it a bad thing.

But the statements made by the CEO's always talk about employee trust and being a family.

At Red Hat, it was. The culture was such, for the most part, that you never had to be worried about getting fired unless you really badly messed up. People felt safe. Many said that Red Hat would never do layoffs. There were many boomerangs who went to other companies and came back for the culture. I guess that feeling of safety is now gone.

Source: I just left Red Hat unrelated to the layoffs.

It's likely either over-hiring or a "bubble" business with poor fundamentals/prospects.

In my estimate it takes an intermediate software engineer "new hire" about 6 months to get to a point where they can add measurable value and it probably takes 2-3 years to maximize their experience/contribution ratio. From then they can still ramp up but it's a longer curve.

Rehiring some random person, if you already had a good person in the role that you're firing, is just plain dumb.

Likely most CEOs do not understand that.

On the other hand, keeping a person that's not a good fit is just as plain dumb. That's true regardless of the state of the economy but doubly true when times are hard.

A typical ROI on new initiatives in tech can be anywhere from 2 to 5 to even 10 years. I.e. companies that are going to be successful some years from today need to be working on that event horizon. Companies that have laid off less or no or "token" amount of people, while maybe also still hiring (there are companies like that), are likely those that think like that.

The cost of re-hiring someone will probably outweigh the benefits of saving a few months salary.

> Is there any tech company (or any other than Apple) that hasn't whacked a slug of people right now?

I don’t think Adobe has had general layoffs yet

Yup

   How Adobe’s CFO is avoiding mass layoffs: ‘We don’t want our employees worried about when the next shoe is going to drop’
   https://fortune.com/2023/03/22/adobe-mass-layoffs-tech-industry-trends/

Good for them. They’re older, more established than some and might actually give a sh*t about their staff.

Seems like companies are either friendly to their customers or their staff. I guess this makes sense since it's largely about the allocation of resources.

I work at an S&P 500 US tech company and we did not, and do not (fingers crossed), plan to lay people off.

Apple has a McDuck pile of gold. Mass layoffs would kill morale and hurt long term value.

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