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Comment by manishsharan | Hacker News Reader

The formula is to lay off senior people who are at the higher end of the paygrade salary range and hire similarly experienced people at the lower end of the salary range. They can shave off ~50k for every such position. It sucks and it happens a lot when you are older.

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Is that a "formula"? Or does this happen in some cases where certain factors indicate that hiring at reduced salary for a similar but less experienced worker will yield the same results?

If you have an employee in the company for 20 years and they haven't grown or shown any desire to grow, but has gladly taken raises and promotions; that employee has kind of worked against their own best interests.

If you have a department that has been inflated for a period of time due to temporary need, be it because the need was there or because of 'trends in the industry' a re-org may need to happen to free up resources.

I'm not going to come at this with so much cynicism out of the gate. Most managers and business leaders aren't the meme of the evil top hat monocle man trying to punch down, especially in the professional industry.

It doesn't always happen, but if the company can operate like this successfully, why wouldn't they?

If you can pay less someone for the same result, it's an obvious win.

I don’t think many companies do this or could be successful doing this. Unless the senior person is just performing like a junior one, they should have got laid off long ago. Most companies have the opposite problem (difficult to hire/retain a senior SWE, easy to hire junior ones, but you need experience to balance the teams out).

> If you can pay less someone for the same result, it's an obvious win.

I guess if the only thing in the world that matters to you is money, sure. I think people who think like that should be shunned from society.

What are you saying matters then?

People. Treating the people who work for you as the people they are. People who depend on stable employment for their lives & family, and who intrinsically deserve to be respected, rather than be tossed on the street to save a couple bucks.

But like what does that actually mean and look like in practice? Pay everyone as much as they want? Run every business as a non-profit? Pay everyone the exact same amount?

It’s great to say things that sound nice, I guess, but it’s hard to see how to translate that into the real world.

Yeah, like you say, it's a massive grey area and impossibly complicated question with no definitive answers (though you listed a few things that sound in the right direction to me). My point is if you're starting your decision-making process from this perspective:

> If you can pay less someone for the same result, it's an obvious win.

then you need to take a step back and re-evaluate what it is you are doing on this Earth.

The problem is that even if the only thing you care about is money ... this is often a poor strategy. Because, achieving the "same result" is rarely something that is actually accomplished. The expertise provided by senior folks almost certainly translates into all sorts of unseen impact, such as crises averted that you don't even know about because they never happened.

except employees aren't really like blocks of aluminum. a lot of their ability to succeed depends on their knowledge about the product and the organization, and their very human relationships with other people.

> why wouldn't they?

Loss of institutional knowledge.

It works fine for years (maybe even decades); however, eventually you end up as a has been wondering where it all went wrong. It happens to every company at some point. They still exists, but they are no longer the dominate force they once were.

Bezos has even said it will happen to Amazon at some point. Jobs said it happens when a company starts to be ran by sales/marketing instead of product.

At least where I sit at Google, the person laid off on my team was among the most junior and lowest paid.

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