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Comment by chojeen | Hacker News Reader

Not a good day to be a contractor and the least senior person in your group. If anyone has been through corporate layoffs before, do you know whether they usually target the most senior people (because they're the most highly compensated) or the least senior (because they're easily replaceable)?

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It's usually not that black and white. It can also be "which of these employees is least likely to make the transition to where we are headed?"

About three months after I was hired at a company they reduced headcount by 25%. Even though I was one of the newest people there (though in terms of experience and salary I was more senior), management came to me and said that my experience and flexibility was going to be key in where they were headed post layoff and I wasn't going to be affected.

Long story short, it really depends. It's not always down to salary. Without getting into a lot of legalese (and every situation varies), when you do a layoff, you're eliminating the position and not looking to rehire, so you're generally not thinking about replacements. You're trying to figure out which staff is going to get you from here to wherever you decided you need to be.

That's definitely been my experience as well, albeit at smaller outfits.

There are essentially two kinds of layoffs: "We're getting rid of Division X and everyone in it" and "We need to reduce expenses and so we're laying off people." In this case, it sounds like a little bit of each.

There are entire companies dedicated to executing (pardon the pun) layoffs "correctly" and there are as many ways to do it as there are managers, but they essentially fall into three categories: cost-based (get rid of the most cost), skills-based (get rid of the people who don't have skill X that we totally need) and performance-based (get rid of the people who suck). Most of what you're talking about sounds cost-based, in which case there's two philosophies: get rid of the most senior people who charge the most (hello, age discrimination lawsuits) and get rid of a lot of junior people whose productivity is lower and expect the senior people to pick up the slack.

And yes, I have had the privilege of working in a Fortune 500 company and helping put together a layoff list - worst job of my life.

There can also be accounting considerations. Sometimes contractors are the first to go, other times they are last. Carrying a contractor frequently looks much cheaper than carrying an employee.

I haven't run into this in person, but my dad worked for years at a BigCo engineering firm that had multiple rounds of layoffs, and they seemed to use a fourth strategy: try to get as many volunteers as possible by offering some severance packages, and just take whatever random assortment of people said yes. The theory was that that was the way to reduce headcount with the least impact on morale, since nobody was actually being fired. In practice some people were strongly hinted that it was in their best interests to take the package, though. It also tended to be de-facto biased towards getting rid of the older/more-expensive employees (who would just take early retirement) without overtly singling them out.

My experience during corporate layoffs seems to lean toward letting the senior people go. Whether contractor or employee, doesn't matter. Twice I saw them ask 30+ year employees to retire and, when they said no, let them go within a week.

My experience has been that politics (who's friends with whom) plays a lot more into it than competence, pay, or seniority.

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