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Comment by thiago_fm | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't matter where you work at, when layoffs come, the executives will care about location, timezones, desire on finishing the current project you are working on, (maybe) performance etc. There are too many criteria and no clear pointer on what is safe and what isn't.

Being part of a layoff and also watching other colleagues coming from other Big Tech companies share their experiences, you'd see people laid off from literally everywhere: key projects, R&D (I was part of), sales, high-performing etc.

It's a financial decision, the cut NEEDS to happen once the higher ups have decided and you can be cut, for you as an employee, anything can happen.

Lots of R&D people end up being on the chopping block as well because you could be suddenly in a very promising project, but that the company no longer cares about, because some executive above even the boss of your boss told it isn't a priority.

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In my experience there are two things that bring layoffs: poor sales and bad product management.

When I was at Travelocity they had by far the best brand awareness and marketing. They also had the best pricing algorithms resulting in massive profit margins compared to the competition. Nonetheless they were destroyed in the marketplace. The biggest killer is that Expedia invested heavily in sales to the sacrifice of everything else eventually resulting in inventory relations teams 3-5x greater than what Travelocity could dream of affording. That was enough to achieve market dominance for Expedia.

Then to make that worse Travelocity only understood growth which was a colossal strategic failure executives would repeat over and over. When it became clear to the original executive team they simply left the company. There was a later executive that doubled down on this and in one year converted a $100 million business to a $60 million business. That guy is still a travel industry executive.

The final nail in the coffin is poor product. It would fail at checkout thereby dropping sales and those customers would never come back. It costs too much to maintain because of poor decisions about software execution. They would also make bad decisions about new initiatives until they doubled down on A/B testing. Then to compensate for all these product failures they would over invest in advertising which drove more customers off the site.

Poor software execution resulted in my layoff from my previous job. The thing that has saved me from layoffs in the past was having a skill that was both essential and difficult to replace just by hiring. The thing that resulted in my layoff from the last job was a fragile product and the unwillingness to fix that product. This is why I have abandoned any kind of web related work. More often than not terrible decisions are intentionally made on the basis of immediate people replacement or immediate feature delivery without regard for how shitty or expensive the new feature is. So much of the time it feels like children are running the daycare because people with inadequate experience want to visibility and nobody wants to clean up their messes.

Salesforce layoffs had no internal cause - just "investors want us to cut costs". They selected people at random, and we lost tons of people who were essential and difficult to replace. Then they said "we can't guarantee there won't be more, and we can't tell you any way to avoid being hit". And then they said stuff about productivity going down but I didn't care, surprise!

Nobody wants to believe that they are easy to replace... as they are laid off and replaced. So, comment redacted.

Some of my former coworkers are lucky enough to now know that they were irreplaceable, or close to it, as they were hired back after being laid off. There are more former coworkers who have been gone almost a year now and wouldn't dream of coming back, but have not been replaced and are still regretted by their former colleagues.

Peter Drucker called random firing amputation without diagnosis.

Same situation at a different company, except they kept telling us "we made sure this won't keep happening". Of course few people believed and we lost many good engineers that simply left because they couldn't have a major source of income coming from such unstable place.

I like to believe executives know their workforce will shrink more than the layoff numbers. They must know this. They also must know it will be harder to hire new people. They know this, right? Please someone tell me so.

>They must know this. They also must know it will be harder to hire new people. They know this, right? Please someone tell me so.

What time horizon are you thinking? People will forget '22/'23 layoffs very quickly. This is especially true if you made it through these last years, the market picks up and you want to move.

I have no doubt people will forget in time (<5 years).

But anyone looking for a job ought to do due dilligence when things pick up again and at least set the correct expectations about how long their relationship with the company could last if the market turns bad again.

Why? If anyone frequented this or many other forums they'd know employers can terminate employee any time without any reason whatsoever. Leave the job with as little notice as possible because employers absolutely do not care for you. And when last year it did happen people here are feeling hurt as if forever job promise is broken.

"As little notice as possible" as in send an email 3am Wednesday that you have left the job and as of sending this email you are no longer able to be contacted? I would have a very negative opinion of that person, just as I do of the employer who conducted layoffs that way.

You clearly need to spend more time on /r/antiwork.

In a world where Glassdoor and LinkedIn exists?

I've got an employer that I've held a grudge against for nearly two decades now and another that friends of mine have held grudges against since at least two corporate rebrandings ago, all just off the top of my head. We'll all happily talk dirt in a LinkedIn DM or over beers and who is to say how many of us all posted some anonymous strongly worded letter to something like Glassdoor.

Labor is still a market, for now, and while it isn't as liquid or as free of a market (in terms of open price [wage/salary] information, in terms of too many near monopsonies and/or trust-like behavior) as it should be in America, and companies should stop treating it like a one-way street. Bad labor relations hurts brands and eventually the market uses that information. It's not always efficient at using that information especially because it isn't liquid/free enough, but it uses that information.

I think this example is way more common than the situation your parent commenter described. Most corporations don’t seem to be identifiably strategic about layoffs. They don’t make a coherent plan until the shit hits the fan and the board dictates that a certain percentage must go.

I’ve been laid off three times and not once was my layoff a result of a coherent strategy or reflective of my utility/value to the team.

The first time, I was an accounting mistake. The company quite literally hired me and numerous other contractors by accident. The bean counters in corporate simply weren’t talking to each other and hiring managers somehow got their reqs through.

The second time, I along with my new hire cohort was laid off a month after my start date. I’m not even sure how a company is so disorganized that they can go from approving new hires to laying off those same new hires within a time period that couldn’t have been longer than 3 months.

The third time was similar except that it took place in a slightly longer timespan, still less than a year. Company management handled growth immaturely and irresponsibly, choosing to bulk hire then lay off the cohort rather than growing more conservatively. Paying 5 employees for almost a year could have paid for one employee for over 3 years, no layoff necessary.

Relatedly:

- Layoff to hopefully bump stock price prior to M&A negotiations

- Layoff to "streamline" before new CTO start date whether or not the CTO was expected to change directions and before incoming CTO even evaluated the existing teams. Further simplified: layoff to hopefully bump stock price due to speculation about CTO transfer being theoretically messy on paper.

There's definitely a common thread in my layoffs of some dull ideas to please some form of stock investor's short-term, single Quarter thinking, maybe influenced by actual stock investors. That's also something that there seems to be some data on in 2022/2023 layoff cycles in general how much of them have been "activist" shareholder lead, as much or more than board strategy (though the Venn Diagrams between boards and "activist" shareholders is sometimes quite close to a circle, go figure).

> Salesforce layoffs had no internal cause

This is the shared theme of most of the recent layoffs.

I don't know where the GP is coming from. Layoffs with clear and local causes seem to be a tiny minority.

The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes. At one job, I reported directly to the still-reigning cofounder of a long lived company. Never have I felt a stronger sense of job security than that.

It's different security. Like in game of thrones in that scenario you're as safe as your boss is, which will depend on the evolving politics. Even founders get housted sometimes, but I'd agree that I'd choose your scenario over others.

I can totally attest to that. I once worked for a company where the CTO that was 3-4 levels above hired me directly and I reported to him. It felt very empowering and motivating because I was working on what he considered a critical area for the day-to-day of the company. Once he was gone, I suddenly was a huge problem to all the middle managers that disagreed with the CTO.

If you happen to be in that situation, better to watch Game of Thrones (which I did only for entertainment not for work-related reasons). Ignore politics (like I did) at your own peril.

What would you have done differently? Built a better relationship with the middle managers? Kept your ear to the ground and left before the CTO did? Interviewed every quarter so you'd be able to leave and land elsewhere? Something else?

I think better relationship with middle managers and maybe leave with the CTO if it made sense (it didn't, in my case). I was too focused on doing things and assumed the CTO was taking care of "winning the hearts" of middle managers. He wasn't. It was a very top-bottom initiative and that rarely works when culture is involved.

So yeah, I think I should have "managed up" so this initiative wasn't tied to the specific CTO but was a common agreement. If the CTO wasn't doing that, I guess I should have called his attention to it or done it myself.

To be honest, middle managers not thinking it was important is just baffling but that's another long story.

As for keeping ear to the ground, I wouldn't even attempt that because I really suck at that (and it's distracting, I'd rather leave). But many people have success with that approach.

There's a troubling/fascinating implication here: generally we just want to 'do the thing', but it's rarely that simple.

Often to be able to just 'do the thing' you have to game out a bunch of this political/strategic stuff, and start maneuvering across those dimensions, in order to create or maintain the conditions under which you can just keep doing the thing.

Yet the more you do that, and the more you think in that way, the less of the thing you're doing...

>>"He wasn't. It was a very top-bottom initiative and that rarely works when culture is involved."

I work at a very large organization where the top is too scared to give any direction whatsoever, so it's middle managers and their lower staff henchman, that battle it out over major decisions with politics and schemes to get their preferred stuff implemented. It's more terrible than you can imagine, I never seen a more chaotic place.

So, I just want to say top-down management isn't the worst thing. I'd prefer that to no top down management at all.

I'm on the same page. The problem in this case was a very hands-free approach to management that suddenly changed to top-down when the chaos produced almost daily outages. So the very relaxed environment now had to somehow have rigorous engineering practices... mandated from the top.

Reminds me of holacracy and how companies picked up the pieces after that fad went away.

Because no manager would layoff him selfs even if his position and project is obviously unnecessary. In other words only above people can layoff below people :)

I already worked for companies where there were management changes at a crazy pace, I'm not sure that all of them got promoted and I have the impression that some of them might have been fired as well.

I don't want to start a flame war but it's much easier to replace a manager than a technical person, a technical job is boring and most people don't want to do it while management relies more on soft skills, something that most people can do at a minimum level. Being a manager who's always employed is more about social connections, if you don't befriend the right people your job security might also be at risk.

Most people don't want to do technical jobs? That's not my experience at all. We've had vacant management positions for months because nobody wants to do that role. We'd get no volunteers internally and only a handful of suitable candidates would apply from outside.

If you ask people who come here, probably most of them would choose a technical over a managerial position, but I talk about the general population, of course. Being someone who coordinates the work of other people is much more amenable to human nature than banging your head against a many times unintelligible mass of code.

But you can always check on linkedin the many hundreds of people who apply to any managerial position.

trick is to hire women into technical positions and fast track them into management. My company uses this strategy and almost 90% of low/mid management and admin are women.

You must be in a bubble. Majority of people hate reading a document. Staring at a screen and googling would be misery for them.

It is really the minority who can do tech for the long haul.

> The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes

Last layoff at my company was predominantly of middle managagers and very few line workers. Even meta layoff was "the flattening".

surprised by your comment. Is there any data supporting this?

No data, just an intuition about being closer to the power centers.

I guess that makes sense. Level 1 and 2 managers are not really closer to power centers despite being higher in the org chain.

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