Layoff season is becoming an annual thing in tech, isn't it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
1. Rank everyone
2. Layoff bottom 10% or so
3. Reward the top
4. Keep it secret or the workforce will adapt by hiring bad people and sabotaging good people
Used at most companies with performance evaluations. Taught at MBA schools.
Trivia: MBAs have accomplished nothing throughout human history. Only creating overpaid executives that avoid taxes, corrupt the government, ruin the environment, make people poor, sick and make other countries richer. If all MBAs retired tomorrow 90% of obesity, pollution and corruption would stop.
Because of bad math and pseudoscience.
Someone makes the choice.
Same with interviews: gotta keep things qualitative lest someone sues you for not being the successful candidate.
I suspect this is not true. Evals are far more common that stacking.
Btw when you do do this, 4 pretty much never works, and generate a political layer around it.
Perversely, at the group level it raises the value of lower performers, mostly as "chips".
After surviving what feels like a dozen rounds of layoffs over the past year, morale is already non-existent. You can go weeks and sometimes months without even hearing a peep from the people you once thought were the brightest and hardest working. The whole thing just feels in need of a reboot. Is this consistent across all companies at the moment or is it just time for me to leave?
Not to mention Jack Welch's very "Let Them Eat Cake" attitude to the middle and working classes and executive compensation.
So don’t play a part in it. Is doing it more or less crushing than being sacked?
Sucks to be on any team that delivers cyclical/lumpy value (with arbitrary windowing/snapshots).
I think this is a little hand-wavy. I bet the number of people identified for PIPs by stack ranking who survive the process is likely to be in the low single digit percentage, if that.
Strong performers from the teams around have been laid off, and people who really need to be gone have not.
AWS isn't even hiding it anymore ...
There's definitely more layoffs this year than usual. There's always layoffs, but the size / scope of them are not traditionally this big.
Not to say this is universal, but I read a comment here on HN just earlier that said their company said this last year... then did the exact same thing this year.
Whether that's a 5% increase or a 500% increase in amount-laid-off though, no idea. And I do worry that the increased media attention will simply make these easier to pull off unjustly, as people get more and more used to seeing it happen.
Companies need to stop defining growth in terms of head count and instead in terms of revenue and profit and learn that just because you have access to money doesn't mean you should go on a hiring frenzy.
To the point of the parent, in a lot of Europe it’s not so simple to just lay off some small portion of the company. It needs to be justified and a decent percentage, and employees are often entitled to some compensation (some severance) to offset the layoff.
Of course there are other ways to fire employees but those have their own rules.
the being laid off part itself takes a huge mental toll, regardless of material circumstances. There's a reason the mental health of phd candidates and a good chunk of white collar workers in nominally lucrative professions is in the gutter. The hire and fire hamster wheel is in itself completely pathological. The industry just has done a really fantastic job of marketing permanent insecurity and precarity as individual choice.
I agree that a lot of US companies have behaved very poorly and casually with people's lives.
I guess I just see stuff like health care as easy wins. The rest of it is trickier.
I think the approach of things like the WARN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...) act are more plausible. Use legislation to make the workforce more informed, resilient and ahead-of layoffs. You don't want mass layoffs crippling your economy because people are unable to plan.
It's a direct consequence of the WARN act that most tech layoffs have extremely generous severance.
What makes you think that's why most of these tech companies are laying people off?
As for "someone has to pay for it", well we already are. We have the highest per capita healthcare spending in the world, also the highest rate of medical-related bankruptcies in the world and lowest life expectancy in the developed world. We are putting 6-12% of our paycheck into social security and will likely never see a payout when we need it. Different industrial sectors are getting hundreds of billions in subsidies. The military is getting trillions.
The money is there, we just need to have the will to spend it to everyone's benefit. But no, we'd rather set it on fire instead so the wrong people don't accidentally get helped.