Personally, I believe advance notice is better, because it signals to employees that, if layoffs are going to happen, there will be some time to prepare. By choosing to blindside employees, it creates a culture of paranoia, IMO. ("Will today be layoff day?" "What about next month?" "Oh no, it's the end of the quarter, does that mean tomorrow my laptop will lock up at 4am?")
Sure, in fantasyland. This is unrealistic. What if you have a severe business downturn? No choice, but to layoff. In services, your number one cost is always people (talent).
Look, so much of layoffs from the past 1.5 years or so are the result of massive overhiring during the pandemic. Sure, it's easy to argue companies were short sighted, but even if they hadn't been, why would it be better to never have hired all those people to begin with? That is, even if a company had thought "the pandemic has really just pulled demand forward - we need a lot more workers now that we won' need when the pandemic ends", why shouldn't they hire workers for that period? Yes, I totally agree this is bad form to disrupt someone's career tenure if it's for a very short period, but a lot of these pandemic hires lasted several years. All those people got great experience and salaries, and I don't think the better thing would have been to never have hired them in the first place.
I wish people would move away from the mindset that a layoff is the most awful thing possible, as long as people are treated respectfully and with adequate severance. When a company hires me, I don't expect to work there for life, nor do I expect them to have an obligation to keep me employed for life. As long as we give each other enough heads up if we decide to separate (and folks can have an honest debate over how long "enough" is), I don't see the problem.
Telling your top talent a layoff is coming, even if they feel “secure” in their role, still gives them a reason to look.
Let alone competitors now have a great pitch to your top talent - “do you want to risk getting laid off or join our awesome company”.
Can you expand? Doesn't at-will meant that you can be fired without advanced notice?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
Cal-WARN Act
I recently took a shocking pay cut to get "not awful and very fun."
Being bored was killing me. Draining your soul for money is not wise. Your mind takes on a personality you can't relate to and sinks to an imperceptible malaise. It's a form of torture. Leaving that to discover purpose again is an unforgettable relief. I feel young again and I'm flooded daily with feelings of optimism, something I thought was just lost to youth. Like being released from prison.
This is rich thinking. Most people that I met from developing countries who grew up poor would sell their soul for shitty unfulfilling work that pays huge salary / bonus / stock. I cannot blame them; I would do the same in their situation. I don't pass (too much) judgement on where and why people work. Mostly, it is a luxury to decide when / where / how you work, including for less than the maximum that you can be paid.
Personally, my biggest professional problem is that I get bored on a project after two years. It is incredibly rare in my career to stay more than four years on the same project. Yet, time and time again, my managers are surprised when I resign for a new role.
> I recently took a shocking pay cut to get "not awful and very fun."
Curious what your financial situation looked like between these two stages. It's easy to be willing to take a major pay cut to work on a fun project when you've already got 6 figures stashed in savings and your house and car are paid off.
I wish people would not use that term "x figures". It is too vague. Are we talking about 100K USD or 900K USD? There is a huge difference, yet both are "6 figures".
2023 inflation was ~3.5%
- soda is up about 50% for name brand, and generic soda is up around 80%
- diesel is up, what 50%? how much is regular gas in california?
- housing "values" where I am at are up 25-40% in the last two years
- Potato chips are up at least 40%
- Apples are much more expensive
- Restaurants are up at least 25%, some 50-75%
Many of these products went up by these amounts yet also engaged in shrinkflation. The biggest example of this is Chipotle which almost doubled the cost of its burritos but also shrunk them in size by about a third.
Governments are motivated to reduce inflation in inflation statistics. Perhaps the cost of goods for the ultra-rich hasn't really changed much, but for the poor (or cheap) they have all gone up quite dramatically in two years.
(which is to say that is just natural market forces, not collusion)
No it doesn't. You make a "gentleman's agreement" to do your layoffs and trust your chums to keep to it. Are you arguing that industry collusion is impossible?
After a month or two one company announces they're going through with layoffs, and that sets off a chain reaction for the rest to execute their own plans as soon as possible. It always happens like this. Everyone just decides now is the time to clean house, all at the same time, and we all decided to do this independent of each other...
The "collusion" is a dog-whistle protocol happening in plain sight. There is no "evidence," no damning email to be found, only behavioral patterns to observe. It's the same playbook every single time.
When you shed labor during poor economic conditions, it is not collusion, even if they, hypothetically, "colluded" to do it.
When a bunch of people see that a stock is crashing and decide to pull out together, it is not stock manipulation. It is a rational decision. (And don't nitpick the analogy on things like "buy low sell high", you probably understand the point I'm making.)
Companies need some labour, sure. But they can absolutely do things like hiring 10% more or 10% less, bringing a layoff forward a few months or pushing it back.
> When you shed labor during poor economic conditions, it is not collusion, even if they, hypothetically, "colluded" to do it.
> When a bunch of people see that a stock is crashing and decide to pull out together, it is not stock manipulation. It is a rational decision.
That's backwards logic. If a bunch of people agree to sell a stock at the same time so that none of them are left holding the bag, that is stock manipulation, even if they sold at a time when it was "rational" to sell. The fact that companies can act as a de-facto cartel without the kind of explicit coordination that our current anaemic anti-trust regime might punish is an argument for stronger anti-trust laws, not for ignoring the cases when we do catch them red-handed.
Even give them reinforced contracts to make them at ease?
In fact at a company like this, your best talent probably wishes the bottom 10% would get trimmed because they produce so little relative to higher performers.
And this is the sort of thing that can be especially problematic in creative companies when the layoffs are being run by bean-counting executives who have no presence in the day to day work of ICs.
Will top talent get sacked at Pixar? I have no idea, but as a 50 year old tech worker I've seen a number of layoffs first-hand and have heard anecdotal reports of dozens more that lead me to the conclusion that being among the "top talent" does not make you immune when it comes to large belt-tightening layoffs.
In Titanic the folks that got on lifeboats early survived, the ones that didn't got caught up in whatever traps as the rest of the ship goes down. If the ship is going down, its good to not ride it to the depths.
If it's not going down, then maybe it's not worth jumping. That's thr skill in it I guess, knowing which is which.
Essentially the high performers understand that they'll be expected to do more with less (people, resources, benefits, ...).
Likely the layoffs won't affect the layers of grifters above them, so it becomes a question of whether they really want to work harder for little or no personal gain, just to support the layers above them who are making and being rewarded for the bad decisions, or whether the high performers should look elsewhere for something more aligned with their personal happiness.
The best talent is often unknown to the csuite.
If they didn't want to be at Pixar, they'd already be gone.
If they like it there, they aren't too worried about getting fired, because they know it won't be hard to find a different (probably better) job.
Its a big risk to just wait it out and see if you are not financially secure.
Thank you for speaking on my behalf. No, it does not. In my experience, I am never concerned with small and targeted layoffs because I am never in the bottom 25% performers in my team. Instead, when the layoff are mass and broad, only then, have I experienced those personalised meeting with senior management. (To be crystal clear: I was only invited to those meetings when I was viewed as a top-top performer. Not always.)
Also saving money on hiring often means saving money in general and elsewhere too, worsening quality of life.
In particular projects can get canceled, priorities shifted, grind increased, privileges revoked, remote work banned, etc.
People who have the option to leave might do just that.
Plus that L4/L5 employee might look stellar on paper. Or even be stellar, just not very vocal about what they’re doing.
I thought that was true as well but the tech layoffs that have been happening have all been about being leaner to grow faster. Look at Meta, for example, that did layoffs in spite of massive continuous growth.
This drives people to take a more mercenary approach to work and look for better pay elsewhere.
Cult connotations involving "chosen" families aside, it's family that's statistically most likely to molest you.
It's never just 10%, just 10% this week.
Once they see stocks go up, and costs go down because everyone is working an extra hour a week to keep on track why wouldn't you cut another 15%?
You cant force the talent to stay.
No good answers here. They're both bad, but in different ways, and I suspect that whether one is worse than the other is probably a matter of personality type.
I find that stressful even if I live in a country where I have the same level of healthcare no matter whether I'm employed or not. How do you guys in the US cope with that? Is it as bad as it looks from outside or you have mechanisms to not lose all your healthcare if laid off?
If you plan to jump ship, negotiate with HR to get the severance package and voluntary leave, especially if you're hot shit and can get another job quickly, otherwise you're leaving money on the table. The only thing you lose here is eligibility for unemployment, which you won't need anyway.
Healthcare is a shitshow. You can do COBRA, which lets you maintain your health plan by picking up the tab the employer previously paid. I've never done it myself but heard premiums were like $800 per person per month, years ago.
I agree, I prefer it.. but also, it's weird in 2024 where corps basically try to fuck everyone at every possible turn that they're being so open about these layoffs.
What Pixar has created is an environment where nobody knows is they’re going to stay, so people self select into two buckets: 1) those who say “I’m not going to bust my ass just to get fired”. They coast and prepare to leave. And 2) those who work their ass off to try to “prove” themselves. If any of 2 get fired, it’s a bad morale hit for anyone around after the layoffs. You’ll lose actual talent this way.
Make the decision of who to layoff and do it, but be kind as you do.
and before anybody says that's maybe intentional, that just a really dumb way to do layoffs. that's how you lose your best people, rather than your worst.
Most of the (risk averse) great folks I know have purposely found safe harbor over the past ~2 years.
Also cost savings to consider such as severance.
Most people who think companies have a 'best person' aspire to be seen as that person, and haven't really thought about what it would actually mean.
I don't have a conclusive answer, but I'd want to know I think & respect companies that have the bravery to be up front.
As an IC, the day it happened and the weeks after it happened were tough, but I knew if I was the one impacted and my job was 'safe' for the time being.
As an EM, I knew months in advance, but I had no idea if I would be on the list. This caused months of stress while I planned for promotions and projects for people that might not (and eventually weren't) there after the rif.
Ripping off the band aid is much more human than telling people "sometime in the next 12 mo we may or may not fire a large portion of you, so please keep giving your 100%"
This gives the impacted people plenty of notice and time to look for new opportunities.
Now they have 80% of the company trying to leave.
Classic overreaction on HN. Did you say the same when Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft slashed huge number of employees in last year? How about Spotify?
1. Layoffs were a surprise. 2. When you leave Google there isn't a better option + you are easily employable elsewhere.
1. Say nothing until day of. 2. Say someone somewhere at some point or by some date.
For the employees, neither solves the problem of uncertainty that causes the most psychological turmoil.
The best for the employee is being told several months in advance exactly who is going to get axed and when.
This is considered risky for the business though. At that point you have an effective outsider with access to your systems for several months.
Sounds like the mafia
And they won't have to pay any severance packages for that 10%. Heck, if 20% choose to leave they can cancel the layoff. Imagine the PR!
The outcome of corporate comms strategy is never unplanned or coincidental. People quitting over it is exactly why they made this announcement.
Which is one of the benefits of making such an announcement.
You don't have to pay severance or unemployment benefits to those who quit on their own.
And if you are already treating headcount as a fungible commodity, it's a pure win for the HR department.
Is this actually happening now? It's a great trope and probably most of us have seen it in action, but I wonder if it's even reality any more.
The labor market is tough, the attrition you speak of did not happen at Meta. And that's for SWEs who have a lot of potential employers.
Surely nobody actually believes that?