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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

This is true with all layoffs. If you can't explain your direct role in creating your product/service, you're going to be higher on the chopping block.

Sales, marketing, HR, admins, PMs, etc. are usually the first to go because they don't "keep the lights on" and it's hard to measure their impact.

While it's true that it's also hard to measure a single engineer's impact, it's scarier to fire someone who may be expensive to replace and who may take institutional knowledge of the inner workings of the product with them.

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Sales does not belong on that list, since their impact is the easiest of all to measure ($$$).

Also, top-down layoffs tend to target expensive staff with large paychecks, without accounting for institutional knowledge or intangible value delivered.

Easy to measure isn’t always good. If the org tends to sell $5m per sale person and they try to scale it by hiring it might just fall to $4m per sales person. When things go under the microscope, they’ll want to put that back in balance by reducing heads.

Sales isn't easy to measure.

If you generate the same number of leads, do you need 300 salespeople to convert them? Or could your top 100 performers do it? Do you need separate salespeople for each product or can one person sell it all?

At the trough of interest rates, big companies had insane numbers of salespeople touching each deal (easily 10+ at some orgs) because they'd over-hired and the forced people to hyper-specialize to justify it.

Is it though? Without products there are no sales at all. A compelling enough product will sell with no marketing/sales effort, so sales is really only whatever that baseline is + (extra units sold from sales and marketing efforts - cost of sales of marketing). I would think this is actually quite hard to measure, you also have to normalize against many external market factors and behavior of competitors.

> A compelling enough product will sell with no marketing/sales effort

would it? maybe you are talking about video games and a good enough game would sell itself. But for other businesses sales / marketing / ads do matter. Imagine you provide a 50% better service than your competitors, but you target audience never reaches your page because they are bombarded with google ads of your competitors

For enterprise SaaS companies sales is one of the most important roles, tied with engineering. Especially if your engineering org/product is weak.

To quote Larry Ellison, you're either building the product or selling the product.

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