It's usually approached as a budget reduction exercise: Company is reducing budgets by X%. Select which projects get cancelled. Now work with managers to identify enough employees to lay off to reduce headcount spend by X%. Now reorganize remaining employees across remaining projects, with the understanding that a few extra people will leave due to future layoff fears.
The idea that companies like Twitter/X just removed a lot of employees and then operated exactly the same as before is a myth being propagated online right now, but companies must change their operations as part of layoffs. It's usually not obvious from the outside because the core product always gets attention, but side initiatives, internal tooling, new feature concepts, and even less-visible things (think bot/spam detection on X) lose attention that they may have needed.
But no, the idea that companies are making 10% of their workforce disappear at no cost to the business is just fantasy. The only time I saw this happen was when a company hired so fast that they didn't have work for some people to do, but that mistake was quickly recognized.
80% is a lot and it works just fine. 7,500 to 1,300 in Jan 2023. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
Your definition of "working" needs work. Nothing you said contradicts the parent.
Whereas there used to be interesting exchanges and threads before, algorithm now promotes similar nonsensical short responses again and again. The stuff on top is just not interesting anymore.
They have a ton of outages, the app is constantly buggy, the ad network is ridiculous, the moderation is nonexistent. I faced a bug that new tweets wouldn't load _for weeks_. If it was any other company, we would be saying they are done, but since it is Elon at the helm, some people pretend that Twitter still works.
The parent reply has an important point: a good % of headcount reductions tend to affect r&d and the type of projects where cutting investment doesn’t have a negative short or even medium term effect on the company. Sometimes it can even be positive for operations (e.g. infra teams have to support less product teams). This is mostly why it’s very uncommon to see headcount reductions lead to instability, etc.
Long term effects (e.g. stagnation, no innovation..) may manifest, but are harder to see clearly in advance, and when they do happen the connection to those layoffs from N years ago is not obvious/even remembered
They also changed their content rules to allow drastically more content, which reduces the total amount of work to be done. You could argue that this is a good thing because the moderation was useless and censoring before, but the moderation also made it a friendlier place for major advertisers who have since pulled out—so changing the moderation resulted in a business model change. That's naturally going to reduce headcount.
The main app is generally functional, but it's easy to see the deterioration of the smaller subsystems that large platforms like that need for a good user experience. For instance, I have an account that I am unable to log into because their password recovery/change feature doesn't seem send me anything when I click it. I'm sure frequent users have a litany of little things they've noticed that are flaky or outright broken, even if they can still send and read tweets.
I'm also getting a lot of garden variety "West/Christianity vs East/Islam" type race baiters and stupid 9gag type memes despite actively trying to indicate to the algorithm that I'm not interested. I think they've skewed it towards controversy to increase engagement but it's just boring.
Twitter is not able to attract ads, because they don't communicate with companies properly and are chaotic.
Without question though, despite the appearance of velocity in shipping features post-layoffs, the features were either small changes or if they were big, already partially deployed as experiments to small groups of users.
Aside from Grok, Musk's Twitter hasn't shipped anything new except and expanded monetization system (again, partially implemented when he took over anyway).
A premium (as in requires money), also-ran AI with a juvenile "sense of humor" and payments? These are significant?
Having 5000 engineers on tap for... potential user growth? Makes sense if you're planning on user growth, but Twitter is kind of the poster child of "we don't need engineers for anticipated growth" given a near-decade of totally flat userbase number.
Technically maybe everything works more or less as well as before, after a year.
…but the experience is quite bad now: every other thread is full of crypto and/or onlyfans promoting bots. The algorithm displays a lot of obvious attention grabbing posts which have 300 replies, 10 of which are from humans. There’s a constant stream of bots trying to connect with you via follows or likes.
It’s a mess and a fantastic example of why anonymous and free communication platforms absolutely need professional moderation.
My personal politics better align with based Elon than the previous regime, but let's not pretend there's no moderation happening. It's just different.
This was one thing we had tried on Twitter before Elon, and had found that it is detrimental to the platform and engagement. So, had to roll it back. But now it is a thing again. This drives down the popularity and overall usage of the platform, but some people will still claim it works the same (or even better).
Remember when we were told Elon was going to unleash AI on the bot/spam problem and solve it in a month?
It's worse than it ever was. I hardly ever saw bots or spam. Now I have 100+ spam followers, and on the very rare occasion where I reply to something, it gets 90% spam likes. Ads are also crypto, soft porn games and drop shipping companies.
You can see this a lot with companies bought by Private Equity firms. They slash costs and save a lot of short-term costs, and all looks good, but the company is now on a path to death.
> the company is now on a path to death
Probably, but it's going to be a very long tail. Forums do not cost that much to run.
1. The ones remaining are practically working 24x7 every day for essentially the same pay, with the promise of more.
2. You keep falling behind on all the things you need to do to keep things alive and compliant. This eventually comes back in the form of outages or worse, FTC fines.
3. There is very little room for forward looking work, which means you are sacrificing opportunities for growth. E.g.
> 325 million active users in 2015 and it's still about 300 million active users today
These were two very different numbers. The numbers in 2015 were DAUs and the numbers today are mDAU. mDAU are in layman terms users that can be monetized. This number was ~180M in 2018, so the growth was there. Part of the reason why the ad revenue was growing for Twitter during that phase.
4. Safety and Trust on the platform drops quite a bit when you are understaffed. Regardless of your political beliefs or whether you're team Elon, when there are 10 people banning CP instead of 100, there is no way you could argue objectively that the platform stays the same.
There's plenty of other problems, but you would not know they exist unless you're one of the people left after the figurative massacre.
When trying to upgrade to verified org: "An unexpected error occurred"
When trying to change my display name: "An unexpected error occurred"
When trying to run an ad: "Awaiting verification" for a week
Contacting support through messages: No response
Finally finding a way to submit a ticket: 3 day response time with a standard response that didn't resolve the issue.
Responded to that ticket and haven't gotten a response in days.
I don't think they're operating at the same level as they used to :)
Until it is not. I am regularly interviewing people with remarkable low skills who want salary of a full-fledged software engineers, and they even had that salary before. Lots of companies overhired low-quality workforce in the last five years, maybe it's time to fix that.
In the end he succeeds powering through all the dumb decisions he makes and manages to pull ahead:(Tesla production and engineering is now seen as a innovation leader in the industry and not just dismissed as some dumb flash in the pan, SpaceX has no real competitors, maybe the Chinese will eventually catch them but no one else is even in the conversation).
I have often wondered why so many people sign up to put themselves though this and I guess the clearest answer I got was when I interviewed some Starlink employees at DEFCON. They just want to be part of a team of excellent players and will overlook Musk's faults to be a part of that team.
It's not like overworking employees is a novel concept no other big corp has left untried.
I think attributing Musks success to "overworking employees" is either completely wrong or not sufficient to explain his success.
You can't say it's by chance, because it's not his first and last successful company either.
Recently it broke, and I have no clue how to get it working again. Fortunately it's just an internal thing so it's just disrupting work and not causing problems with customers, but now we're having to abruptly scramble to migrate off it and it's going to push back a lot of timelines. We got away with coasting on our upfront investment for six years, but it didn't last forever.
The analogy I reach for is fitness. If you were super fit for years, you can probably take a year off from exercising and still do that all-day hike. You'll probably be slower, but you'll make it.
But eventually the lack of investment will hurt.
For starters, productivity is a broad term, so without defining what it means in context it isn’t doing anyone any favors.
You won’t feel the dip or record it until after the event happens, and often not right away. When productivity drops a year from now for example, that could be due to layoffs. It’s not always immediate in its impact.
I also question this from the other side: why are executives who set the company priorities not also axed? They are the ones that ultimately messed up as they had poor strategic vision. Their ineffectual leadership is how it got there in the first place, if they aren’t gone how on earth do you know that it wasn’t their responsibility for the decrease in productivity? Logically one would think that axing the executives first and then seeing how productivity increases or decreases with new leadership would make more sense
Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not.
And managing staff size is like 1% of their job. They're also busy running their divisions, managing roadmaps and objectives and all sorts of non-staff resource planning, etc.
It's entirely reasonable to think economic and competitive conditions will probably be such that we should hire more, and then your competitive situation changes and you have to have some layoffs.
That doesn't mean anybody made mistakes or the executives should be fired as well. It just means that nobody has a crystal ball. Very little future estimation that is done in the business world turns out to be perfectly correct.
Sometimes executives do mess up in big ways and get fired just like anybody at any level. But that has nothing to do with layoffs in any special way.
Yeah I think when a layoff is enacted, you made more than a mistake, you fundamentally missed something. Its outside the bounds of needing to be perfect or what have you, something went sideways in a big way, and unless you can actually simply trace it down to market forces beyond your control and you are telling me those people can't be productively moved into other parts of the business, then sure, we have some criteria for layoffs, but then we can be adults and get walked through the failures and how there wasn't anything that could be done.
How many situations do you think this actually applies? I have been apart of 2 layoffs (not affected in either, thankfully) in the past 3 years.
In the first situation, I and others repeatedly warned that our biggest 3rd party integration, which made the backbone of our business, was going to ban us for abusing their APIs and other business practices that we were doing, and we needed to address that. This was repeated all the way up to the highest levels, I was in the meetings with the CEO, talked about precedent etc.
They didn't change anything. The ban eventually happened, and they never recovered, laid off over successive rounds, ultimately ~50% of staff is gone now, because of this very obvious strategic error.
In another situation, they tried to blame it on interest rate hikes, but before interest rate hikes, we were sounding the alarm that we were on-boarding way too many iffy customers (its a fintech place for SMBs to manage AP) with out of bounds credit profiles, and that these new sign ups would dry up way too easily, we needed to re-focus on a better core ICP before we try to further expand the business, try and target customer segments with stronger business profiles etc, and this is prior to the majority of the interest rate hikes. I and several others made this case, and yet again, not headed, layoffs hit 6 months later, because all those customers either went belly up or had to downsize themselves, because they were too credit dependent.
So what commonality do you think this happens? Because I have a feeling its alot more than is acknowledged.
> I and several others made this case, and yet again, not headed, layoffs hit 6 months later, because all those customers either went belly up or had to downsize themselves, because they were too credit dependent.
But what if the customers survived? What if interest rates didn't hike as fast? You're suggestion would have been horrible. The risks of over-hiring is a layoff which no one else views as really that bad vs failing behind competitors.
Most likely, and I personally believe that is part of the problem, not the problem.
I recognize how damaging layoffs are to people. Its unfair to act like they aren't. Its people's livelihood and we as humans often make decisions around these things, and when its yanked out from underneath them without notice, its very damaging.
Its not numbers on a spreadsheet, it is human lives.
>But what if the customers survived? What if interest rates didn't hike as fast? You're suggestion would have been horrible. The risks of over-hiring is a layoff which no one else views as really that bad vs failing behind competitors.
We would have hired more modestly, and could focus on making the business more generally efficient, cut down on process, and focus on keeping the business nimble and responsive.
If I'm wrong, we end up primed to take on more customers while continuing to hire modestly. Ironically, our smaller more nimble competitors ate a bunch of market share from us with much smaller overall staff, because they could move faster, and I can directly trace that to the hiring spree.
Now, I will admit, if we had stronger safety nets in the US that made layoffs relatively painless for the unemployed, I'd feel differently about this.
Every company already tries this as hard as they can, there is no magic button they can press to just make themselves more efficient.
Then why are so many so inefficient? In the Silicon Valley mythology, one of the core tenants is that startups can act more efficiently than big companies simply due to focus & size.
If this were inherently true to any reasonable degree, I actually think we would have a differently shaped workforce. I can point out dozens of inefficiencies I experience even today that slow down development, and that is just if we analyze development. I hear from other wings of the company[0] of other things - simple things like consolidating tools so they don't have to bounce between different apps to do things - that also drive alot of real inefficiency.
This isn't the first place I worked where all these issues exist either, and its not nitpicky stuff, its all low hanging fruit. Consolidating tools is a complaint I have heard at almost every job I've had sans 1. I don't imagine I'm alone, my peers at other companies often have similar complaints when we talk.
I think some things are inherent to simply organizing humans, and I get that, but the obviousness of some improvements that simply aren't undertaken runs counter to the assumptions one makes when they buy into the "efficient business" hypothesis
[0]: we successfully became more cross functional, that's a huge plus, our solutions are much more holistic now, but its only part of the problem.
Or more realistically doomed the company to fade from grace as you competitors surge past you eventually ending with a massive layoff.
This is a black and white take that doesn't jive, additionally, we have the hindsight of history, both recent history and the history of other boom / bust cycles, that serve to validate. Our competitors wouldn't have zoomed past us. We have strong market presence and we bleed more users due to our own ineffectiveness than strictly from competitive pressure, and I can trace much of that ineffectiveness back to hiring practices from late 2020 to mid 2022. As I noted previously, we have a clear line of how this happened.
Generally speaking, a moderate growth strategy would have left us in a better place, and it was easy to see by the end of 2021 that things were going to change sooner rather than later. I'm not that smart, by my own admission, I'm a pretty dumb guy, but I put the pieces together by then by simply looking at where the money was coming from. There was no way the conditions of 2021 were going to continue at most past 2025 if you wanted to be an optimist, but realistically, it was coming down a lot sooner to anyone paying attention to how the money was flooding in, and I felt we would start to see some downturns in 2022 and 2023. As soon as the COVID relief stuff was announced to be ending, it should have been even more so, yet there wasn't a prevalent skepticism in the status quo until much later.
Or you can do a massive pivot, which has successfully worked at times.
There's only be limited studies done in this vain, and the results, while limited, seem to suggest that any reasonably smart person with knowledge of the industry could do a good job but the studies are pretty limited, and don't construct the circumstances as I described, so its hard to say its true or not true.
It makes as much sense as taking an oboe player and asking them to conduct an orchestra, without any conducting experience.
Do you know how to handle investor relations and different factions on the board? Managing sales and marketing strategies? Assessing the regulatory environment in Europe and the legal risks of expansion in China? Can you speak confidently and charmingly at conferences with billionaires? Do you understand how to manage different interest rate environments? Is it obvious to you which law firms to hire for different needs?
This isn't just stuff you can learn on the fly. It takes many years of experience, and often a business degree in the middle, to become even moderately competent in this stuff.
To be charitable, for some of these, what's happening is that rather than leveraging their skills, they're leveraging their relationships. And that can be valuable, sometimes, but it's not a substitute for actually knowing what the hell you're doing.
The real problem is that far too many of these people—skills or no skills—primarily bring their egos to the table, and operate mostly based on that.
You "have yet to see evidence" because you haven't actually tried to learn accurate information about it.
In reality, they are able to fire the people with the least amount of power.
(With apologies to Upton Sinclair.)
HN has a lot of "wish I was a tech CEO" types, plus the general dose of contrarianism that runs deep in this place.
Corporate and Political propaganda since the Powell Memo.
Everything is a gamble, the right decision can still lead to a bad result due to randomness. So just because a gamble didn't pan out doesn't mean that it was the wrong thing to do.
For example, not hiring extra is also a gamble, it means you gamble on the market not growing and you would lose a ton of money if the market didn't stall.
This assumes hiring is the only way to grow the company. More specifically, it assumes ramped up hiring is the only way.
There are balances that can be struck, for example, instead of hiring 100 people, maybe hire 20 and see how onboarding and growth pans out? Perhaps evaluate business inefficiencies that serve to slow people down like bad process etc. so people can focus more time on what matters.
Automated onboarding, group sales calls and other tactics let you make more with the same amount of people.
There are other things you can do, not just hire. And I'm never going to say don't hire people, but what executives did was irresponsible and I knew it even at the time.
IMO, this stuff happens because executives know they won't be held responsible if it can't be sustained, and that is really the core issue.
Proportions are what matters. I like many am tired of seeing a world that favors oscillation in the extremes like this, and its the average person who takes the brunt when it goes south and the higher ups rake in the brunt of it when things are going well.
For what its worth, if we had European style safety nets, this would be a moot point in a way, because we have so much of American society tied to having a job (be it health insurance, ability to afford rent etc)
> but what executives did was irresponsible and I knew it even at the time.
Lots of people said this during the entire hiring spree from 2010 to 2020, but most of those people are still there paid and working. If they listened to people like you most of us here would be out of a job since the job market wouldn't have grown that fast.
That assumes I'm taking an absolutist position like you shouldn't hire or hire rarely, and I'm not. There needs to be successive indicators and re-evaluation of conditions that need to be balanced. In many (most?) cases, they simply weren't. I would say the accurate time to call this out would have been 2021, not 2009, and that is the timeframe in which I looked at everything and thought to myself "this won't last more than 5 years at best". By late 2020 to early 2021 I created a thesis that we crossed into artificial growth rate and too much "free" money being pumped into everything around us, to be clear about this.
The steady growth from 2009-2019 in tech was relatively organic by comparison, and far more moderate for most of the industry if you compute only non FAANG companies (FAANG companies, and those near that acronym, simply had outsized growth by comparison, by many multiples)
All this is to say, that I think if people listened to me, it would have nothing to do with 2010 to the start of 2020.
Why? The vast majority of people have not worked in managerial positions with high levels of responsibility to understand the decision-making and interest balancing processes required for a large organization to operate.
But everyone's been a victim of managers at least once, and certainly seen bad ones. And many people think they can imagine what's entailed in the job. Your questions about ownership and responsibility are not invalid, but they are also the most accessible (easiest) questions. You don't get to see the sausage unless you're on the inside and most people can only imagine what that looks like, and then tend to imagine the worst or most malicious alternatives. Thinking beyond those questions isn't always warranted, but doing so does require a perspective that most people don't have direct experience with.
There are some of us who have and still see the facades and illogical reasoning for many decisions, decisions that if made in the lower wrung of the company would definitely lead to someone getting fired. People ignore good evidence even at the highest levels all the time because their incentives are not aligned, for example. I witnessed this before. I've been in director+ levels multiple times, at small and medium organizations. I'm not convinced that my peers were any smarter than lower level employees when it comes to making decisions given all the available inputs.
I will say, that in mid sized organizations I've been apart of, you do see sometimes that lower level employees have no concept outside the department, and that leads to tunnel vision. They don't see the complete story all the time, but I always viewed those as communication failures most of the time.
I "made the sausage" at my previous job reporting directly to the CTO[0] at a 1000+ person company. It was alot more volume of information, and I talked to alot of different people all the time, but I think you could take any whip smart employee, elevate them to that position, and they could do a reasonable job.
That experience has left me really jaded to be honest. Whatever humanity I had left to endure corporate life had sunk by the end, as it were.
[0]: This is why I was raising alarm bells in the first place, because I knew it'd be heard. Fact is, it was ignored.
The punchline is that in addition to hundreds of failed hobby projects, their stock is doing great. Monopoly rents are a helluva drug.
That is not true either at the individual level, or at the level of companies. It is particularly untrue with tech behemoths who enjoy near-monopoly status, massive network effects, and/or huge mindshare.
At the very simplest level, it is not at all uncommon for good decisions made previously to allow an organization to "coast" for a significant amount of time after it starts making bad decisions. This is part of why bad CEOs are so frequently not held accountable for their incompetence: they take over, and for 3 years, everything's going great! It's only after the accumulated "soft" resources (customer goodwill, employee loyalty, lack of technical debt, etc) are burned away that the bad decisions actually start being reflected in the balance sheets.
I've never understood why people would believe this overhired narrative, have you ever worked for a company that correctly understood it's own hiring capabilities or measurements? I haven't 15 years in.
Musk bought Twitter in April 2022, had huge layoffs and then rest of tech followed in Nov 2022 onwards.
Prior to current trends was it common to announce great earnings and then announce layoffs?
Musk made layoff palpable to investors, ZIRP ended, the industry is correcting for over hiring when assuming the 2020s growth would continue forever.
Just a bunch of things that happened. As always.
“We didn’t start the fire”
Having extra people on staff who aren't needed can be good as long as you expect to need them in the near future. That obviously creates the risk of needing to terminate the positions if the need for the person never materializes.
It takes 2-3 months to hire someone after opening a role, and 6-9 months to onboard them. So 8-12 months to fill a role with someone fully up and running. That's a really long time which is why so many high growth companies fill roles they don't actually need right now.
In a company that's growing slowly or not at all, hiring "10% too many" people is a much larger error, possibly even a disaster as it could be a full year or more worth of extra hiring in a slow growth company.
This is much better than the "you get what you use" resource allocation where organizations never shrinks, we want them to shrink when they don't have any useful work to do.
Human labor is becoming superfluous in the face of self-sustaining capital arising or whatever.
Sometimes problems take time to present themselves.
Or we fired 1/2 the scrum masters, so now each project only gets 50% of one instead of a FT one, and BTW, all of a sudden developer meetings get cut in half as a side benefit.
Every large company I have ever worked for could have easily fired 1/3 the staff and ran just fine indefinitely - but only if they fired the right third.
Hire for positions they don't hire because they seem superfluous.
I think in every bigger project over the last 10 years I asked, in otherwise reasonably staffed companies, for a technical writer. Even part time one. Fohgeddaboutit. Sometimes the issue is, as sacrilegious as it sounds even to me, not enough managers. Because sometimes you need people whose only role is to be communication points, or people whose job is to be responsible and accountable.
In most of those companies we could probably fire a lot of people too, probably mostly among executives and a lot of those invested in SAFe and the like...
Even an understaffed team can crawl along with a skeleton crew for a while, but you will burn people out. A burned out team ceases to make forward progress and is going to act like things are in maintenance mode. You're liable to spend more money and SWE-hours looking for backfills vs if you'd just kept your team intact.
Eventually some planes will crash, but it's ok as long as it happens after effective management gets their bonus and moves on to optimise another company.
Here's another thing: the productivity that's being tracked isn't aligned with the value that the consumer is paying for. You can see this in government contracting a lot, where the consumer doesn't even see the product - they just see the paperwork. If you're really good at "producing" paperwork, you don't need anything else for a very, very, very long time.
God, I wonder what kind of people are out there typing these messages.
How did you measure that? How long are you tracking it? How are you isolating other factors?
While you figure that out, what accountability does your organization have towards the hundreds of thousands of human individuals whose lives were just grossly disrupted and sent into potentially catastrophic strain?
Different societies have found different answers to the accountability question.
Whether or not the jobs were individually bullshit (almost all jobs are, as are almost all companies) has little to do with the conversation.
Whether that is a good long term strategy is a different question.
They don't, they just stop doing some things and pile on extra unpaid work on those left.
The best tech example is IBM. They descended from industry leader to desiccated husk, only sustained by legacy business and acquisitions.
Companies exist at the allowance of a nation-state for the benefit of the people.
If the benefit is attenuated, the people, via government, can sanction the corporations.
If the corporation is succeeding and paying more into the public till by providing fake jobs, what's the problem? They're not succeeding hard enough?
I think the error you've made is that you've mistakenly projected your sense of "fairness" on corporations.
Corporations aren't people my friend.
A few issues to consider:
1. Many companies can continue to operate for a time purely based on momentum and existing pipelines. That does not mean that this is sustainable.
2. The lack of a visible dip does not mean the internals are healthy. Often layoffs are accompanied with an expectation to "do more with less", which generally means the conditions going south for remaining workers.
3. In an economy that is predicated on everyone having a job or enough income to spend money to support the continued existence of companies, it is not sufficient to look only at the output of the company itself.
Bullshit jobs may be a real thing, but much of the system is built on "bullshit", all in service of perpetuating the ongoing success of the system.
If every company could automate every function and there were no employees anywhere, this would obviously not be sustainable in the long run, and it becomes more apparent that the role of the worker is not just about the company's output, and is intrinsic to the whole system, and that's something we'll have to contend with eventually.
I'm not arguing that this is a good thing, or that companies should keep people for no reason, but we're in an era where technology is increasingly disrupting core aspects of the system.
Perhaps not, but I'm not sure it would be for the reason you are implying.
What is this hypothetical company that automates every function and has no employess anywhere producing? And what price can that thing fetch in the market? If the marginal cost of producing additional units is basically zero, which is what the hypothetical implies, then the products should be basically free, since standard microeconomics says that price = marginal cost. Which means nobody would need jobs to afford these products. Which means this condition would be sustainable in the hypothetical as you state it: sure, there would be no employees, but there would also be no need for the jobs that no longer exist.
Of course in the real world there are plenty of ways this could go sideways, but they all basically boil down to: in the real world, governments mess with markets in ways that prevent price from being driven down to marginal cost. That means many things (food, for example) cost more than they should, which means people need more income than they should need if the market were truly free. So what is really not sustainable is governments trying to mess with markets. If that stopped, we could make the necessities of life basically free. That would be a good use of technology.
> If the marginal cost of producing additional units is basically zero, which is what the hypothetical implies, then the products should be basically free
I don't think this is implied unless all productive work across all industries is automated. Practically speaking, this would happen over time, meaning that a fully automated company today could significantly reduce its costs, but would still have to purchase goods and services from upstream providers and pay to market and distribute their products.
And since companies essentially operate on greed, the leadership of these companies would carve out space for themselves, and the short term goal would almost certainly still be to maximize profit, meaning goods are not free, even if the marginal cost is low (gotta pay for all of that automation R&D after all).
Somewhere there is a tipping point where enough automation would throw the system into chaos without major changes. If it could be achieved overnight, then hypothetically we could all have free stuff.
I've always wondered: If the layoff is happening because the company over-hired and the roles are no longer needed, then why do existing employees need to step up and do those roles that the company just said are no longer needed?
And even if there is really none, then sure it makes sense from the company point of view and pure profit perspective. But if the company is well of, why lay off experienced, trusted and loyal workforce still? You always need slack room, like you need some money put aside.
And another level, work puts meaning to our lives.. either we allow for other meaningful things supported by some UBI, or we should rethink if profiting companies really need to ultra-maximize, or how they can also do a little welfare for their employed work force.. imo it's a pity the employee owned model is not more widespread, and it is all for the few.
But anyway, different end of a very wide spectrum. Certainly, struggling companies must get rid of the bloat, bullshit jobs, and evil within, if it needs that to survive and is the actual problem ;)
A company I used to work for set up a team to develop a new product for a new market. After 3 years they were still unprofitable, the product was shut down and the entire team was fired. This obviously had no direct effect on the companies overall productivity. Was that team doing a "bullshit job"?
If you fire the team doing R&D on the next generation of one of your products or the team working on launching your company into an entirely new market or the team the works on internal tooling or some of the people managing key account relationships with certain customers or suppliers or many other similar jobs then the company can absolutely keep going without a hitch, for a while.
I saw a lot of this back in the "reengineering the corporation" craze in the 90s (and then the "lean organization" and so on). They cut all the slack out of the system so in steady state everything seemed to work. But the world is not consistently in a steady state.
So fire that guy doing backups, and save money by not paying for the redundant network connection you've never used. Stock goes up, prepare three envelopes, and retire!
This presupposes a company can even somewhat accurately track productivity for the short, medium, or long term.
Much of a large company's headcount at any point in time, is people hired to work on these bets on the future. You can fire all of these people, and nothing will happen to the company's day-to-day operations.
But the company's stock will take a nosedive nevertheless — because the promise of future increased returns had already been factored into the share price, and that factor now has to be removed.
Why? How?
You start making it painful for the company to lay off people, I anticipate they stop hiring people to minimize risk, and then unemployment shoots up and presents it's own set of (some overlapping) problems.
Companies keep these productive people if they want to grow and deliver even more products. They fire these productive people if they're not aiming for more growth at the moment.
I use some old software that nobody has been working on for a decade and it still works perfectly, to give an example.
-like maybe all salaried people need to work an extra hour every day to cover the laid off people's work-
Productivity per employee would go up, and it would be impossible to really attribute any negative impact to the product to the layoff!
But would that have been a wise decision for the company? If it was wise, the company should keep laying off more people, but how can you tell when it has gone too far?
Companies are just collective endeavours of multiple humans trying to produce value to other humans.
They hold an insane monopolistic position. Often these companies utilize verticals which obliterate entire business segments because they are allowed to give products for free (MS Teams for example).
This should not happen.
Another is that that 10% of work is distributed to the remaining 90%, who now work harder and are more stressed, but well aware that they were lucky to keep their jobs and therefore willing to absorb an extra hour a day.
Which, free market and all that, may just be smart business. But I don’t think it’s necessarily good management in the long term.
It takes a while for that to show up on income statements though, and the quarterly results look great in the meantime, so it is by definition good management (by Wall Street standards).
I've seen this happen many times in large orgs, and the people making the decisions to cut engineers in certain areas often aren't responsible for what happens down the line and don't need to deal with the fallout. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Similarly, many systems can continue functioning (seemingly without a hitch) when you cease all maintenance and preventive care. Eventually, they will fail.
That's not always true though. I've been on both sides of layoffs: laid off and remained. Sometimes the people who remain are asked to do more with less. I was even asked to do more with less pay at one point.
Probably not.
unless those 10% were working on things which may become important to the company in the future; a company that just "chuggs along" will eventually die
All this just means that the balance of society has tilted to one unsustainable direction. Society simply needs much better antitrust (or other) laws to the point that every monopoly/duopoly is broken down and balance is restored.
I will use twitter as a hypothetical example. If only twitter can raise capital to the point where it can handle enough traffic at scale and be an arbitor of global news, then it can easily use its resources and reputation to create and staff bullshit jobs without much consequence.
To bring back balance:
1. other legal jurisdictions should ban or tax twitter out of existence over there and raise their own monopolies, for which they will likely need a global workforce
2. cost of investing in twitter or the cost of holding large investments in twitter should be increased so that the instead of accumulating capital in the market leader, people are incentivised to let their money be reinvested into competitors.
This will be resisted by those who already have enormous sums of money invested into the market leader, which unfortunately also happens to be the people who make the rules.
It's great for the company. Not so much for the people.
It's a matter of perspective.
> The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.
Perhaps, but who's fault is that? Sounds like the company's problem. Who suffers from the layoffs however? Per your example, not the company.
And they aren't laws, just heuristics, that the tech world likes to propagate as if they are laws, when if fact most tech people that believe they are part of the "square root people", but really just lack an appreciation for what is often really going on.
People are burning out, working the jobs of 3 people and are told they’re lucky to have a job. It’s not bullshit if it’s unsustainable.
Which part is bullshit? The part where, in order to survive, everyone* needs a job? Or the part where, because everyone* needs a job, some jobs might not be as important as others?
*Y'all know what I mean.
Accumulate capital, make it grow
If you fail, your life is encumbered in ways that prevent you from doing that, there are limited programs in the US for you, but burdening corporations is a symptom
Sure, some bullshit is going to slip in, but it’s still a bunch of human beings trying to make a living on this dumb rock. Software itself is all bullshit in the grand scheme of things.
We're not paying people to dig holes and fill them up as a society, instead we're demanding that centers of production and growth willingly disdain productivity in order to subsidize people digging holes and filling them up.
We'd be far better off directly subsidizing education, health care, or even customer service and scientific research than demanding that the real sources of all economic growth (and prosperity) have departments printing out reams of paper for another department to shred. Efficiency and technology lower costs and (when properly distributed) give people more time for leisure across the system. You aren't sticking it to the fat cats by telling them not to do layoffs; if you want to stick it to the fat cats, tax their profits and strip layers of economic indirection/middlemen.
Also HN: "You can't have less than 1000 people for that!!"
As long as they can find people to educate themselves on the systems fast enough it's not an issue.
I'm sure there's chafe in that 10%, but not all of it is.
How can you be so callous? This is why people don't like startup people.
Yes, obviously it's a bad thing, because those people are now without a source of income and often without health insurance. I say "obviously" because it's pretty reasonable to expect people aren't sociopaths, and care about the well-being of others. It's only within your sick bubble where maximizing profit at the expense of human suffering is considered a reasonable option. Unfortunately, people like you have a disproportionate power in our society.
I'm not saying you're a sociopath, I'm saying that the economic ideology which is commonplace on Hacker News makes normal people who believe it behave like sociopaths.
Sure, in a society with a reasonable safety net where losing your job wasn't a potential death sentence, laying off some workers occasionally would be fine. But we don't live in a Keynesian fantasy-world, we live in a world where insurance companies have death panels.
If 100 fewer employees is bad; is 100 more good?
No, that's a low-effort straw man argument.
It would be preferable for us to stop trusting companies to provide for people's needs, and build effective systems for providing people's needs.
A good start might be to stop pretending corporate actions are always morally good as long as they're profitable, and recognize that firing people causes harm to those people. That's not a difficult concept for normal people--again, its obvious--and corporations have spilled a great deal of ink to override basic human empathy on this subject.
I'll agree that companies can't be made to work if they're required to act as charities, but I'll also say that if corporations can't exist without causing harm then I'm not sure why we'd want them to exist. The entire purpose of allowing corporations to exist is that they are supposed to benefit society.
At the very least, if we're going to allow companies to fire at will, we need a much more effective social safety net to help workers pick up the pieces when they get fired. But of course these corporations will fight against that, because exploiting their workers' dependence is profitable, and besides, they don't want to be asked to pay to fix the harms they cause.
There are very reasonable arguments to be made that capitalism is the best way to achieve compassionate and empathetic results. But you're not even on board with that more fundamental goal, you're just dismissing it as socialism.
And I AM moralizing here, and I AM personally criticizing you. If you see someone advocating for basic compassion and empathy toward human beings and all you can think is "socialism = fail", you're a bad person. Being able to have compassion and empathy towards others is at the core of any ethical system I can imagine.
Grow a conscience.
Yes, getting fired is an unpleasant thing and a necessary evil similar to break-ups and falling off a bicycle. Life has its components of suffering, and that’s more than fine.
I'm open to capitalist solutions to the lack of a safety net for people who get fired, but a) you're not proposing any, because you don't see other people's suffering as a problem, i.e. you're an amoral danger to society and b) H.N.-style "all regulation is bad" isn't even capitalism--a free market requires a strong central authority to prevent anticompetitive practices. If you see all government intervention as anti-capitalist it's pretty clear you haven't actually read Adam Smith's works. You aren't even capitalist, you're just pro-corporate for selfish reasons.
Stealing is wrong, and socialism is stealing. I like helping others and I do it all the time. I don’t want anyone forcing me to help others, though.