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Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

Why is anyone so quick to take the company side?

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

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> Why is anyone so quick to take the company side?

HN has a lot of "wish I was a tech CEO" types, plus the general dose of contrarianism that runs deep in this place.

We are all temporarily embarrassed founders here.

And don’t forget a nice dose of “I’ve never struggled in my life” libertarianism.

... who also won the birth lottery, went to stanford, and then golfed with venture capitalists.

> They are the ones that ultimately messed up as they had poor strategic vision

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.

>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)

You assume they were fired due to inefficiencies, but they were fired since the market went down and the US government made software engineers more expensive short term by changing how those investments were taxed. That means they can no longer maintain as many software engineers.

> 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.

>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.

“It is difficult to get a man[ager] to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

(With apologies to Upton Sinclair.)

> Why is anyone so quick to take the company side?

Corporate and Political propaganda since the Powell Memo.

Honestly, I think taking the company's side is the contrarian opinion. The knee-jerk reaction is to judge them as the evil man oppressing working families.

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.

>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.

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.

> 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.

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.

>Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not

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 think you just have a fundamentally different view of what a layoff means then the executives, board of directors, and general shareholders.

> 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.

>I think you just have a fundamentally different view of what a layoff means then the executives, board of directors, and general shareholders.

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.

> could focus on making the business more generally efficient, cut down on process, and focus on keeping the business nimble and responsive

Every company already tries this as hard as they can, there is no magic button they can press to just make themselves more efficient.

>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.

> 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.

Or more realistically doomed the company to fade from grace as you competitors surge past you eventually ending with a massive layoff.

>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.

Sometimes a company is moribund much, much earlier than people realize. When you're faced with "do X or shut down" you will often chose to do X, even if X is pretty likely to result in shut down because you have a "die now, maybe die later" thing.

Or you can do a massive pivot, which has successfully worked at times.

Has anyone tried laying off most of the executive team - instead of the workers?

I always wanted to see an experiment where you take a really knowledgeable about the business front line employee, and hoist them to the C suite with all the same support systems executives have (and there's more than you might expect) and see if they do the same or better in that chair.

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.

They would do terribly. They're completely and utterly different skill sets.

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.

I have yet to see evidence that what gets done in the C-suite of many (not all, possibly not most—but many) companies is making use of any skill set at all, besides self-aggrandizement and bullshitting.

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.

Then you're not paying attention. If that's what you think, you simply have zero actual experience with C-suite jobs.

You "have yet to see evidence" because you haven't actually tried to learn accurate information about it.

All these tasks you listed - what makes you think an average CEO knows how to do any of them? How do you know if the company is doing well because of the CEO or despite them?

You might want to go with Occam’s razor here and admit that there’s probably no conspiracy going on with incapable executives running companies, and instead the right hiring choices are being made.

I prefer Hanlon’s razor.

What's funny is that people assume the executive team must be high performing.

In reality, they are able to fire the people with the least amount of power.

Until they no longer choose to cut employee costs, or what would be the end goal here?

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