But some people want to play music while the ship sinks. So they arrange for the most pleasant rest of the voyage they can, instead of saving as many people as they can.
I’m pretty cynical and assumed this was how layoffs worked but at least in faang and even smaller (maybe 500 people) SV companies, I actually don’t think this is the case anymore. Most I’ve seen have been extremely random – it seems like they cut teams/orgs very differently but on an individual level it seems random. I got the impression it’s some lawsuit thing, because they never leak the info beforehand so managers and other seniors can chime in, so it appears they’re cutting blindly from the exec level. There’s probably some politics going on in the higher echelons and maybe they force individuals out but with managers (including decorated ones) and regular employees it has not looked like a surgical political - not performance - play. From what I’ve seen.
If I worked somewhere that I loved that much that I’d even entertain the idea of coming back, I’d probably be too gutted to talk to them about it.
I'm glad I left as I got a large pay raise and didn't have to move to Toronto; but I wouldn't say it was random, just based on metrics unrelated to the individual's contribution.
You're right, it could have been based on the number of letters in their name, or the last digit on the clock when their name came up for a decision. It could have been every employee who hit a certain ratio of salary/years of experience. For the purposes of many employees being laid off, it was completely random. We had a lot of farewell drinks in Seattle, but the offices there aren't going anywhere.
Incidentally, did they do the "2 months to find a new job" thing for you too? I remember the whole process of looking for internal jobs to have been a bit chaotic and not very well planned at all. In retrospect, it made more sense to not apply anywhere, and just take it as a vacation, since they didn't pay out my vacation days. (I wonder if that wound up as an extra boat for someone)
-edit- I have absolutely no idea why your post is being downvoted, and I have started seeing this random downvoting everywhere.
Not the “untapped” people the author is talking about.
Say I'm a phone support company. I have a script I want my employees to follow and the average support time per phone call should be anywhere between 15-30 minutes. Sally Sue is on the phone for the full 8 hours and handles 16 calls a day. Billy Brass is on the phone for 4 hours of the day but handles double the amount of calls a day.
To the bean counters Billy is underperforming because he only spends 4 hours time on the phone and the company only makes money for the amount of time they can keep people on the phone. In this example it doesn't matter that Billy is an all-star because he completed more calls, he's underperforming because he's not following the script that should keep people on the phone for as long as possible.
The point is that Billy will feel resentful because even though he's able to help more people in less time he's getting penalized so Billy has less incentive to go above and beyond and in fact needs to degrade his workflow to fit someone else's metrics. So Billy becomes "untapped" because the company has restricted his autonomy. He "CAN" do more but that's not what the company wants from him so he will choose not to do it even if it's to the benefit of the company.
This is my understanding based purely on my experience getting laid off once - so take it with a huge grain of salt. The product I was working on was shutdown. I got paid a retainer to stay until the product can be properly wound down. Then got hired into a different role in a different team with a pay bump within a month. I got to keep the retainer as well - as long as I support the wind down efforts.
People are not fungible. Someone can be in a role where they're really valuable. But the company evolves and roles evolve and the needs are different. Sure, they might be able to excel in a new role eventually--but maybe it's not optimal to try to make them fit especially at a senior level.
If the reality is that people are fungible and leadership is just out of touch and made bad decisions then they’re the ones that should be canned.
Hiring people is expensive. Firing people is expensive. Reorganizing people requires competent leadership.
The same reason many devs exist - people convinced them it's better or more convenient to have an expert. The number of systems that could be an excel sheet...
In US tech, companies today generally prefer some degree of continuity/culture of employees and many employees prefer some degree of stability but it's hard to argue that there isn't less of both than in the past.
I recently did an internship at one of these big companies, doing ML. I'm a researcher but had a production role. Coming in everything was really weird to me from how they setup their machines to training and evaluation. I brought up that the way they were measuring their performance was wrong and could tell they overfit their data. They didn't believe me. But then it came to be affecting my role. So I fixed it, showed them, and then they were like "oh thanks, but we're moving on to transformers now." Main part of what I did is actually make their model robust and actually work on their customer data! (I constantly hear that "industry is better because we have customers so it has to work" but I'm waiting to see things work like promised...) Of course, their transformer model took way more to train and had all the same problems, but were hidden a few levels deeper due to them dramatically scaling data and model size.
I knew the ML research community had been overly focused on benchmarks but didn't realize how much worse it was in production environments. It just seems that metric hacking is the explicitly stated goal here. But I can't trust anyone to make ML models that themselves are metric hackers. The part that got me though is that I've always been told by industry people that if I added value to the company and made products better that the work (and thus I) would be valued. I did in an uncontestable manner, and I did not in an uncontestable way. I just thought we could make cool products AND make money at the same time. Didn't realize there was far more weight to the latter than the former. I know, I'm naive.
So let's compete! What are they selling? What prevents competitors from springing up?
I think what a lot of people don't understand is that there's criticism and dismissing. I'm an ML researcher, I criticize works because I want our field to be better and because I believe in ML, not because I'm against it. I think people confuse this. I'll criticize GPT all day, while also using it every day.
I used to have that attitude, but since then I've grown to learn that people who bring back news are also creating the problems without providing any solution whereas the "yes-men" excuse is a coping mechanism to rationalize why those who try to actually tackle problems and are smart enough to not raise them before they actually exist ir have solutions are indeed an asset to the team.
No one wants to deal with a pain-in-the-ass who creates problems for everyone out of thin air. That's what gets you fired. Everyone has to deal with real problems, and they don't need the distraction of having to deal with artificial ones.
If you want worker interests to be even a little aligned with owner interests, the correct corporate structure is not an S corp, or a C corp, it is some flavor of worker co-op.
And even then, it can't grow too big.
I used to document things in a way that would quickly get people up to speed, but was generally useless to current team members. Very useful if you where new or hadn’t touched the project in 3+ years, but no so helpful if you’ve been working on it for the last few months.
I am very interested in learning about these types of models.
I don't know what search terms would get me there, and/or any lists of these types of models that have been curated.
Could you suggest anything that would expedite researching this?
[0] https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/ [1] https://www.fairshares.coop/fairshares-model/ [2] https://p2pfoundation.net/the-p2p-foundation/about-the-p2p-f...
I previously had no idea of any existing frameworks.
I will undoubtedly gain a lot of insights through learning about them.
Thank you.
In reality, it most.often maximizes its executives lives while minimizing all other forms of frictions.
Everyone whose worked with small businesses will rscognize this pattern easily. Uts only when you get a few e?tra executives that the equation itself gets comolicated, but its still typically about maximizing the executives livlihood.