Calif. tech companies see laid-off workers as 'table scraps,' recruiters say | Hacker News Reader

Calif. tech companies see laid-off workers as 'table scraps,' recruiters say

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38 pointsummonk35 comments

The same people who say this will be crying about a lack of loyalty from workers when we experience the next tech boom.

The message these recruiters are sending is that people should be jumping ship more regularly so they are not caught up in a layoff. Soon they will wonder why people are churning so much.

Well, that, or… lobby work for stronger workers rights, for example at least three months of notice before a layoff, with a proper justification presented, like it works in Western Europe. If you’re too weak individually to push that through, maybe band together with other employees?

>Well, that, or… lobby work for stronger workers rights, for example at least three months of notice before a layoff, with a proper justification presented, like it works in Western Europe.

I worked for a company that did huge layoffs and they management was so mad when they found out they had to give the French workers three months notice instead of the 4 or 5 days they gave the US workers.

There are some companies that avoid France just because of the workers rights. There are a lot of places in Europe you can get good engineers for cheap without the rights that some countries have. For better or worse this is factored into the decision making process.

Churn is great for recruiters and HR! I once worked at a startup that implemented a policy of trying to always get rid of a certain % of workers every year to make sure they only employed "the very best". PS: Every confident company thinks they only employ the very best, and who they employ or hire is usually different.

The HR people really pushed this, I think because they believed in it. But it also coincidentally gave them a much bigger role than they would have had at a small company with a stable workforce.

At Amazon, that would be called Unregretted Attrition.

So, teams are known to hire people, fully expecting to turn around and fire them before the end of the year. That way, they can provide the churn that is required, without actually losing any of the people they might want to keep.

I didn’t actually see that on either of the teams I worked on, but I certainly heard plenty about it.

Recruiters would probably love constant churn, but their employers would not.

It’s insane that we’ve allowed an entire layer of people that don’t understand or work at all and generally work entirely off of “vibes” (I’m talking about HR departments) to interest themselves into the hiring process. Just massively inefficient and wasteful.

Automate HR.

I'm serious. Company of 50 that I run, with a bunch of other subsidiaries that employee around 350 people altogether. We have a central admin team (who handle general administrative duties) with a very strong set of internal tooling also augmented by some rudimentary crud UIs and AI. It's magical because we never had to use recruiters to hire and everything runs automated/semiautomated. I'm honestly considering spinning this process out as a way for companies to outsource and minify their HR processes, and surprisingly I've received some very strong interest from some equally sized companies (100-300 employee teams).

HR is a wasteful expenditure pushed by the likes of thinkers who've never worked an actual day in their lives. If there's one culture any company must follow, it's simply one of Prussian-style discipline (which can by definition take many forms).

It's sad that Bill Hicks isn't alive so he could tweak his "Marketers" rant towards HR.

Rejected for being "over-practiced"?!

Many companies have made their interviews so difficult that people are spending months studying and doing hundreds of leetcode problems.

Meta's Interview Guide even says you need to be able to solve 2 problems in 35 minutes. They recommended solving medium and hard problems in less than 15 minutes. On top of that, they say:

"Let us know if you’ve seen the problem previously".

The only way I can solve two questions in 35 minutes is if I've seen it before or I've "over-practiced".

i feel like we've been in a "post-work/value" fugue state for at least 10 years. this another symptom of it. the ones who built the gig work companies and zero hour contracts are now themselves being chewed up and spat out. self cannibalizing.

only positive, if more affluent people lose their jobs we might finally get UBI.

i was lucky to catch the tail-end of the opportunity golden period (1995-2007) which enabled me to have a decent career.

> if more affluent people lose their jobs we might finally get UBI.

i dont follow why this has to be the case.

Affluent people who lose their economic value will just cease to remain affluent. They have no power to compell ubi.

“Layoffs usually have nothing to do with performance”

This has not at all been my experience. When forced to do layoffs in a large company, executives tend to look at performance reviews.

What are other people’s experience with this?

> This has not at all been my experience. When forced to do layoffs in a large company, executives tend to look at performance reviews

Speaking specifically to Facebook and Instagram, I know of more than one team where the manager wasn't consulted when someone higher up (I think they were advised by BCG) chose whom to cut.

The kicker? They frequently cut the highest paid. That obviously removed with a bias towards seniority. But it also meant that managers woke up to find their best-bonussed people gone while their worst performers--the cheapest on paper--remained.

Happened to me. Ranked near highest in company, promoted, pay bump two months before a layoff targeting US staff. They kept engineers in Australia who made 50-60% less. Before severance ran out, I landed a job that paid 50% more than before. Layoffs don’t indicate that much about the people laid off; they say a lot more about management.

I used to work _doing_ layoffs. Think George Clooney in Up In the Air.

I never encountered a layoff where performance reviews were considered. It was all line of business considerations.

My “favorite” was when the top performing call center got chopped wholesale simply because their lease was up soonest.

I have found at the companies I have worked for it is two things for a layoff: cutting a product/change in strategy and how much you are being paid. Layoffs for performance tend to be more one off than a massive cut.

What I am most surprised about is how many really good performers get cut for a product or strategy change. A company will be cutting a high performer while searching for a high performer at the same time like it is taboo to move people within the company.

IME, it's based off of "performance", not performance. So what happens is someone 4 levels above you on the org chart has a google sheet of all their underlings, their most recent grade - erm I mean performance review result - and their total comp.

They sort by total comp, then go down the list and figure out a reason to let that person go. Was there literally anything in your performance review summary they can ding you for? Yes? Phew, that was easy. No? Well, keep looking. "Strategic mismatch for skillset" "too junior, want senior" "too senior, want junior" "role eliminated due to headcount allocated to team being reduced" etc.

So, in the layoff I was privy to, somehow everyone who still had the large lucrative 4-year stock-denominated grants was suddenly gone, and the people who had the newer cash-denominated grants were still there. Meanwhile, several cheaper employees who were perennially underperforming were retained.

Honestly it really soured me on equity grants. It's a game of "heads I win (my company didn't grow and i got to pay you peanuts), tails you lose (my company grew and now i can just fire you and re-hire someone with a cheaper grant so you can't vest those now-very-lucrative appreciated shares)".

One of my former employers did a big layoff last year -- lots of folks who I remembered as being "important" (long time employees, large contributions, lots of domain knowledge) were let go. Seemed pretty dumb, but the wreckage stumbles forward anyway.

> Seemed pretty dumb, but the wreckage stumbles forward anyway.

the momentum in the org will continue its course, but without those long time employees who have the deep domain knowledge built up over the years, there's no way to steer nor alter course. So it's luck that a company continues on, because this momentum can't do anything else but continue on the current course.

It's why start ups can beat a behemoth.

I think it depends on the size of the company and who ends up being involved in the decision amking and when.

From what I have seen, the amount that someone is making can be a contributing factor. Maybe your performance reviews but that doesn't always paint a full picture of your actual performance since those are often kinda black and white.

In every layoff I have been a part of (wether or not I was personally affected) the managers found out the morning of and were not consulted before it happened. In more than a few cases someone critical was let go.

Making it mostly a numbers game.

Personal experience:

Counterexample 1: company had two products, one java one c++ based. Founders decided to focus on one product to extend runway. Everyone on 2nd product team laid off, regardless of perf reviews.

Counterexample 2: layoff needed to boost short term profit metrics for potential sale of company. Since focus is cost cutting, not long term viability, expensive folks targeted (ie senior high performers)

Counterexample 3 (union shop, yes rare I know but gov and academia often have union IT workers. Layoffs are purely seniority based (as in most recently joined union = first to be laid off)

HR requires at our company that entire teams be removed to show that the company is changing strategy.

This gets rid of good people, but it lower the risks of lawsuits.

Last layoff I was in, my boss was in the middle of writing my promotion paperwork. The people cut were mainly people with seniority ($$$). The company then sent my contact info to scammers in a probably well-intentioned attempt at placement help.

I've been at two small companies that had layoffs, and who was cut/retained was 100% based on what was best for the company (except some visa holders were retained). Which is what it should be.

What you said is one of the reasons a person can be laid off. Another is when the product, project, division, etc. is shut down and all personnel are laid off regardless of performance. Sure, they'll be given an opportunity to find a new role within the company but there are always far too few openings for more than a few to be retained.

In my experience performance reviews don't accurately differentiate the high performers vs the low performers. No one gets below average unless you are really struggling. The only real currency is if PMs want you on their team or not.

>No one gets below average unless you are really struggling.

Plenty of companies require someone to be rated below average. See "stack ranking" for example. Is it dumb? Probably. Is it common? Sadly yes.

My experience is that a list of employees ordered by (compensation/contribution) is created, sorted highest to lowest. Those nearer the top of the list are most likely to be let go, those lower on the list are most likely to stay. And, contribution != performance. Profitability (margin) and revenue growth of the product and team affect contribution as much as individual performance.

I don't think this is necessarily true for some larger companies. Sometimes, entire divisions are axed. It's more trouble than its worth (to the higher ups) to pick out the few good ones when the company is in turmoil. In startups, I agree, it's never "nothing to do with performance."

When whole orgs/product lines are cut, you’re laid off regardless of performance.

I work as a freelancer with a few clients who are tech-adjacent but not "the tech industry". I'm a programmer and web designer going on 30 years by now.

I loathe the tech industry. I despise the inhumanity and the hypocrisy. The very companies which grew out of a lofty movement which claimed it was going to change the world, revolutionize business, and do away with all the bad stuff in pre-computer-age corporate America…ended up simply replicating one new horror after another.

I've resigned myself to the idea I'm unemployable in tech—even though that's exactly where my skillset lies. I simply refuse to deal with this crap. I would rage quit the first interview where someone pulled shit like this and never look back.

I can't imagine I'm the only one. Companies are literally losing out on solid talent because their hiring practices are byzantine. Shame.

The free love vegan hippies of the 70's became the literal CEOs of the most soul crushing companies on the planet in time, the whole while telling themselves how they have done it better than their parents/forebears would have.

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