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Comment by ellisv | Hacker News Reader

Even if mostly the “right” people are laid off, laying off a wrong person can have a cascading effect.

Good people like to stick together. Get rid of a couple and the rest will start to leave.

Even if, from the company's perspective, if lays off all the "right" people, some of those people will be "wrong" from the point of view of other people on the team. Maybe the company didn't value a certain person, for corporate or HR reasons, but there's always a chance that person was a valued team member for human reasons.

Layoffs will lead to people leaving, regardless of how surgical or random they are.

Exactly. Somebody who is universally hated by their co-workers should just be let go. Nothing to do with a layoff. So everybody who is around has some reason for actually being there. In a well-managed place, that is.

> Somebody who is universally hated by their co-workers

How many times have we seen a company fire whoever they consider "dead weight" but keep the universally hated guy because he's a 10x rockstar whatever?

A 10x person who brings down 20 others to a small fraction of their potential and causes other rockstars to leave is still net-negative. Good management understands this.

(And I'm not sure why I'm downvoted for this. Nothing about that should be controversial?)

Exactly. So the company keeps the guy everyone hates after laying off people that get along. The next people to leave the company are the ones disgusted by the move.

Depends on the company. I've seen the opposite case were such a person was let go, much to everybody's relief. Some people had to clean up his mess, which was genius in the sense that it worked flawlessly, but nobody else could maintain it, so he had locked in a minimal bus factor. Which makes such a move harder to execute, but the earlier the better.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/we-fired-our-top-talent-be...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474893 (2017) (133 points | 130 comments)

I've seen the opposite happen: fire the unsocial guys and keep the social guys that do absolutely nothing but flame and troll on slack.

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