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Comment by rcatcher | Hacker News Reader

> Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.

How did the company decide who to lay off? They didn't even ask EMs?

Almost 99% sure that They hired a consultant firm (MBB) that told them who to cut; this is pretty standard practice now at public tech corps. Especially if EMs weren’t in the loop. This looks like purely a margin improvement exercise thats hiding weaknesses in the company’s financial performance.

I’m sure they don’t know what they are doing or necessarily care, but I’m still curious what the consultants even claim to be looking at to make the list? Job description, git activity, team level profitability, salary, etc?

They probably claim all of it, but likely only job description.

"You have 20 guys that can code, so you can get rid of two of them".

Employees are treated as a cost which is why you often see the strongest performers inexplicably laid off (since they are likely compensated higher). In situations like this they don’t care about productivity; leadership is given a list and they can move a few people around but for most its game over once they’re on it.

EMs are never in the loop for layoffs for companies of this size, because the whole company would just get forewarning of the layoffs

Thats usually correct for these “surprise” layoffs. For the ones that are announced in advance there is a bit more coordination (like the meta/amazn ones).

At Amazon managers absolutely are not in the loop for layoffs. I would very much doubt they are at meta.

Wow! Is there any good read on that, like even if a "YouTube" show or something? This is quite interesting.

If you know anyone that works at MBB they would be happy to share this with you; if you’re in SF just hit any bar for a weeknight happy hour and you will 100% find someone.

Yeah, honestly this is where LLMs shine since they were trained on so many MBA/HBS materials. Just remember to ask your questions in a way that praises neoliberalism and you'll unlock even more secrets about how they fuck over and alienate workers.

I really don't know. My org now has 40+ engineers with 2 managers. Down from 6. I really don't know how they will do it. Each one of us were handling critical shit, and desperately needed more engineers. PMs made things run and they got hit even harder

No one had any idea. My director got the same email

This style of layoff seems far more common post-2020 than targeted "restructuring". I've lived through a few layoffs now, survived most of them, but each time and at each company I've gotten by on an apparent roll of the dice and nothing more. Every time I've seen some truly important ICs get let go, their EMs having no input.

My boss had no idea layoffs were even coming, so who knows how they picked.

Companies have so much data on employees/products/customers etc these days the EM's opinion is just noise.

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