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Comment by jarsin | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. Every layoff i have seen personally or through close friends at other company's the ass kissers survive and those t hat threaten them get laid off. Those that threaten them (the competent ones) are always painted as non team players because generally the competent ones are unhappy when the teams gain so many slick talking ass kissers but few doers.

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Competent people need to know the political basics, it's like defensive driving.

http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/04/politics-101-chapter-3-...

http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/05/politics-101-chapter-3-...

This is good stuff. Thanks for the links. I have seen many times and even done the withdraw and become cynical that they talk about. In my case I hated the entire company so it was a bigger issue.

I will say though that when companies lay off competent people one thing I see time and time again the competent people that survived (who probably are better at the politics) always abandon ship. Its very demoralizing watching the kick ass coder you work with go and Joe Slick that never checked in one line of code stay.

So its really not in a companies interest to get rid of those that can do their jobs well even if they are not wise on the politics.

One remedy for this in the software world would be to publish detailed credits for key employee names/roles associated with software releases, something that is done in the film industry where people care very much about where their name appears in the opening and closing credits.

Great teams are quite rare and short-lived. One specific version of a software product can be fantastic due to the short-lived team that designed and built that one release. You see this clearly with hardware, e.g. the 2012 version of device model XYZ earns a higher price in the resale market. It would be great if the teams building these positive exceptions could be recognized, as they scatter and reform across companies.

In the comments sections someone also recommended this great talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_prager_in_search_for_the_man...

I'm sorry but the first one was 20 minutes of "the world is not fair. Some people think its fair but it's not" repeated for 20 minutes.

The second one was "You need to observe people's actions and understand why they do things" repeated for 20 minutes.

Those are both very helpful points but I think people would be better served with some advice or techniques.

For example: Discuss your plans with each person one by one before a big meeting so that everyone will be more likely to see it your way in the big meeting.

One challenge is that naturally talented people often don't understand why the facts are insufficient. Others who are less talented often needed to develop political skills for survival. Agree that those links are basic (hence Politics 101), but convincing technical folk to care about this topic isn't easy.

One needs to understand offense in order to play defense. Here are some books with timeless techniques for those with ethical intentions:

1) Herb Cohen, You can Negotiate Anything (general)

2) Chris Malburg, How to Fire Your Boss (labor)

3) Robert P. Smith, Riches Among the Ruins (sales)

Re: big meetings. Herb Cohen points out that most meetings are the end of the negotiation, not the beginning :)

So the solution is to join the ranks of the lying ass-kissers? Who would be left to do any work?

That's not suggested in my post, the references or most interpretations of the word "defensive".

You don't need to read that much. Most people on HN aren't going to be next Petur Balish, but if you want to protect your job what you should do is find the guy who is the best political player and make sure his job is secure only so long he has your technical expertise. Now it is in his interest to keep you around and your job is almost as safe as his is.

If you want to read more, get a copy of How to Make Friends and Influence People, or 40 Laws of Power (depending on how evil you are okay with being).

Companies should lay off products, not people. How can a company expect to support the same products with fewer people? The hoped for efficiencies from laying off the "dead weight" are probably small. The company should kill its loser products and focus on its winners. "More wood behind fewer arrows."

Michael O. Church wrote more about this in a recent blog post:

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/why-corporate...

The last layoffs at Microsoft were largely cutting products, it was an utter failure IMHO- there were very few teams who were allowed to hire and so many rockstar devs taking a chance on products which got cut were left in the cold. I saw way too many awesome devs get pushed out of the company because their product was canceled and the project they wanted to work on had no headcount.

> Companies should lay off products, not people.

Layoffs are generally associated with reduced mission scope, even if its not a reduction in named product lines (it can, e.g., involve reduction in supported platforms for the same area of named products.)

Still, reducing products or otherwise reducing mission scope on its own doesn't save money, you still have to cut people. Especially if the scope reduction doesn't neatly follow organizational lines, there may be no direct mapping between scope reduction and which positions get eliminated, and even if there is, if you have good and meaningful performance metrics and similar skill requirements across the parts of the mission that are preserved and those that are retained, not simply mapping from the functions reduced to the people let go makes sound business sense.

There needs to be an org change first- flattening the hierarchy and a focus on getting shit done. Put in a process where teams can jettison inefficient members.

In most areas at Microsoft above level 65 it is all politics.

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