As far as I can tell from anecdotal reports by friends at some of these companies, many of these tech layoffs have been done with little rhyme or reason - at least with regard to technical skill, individual contribution, and team cohesion. There's inklings of metrics that the suits decided on, but it is murky and unclear.
It seems like few to no people in any of their managerial chains were consulted.
I'm curious to hear from HNers if any of you were in the room that got to decide who got to stay and who had to go.
> It seems like few to no people in any of their managerial chains were consulted.
From a worker perspective, line and middle managers look like bosses.
From an executive perspective, they look like workers. They are usually also cut in layoffs (often disproportionately, even: increasing management span of control in layoffs is common.) If you consult with them on coming layoffs they’ll either try to protect themselves and the employees they see as key (regardless of the corporate objectives of the layoffs) – or they’ll bolt and try to get the best staff out safe with them before the layoffs hit and they are competing with others for limited opportunities.
> From a worker perspective, line and middle managers look like bosses. From an executive perspective, they look like workers.
A former employer had layoffs this week. Of the people I knew who were laid off, at least 60% were management. Many of them were at the Director level and up to VP and even an SVP.
You assume a lot. Or maybe project. In the cases where I've been close enough to see, the managers were maintaining empathy and professionalism toward their team members even as they were facing uncertainty themselves. That's still hard. Whether they were staying for the money doesn't change that. Managers are people too, and not everyone is motivated solely by money.
There is no way to lay off thousands of people with rhyme or reason. Too much to coordinate with too much secrecy/liability. So it ends up being really broad cuts, like:
- entire business unit or team
- everyone hired after date X
- everyone in geography Y
- everyone with some level and at or below a certain perf threshold
It's chops with an axe not incisions with a surgical tool.
Being really good can save you from that last bullet points but not the other. It can also help you find a new job that much faster.
In one case of layoffs this week, I know of people who were laid off that were in the first ~100 employees. I speculate that this specific layoff was purely financially motivated.
My employer had two rounds of layoffs recently. People from my team were let go both times. Neither time did my team lead get consulted. No higher manager regularly interacts with me or anyone else on the team, although I now have once a month meetings with a slightly more senior engineering lead.
I asked which factors led to being let go. First round, it was underperformers, then tenure. Second was purely tenure. Now I'm the most recent eng hire on the team. My tech lead insists I'm far too valuable to lose, and wouldn't be on the list for any future layoffs. But how could his boss know? Perhaps they care. Other teams got wildly upset when similarly critical people got let go, though, and I don't recall that being undone.
I have little information about my employer, my own future, or how these decisions will be made. That information would be valuable to me. I'm curious if there are employers who would prefer to make the change of more honor for less base pay. I might accept, depends on details.
> My tech lead insists I'm far too valuable to lose, and wouldn't be on the list for any future layoffs
I've been told things like this in the past. Each time it triggered my Spidey-Sense. I've yet to get hit by a layoff, but 75% of the tech companies I've worked for have experienced layoffs in the '00s, '10s, and now '20s.
The last time a manager told me this I took it as a sign of incoming trouble and found a new employer. That former manager, a VP, was laid off this week. As another HN user commented in this thread, most management are also just workers. As such, they don't have really have the pull to say these things. IMO, they're trying to stop the bleeding.
I was in a company where I was part of the middle management, and my upper management boss knew that we had to lay off some people in the company (mainly sales).
My boss asked me to select one person to be laid off, as we have been chosen to be reduced by a single headcount (sales saw much blood). I picked our newest guy; our ROI per person was a bit long, so it was an easy choice.
The upper management bargained about keeping some extraordinary people, but I was not in that meeting. I was in another discussion on votes about top performers, and that one got contentious as some personal preferences (favouritism) arose between managers.
From someone who has always been very close to management all my career and is now a manager. The unfortunate truth is a lot of this comes down to social capital. That is the starting point and then the rest is all figured out after.
We truly don’t have the metrics when we are asked for laying off large amounts of people. Any metric we might find would just be gamed so it comes down to how liked you are.
I work at one company named in recent headlines, and have friends at some of the others. These layoffs have been decided at levels too high to even know if someone is liked.
Sure, there are cases where the axe is swung broadly, and individuals cannot protect themselves because they were not individually targeted.
However the point of being "liked" is as good s proxy measure as any other. People like working with people they like. Things that get you liked are often related to either overall usefulness (I like, and thus protect, the people who make my day easier).
Like any measure it can be gamed, but it's certainly a measure that doesn't hurt to optimize. (no one was chosen to be cut because "they are well liked")
Conversely being disliked can certainly bump you up the queue.
After a long time in the industry what I like to do now is give each department head a budget target. Then they can decide however they want within that. If they want to then give their own lower managers a budget, great. Or they can do it themselves.
The point is I make each VP / director fight for budget, then once that’s decided, I wait and see what the results are. They may keep a very expensive person or they may keep more cheaper people. Up to them to know who to keep and who to lose.
I do stick my hand in the process occasionally to save someone I like, or have a history with. That’s my prerogative as a leader. But in general I defer to the process.
> many of these tech layoffs have been done with little rhyme or reason - at least with regard to technical skill, individual contribution, and team cohesion. There's inklings of metrics that the suits decided on, but it is murky and unclear.
Maybe it’s even simpler. We all complain about the interview process, but it doesn’t end there does it? The management kinda knows what you’re doing but at a very high level. The management has no idea how productive John is vs how productive jack is, unless jack is actively unpleasant to work with. Maybe it just turns into another kind of social popularity contest.
Exactly. Also good from laid-off person pov (considering...) as if it were just performance metric, most people wouldn't be able to get hired, or even considered for interview...
I've seen people argue that, but I actually think it's mostly supported by confirmation bias: when two people are laid off, one of them is a senior developer that works with many others and one is a fresh grad who started four months ago and hasn't worked outside her immediate team, many more people will hear that the senior developer is gone.
There are a lot of people high up in large organizations that do not care if the company loses individuals with high output and high skills. All they care about is making themselves look good and get promoted. So yes, if they can get a list of 10k people to fire together very quickly that may make them look good even if that list has no rhyme or reason to it.
But also there are people who are just barely productive enough to not get fired at these companies. Layoffs are a great time to get rid of them without going through all the effort of documenting that they are just barely not doing enough to keep the job. Large companies are afraid to fire people without good documentation of the person doing a bad job or something wrong because they could be sued for wrongful termination.
I was the CTO of a tech company where we needed to do layoffs or go out of business in a month. Layoffs extended our runway by 2 years if all else remained the same. It didn't last that long though. We got acquired a few months later and once debt was paid and the VCs got their cut there was just enough left to provide 3 months of severance to employees (my co-founder and I used our payouts to cover that - I walked away with less than $1k when all was said and done).
When I had to do layoffs, who got picked to be laid off was almost entirely random.
I say "almost" because before picking who would go, we first selected teams with redundant roles. For example, if a team had two mid-level backend engineers, they had redundant roles, and one of those two roles would be eliminated at random.
That was literally the only "thought" put into who got cut or not. Where we didn't have redundant roles, it was random. Directors got laid off, QA testers, facilities people. It was one of the worst experiences of my life.
Today I'm convinced that the only people safe when it comes to layoffs is the board of directors.
It doesn't go a long way to help people feel better, but if you're laid off, it's nearly 100% likely that it had nothing to do with your performance, whether or not you were "liked", tenure/seniority, or how much you got paid.
No one - no one - is irreplaceable. Long after you leave, your organizations will continue on, as they should.
Counterintuitively, trying to be irreplaceable will hamper your ability to share information, power, and credit. It’s much better to just be as generous as you can.
I've encountered several people who tried to do this... all of them were not as smart as they thought they were. I got 3 of the four to stop by saying "after we fire you I'll just have [the two smartest people they know] spend a month on your system do you think they'll figure it out"... they were like "yeah you're right" and became a lot more productive... the 4th we had to let go and it took about a month.
It depends. If someone is feint am asshole and tearing down the team, a “knock it off or else” approach is certainly a reasonable response, especially if done privately.
I'm not a manager, I'm a lead / pe. This is over 22 years that it's happened 4 times. 2 were at drinks and 2 were at mentoring sessions, all 4 were kinda struggling and looking for a safety net.
> Counterintuitively, trying to be irreplaceable will hamper your ability to share information, power, and credit.
Trying to be irreplaceable is bad enough, but imagine if you actually succeed in carving a niche out.
Being irreplaceable in a specific project often means that you get "left behind" in it while new projects get started elsewhere and gain more relevance in the company.
If you've made 3 pivots across different teams, it is much more likely you'll be absorbed into something new in the company than staying on a deserted island with dwindling budgets as the years go by.
It's arguable. No one is so valuable that they could never be let go, laid off, or fired, regardless of circumstance. That much is true, sure. But I have certainly seen projects veer off course, wither and die, or else crash and burn due to a coworker's involuntary departure. They were irreplaceable. Not that it saved their skin. Projects with a bus factor of roughly 1 happen from time to time, so the person who happens to equal that factor is de facto irreplaceable. The organization will move on as if everything's fine, but the loss of certain individuals may be far more expensive than anyone in charge is willing to acknowledge.
Furthermore on the matter of being irreplaceable, having been there at times, I've found it to be incredibly stressful bearing such responsibility and knowing it confers no actual job security makes it feel even worse.
One way to think of this is take a look back at the previous positions you've held, then left. Did any of those companies go out of business because you left? Were they (or the department) seriously injured? Now, ask yourself if they knew they would have major issues to overcome if you left. If they didn't, then even if they fell apart when you departed, then there was nothing stopping them from laying you off if a strong enough reason came about. If, however, they realized how bad things would be if you were gone, then they were negligent by not hiring redundancy.
What you need to do is make yourself as valuable to the company as you are willing to do (avoid burning yourself out though). Make sure you have a deep enough emergency fund, and enough expenses that you can cut to survive an extended unemployment. Chances are that if you are part of a mass layoff, that won't reflect as badly on you as if you got fired for other reasons. And if there is a severance package, don't panic right away -- you have time to address the situation properly.
Oh, and if you have enough time off before you land your next position, make sure you take care of yourself. The lack of work stress will do wonders to re-energize you, making you perform at a higher level at the next gig and hopefully exceed expectations (thereby setting you up for promotions etc).
Absolutely not. You have to understand how indiscriminate and capricious layoffs often are, especially for large organizations. Frequently the criteria for a layoff is crafted first in foremost with the goal of not being sued for discrimination. I worked for a very large, very well known global industrial giant. When the economic winds were too unfavorable they cooked up a layoff that was based entirely upon where the employee was located, and whether it was aligned with their "site strategy". So if you sat in the wrong location, you were gone, regardless of how good you were. They actually laid off one of the best and most valuable engineers that I ever worked with.
At least at a big company, RIF decisions are made at higher levels than anyone who knows anything about you or your work. Obviously people on PIP are in trouble, but beyond that there's not much you can do, unless you're Jeff Dean level.
I know two people at Google who were slotted for T (transformative) and O (outstanding) GRAD ratings who were laid off, along with their entire teams. There's only so much you can do.
> I know two people at Google who were slotted for T (transformative) and O (outstanding) GRAD ratings who were laid off, along with their entire teams. There's only so much you can do.
There's only so much you can do, but developers and other ICs often turn a blind eye to the actual wider business. Sometimes it's exceedingly obvious that the business unit, company, or even wider industry as a whole that you're working in is on a downward spiral, but people won't or can't recognize it.
The writing was on the wall for Twitter for many years. Alexa and Echo were clearly massive busts for many years. If you're still at a crypto company in 2023, you pretty much have to have resigned to just coasting until the inevitable layoff or company bankruptcy. If you're at Meta working on Metaverse/VR, don't say I didn't warn you when you get your layoff notice in a year or two.
If you want to avoid being laid off, join a company that makes money, and make sure you're in the part of the company that actually makes money. The crazy new tech and R&D groups might be the most fun, but they're also going to be the first to get slashed.
For the concrete situation I mentioned above, they were in a part of Google that was profitable, but just not profitable enough. (The Google graveyard is going to have a lot more tombstones over the next couple months.)
But, yeah: all other factors being equal, it's always better to join a company that's making money in the org that makes the most money.
As an ancillary point, I think ICs and anyone who isn't empowered to influence things should turn a blind eye to them, and do the absolute least you can to get your work done. Obviously exaggerating a bit here, but you should absolutely not try very hard at a bigger company. Distance yourself emotionally from the political powers at play, and just do the things that are asked of you, no more. The idea that hard work == more reward is a fantasy that boomers' retirement depends on.
Your last example is the opposite of this, if there's a clear path between work and outcome, either for the company and/or yourself, then make a call that works for you.
The larger the company, the less likely your performance even matters. When they are laying off entire teams and divisions based on entries tabulated in a spreadsheet, no one gives a shit that you are the one that gets called on the weekend to help troubleshoot a critical service that no one but you really understands. Your salary and benefits are just a tally in the "costs" column that has to be reduced.
That's exactly how it is. I still remember going into the office, when the company was going through some very tough period, and sitting with the directors and other managers. All we had was a spreadsheet with employee names, positions, and their salaries. Then,one by one we removed as many as it was possible and then people got made redundant.
For software engineering orgs, I try to push a practice of lightweight effective internal documentation.
Part of my argument sometimes -- to handle objections about job security from keeping info in one's head -- has been that people shouldn't worry about it hurtig job security, because the people who are conscientious about documenting will be recognized as too good of engineers to lose.
But when we're seeing a frenzy of layoffs across the industry (even by companies making huge profits), it's harder to say that job security isn't a concern.
(I'll still push on documentation, because it's important good practice for the team's success, and we're doomed if individuals start thinking they need to hoard the company's knowledge. But I'll have to be thinking of better ways that people's livelihood interests can be covered.)
Do you have any more information on "lightweight effective documentation"? I never seen it work in practice. If there is a method thay has worked for you I would be keen to hear.
We can start with the obvious part, everyone, literally EVERYONE, from the part time intern janitorial contractor, to the demigod CEO are completely replaceable.
If you dropped dead today, the team you’re on will have already divided up your tasks and recovered by the end of the week. Your division, let alone the company, will never even notice you’re gone.
That’s just the honest truth.
The second hard truth is, getting laid off is not your fault or a reflection of your abilities. It’s about an edict that came down from the c-suite. This is why entire teams are laid off. There’s very little rhyme or reason to these things. Don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s inevitable that you’ll eventually get hit.
If anything, it reflects on the incompetence of upper management. Microsoft admits to hiring 10,000 too many people? Whose fault is that, Jake in SRE? No! It’s Satya Nadella’s fault.
I sometimes wonder if these seemingly random layoffs at top tech companies, irrespective of whether they were high performers would cause reputational damage to a level where they would have to pay even more money the next time they need to hire talent.
I'm assuming top tier talent isn't going to want to work for you if you're gonna be randomly laid off, not to mention people on work visas who need to maintain a job to stay.
The problem is being essential isn't the same as job security. You can wind up with new leadership that dislikes the old guard, or entire divisions or businesses being wiped out by a small circle of executives and accountants that don't actually understand how anything get done in practice.
Job security is the ability to go get another one. I suppose that's a place where being really good and someone people like working with can be extremely helpful.
The dot com bust was so much worse (so far) because you had teams and companies and markets just vaporize. Made me pretty sour for a few years, but realizing it helps now to one, keep the current cuts in context (not too bad), and two, that even if the world seems to be falling apart, things do get better.
Another silver lining is the junior devs not asking "Why are you still working at your age? I'll be retired by 35" :-)
Many years ago Chris Espinosa (Apple Employee #8) gave a talk at MacHack about how to stay in a job at Apple for so long. (This would have been around 2000 and he had been there since the 70s.) His conclusion was that you should be obscure but irreplaceable. That is do something that nobody else understands, but that is necessary to keep things running. Seems to have worked for him!
No one is so good that they can't be laid off. The entire point of the way production is practiced is to ensure that labor fungible. To think otherwise is an exercise in ego stroking.
You are a mercenary. Who you work for and the work itself are inconsequential, and you could be out the door at a moment's notice. It is not a family, and the job is never going to love you back. Do not get emotionally invested. You will suffer.
It is not about being good. Good people (exceptional people even) get laid off and fired too. Rather, be "So Prepared You Head To The Pub and DGAF, The New Gig Starts Monday." Low burn rate, substantial emergency fund, robust retirement and investment accounts, being able to negotiate from a position of power, professional network to rely on, etc.
Sales people are the exception to this. If a salesperson has a 10M deal that he is about to close within the next 6 months, it is a really bad idea to fire him, since he will probably tell the customer that your company isn't that great.
Every employment contract I've signed, or that I can at least remember, stipulated that you can be sued if you interfere with their client relationships after leaving.
Agree with you that it's a bad idea to axe liaisons while deals are going through, but at the same time clients agreeing to deals at that stage will probably still see them through despite their sales contacts leaving.
Everyone being replaceable is a concept that is emotionally hard to wrap your head around, especially when you're the one being replaced, but it is undoubtedly true. Even Caesar was replaced, I think they can replace a programmer or PM/AM, etc.
That being said, I did leave my previous company for a better opportunity and am on occasion reached out to from that company or even that company's own customers for assistance on specific items. Still replaceable, but there is learned knowledge that can be a deficit for a while or even forever, especially if it is simply not profitable to have someone learn it or it exists without maintenance for so long that no one remembers or knows how to fix/remedy if it ever does need maintenance.
It’s always humbling to be in a position where you think “there’s no way this place will survive without me” but it seems like the show goes on, no matter what.
I don't think this post really views this from the perspective of the company. Why do companies do layoffs? Well, many reasons, but in general they feel a need to spend less money but intend to get better results. To some extent that means laying off people who are poor at their jobs and keeping people who are good at their jobs. This is almost impossible, because the good people are the most willing to leave, and the bad people are most motivated to politic. So the company is going to lay people off and realistically, it's not going to be about who is good or bad. There is some sense though, cuts are not going to hit core parts of the business first.
One of the curiosities of this is that the rockstar engineers often want to go and build something incredible and new. But those are the exact types of places where management will turn around and say "Yo! Why do we have 50 extremely expensive engineers working on this weird project bringing in no money". So you can go where the interesting work is, but often that's the most precarious position. Do you think the mediocre engineer working on Facebook's timeline is more or less at risk than the Rockstar building a new UI for Meta's next headset? I know who shareholders would want to keep.
The only way to get so good they can't lay you off is to be in the room where selection criteria happens. That's typically middle management (not line management to be clear).
On the one hand, the severance packages at all of these places are so generous that I would want to get laid off in order to work on side projects, take a vacation, play with some startup ideas...
Maybe that's why I don't work at any of these places. I'm sure many of these folks are dependent on their very high salaries to maintain their lifestyle, but seems like a golden opportunity for some temporary freedom that we're not often afforded in the USA.
Owning a company is safe? Not at all. It might not be called a “layoff” but you can sure fail at it.
Also, you can maybe build something people want today but we can’t predict what the future will bring.
It is comforting to think we have some influence on our fate. But also comforting (more comforting, I think) to let go of the illusion that we have control.
If you take other people's money to run a business, those people can run you out if they feel you're a detriment to their investments. Investors can afford legal battles, and if you're taking other people's money, chances are you won't be able to outspend them in court.
An industry term I used to hear was 'golden handcuffs', but that was didn't necessarily mean being 'so good' over rather some culture of corporate politics.
Employee B will be put in a "it's time to train your replacement" scenario and will be let go.
Employee B would have probably been dealt with way before layoffs, as well. Relying on an oracle is a roadblock that will have, at the very least, annoyed anyone who had to work with them. That oracle is an easily recognizable bottleneck.
at what point is a business allowed to be a business and run itself for profit (even more than it is making now) without being “judged” for the mean stuff it has to do?
it isn’t personal that it gave people a job and then took it away
they don’t owe it to anybody to sacrifice their profit so others can have a job
> at what point is a business allowed to be a business and run itself for profit (even more than it is making now) without being “judged” for the mean stuff it has to do?
Never. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, losing homes, filling prisons. The majority stockholders are of the CEO class. They aren't in any danger of life-impacting loss if they have a lick of financial sense. Dividends to the cronies and axe to the peasants is never going to be popular with anybody but cronies and bootlickers.
A company can run itself without regard for anything but profit. That's been a winning strategy for quite a while now. There's no amount of money they can make that will prevent them being judged for it though.
It's always interesting that some focus more on those who speak their minds about something than the actual actions taken that are being criticized, as if the real problem is people having opinions and speaking freely about them. It feels like the root sentiment is "X can do whatever they want, but you're not allowed to do the same by saying anything about it."
Salesforce did this way before anyone else, during the actual pandemic.
M$FT has been quietly doing this for eons. It's just that they are good at doing this without laying off a massive number of people at a time. So for M$FT this layoff seems like it's about posturing and being "in line" with the market, which makes it even crappier than it really is.
I disagree. When someone gets laid off there’s different emotional responses. Sadness, anger, guilt, wtf, etc.
Look at it as a narrative of how someone’s journey in their mind progressed after a major event. There’s no such thing as “so good they can’t lay you off” - that’s the point. The authors conclusion is that focusing on what you offer versus what you can lose, you’re never lost.
That's fine, and it's also fine to share it on HN, but the title should reflect that it's just an introspection post layoff rather than a more researched article.
Nobody's so good that they can't be laid off, because layoffs are rarely about function or skill. Layoffs are mostly political; They're about which parts of the company are successful as a whole viewed by the CEO.
You can be so good that the business will fail without you[1], but you cannot be so good that the business cannot lay you off.
[1]though that itself should be a firing offense; It's impossible to tell that from "job security through code obscurity" and the latter should be assumed.
It seems like few to no people in any of their managerial chains were consulted.
I'm curious to hear from HNers if any of you were in the room that got to decide who got to stay and who had to go.