this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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Yeah… that’s probably sometimes true. But I also work in a tech company and holy fuck do we have a lot of dead weight.
That's a management problem. Managers should be getting poor performers up to speed (or firing them). Dealing with it through layoffs juices the stock and makes investors think the company is LeAn
I think thats a (shocker) overly simplistic approach to the dynamic. Layoffs are never a good look - and we’ve had an unprecedented boom time in tech for the last 20 years.
Companies were hiring just so competitors couldn’t. That doesn’t really happen anymore outside of AI.
We had what felt like make-work jobs, some nice guy or gal that no one wanted to fire who was “involved” but literally not responsible for anything.
Broad layoffs in the industry gave everyone cover to make unpopular decisions because everyone is doing it.
I don’t think - at least the ones I saw directly - it was the wrong choice.
Everything you described is still mismanagement.
Layoffs are considered a good look by big shareholders, though. Most of the time when the layoffs hit, the stock price goes up. Just look at Unity for a recent example. (I'm convinced they don't think it's good for the company and they just like seeing people suffer but i have no evidence for that.)
Layoffs aren’t a good look for a lot of shareholders unless the org is bloated. There are a variety of metrics to compare companies against each other in terms of head count efficiency.
Company values are basically just a view of future revenues minus expenses plus/minus sentiment. If you lower the company expenses, all else being equal, the share price should go up. Those shares are worth more.
But it also might say we’re not growing as fast as we thought we would or our business is challenged in other ways which will negatively affect sentiment.
Shareholders don’t like layoffs. They would much prefer you a) hired the right people the first time, b) hired the right number of people, or failing that c) grew into the number of people that you hired.
No one loves a declining business, and many businesses doing layoffs are - either outright declining or declining growth.
I agree with you but boy, here in America, employees are disposable assets, not potentially highly useful and reliable experts worth any kind of actually useful investment in or training.
I know. And that's not how it should be. I've had the privilege/luck of working in orgs where my management actually gave a shit and tried to do the best by their employees. If someone is struggling we do our best to get them back to performing or find them a position that works. I don't think we've ever had to fire anyone.
Cutting an arbitrary 10% of people (or a few underperforming products) is absolute bullshit. It's unfair to the employees because it doesn't give them a chance to improve, and it's unfair to customers because stuff they rely on disappears.
Sooo... good strategy then, if you're a capitalist sociopath...
Unfortunately cuts don't usually target the dead weight. I've worked in IT consulting for a while now, and cuts to consultants is always the first step. Just across the board, companies slash their consulting budgets blindly. Most of the time, we are leaving behind company critical systems to be supported by the "dead weight" people that couldn't tell their ass from a hole in the ground.
I'm currently on an integrated team, meaning half our developers are consultants and half are regular employees. The consultants consistently put out significantly higher quality work in a fraction of the time. But as of Jan 1, we cut almost all of them. And as of June, we're cutting the rest. What's going to be left behind is half the number of people that will put out less than a quarter of the results than before.
But the reality is that consultants are easy to cut. You don't have to call them layoffs or pay them severance.
That's because the better people leave to become consultants. People aren't going into consulting to make less money.
And does the dead weight get cut during layoff season? Or does it affect people who are capable but won't take bullshit from management?
I've seen both, sometimes middle management gets gutted and things are reorganized, sometimes it's more focused on the grunts.
You can only generalize it so far
I actually think we did a pretty good job - but our “layoff” was a mini one. Fractions of a percent. But of the people I knew, wasn’t worried about any of them. Felt bad for the people, they were all nice, but none of em were good at their jobs.
Quite a few sr directors and VPs were let go, or allowed to leave….
For me it finally did. A long time team member who in the past year probably had negative productivity was let go. Sucks for that person, but a big relief for everybody else.
Now this is Sweden where unions and labor laws are strong, so usually it’s difficult to fire long time employees like that.
I inherited a team when a manager left a nonprofit that I worked at. This was in the Netherlands, and in my earlier management training here we were basically told that the list of valid reasons to fire someone does not include poor performance.
Of the team, like 4 people were pretty good, a couple excellent, and two were basically dead weight. One even worse, because he was a constant source of negativity. I spent ages working on ways to figure out how to help, cajole, and otherwise magically somehow improve these two bad workers ability to contribute to our company.
Eventually in frustration I went to HR, and was like, "look at all this shit I've tried, what else can I do?" The head of HR was like, "Why did you waste so much time. We'll fire them." I was shocked, because I didn't think that was possible! It turns out that there is always a way to fire someone. You have to give them severance pay, but better pay someone to leave than have them ruining morale for everyone.
I talked to one of the people I fired a couple of years later. He thanked me. He was working for Greenpeace at the time, and basically said that he felt trapped at a good paying job, and getting fired gave him motivation. I also ran into the negative guy, and he remains a worthless shit.
Anyway the point is that management should not rely on layoffs to sort out staff issues. Sort out your problems when you have them.
Broadly from what I saw, it was pretty much all the people that didn’t do anything useful.
In fact a lot of them were the guys who didn’t give anyone shit, because they didn’t do shit.
I'm in tech and there's a lot of dead weight in my company, but our layoffs don't really target those people. We just lost several of the best engineers in my department for stupid reasons (introducing a new c-suite position), and it caused problems immediately.