I don't think you need to "justify layoffs". If a company feels an employee is not being productive, they should be allowed to let them go. Same way if an employee feels he is getting underpaid or wants to work somewhere else, they should be allowed to leave.
I've actually always liked working for companies in which the objective was straight forward. None of this "we're a family" stuff. You should be kind, and all the places I was at were kind. But layoffs are a reality and reducing headcount at times is part of that. You need a way to get rid of dead wood, otherwise you would be too afraid to grow and hire when you need to.
In demanding industries, people spend 2/3rds of their waking hours around their coworkers. That's practically their whole life. It's cruel to encourage coldness in such an environment. You aren't family. But, you can be comrades. Your friendships can be forged through shared struggles, shared spaces and convenience.
It's a unique trait of tech companies to encourage cold but polite relations with your coworkers. Other industries have layoffs, politics and capitalistic competition. That doesn't stop coworkers from becoming friends.
The new generation is more isolated than ever before. The workplace is one of the few remaining mandatory social spaces. We should encourage the organic warmth that builds up between coworkers. It's cliche. But we're social animals.
> It's a unique trait of tech companies to encourage cold but polite relations with your coworkers.
I don't know how you can assert this, among any other "stuck in a cubicle" office environment. Opportunities to be social are brief anyway. I'm on the side of 'give people time off enough to develop relationships outside of work'. 4 day work weeks would go a long way to helping people get the socializing we need.
The problem is the lack of "everyday" socializing, and commute is the cause of that. In ye olde heavy industry days, workers lived relatively near to their workplace, and often gathered for a beer after work - just visit any of the old heavy industry towns here in the Ruhrpott, there's so damn many pubs situated closely to the mines, pits and smelters. That also was the prerequisite for why and how unions got popular - the employer could ban unions from entering the workplace itself, but they could not restrict political activity on third party places such as beer halls.
Today, all of that is gone. Average commute times tend to be measured in hours, so with regular "overtime" you're looking at 12 hours of being away from home for work purposes - eight hours of working , two hours of commute, one hour of lunch break, one hour of overtime. And on top of that, work is condensed ever more by everything being tracked, can't even take a piss any more as a call center worker before the supervisor gets a notification that you haven't picked up a call in 60 seconds.
Let's be a bit gracious. A big issue is how much value is destroyed forcing people who don't necessarily want to live in a big city to live in a big city. Take Dallas. If you condense it into a 10 mile super city, you lose the sprawl. You gain a short commute, maybe? But you now have people sitting on top of each other. Is this good? No more sprawl, sure. But good?
> But you now have people sitting on top of each other. Is this good?
Yes, it's good. The US seems to have either massively spaced out single family housing, or high density skyscrapers. That's not good.
Most other part of the world, and even older US cities before the urban sprawl started, have reasonable densities where you share a wall or a ceiling/floor with only one other family, or not that many. It's sociable, especially if the housing offers a third space (such as a shared green or a courtyard), and the density is such that amenities are no more than a few minutes walk.
So many neighborhoods could be fixed by adding front/backyard ADUs, converting a handful of houses into commercial amenities tuned for the local community (cafes, small convenience/grocery stores, small libraries/coworking spaces, with minimal parking), and car-inaccessible passthroughs to nearby neighborhoods. There's way too much of a focus on building walkable communities, and not enough on converting existing ones with these small changes that don't disrupt the character in the way huge developments might (and in some cases might lend character to cookie-cutter sprawl that has none).
The problem is, converting an existing setup isn't easy. You just can't go and tear down houses that you got by using eminent domain - you need to either pony up a metric shit ton of money or you need to wait decades, no one will grant eminent domain to build a cafe and convenience store.
And even if you'd manage to acquire the property, you'd need to deal with zoning accomodation to allow non-residential use and that's where the NIMBYs will seriously throw wrenches wherever they can because it will mess with their property values.
Building from scratch doesn't have any of these associated efforts.
NIMBYs make new developments difficult to produce, too, actually, and for similar reasons: zoning and environmental laws. New developments also cost more, because you're putting in all-new infrastructure, whereas many old communities are approaching their replacement dates for water and sewer and whatnot anyway. You might as well get the most bang for your buck by introducing more avenues for generating property taxes (ADUs, subdivided lots, and especially commercial establishments).
Also, you don't need to tear anything down. Small neighborhood-use commercial establishments can be converted from existing housing.
This is a small neighbourhood. There are all types of houses there. To your right is half of a regular semi-detached house having become a small pub, and its garage is a barbershop. The other half is still a normal house.
To your left, the two end houses on a terrace are joined to make a shop.
It adds immediate value to the neighbourhood, as the people who live there need walk no more than a few steps to get their milk and bread, to enjoy some social company in the evening, or to get their hair cut.
You'll also notice the density is nothing like US suburban houses with their masses of space all around each one. And if you travel a little further down the road, you'll see there are more shops not that far away!
Planning permission is handled by the local council, but it is mostly standardised. This would be conversion of usage class C3 (normal house) to A1 (shop) or A4 (pub). Councils have a list of things they're allowed to consider in planning applications (and solicit comments from the public for 21 days), called Material Considerations, and things they're not allowed to consider.
For example, they are allowed to consider traffic and parking, appearance of the area, noise and disturbance, loss of sunlight or daylight, etc. But they are not allowed to consider the effect on business or property values, or the reputation of the applicant.
And the best part is that we don't even need to get this dense. Americans love our greenery, and there's space for that, just not multi-square-mile neighborhoods with NO commerce and housing only a few hundred (or a few dozen!) families. This is where planning IS helpful: identifying places to keep green-space, while also filling in dead-space.
Increasing density within the core allows people to switch to walking, cycling and transit. It reduces road traffic and those who want to commute from the burbs gain a faster commute. New housing isn't zero sum. Increasing housing in the core doesn't reduce housing in the outskirts.
The new Caltrains are a good model for transit as a valid mode for suburban commuting. A table, chair and wifi allows commuting to be a productive period to get work done. Boston's commuter rail & NYC's LIRR routes are also excellent, though they could use technological (wifi, charging, tables) upgrades. It doesn't make the commute shorter, but allows you to leave early and continue work on the train.
Not everyone wants to be required to purchase and operate a 5-figure transportation device where you must be abled to operate it, it depreciates to dust and might kill you in a crash, etc. Why is that the standard of “freedom” but “living on top of each other” is a bad thing?
Comfortable suburbs do not have to be wasteful of land, purposefully difficult to walk around, and built so that you must own a car to get around. You can live in a single family home without consuming an excessive amount of land. There are many examples of single family homes suburbs and neighborhoods within city limits where land isn’t wasted like crazy and residents are confined to living life in their vehicles.
Americans literally spend thousands of dollars on vacations to the great cities of the world (and Disney World) where people gladly “live on top of each other” in order to enjoy the benefits of walkable urban fabric.
I will also point out that sprawl is horrendous for the natural environment. Dense cities are better for the planet and our long-term survival. Replacing fertile farmland and natural habitats with development has negative consequences. Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs.
> Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs.
What is the benefit of having this type of argument with people? It sounds like you're saying that you'd prefer to live in a fascist dictatorship that just bulldozes insufficiently-dense neighborhoods as it builds large, dense apartment blocks downtown to forcibly relocate the residents into, for the "good of humanity." Setting aside logistics of this (such as who's going to pay for that project, how many gestapo do you need to force people out of their homes) you first would need absolute dictatorial powers -- and I bet you will say you don't want that. You just want all of the non-city people to all change their minds at once and move to the city. Not really a proposal that's going to be very impactful, because that's never going to happen. For one thing, because most of the people who already live in the city hate the idea of building any new housing anywhere at any time. They hate low-income housing because it's wildly unfair to give it to a lucky few while everyone else struggles, and they hate market rate housing, because (eat the rich/hate those gentrifiers/etc). And everyone agrees they would hate for Transit System or the streets to become more congested.
It's better to focus, instead of on shame, on making the cities that already exist more attractive to people you think should want to live there. Work on crime, work on transit that makes people be glad to not be driving, rather than miserable that they can't afford to park a car there as they watch a full bus bypass their stop or wait 25 minutes for one to come. But also, cities would need to have a lot more high quality housing large enough for families, which again isn't something the suburbanites can fix for cities.
> It's better to focus, instead of on shame, on making the cities that already exist more attractive to people you think should want to live there.
This is exactly what's needed. People should stop trying to convince others that they should be forced out of their homes and into high density apartment complexes where no one drives and instead demonstrate an alternative to having private homes and backyards that's actually more attractive. If it's actually better, people will go there naturally and demand more developments like it.
Exactly! And the funny part is, this exact thing is what’s being done on a small scale, and there are a ton of willing buyers for those developments. The main problem is that, due to the massive supply constraints imposed by urban NIMBYs, they are way too expensive for most Americans to afford living in, so the whole thing is just a nonstarter for most. Sure I’d love to live on the cutest walkable street in Brooklyn or whatever. Those houses cost $3 million though.
I never said non-city people all need to move to cities. In fact, small towns predate automobiles by thousands of years, and are not examples of urban sprawl. Furthermore, there are examples of suburbs and small towns that are well-served by transit, don't waste land wildly, and don't force you to own a car. [1]
I'm just saying that American zoning and regional planning should be adjusted to use land better and be more focused on humans than vehicles. I'm not saying that everyone needs to live in a studio apartment, nor that the government should use eminent domain to re-develop vast swaths of land and displace people. But simple things like zoning law changes can impact the direction of the future.
You've done a lot of talking about freedom, facscism, and dictatorship of being forced to live in close quarters. I would submit that the opposite has its own aspects of this "dictatorship." For example, you are forced to buy an automobile from a corporation (and most of them sold today track your every move and sell data to insurance companies [2]). You are forced to risk personal injury to drive that vehicle on the road rather than a safer alternative like walking, biking or transit. You are forced to change your job or lifestyle or home if you ever lose the ability to drive yourself by age or disability.
You say that the non-city people will never move to the city, but that has literally already been happening in the past 20 years or so.
Finally, I will point out that cities are already making themselves more attractive in exactly the way you describe. Crime has been plummeting in the last 30 years, city streets are being reconfigured to favor livability, blight is being redeveloped, and more housing is being built. For example, downtown Cleveland, Ohio has more people living downtown now than at any point in history, since before urban flight and regional population decline ever occurred.
I would also submit the idea that it's something of a misconception that cities don't have any family-friendly housing. Sure, NYC isn't a great example, but many other cities have plenty of suitable dwellings at affordable prices. Just because they aren't square footage maxxing doesn't mean they are inadequate.
I also think that many suburbanites visualize themselves as living in "small towns" when they really live in somewhat large cities in their own right that really could be entirely traversed by walking, cycling or taking financially sustainable transit like a modest bus system if they weren't made up of haphazardly parceled off farmland with winding streets rather than an easily traversed grid that has some level of long-term planning rather than a haphazard piecemeal development plan based on which farmers are selling.
Today, nobody is really being “forced” to live in either of those environments. Anybody who doesn’t want to own a car and wants to walk everywhere and hates sprawl can live in a city - as long as that city contains a home that fits their family and budget.
It’s not the fault of the suburb people that the people who control city governments, the city dwellers themselves, continually thwart the building of housing in cities that is both suitable for families in terms of things like bedroom count, and affordable (dictated almost entirely by the amount of supply, but sadly all of those in charge seem to have failed economics class so they don’t acknowledge that fact).
Also, re:crime
SF for one still has a lot more crime than the state average by all types of crime except murder, and has more crime than its surrounding suburbs. The murder stat is nice, but I still don’t like how much Rape has gone up since 2011 in these stats. Overall the line that crime is way down across the board is not proven by long-term trends. I’m sure it is for some cities, but not all.
This is a great comment. And don't forget, small towns can be walkable too. Old small towns anyway. So it's not just cities that are dense, rather it's modern suburbs aren't dense.
But how will we ever solve this when people don't seem to care?
Definitely. Are you in the US? Here in the suburbs things are just awful. Massive houses with 1 to 2 people, massive yards, many suburbanites grow no plants at all. It's very different from both rural neighborhoods and urban neighborhoods. But suburbanites tend to like it, and recent urban sprawl decisions in my area have been approved despite voices against them. And again to your question, people aren't happy with commutes now ... to get _anywhere_ in American suburbs you have to drive constantly. It's a draining way of life, that I can't even begin to describe well.
The US has already experimented with the theory that nobody wants to live in a dense city: urban sprawl is ubiquitous and also why all of our cities have the same problems.
It would be nice to have other options more like the dense cities in other parts of the world that Americans vacation to because they are far more pleasant to be in.
One single east asian style metropolis in the US would be nice.
I strongly disagree, because that argument just becomes an attack on people's freedom of movement rather than an attack on the structural issues which led to long commutes being the least-worst option for many people.
This is evident in the way people immediately screech “induced demand!!!!1” the second anyone talks about widening a road, like the point of building _anything_ isn't for people to use it. Nobody ever says induced demand when we build houses and people want to live in them lol
If somebody widens a road and it's instantly filled with more cars that's not "induced" demand, the demand was clearly already there, just not being met by the narrow street.
Destinations drive demand, not traffic lanes. A road can be so inadequate that the traffic makes it painful enough that might I decide to just stay home when I'd rather go somewhere, but the demand is obviously there either way. Infrastructure should enable us to do the things we want and get to the places we want to be.
I don't understand how people view making or keeping streets so shitty that many people can't or won't use them to get to where they want to go as a good thing.
> If somebody widens a road and it's instantly filled with more cars that's not "induced" demand, the demand was clearly already there, just not being met by the narrow street.
Widening the road doesn't necessarily create demand (although it may, by making a given route more attractive to folks who would otherwise have worked/shopped/traveled elsewhere), but it does shift demand away from mass transit and towards individual vehicles.
That makes no sense because the original issue is everyone living so far from work that they never make time to gather near work with coworkers because that time is spent commuting. How they get to and from has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Have you tried walking in Houston? Everything is so far apart on a block by block level (crossing the street) and people are flying down the roads while parking gobbles up real estate everywhere.
I agree with the first sentence, but not the rest: even 4 days of work and 3 days of weekend means I am still around work friends more than I am around outside-of-work friends.
I'm also wondering if a 4 day work week would only then make it easier to work two jobs, since there will be people who don't want to be 'idle' for three days, and others who will not use that time to be more social.
There's a difference between professional warmth and "we're a family". The latter usually comes top-down, from management and is fundamentally disingenuous. It's often a self-serving way of trying to get you to treat the company as your family, while company leadership still won't hesitate to lay you off in a mass zoom meeting. It's fine to be friends with co-workers or managers, but don't let companies obscure the fundamental nature of the relationship.
That doesn't seem all that unusual for the Silicon Valley darlings. The days of FAANG employees playing table-tennis all day and heading home at 4:30 ended a while ago
Agreed wholeheartedly. I'm not certain it's the company encouraging it, though. IMHO it's far more the economic realities we find ourselves in, where holding onto the same job for an extended period of time is basically, according to all casual career advice, fucking yourself over in terms of compensation.
My generation has been encouraged by this reality since we entered the workforce to change jobs every few years, because companies are so stingy with raises. If you're planning to do that, you naturally keep distance with your coworkers; they're probably leaving before you are, and even if not, you are planning to.
Companies see no value in their existing workforce and it's honestly quite self-defeating and stupid. "Losing" any worker be it to their choice, or layoffs, or whatever it might be is a genuine LOSS to your team. It's however many months or years of experience not just with code, but with your code-base, your business, and your products going out the door. The fact that so many companies lose so many good people because they simply refuse to let an employee have a bit more money is honestly mind-bending; and once they're gone, they'll happily list their job online, often with a salary range even higher than the employee they just fired wanted.
> It's cruel to encourage coldness in such an environment.
You're straw-manning. The person you're replying to never once mentioned being cold, let alone encouraged it.
They simply expressed a preference for companies that don't try to pretend that their mission and purpose is something other than what it is.
I've worked in tech exclusively my entire 25+ year career. And I've worked for way more companies that try to put on a front of "we're a family" than the opposite.
As someone who has worked as an employee and owned businesses (often simultaneously), I'm on board with the parent. I don't want coldness in the workplace. But I also don't want employees or co-workers who don't respect that we're here to build something that we're offering for sale on the marketplace either, least of all in a highly competitive landscape where we're under constant threat of going out of business if we don't get productivity and efficiency right.
I want my businesses to be enjoyable places to work. But at the end of the day, if I'm paying money for someone who isn't pulling their weight then I am extremely resentful of anyone who tries to get in the way of me correcting the fact that they are effectively ripping me off and, by doing so, hurting every single one of their co-workers by hurting their employer.
Succeeding in business is hard. And while there are a lot of shady businesses out there, and a lot of big corps do things we take issue with, 99.9% of businesses are making the world a better place for you to live by producing everything from the concrete that paves your sidewalks, to the shippers that get food from farm to your table. The anti-business, anti-capitalism attitudes that are so prevalent in the west are truly disturbing.
By all means be pro-worker. But there really ought not be a conflict between business and employee since, at the end of the day, it is a mutually beneficial relationship. Business can't succeed without its employees, employees don't earn a cent if the business doesn't earn a profit. And lets not forget that what a business can afford is irrelevant. The business doesn't exist to employee people. It exists to produce the goods or services that it set out to in order to turn a profit. And there is nothing wrong with that. An employee that hates the profit motive is one I don't want working for me. You're hopefully profiting by being employed. Otherwise I don't know what you're doing with your life. So stop the hypocrisy and double standards. We're not a family, and we don't need to be cold to each other, but we're in this shit show together so let's act like reasonable, rational actors and do our fucking jobs so we can all take home money and feed our families and savings.
The term 'layoffs' in this context is simply not what you're describing.
These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.
And, yes, of course layoffs are something that need to be justified, just as with firing an individual employee, as you know -- the "employee is not being productive" is a justification.
>These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.
Isn't that most layoffs? Think of the layoffs post GFC. Did the subprime mortgage crisis suddenly make everyone incompetent, or are companies simply trying to trim budgets and need to hit some number? If it's actually due to poor performance, it would be through a PIP or similar.
Yes but the GP used poor individual performance as their only positive reason of layoffs not needing justification. So the reply was that individual performance is almost never a factor in actual layoffs, a point which you and I agree with. Thus, poor employee performance is not a monolith that can be used to explain all layoffs, and these companies should have to give better reasons that align with actual reality.
It's about the immense asymmetry of power here. Yes, a person can leave just like a company can fire. But a single person quitting is nearly never a massive disruption to the business, but the business firing someone is nearly always a catastrophy for that person.
I don't need to justify quitting because I'm not harming you by doing so. Laying off hundreds of people absolutely requires careful and validated justification as your significantly harming nearly everyone impacted.
Of course these companies do pay well usually, but not all of them do, and not every individual has the privilege of cheap health and rent and a cheap family. Any single significant factor in a persons life can cause that "well paid" factor to mean a lot less, especially if it drags out to 6 months or more like it is known to do
Ya, it's an easy mistake though, very subtle difference between general dismissal/firing/layoff. They're interpreting layoff to mean the same as "firing" or general dismissal, but as far as I understand it's more like a shortage of work thing due to lack of income on the company side, compared to insufficient productivity on the worker's side.
A subtle difference in terminology, but a bit difference in terms of outcome. In a layoff you'll likely have no issues getting severance if it was ever on the table to begin with, employment insurance, it's not a mark against you on a resume necessarily or socially.
This really isn't true. Take Microsoft, for instance - one of their recent layoffs eviscerated the Principal band including a number of high performers. I'm talking people I personally knew who had climbed the ladder rapidly, were directly working with multiple external partners driving tens of millions in revenue (that is, external partner has problem, threatens to pull spend on product, this employee is one of the first pulled in to engage and get it solved), with visibility all the way to the VP level and higher happy with their work and partner teams trying to poach them away - still laid off.
> High performers aren't getting let go, even if they are in department being cut, they will be moved.
Wishful thinking. I just survived (yet another) round of layoffs. They are desperate to bring headcount down. If a whole team is being cut, everyone goes.
It's really a question of how flexible upper management is in the numbers they set out. If there's wiggle room - sure. They will try to find a place in an adjacent team. But if the whole department is getting slashed, there is no adjacent team.
A 20% cut across the entire company isn’t the only form of layoffs. When everyone at a factory is laid off individual performance means absolutely nothing.
Sometimes a company decides a specific market it’s worth it and every single programmer in the company is let go. Sometimes companies decide everything making over X$ in a position isn’t worth keeping etc.
>High performers aren't getting let go, even if they are in department being cut, they will be moved.
Dude, no. This is just wishful thinking.
I've seen critical employees get laid off without any backup plan or even knowledge of what these employees do. When those critical tasks then don't get performed I've seen laid off employees be called and begged to come back because there's no one left who even knows how to perform those critical tasks.
Layoffs rarely make sense. I've been though multiple rounds of:
"Our administration costs are too high, layoff 20% of them."
"Oh wait, admin work is not getting done. We need more admin staff, hire"
"Our administration costs are too high, layoff 20% of them."
With the way our society is set up to tie a large number of benefits necessary to live to employment, then yes you are actually harming someone by ending their employment.
Severance might outweigh that harm, but it depends on the amount, if any is given. Also I want to point out that the vast majority of companies give 0 severance. I’ve gotten it once in my life and I’m fairly certain it was “shut the fuck up” money as they had done some shady shenanigans to a bonus I was entitled to.
Ah yes, I forgot that surviving treatable diseases is a luxurious first world lifestyle.
If you don’t believe that US regulations and law are set up in a way that pressures people to maintain employment at a company, then you have your head in the sand
> These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.
There’s no reason to think that you need to evaluate individuals to have a reason to let them go. I might be the best iOS developer in the world but if I’m working for a company that doesn’t need a custom iOS app, they should lay me off.
If you're an individual or a small business owner who wants to no longer pay for my services, you should be allowed to stop doing so. If you're a megacorp, however, you wield extremely disproportionate power over thousands of people, and your moves can send shockwaves through an entire industry and have severe consequences for your employees that have no real power in comparison to you. I think that moderating the actions of huge businesses will be far better in these situations, especially if their reasoning for mass layoffs is maximizing profit-wringing rather than actual desperation and an immediate need to cut expenses.
Absolutely not, if megacorp feels need to lay off half its workforce that is its prerogative. Employment is a business relationship. Businesses have to be flexible to be competitive.
The whole point of a business is to make a profit. If its not making a profit or growing, its at risk of dying, then layoffs hit 100%. The ship has to stay afloat.
There's no fundamental diff between a small business and large business here except scale.
That just is not true, though. A company externalises a lot of its cost on the rest of society; laying off older employees, for example, that likely won’t find another job until retirement, are a liability society has to take care of. The only thing separating Workers with insurance coverage via their employer from eternal financial ruin is their very job.
When the auto companies fucked up in Detroit, they wreaked havoc on an entire town. The tech giants raised rent in the valley so much, it essentially became uninhabitable to anyone but software engineers. There are more examples.
Businesses are just as much part of society as individuals, and they have to do their part of this relationship. IMHO this includes being considerate about layoffs, and taking care of your employees.
A company generates value for society, or it ceases to exist over the long run.
We have unemployment insurance for laid off workers and most people at megacorps also get severence when they get let go. Older employees can find the same jobs at different companies there are almost no jobs that are exclusive to any one company and even where that is the case you can still find related jobs. There is no excuse.
Unemployment levels are near 4% right now, historically near all time lows.
Silicon Valley is expensive because of nimby zoning laws. We do not have that problem in Austin as Texas is pro-growth and allows for dense, high rise buildings and apartments to be built at will. As a result, our rent has gone down significantly in the last several years despite population growth. Fix your regulations and the supply problems in housing will fix themselves.
Just look up any town that had a single large employer and what happened to those towns after that employer left. Small companies do not posses the same ability to impact an entire town of people and everyone who lives in it, even those that didn't work for the employer.
They don't have to cease to exist. They can just choose to relocate or close that location because they're big enough to do that. Maybe extorting another town for tax breaks if they relocate there while they're at it.
I also believe that the fact 1,000 employees can be laid off at once, and then flood the market with applications, is not something we should prevent. Rather, it's a sign we need to make more small independent companies. This is a concentration problem.
That would of course require that maybe we shouldn't have the Magnificent 7, but the Magnificent 100. Maybe instead of the Fortune 500, we need the Fortune 5000, with each one much smaller. Not happening anytime soon with current incentives, but I think it would be better for everyone. We shouldn't split Google into two, but into thirty.
It would be radical... but imagine if we set an aggressive, aggressive cap on employees and contractors. Like, limit 100, with a 1% corporate income tax on every additional person. Projects at scale - 50 companies cooperating; maybe with some sort of new corporation cooperation legal structure (call it the D-Corp, it manages a collection of C-Corps working together, and cannot collect profits for itself or own property, a nonprofit that manages for-profit companies who voluntarily join in a singular direction).
That wouldn't just be radical, it would be a violation of free market principles. If smaller orgs are actually more effective than big ones, then the market would self-correct. I'm inclined to argue that we have the economic data to prove your theory wrong.
Imposing a hard headcount limit would be the definition of pointless government overreach.
This libertarian fantasy where you can do as you please, pretending your company is a person and your employees are furniture might be what you think is a "properly ordered society".
But guess what? , most of us don't, and it's a common view across both the left and the right :-). It's same reason most people left and right didn't really care when some guy that denied people their health insurance got denied himself.
However the best work I ever did was done when I didn't have a pressure of being fired for offending the wrong person, and that I had the psychological safety to think longer term- since a short term "time-waste" often converted to better long term outcomes for everybody.
> However the best work I ever did was done when I didn't have a pressure of being fired for offending the wrong person, and that I had the psychological safety to think longer term- since a short term "time-waste" often converted to better long term outcomes for everybody.
I felt the same way until I worked at a company where almost nobody ever got fired or laid off. Anyone who was hired was basically guaranteed their job until the end of time because the leadership didn't like letting anyone go.
It only took a couple years until every time you needed to do something you'd run into some employee somewhere who wasn't doing their job. Even many people who seemed capable and appropriately skilled started slacking off when they realized there were never any consequences at all.
It was like a broken windows theory for the workplace. As people looked around and saw that others were doing almost no work, it started to spread. The people who liked actually shipping things started leaving, turning it into a snowball effect.
So there's a balance. Always working under threat of layoff and seeing good coworkers let go when you're already overburdened isn't good. Working in a company where there is no pressure at all to perform isn't good either.
Hah, yes, I've also been in those companies, and that's exactly why I have the shared view of the person I was replying to.
There's a sort of apathy osmosis that happens when you realise that you can't actually do anything because everyone else is sort of checked out... so the you, yourself, sort of check out too.
I get anxiety and "itchy" if I don't move towards my goals with any kind of swiftness.
That's the opposite end of the spectrum though. OP was describing a culture where you're free to make short-term trial and error losses as part of a long term strategy. You're describing poor management.
In my experience, companies that are focused on being a well-run company rather than a politically/personality/emotionally driven shitshow also are the ones that have long-term perspective and avoid making kneejerk reactions to almost everything.
Been there - done that. Worked at a company with no employee pressure, and it was absolutely infuriating that I could work my tail end off, while another employee was provably committing borderline wage fraud, but it always got written off as "personal issues" rather than take the risk of intervening... ever.
To the point I even had a boss say that part of this happens because nobody is there to spank adults when they need it (seriously), rather than intervene too strongly and have to find a replacement or hurt feelings or something. Or another contract worker, I got an apology from said boss... but he insisted she's better now than she used to be, the latest incident is mild compared to incidents before I arrived. As though that fixes it.
Much happier now at a company which cuts dead weight; and accepts we can't afford it.
I like more competitive environments too, but when life hits you out of nowhere, as it surely will, you may come to regret working in one of these environments when it happens. It happened to me - a close family member died and they wouldn't approve any time off to attend to it, then I had a major surgery, barely got approved for the day of the event and no recovery time, so I was forced to take over a month of unpaid leave. I was basically forced out after that point, for things that are pretty normal for someone to be dealing with. You're not going to be young forever.
Layoffs are different from firing individual people. Layoffs do have some legal requirements, including what's outlined in the WARN Act and/or whatever local equivalent. Layoffs also have to be justified to Wall Street or else the stock price will be affected. GP is clearly talking about the latter.
Productivity and performance are not the same thing. You can be a top performer on a project that flops and you're a net negative. Ideally you'd get transferred to a more productive role but there are a lot of variables involved.
To be fair, a handful of large companies have explicitly said[1][2] that their layoffs were largely about individual performance. All my experience as a manager in a large tech company says that that's almost certainly not the whole story, and unfair to many of the folks getting let go, but official word from the companies say otherwise.
You can loosely rank folks as best as you can but its still inherently a systemic action and not based on individuals. Other factors beyond individual performance caused the layoff.
You can’t always select the bottom 20%. Sometimes, whole teams or departments are eliminated. Employees are simply a number with cost and only thing matters is cost. They almost never look at individual performance or productivity.
If your manager or director is not getting laid off with you and you have a good relationship with them, then they might fight to keep you.
One comment on this is when you leave a company is customary to give your two weeks. Companies rarely offer than consideration for employees. This unbalanced power dynamic is even greater as a layoff doesn’t mean a catastrophic situation for the company but for the employee it often is. The two events shouldn’t be compared apples to apples.
Define small business, because unless you are talking a mom and pop shop, my experience is severance is still a thing and definitely not big tech exclusive.
Any company under 50 employees, which makes up 85% of American businesses. And even bigger companies outside of tech usually give really small severance. Tech is basically the only area where you get 3-6 month packages for a standard lay off.
Imo the term layoff used to mean something different. Getting rid of "dead wood" should be a firing, not a layoff.
Layoff is "this division or project is a dead end or not aligned with strategy and we are shutting it down, and don't have other spots to place everyone"
> If a company feels an employee is not being productive, they should be allowed to let them go.
That's not what layoffs are. In fact, your belief is not productive. Why are you waiting for layoffs to get rid of people who are not being productive? Why are you supporting people being unproductive?
> You need a way to get rid of dead wood, otherwise you would be too afraid to grow and hire when you need to.
That's not what's happening. Generally it's a result of leadership failing to do their job, misusing resources, and needing to compensate for that in the market.
Layoffs are signals that the leadership is not being productive. Full stop.
There is zero top down accountability from supposed leaders these days. They will happily throw employees under the bus to cover for their own mistakes.
> You need a way to get rid of dead wood, otherwise you would be too afraid to grow and hire when you need to.
Alternatively, you can retrain the workers. Replacing workers has serious cost disadvantages: recruiting itself costs money (the HR staff dedicated to that, external headhunters, "employer branding" measures, job exhibition rents and swag), layoffs cost reputation, and new workers need to be trained in your company specific procedures from timetracking to expense refunds.
Unfortunately, these costs are all too often hidden deep in the balance sheets, which makes just dumping off entire departments while hiring up other departments appear much more financially attractive than it is in reality, all costs considered.
And finally, the ethical question remains: executives get paid sometimes a hundred million dollars a year because of the "responsibility" they hold. But in the end, they do not hold any responsibility, any accountability - financial penalties for shenanigans get covered by D&O insurance, and the first ones to get sacked for (or having to live with) bad executive decisions are the employees while the executive gets a departure agreement showering them with money.
IMHO, before a company can even fire a single worker for another reason than willful misconduct, the entire C-level executive has to go as well, with immediate stop of pay and benefits.
Back in my PM days, I tried this with a couple old timer SWEs at my company. All except 2 blew it off and when pushed back they tried to play politics via the "old boys club" of buddies in Engineering Leadership (in PM vs Director or VP Eng, the Director or VP Eng always wins).
Retraining only works if the people who need to be retrained want to take the effort to retrain.
In an industry like tech where self-learning is so normalized and to a certain extent expected, the kind of person who needs to be forced to retrain just isn't the kind of person who actually wants to retrain.
Also, ime, age does not correlate to this. Being lazy is a personality defect orthogonal to being a gray beard or someone in your 20s.
> these costs are all too often hidden deep in the balance sheets, which makes just dumping off entire departments while hiring up other departments appear much more financially attractive than it is in reality, all costs considered.
Not really.
The process of hiring a new employee in aggregate costs at most around $10k on top of salary.
The cost of keeping a low effort employee is the salary along with the additional 30-40% paid in benefits, insurance, and taxes of retaining that employee.
As such, it's basically a wash at the individual level.
> executives get paid sometimes a hundred million dollars a year because of the "responsibility" they hold
Most don't though.
The person who ends up deciding to increase hiring is almost always an Engineering Manager or Director (depending on size of company).
VP and above only have visibility on top-line numbers, but the actual business case to hire is made by EMs or Directors.
> In an industry like tech where self-learning is so normalized, the kind of person who needs to be forced to retrain just isn't the kind of person who actually wants to retrain.
I think that's actually a two-way street. Companies expect self-learning and -improvement from employees, but where's that 20% time that used to be the norm in IT?
IMHO, the root cause rarely is someone being "set in stone" from the start - it's when the relationship between the individual and the company (or their direct manager) grows cold. In German we call that "Dienst nach Vorschrift". Loyalty is a two way street as well, and most companies aren't loyal to their employees - or they cease to be loyal and supportive towards their employees when the executive suits decide that their bonuses are under threat.
> The process of hiring a new employee in aggregate costs at most around $10k on top of salary.
Headhunter rates are ~20% (although I've heard of 50% for really senior staff) of the yearly base pay... so you're looking at $20k just in headhunter costs for your usual SWE, and that doesn't count the distributed costs for general hiring, "wasted" hours on interviews and their preparation that don't lead to a hire, or the cost to reacquire knowledge that hasn't been formally documented, or the time until the "new" guy has shown enough capability to be trusted to do stuff on their own (i.e. lost productivity).
> VP and above only have visibility on top-line numbers, but the actual business case to hire is made by EMs or Directors.
To hire an individual person, yes. But the decision to do entire departments worth of layoffs because the stonk is going on a dive after some exec's pipe dream didn't play out? That's C level. And these fuckers don't get to feel the consequences.
> where's that 20% time that used to be the norm in IT
That was never the norm outside of Google.
And to be brutally honest, if we are offering a TC of $200k-400k, we expect you to execute at that level of performance.
If you want to just be a code monkey, why shouldn't I find someone else?
> most companies aren't loyal to their employees - or they cease to be loyal and supportive towards their employees
There is no reason for employees to be loyal to a company nor companies to be loyal to employees.
Do you job or we can find someone else who can - most people overvalue their actual value to an organization.
Similarly, as an employee, if you detest an employer, find another job and give your 2 weeks - no more, no less.
But to land another job, you will need to self study constantly.
> Headhunter rates...
Most companies do not use headhunters.
> count the distributed costs for general hiring, "wasted" hours on interviews and their preparation that don't lead to a hire, or the cost to reacquire knowledge that hasn't been formally documented, or the time until the "new" guy has shown enough capability to be trusted to do stuff on their own
As a business, those legitimately are not as significant a cost as dealing with an underachieving employee on payroll when we are paying $200k-400k TC. Most product lines only generate high 7 figures to low 8 figures in revenue a year, so an underachieving but highly paid employee has a significant drag on the business of a specific product.
> To hire an individual person, yes
Even creating the AoP to hire N amount of employees is largely proposed by EMs and Directors, and then iterated or negotiated on with VPs and above
> To hire an individual person, yes. But the decision to do entire departments worth of layoffs because the stonk is going on a dive after some exec's pipe dream didn't play out? That's C level. And these fuckers don't get to feel the consequences.
If a business doesn't work out, there's no reason not to kill an entire product line.
Companies can and should take risks, but should also be open to kill product lines if they do not work out.
I have also axed execs on boards that I have been a part of if I have seen a persistent issue in performance that is directly attributable to their issues.
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Tbf, I think you are in Germany or Western Europe, so I cannot speak to how Engineering Management is done there in the software industry versus the US.
If I was paying German level TCs, I'd probably be more forgiving.
Layoffs are a signal to markets of struggles, and firms absolutely do, in practice, need to justify them (and their scale and focus) to avoid the risk of a self-fulfilling market perception that they signal a problems that they do not fully resolve. (If there is already a problem narrative, much of the justification is obvious, and the firm just needs to cover explaining how the layoffs address the problem.)
Layoffs are a signal that a company feels they don't see a way to get a high enough ROI on their productive capacity. That could be performance related, or it could be e.g. that the company does not see good R&D avenues to pursue, so they scale down their R&D org. Or market demand dries up so they scale down their sales org. Or interest rates change, changing the definition of "high enough ROI". In theory people working in computer fields are always building automation so it should be easy to scale down and coast in maintenance mode if the business wants to do that. That applies less to video games of course, but even there the top selling games each year consistently feature Call of Duty <current year>, Madden <current year>, and FIFA <current year>.
Layoffs indicate a poorly run, inefficient company, especially if other companies in the same industry had fewer layoffs. Typically this means that the company hired and trained more workers than it needed; their estimates of future opportunity was wrong relative to other companies that did not require layoffs because they’re hiring was based on more accurate estimates.
Another factor is that retained employees that learn of companies layoff frequently become concerned about their own position and the treatment of the workers that were laid off, reducing employee morale. High performers may start looking for another job in order to avoid expected future layoffs.
Then there’s the impact on potential future employees, who will also know about the layoffs. These employees will be aware of recently layoffs and will expect more money from said company who will also have to train the new employee that replaced the one they laid off before.
Finally, you have the impact on potential customers or existing customers. Some customers have relationships with employees that are laid off, and this can be jarring. The customers may become concerned about the liability of the company or the management of the company, potentially moving all our part of their business to another firm.
All of these effects are not typically beneficial to the company or it’s shareholders.
If we assume the company runs N projects with positive Net Present Value (NPV) at the start of the project and after re-evaluation some of the project NPV turned to be negative, closing the project and laying off the staff will actually make company worth more.
Yes, but the reason you will see companies put out press releases explaining layoffs is because the market does not on its own make such generous assumptions reliably when it sees layoffs.
(And even if it does, the fact that the NPV of a project "turned negative" indicates that the value of the company dropped, and the layoffs are only a partial mitigation, which still hurts the perception of the company if the market hadn't discovered and priced in the drop before the company did and reacted with layoffs.)
I agree with you, though I would say what is happening here is more like strip mining vs cutting dead wood.
I don't know that it should be legal to buy a company and then pay for it by loading up the company with debt obligations. It seems like a form of value destruction in order to enrich a bunch of vultures.
Fundamentally it is basically saying maybe we could buy this company and then plunder it with some % chance that it will still stay afloat and keep generating profit after they gut the company to try to service a debt that should not be attached to the company at all and provided no value to anyone but the vultures.
I'm not sure, but this seems like a form of anti-social behavior that destroys value for everyone except the people plundering the company. It is almost like piracy and we should honestly try to figure out a way to not allow large companies to be destroyed in this manner.
We just shouldn't let people buy profitable companies because they think they can make a return by destroying the business and then bleeding out a small profit once the company had been gutted. It isn't good for the economy, the employees, or really anyone except the plunderers.
Companies that go out of business hurt more than the owners - they hurt the employees, the community, the state (which has to care for the employees let go), etc.
That is unfortunate, but it is good for society to have rapid turnover of unprofitable businesses. The employees will be fine and get new jobs. When one company goes under, they will go to another. You don't work for a company, you work for an industry, and unless the layoff is due to industry wide issues, you will be fine.
It's bad for society to have rapid turnover full stop. It's disruptive and stressful to the humans involved and can be disastrous for the environment (if a bankrupt company just leaves a bunch of waste behind or already did and can't be sued to cover the cleanup), disastrous for the rest of the economy, local or larger (both their customers and their suppliers are affected), and causes a huge amount of wasted time and resources that should be avoided where possible.
We've learned that businesses are lazy, cheap, and untrustworthy, and will lie, steal, cheat, and abuse everything unless you write strong rules and enforce them regularly. It's in society's best interests to incentivize running good businesses, not creating messes and declaring bankruptcy.
The last damn thing I ever want is some centrally planned hell with some worthless bureaucrat telling me how to run my business when he has no idea how. This is a competition. Sink or swim. And if you can't swim you should be out of the game.
I agree with you, however, layoffs and performance management are different things though.
If an employee is not being productive, that is a performance management issue and a good company will start by trying to fix it and if that doesn’t work will replace them. A bad company will retain bad performing people.
Layoffs are when you don’t have the work for them or you can’t afford something so are restructuring or similar. A good company will make layoffs and restructure if the economics require it. A bad company will keep going without doing that, ignoring their finances.
If you're in the business of making decisions, you should be able to justify those decisions. If you can't, that's a huge red flag. You probably shouldn't be C suite if your answer to why you do the things you do is 'idunno lol'.
If an employee is unproductive they can be fired. Layoffs are how you get rid of employees that are productive without having to make up some justification because it lowers your costs and increases the stock price, which rewards the executives.
This is one of the stupidest arguments I have ever heard. Amazon was worth a fortune even though if made no money for almost 20 years since investors anticipated future profits.
This is a well known problem with the public markets. It is stupid, but your ire should be reserved for the markets themselves not the person pointing out the stupidity.
Over an over, this isn't true. Look at GE under Jack Welch. They sold off everything that made them great, but it sure looked like they were profitable, so the stock soared right until everything went to hell. Look at all the companies that have copied their pattern over and over to this day. Everything is about manipulating the perception of the market right now, not the perception of the market - or even the existence of the company - in a decade.
Long-term oriented markets wouldn't be dumping so much money into high-frequency trading. Instead of reducing latency, a long-term focused market would increase the minimum latency to disable that kind of nonsense.
Well if you're so much smarter than the market, why don't you go ahead and trade on this knowledge and make massive profits from your superior ability to see into the long term?
And s company being able to fire anyone for any reason isn't even close to being comparable to an employee being "allowed" to leave the company for any reason.
> If a company feels an employee is not being productive, they should be allowed to let them go.
Even if they feel they ARE being productive, they should be allowed to let them go. The ultimate point of a job is not to get paid, it is to produce work that accomplishes a goal set by the employers. So if they change those goals for some reason, then the letting-go should be allowed.
I really wish there was some sort of UBI to disincentivize clinging to a near-useless (in terms of ultimate goals) job. Heck, just making unemployment not contingent on getting fired (another perverse incentive) would be an improvement.
Decoupling healthcare from employment would also be an improvement. My mom would have retired several years earlier if it weren't for my parents relying on the county government for healthcare. We don't have UBI, and unemployment is very limited. Getting laid off on a whim with no warning can literally be a death sentence.
I know I post Star Trek analogies a lot, but if Chief O'brien got laid off from Deep Space Nine because of cost cutting, he would be fine. (actually, he'd probably be much better off). We don't live in this world. We live in a world where losing your job can kill you.
You do need to justify them to investors. Layoffs are, historically, a sign of weakness and has an effect on growth.
Companies need to be strategic with the messaging so as to not scare shareholders. Hence, they use "strategic refocusing on AI" or "operating leaner and faster" as buzzwords to characterize the layoffs.
In reality, in the last couple years companies are just trying to slash costs however they can because real sustained growth is highly uncertain.
If you’re in tech in us you’re also compensated based of that, it’s not exactly the same math everywhere/anywhere. Also we’re at a site which is the Mecca of meritocracy and it’s useful to remember that part too.
I used to think like this. However, this kind of argument is only good if the basics are met. We have enough technological advancement in America that given strict immigration controls we can ensure the median American is able to raise a family of at least 2 kids while holding an entry level job (of which their should be plenty). Anything else is morally wrong, and those pulling the levers of power are evil.
We’re seeing the opposite and the wealth gap is increasing because the elites running our society see us as cattle, not countrymen.
The current point of our country is to increase GDP (which is a fancy way of saying make the rich richer, given the current wealth gap). It should be to enrich the lives of all its citizens.
I completely agree with the goal, but I don't think that making it difficult to fire employees is a good way to achieve it. That's essentially funding welfare with a randomized and hidden tax on employers. It would be better if firing for performance was reasonably easy, but new jobs are plentiful and welfare programs allow a reasonable life between jobs. (And, of course, for those who can't work.)
> We have enough technological advancement in America that given strict immigration controls we can ensure the median American is able to raise a family of at least 2 kids while holding an entry level job (of which their should be plenty).
What evidence is there to support this? Kids are expensive, and entry level jobs do not produce enough value to generate an income that can support several people.
In the post war boom, most of those entry level jobs that could support an entire family were limited to white (itself a heavily restricted term back then) men with a union membership.
Heck, unions themselves were heavily racialized back then.
On top of that, housing was segregated either overtly via race restrictions or covertly by overwhelmingly denying loans or sellers colluding to not sell to "that" family.
You'll hear plenty of these stories from older Black, Italian, Greek, Armenian, Chinese, and Hispanic Americans.
That’s true enough, but at that time whites were 90% of the US population, so there was arguably enough wealth then, definitely enough wealth these days, to extend entry-level jobs to the remaining 10%. When 40% or more of your population is descended from post-1965 immigrants, the competition for good jobs goes up a lot in most industries, unless enough economic growth makes up for it - and even with growth, housing scarcity is almost always an issue.
Wages from a single entry level job absolutely did not support a family of 4 or more in the 1950s and 1960s, let alone as comfortably as you are probably imagining.
These delusions need to stop, because it makes it impossible to have meaningful conversations about the many actual issues that do exist. I would expect people here to be better informed, but that seems to be less and less true over the last couple years.
And yes, the wealth distribution is more uneven now than it was in those days, but not to the point that you are claiming.
Why is this the case? I hear this come up time to time, but the only case in which the American working class actually is having their wages lowered by foreign competition is through global trade, which does not need to go through immigration control. In fact, if anything, making it harder for poor workers to move to rich countries guarantees that poor countries will always have a supply of underpriced manufacturing labor to do arbitrage on, and that's what actually happened since America switched from the pre-1970s "high tariffs and whites-only immigration" regime to the post-CRA, post-Reagan regime of "low tariffs and restrictive immigration unless you have family that can sponsor you".
You're entirely correct that the elites see us as cattle, but the whole point of immigration control is to keep your cattle in fences. The elites can always buy their way into a country - in fact, most countries have "immigrant investor programs" that make this an official, on the books thing that anyone with enough capital can do. So if you want to oppose the power of the elites, you need an immigration policy that benefits the people - i.e. one loose enough that the average person can move to another country as easily as one moves to another state.
these companies are breaking the social contract. the society allows them and tolerates them making billions in profit as long as it's shared with the public in the form of good jobs. if you remove the latter part from the equation what's the point of these companies anymore? people are not gonna put up with this and something is gonna give sooner or later.
Society "tolerates" them because they have plenty of people willing to voluntarily give them money which totals billions of dollars for the bigger companies.
Jobs are a byproduct, not a hard requirement for a company to function, because the point of a company is to offer a service to customers, not to act as a jobs program for a town, state, country, or region.
I've actually always liked working for companies in which the objective was straight forward. None of this "we're a family" stuff. You should be kind, and all the places I was at were kind. But layoffs are a reality and reducing headcount at times is part of that. You need a way to get rid of dead wood, otherwise you would be too afraid to grow and hire when you need to.