Layoff season

stevehobbes 30 points 3 years ago

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.

path: 0 6684883, hotness: undefined, score: 30, children: 17

sbv 40 points 3 years ago

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

save

path: 0 6684883 6685062, hotness: undefined, score: 40, children: 7

stevehobbes 12 points 3 years ago

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.

save

path: 0 6684883 6685062 6685896, hotness: undefined, score: 12, children: 3

vexikron 12 points 3 years ago

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.

save

path: 0 6684883 6685062 6686224, hotness: undefined, score: 12, children: 1

Timwi 1 point 3 years ago

Sooo... good strategy then, if you're a capitalist sociopath...

save

path: 0 6684883 6685062 6685286, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

jballs 14 points 3 years ago

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.

save

path: 0 6684883 6688672, hotness: undefined, score: 14, children: 1

KevonLooney 5 points 3 years ago

That's because the better people leave to become consultants. People aren't going into consulting to make less money.

save

path: 0 6684883 6688672 6688794, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 0

Diplomjodler 13 points 3 years ago

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?

save

path: 0 6684883 6685380, hotness: undefined, score: 13, children: 5

squirmy_wormy 7 points 3 years ago

save

path: 0 6684883 6685380 6685795, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 0

stevehobbes 3 points 3 years ago

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….

save

path: 0 6684883 6685380 6685815, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0

magic_lobster_party 2 points 3 years ago

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.

save

path: 0 6684883 6685380 6686270, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1

stevehobbes 1 point 3 years ago

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.

save

path: 0 6684883 6685380 6685927, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

000 8 points 3 years ago

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.

save

path: 0 6684883 6691241, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 0