See, that’s the thing. I hate the 5 to 10 percent layoffs. You don’t get any material impact to lowering your expenses. Yet you get all the cultural negatives of having done a layoff. You get 100 percent of the pain and very little gain. And then you’re in retweet land—you end up with two or three of them.
"We regretfully have to say goodbye to some talented colleagues due to macroeconomic headwinds" sounds a lot more positive than "we stacked ranked all of you and fired the bottom 5%".
And how is reducing 5-10% of payroll costs not material impact to the bottom line?
Having seen a few of these small layoffs over my career, I see Bill’s point, even though it reads as a callous jerk idea.
The sense in which he’s dead right though is any layoff is incredibly disruptive, sapping perhaps 3 months (2 minimum) of productivity from the company across the planning, rumors, worrying, resume updating, gossiping, execution, more gossiping, repair/cleanup/reshuffling, and morale recovery.
Sapping the productivity of 25% of a year’s payroll to save 5% is usually a bad trade. Fire the very few absolutely terrible employees (as always) and leave the rest, avoiding the drag and drama of a layoff.
Yeah - my take on what he said is if you're going to do a layoff you should make it worthwhile. Cutting 5% and incurring all that disruption to just have to cut 5% again later is catastrophic. It's way worse to do multiple rounds than to do it correctly all at once and rebuild with the team that's left.
Even absent multiple rounds, 5% savings probably isn't worth the downside of doing it at all (which I think was his point).
I worked for Qualtrics for about 5 years - the first job I had out of college. While working there, I thought we were the bee’s knees. But as soon as I got another job, I realized how poorly the engineering org at Qualtrics was managed. It’s the Wild West, very disorganized. Would not recommend. I guess I have a bit of schadenfreude seeing them do poorly post IPO.
My firm just dropped their qualtrics license, and they were charging an insane amount of money. $125 per user with a one year commitment, basically coming out to $1,500 a month. I was looking at other competitors but it seems they also have these opaque enterprise licensing models
