>Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not
Yeah I think when a layoff is enacted, you made more than a mistake, you fundamentally missed something. Its outside the bounds of needing to be perfect or what have you, something went sideways in a big way, and unless you can actually simply trace it down to market forces beyond your control and you are telling me those people can't be productively moved into other parts of the business, then sure, we have some criteria for layoffs, but then we can be adults and get walked through the failures and how there wasn't anything that could be done.
How many situations do you think this actually applies? I have been apart of 2 layoffs (not affected in either, thankfully) in the past 3 years.
In the first situation, I and others repeatedly warned that our biggest 3rd party integration, which made the backbone of our business, was going to ban us for abusing their APIs and other business practices that we were doing, and we needed to address that. This was repeated all the way up to the highest levels, I was in the meetings with the CEO, talked about precedent etc.
They didn't change anything. The ban eventually happened, and they never recovered, laid off over successive rounds, ultimately ~50% of staff is gone now, because of this very obvious strategic error.
In another situation, they tried to blame it on interest rate hikes, but before interest rate hikes, we were sounding the alarm that we were on-boarding way too many iffy customers (its a fintech place for SMBs to manage AP) with out of bounds credit profiles, and that these new sign ups would dry up way too easily, we needed to re-focus on a better core ICP before we try to further expand the business, try and target customer segments with stronger business profiles etc, and this is prior to the majority of the interest rate hikes. I and several others made this case, and yet again, not headed, layoffs hit 6 months later, because all those customers either went belly up or had to downsize themselves, because they were too credit dependent.
So what commonality do you think this happens? Because I have a feeling its alot more than is acknowledged.
Sometimes a company is moribund much, much earlier than people realize. When you're faced with "do X or shut down" you will often chose to do X, even if X is pretty likely to result in shut down because you have a "die now, maybe die later" thing.
Or you can do a massive pivot, which has successfully worked at times.
I think you just have a fundamentally different view of what a layoff means then the executives, board of directors, and general shareholders.
> I and several others made this case, and yet again, not headed, layoffs hit 6 months later, because all those customers either went belly up or had to downsize themselves, because they were too credit dependent.
But what if the customers survived? What if interest rates didn't hike as fast? You're suggestion would have been horrible. The risks of over-hiring is a layoff which no one else views as really that bad vs failing behind competitors.
>I think you just have a fundamentally different view of what a layoff means then the executives, board of directors, and general shareholders.
Most likely, and I personally believe that is part of the problem, not the problem.
I recognize how damaging layoffs are to people. Its unfair to act like they aren't. Its people's livelihood and we as humans often make decisions around these things, and when its yanked out from underneath them without notice, its very damaging.
Its not numbers on a spreadsheet, it is human lives.
>But what if the customers survived? What if interest rates didn't hike as fast? You're suggestion would have been horrible. The risks of over-hiring is a layoff which no one else views as really that bad vs failing behind competitors.
We would have hired more modestly, and could focus on making the business more generally efficient, cut down on process, and focus on keeping the business nimble and responsive.
If I'm wrong, we end up primed to take on more customers while continuing to hire modestly. Ironically, our smaller more nimble competitors ate a bunch of market share from us with much smaller overall staff, because they could move faster, and I can directly trace that to the hiring spree.
Now, I will admit, if we had stronger safety nets in the US that made layoffs relatively painless for the unemployed, I'd feel differently about this.
> We would have hired more modestly, and could focus on making the business more generally efficient, cut down on process, and focus on keeping the business nimble and responsive.
Or more realistically doomed the company to fade from grace as you competitors surge past you eventually ending with a massive layoff.
>Or more realistically doomed the company to fade from grace as you competitors surge past you eventually ending with a massive layoff.
This is a black and white take that doesn't jive, additionally, we have the hindsight of history, both recent history and the history of other boom / bust cycles, that serve to validate. Our competitors wouldn't have zoomed past us. We have strong market presence and we bleed more users due to our own ineffectiveness than strictly from competitive pressure, and I can trace much of that ineffectiveness back to hiring practices from late 2020 to mid 2022. As I noted previously, we have a clear line of how this happened.
Generally speaking, a moderate growth strategy would have left us in a better place, and it was easy to see by the end of 2021 that things were going to change sooner rather than later. I'm not that smart, by my own admission, I'm a pretty dumb guy, but I put the pieces together by then by simply looking at where the money was coming from. There was no way the conditions of 2021 were going to continue at most past 2025 if you wanted to be an optimist, but realistically, it was coming down a lot sooner to anyone paying attention to how the money was flooding in, and I felt we would start to see some downturns in 2022 and 2023. As soon as the COVID relief stuff was announced to be ending, it should have been even more so, yet there wasn't a prevalent skepticism in the status quo until much later.
>Every company already tries this as hard as they can, there is no magic button they can press to just make themselves more efficient.
Then why are so many so inefficient? In the Silicon Valley mythology, one of the core tenants is that startups can act more efficiently than big companies simply due to focus & size.
If this were inherently true to any reasonable degree, I actually think we would have a differently shaped workforce. I can point out dozens of inefficiencies I experience even today that slow down development, and that is just if we analyze development. I hear from other wings of the company[0] of other things - simple things like consolidating tools so they don't have to bounce between different apps to do things - that also drive alot of real inefficiency.
This isn't the first place I worked where all these issues exist either, and its not nitpicky stuff, its all low hanging fruit. Consolidating tools is a complaint I have heard at almost every job I've had sans 1. I don't imagine I'm alone, my peers at other companies often have similar complaints when we talk.
I think some things are inherent to simply organizing humans, and I get that, but the obviousness of some improvements that simply aren't undertaken runs counter to the assumptions one makes when they buy into the "efficient business" hypothesis
[0]: we successfully became more cross functional, that's a huge plus, our solutions are much more holistic now, but its only part of the problem.
Yeah I think when a layoff is enacted, you made more than a mistake, you fundamentally missed something. Its outside the bounds of needing to be perfect or what have you, something went sideways in a big way, and unless you can actually simply trace it down to market forces beyond your control and you are telling me those people can't be productively moved into other parts of the business, then sure, we have some criteria for layoffs, but then we can be adults and get walked through the failures and how there wasn't anything that could be done.
How many situations do you think this actually applies? I have been apart of 2 layoffs (not affected in either, thankfully) in the past 3 years.
In the first situation, I and others repeatedly warned that our biggest 3rd party integration, which made the backbone of our business, was going to ban us for abusing their APIs and other business practices that we were doing, and we needed to address that. This was repeated all the way up to the highest levels, I was in the meetings with the CEO, talked about precedent etc.
They didn't change anything. The ban eventually happened, and they never recovered, laid off over successive rounds, ultimately ~50% of staff is gone now, because of this very obvious strategic error.
In another situation, they tried to blame it on interest rate hikes, but before interest rate hikes, we were sounding the alarm that we were on-boarding way too many iffy customers (its a fintech place for SMBs to manage AP) with out of bounds credit profiles, and that these new sign ups would dry up way too easily, we needed to re-focus on a better core ICP before we try to further expand the business, try and target customer segments with stronger business profiles etc, and this is prior to the majority of the interest rate hikes. I and several others made this case, and yet again, not headed, layoffs hit 6 months later, because all those customers either went belly up or had to downsize themselves, because they were too credit dependent.
So what commonality do you think this happens? Because I have a feeling its alot more than is acknowledged.