From my experience in some large tech firms, you could easily cut 20% of the workers and not see much impact. There is so much bloat, process-people, meetings-people, etc... Even if the cuts aren't from AI, execs will use AI as a reason to make these cuts.
Yep - IME the trick is that fixing a bloated company is 2 parts: laying off bloat, and fixing the bad processes / restructuring the company to not need so much bloat in the first place.
I’ve worked at a company that pulled the layoff lever a lot but never did the hard work of investing in fixing the broken stuff… the layoffs actually just made everything worse.
If you have a team whose job is to put duct tape on the widget when it leaks, and you lay off most of that team without fixing the widget, your leak gets worse because you have fewer people with duct tape.
What you need is find people who can fix the widget, then fire all the duct tape people.
The duct tape people are generally drowning under all the work they're doing, and they'd be fine to keep doing other productive stuff.
There's always going to be duct tape stuff around, and you don't want the people who can actually fix widgets to wind up running around with their hair on fire applying duct tape to keep it running without any time to fix widgets.
And when there's too much duct tape jobs going around the widget fixers may take a look at it all and decide they don't get want to get stuck with applying duct tape once all the duct tape appliers are fired, so they just skip to some other job.
Every big company I’ve worked for has an immense about of bloat. Whole departments that exist just because someone wanted it to exist at some point in time.
The health of an organization is often linked in their ability to fire people.
