Came here to say this, it's one of the first things I investigate about a company. If the company does habitual layoffs or has done rather large ones in the past five years, I'll move on 90% of the time.
I disagree. I think it's healthy and more humane than firing people for cause. Hiring is hard and you mess up, or people grow out of their role. Everyone knows people at work that are incompetent. It's tough to get rid of them because they may not be grossly incompetent or malicious, but just not up to standard. The layoffs I've seen usually let people go that are not effective and frankly not very happy. They get a severance, can collect unemployment and usually land on their feet. It's healthier than an organization that essentially hires for life
This is true. “For cause” is “employee fucked up real bad [theft, harassment, etc]”, but many people think it means the plain English reading of “was individually underperforming” which would be a performance-related termination but not a “for cause” termination.
A nonseasonal (or similar) company that has a large swing in employee-counts has a problem. If swings happen repeatedly, the problem isn't getting fixed.
This makes lots of sense. But I never see it play out this way.
Because in a given company, if you ask people to identify “the deadwood” there will be a couple standouts, but otherwise quite a bit of variability. If nothing else because everyone has ego centric biases that over compensate their own contributions (or that of their function/department). And then it’s really just a mosh pit of politics that decides who stays and goes.
Or put more succinctly “one man’s deadwood is another’s diamond in the rough.”
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