The reason I usually hear: Good engineers almost always have jobs and usually aren't looking to change. When large layoff events happen good and bad engineers lose their jobs. This gives other companies an opportunity to recruit better talent with less effort than usual and, if they're really lucky, recruit entire teams that have worked together before.
I totally agree that companies may not get the right people. They also may not intend to get those people. A lot of companies get rid of teams they don't need rather than individuals. Sure, it would be more efficient to lay off dead weight from all teams, and reassign the remainder of the teams you don't want, but higher ups don't have the time for that.
And I was affected by a layoff just recently, but layoffs don't really hurt good engineers. You just find another job. My whole team was nuked back in November. But I found a new job within a month, and at a 25% pay increase. So taking a cut would have been a terrible deal. They say the market is bad, but I think that just means bad for bad engineers. Whereas quality really didn't even matter a year ago.
When it seems like companies don't complain enough how scarce it is to find hirable talent, I wonder what the details are on their engineering layoffs. Why not just move them to a different team? Why not just keep work on tech debt efforts? Laying them off seems like a terrible long term decision. I'm assuming these lay offs are not some guise to hide that they're getting rid of their low performing engineers.
A lot of great engineers get laid off simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, especially in bigger orgs. When it comes time to cut down expenses, the more experienced (and hence higher compensated) engineers are usually prime targets to get axed. Its really stupid and short term thinking, but there is a reason why it happens.
OTOH looks like your org actually benefited tremendously from having those experienced engineers, so in a morbid way their being laid off turned out to be good for everyone involved.
Hiring engineers is hard. Unless you’re in a very large company with complex internal politics, you can tell your manager literally anything and they’ll be fine with it. Most managers have been taught that engineers need excitement and growth and so they’re offering it because trying to retain you, they’re trying to avoid you being excited by something new and shiny. “I am happy and want to stay exactly where I am” is music to their ears, shout it from the roof tops. I wouldn’t take any lessons from layoffs.
All of the various layoffs I’ve been aware of have included a decent number of engineers. Often it is changing direction or giving up on certain products, so entire product teams get let go. Plus, we’re usually the most expensive.
Do note that laid off engineers are typically from teams that have overhired and where we don't have plans to grow, as well as engineers who did not get a good rating and are less promising. It is sad nevertheless.
Most of the laid-off positions, assuming these layoffs do take place, probably won't be developers. During temporary crises, companies prefer to lay off the workers whose positions will be easiest to hire back after the crisis has ended. Engineering positions tend to be hard to hire for, so engineers are usually hit less hard by these types of layoffs than other roles.
But your mileage may vary: companies also understand that one big cut is better for morale than lots of small ones. The current crisis is temporary but might last a long time, so a company that thinks they might have to fire engineers eventually, could plausibly pull forward that decision in an attempt to save the business.
Layoffs may not even be a bad thing if job mobility is high. Startups lay off a lot of people who have bullshitted their way into their position, members of low ROI teams who can't be easily be transferred somewhere else, quiet quitters, etc. On the other hand struggling to find a job as an experienced engineer is usually a symptom of a sick economy.
Googler here. Really good engineers are difficult to replace, our hire/no-hire ratio for candidates is insanely small and and increasing recruiting efforts puts more burden on the engineers who do the interviews. Losing people over this issue definitely hurts.
One concern with that would be that good engineers would usually see this on the horizon and leave for better / more prospective jobs in advance. So those who stayed until mass layoffs might not be the top talent that used to work at the company before when it was doing better.
I am not sure it applies in this case as this was quite sudden and we don't have enough visibility to see how many red flags were there few months / a year ago. In this case it seems to have been so sudden that lots of great people have been caught off guard.
To expand on this point, when you hear layoffs you probably immediately think about the engineers given the demographic of this site and how you wouldn't working for a company like this. However, layoffs have a tendency to hit sales and production harder than the technical team. Production and sales usually outnumber engineers to begin with and has a higher turnover rate due to the nature of the work.
An employer’s market changes the dynamic, which can be to your benefit if you’re a top engineer. I expect that companies can lay off the bottom 10% and then turn around and hire the top 5% in the market who will replace the laid off 10%.
Kind of risky to join a new company though because if they do layoffs, recent hires or more likely to get the axe.
> For companies that are on the cusp of profitability, or still actively burning through money, layoffs seem to be more about reducing burn, which means you're more likely to lay off highly paid engineers.
Bothering to do a layoff only makes sense if management wants to see the company survive. So, assuming that the only outcomes being targeted are the ones in which the company is still alive, consider the cost of replacing the employee later: at least right now, engineers are more expensive to hire than most other roles[0], so it could cost less overall to lay off HR/recruiting with the expectation that you'll backfill those roles in 9-18 months.
[0] for various reasons; to hire for any given role, you have to source, engage/recruit, interview (which takes up the time of the people on the team they'll join), somehow pick one or more of the candidates, make offers, and then onboard them. These costs are largely the same for any role, except that interviewing engineers costs engineering time (and it's harder to get enough quality candidates in the top of the funnel for engineers than other roles, so you have to spend more HR/recruiter time there).
I've worked for about 7 different companies over 15 years and at each of those places I've seen a ton of engineers come and go. Most of the time, the reason they leave is one of three things: got fired, got laid off, or was pushed out. So, if you want your engineers to stick around, you gotta find out why so many of them are being laid off or pushed out and prevent that from happening. That's where you'll get the most bang for your buck.
Engineers don't just leave for no reason. They leave because they're either forced out or there's something that really sucks about the company: most of the time it's the work life balance that really sucks.
Because they get laid off in random staff cuts just like everyone else. When tech companies band together against tech workers, it doesn't matter how many Xs of an engineer you are.
When the company had financial trouble though, they fired all the middle managers and kept the engineers
The truth is that most layoffs don't work like that, unfortunately. Members of the management class will generally try to protect their own, and they see engineers as mere blue-collar workers, no matter how skilled or qualified those engineers are. Yes, even software engineers.
In situations like this, a lot of times a whole team gets cut. For example I think they mentioned the entire Yahoo Toolbar and Yahoo Finance teams in the U.S. were being laid off. That isn't a reflection on the skills of those engineers so much as recognizing that these products aren't mission-critical.
Also, if you have to fire people, often it's easier to fire people who are more recent additions to the team, even if they are more skilled. It has less of a social impact on the rest of the company, and you lose less institutional knowledge.
In short, there are plenty of reasons to believe there are great engineers being let go. Let's stay classy.
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