The statement was about getting a promotion, not about avoiding a layoff.
I've also seen the opposite of your scenario where a company (almost blindly) cuts staff, including IT/Engineering, and lets go of some of the very key people (sometimes the ONLY people) who have any intricate knowledge of the system in order to maintain it and get caught in all kinds of problems.
In one case, I walked into a team that was maintaining a component and they had to claw back the actual laptop from the guy that left and attempt to dig up uncommitted source code that was need to maintain the system.
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.
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.
> And tell me, in case you had to "make hard decisions" like "throwing 10% of team under the bus in form of layoffs" what would you do instead? That's exactly one of the cases where the skills of an engineer are the last a company needs.
Layoffs are an effect of organizational dysfunction. In which case, the responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of management. It’s just that there is a perverse incentive structure in most corporations, so 10% of the team gets laid off to continue to pay for the exorbitant bonuses and lifestyles of management.
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.
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.
That's the default situation, even in software, although more often it's in this form: "Okay, Jon Employee, our company had a bad quarter, we're going to have to ask employees to make some sacrifices." Then Jon Employee is laid off and subsequently has his position filled by somebody much more junior at far more than a 10% discount.
This industry doesn't value engineering experience. It values breadth over depth. There are some exceptions. But the data are what they are.
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.
I know an extremely high performing engineer that was on a successful but completed project (not at Google). His whole team was given a few months to find a new position. Multiple managers tried to get them on their teams, but the transfers all were blocked at a higher level.
Eventually, he asked for and got severance pay. Shortly after, during the earnings call, the leadership told the investors they were reducing engineering spend by cutting hiring and consolidating programs, but that all redundant engineers were encouraged to seek another position in the company.
Of course, they neglected to mention that such positions didn’t really exist.
It was clearly a layoff, except they strung the laid off employees along for a few months. That way, they didn’t have to damage morale or customer/investor confidence by admitting it was a layoff.
I’m sure people further removed from the situation would assume it was a PIP, which hurts the engineers’ careers.
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.
They're really making the argument that these big companies full of engineers that engineered much of modern life over the last 20 years are just blindy laying people off like some kind of social contagion? That's not how it works. Companies that big and that reliant on data don't make big decisions without some team of eggheads showing them the numbers and telling them they have to.
And layoffs are a bad idea? Always? Even when sunsetting multiple large projects and downsizing your speculative endeavors? There are whole teams at these companies who's jobs just simply aren't needed anymore. It sucks for them, but to say it's a bad idea for a company to lay off people is just nonsense, there are times when you have to unfortunately.
It's surprising to me to continue seeing this myth that engineers are spared in most of these layoffs. That may be true in some cases, but most of the large tech layoffs have included plenty of software developers.
> Engineers have even less of a chance to recover [from failure]. Technology companies are notorious for disguising layoffs as “low-performer initiatives”, meaning that the company chooses to save its reputation at the expense of the people it must let go.
Why? They weren’t laying people off because they were bad at programming. And in fact they were likely hiring so aggressively in the first place in part to keep top engineers away from competitors.
If it were my company doing layoffs, I’d hold on tight to the best and most senior engineers and lay off the entry level ones if I had to. Knowing what you have to do and why is much more important than the details of how you get there
Maybe. But if I’ve learned anything from the layoffs I’ve been a part of or adjacent to, it’s that executives don’t share an engineer’s understanding of who might be a valuable engineer.
At the size of these companies they couldn’t possibly hold that understanding in their head. So they’re thinking more about budgets and strategies, assured by their peers that we’re all replaceable in the end. They’re not entirely wrong.
Of course, later (once the economy recovers and hiring resumes) they’ll cry that new employees aren’t picking up context or contributing fast enough, things seem to be moving slower, coordination is lacking etc.
> Every company I've worked at has needed more great engineering managers.
Has every company you've worked at been successful or at least rapidly growing? There's plenty of cake to go around in a company doubling in size every year, but the daggers come out when there are layoffs twice a year, particularly when the people being laid off aren't SV software engineers with tons of other options.
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.
> 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 also seen the opposite of your scenario where a company (almost blindly) cuts staff, including IT/Engineering, and lets go of some of the very key people (sometimes the ONLY people) who have any intricate knowledge of the system in order to maintain it and get caught in all kinds of problems.
In one case, I walked into a team that was maintaining a component and they had to claw back the actual laptop from the guy that left and attempt to dig up uncommitted source code that was need to maintain the system.
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