Have a compelling product that generates revenue. Unless your workforce is 100% saturated and you don't really _need_ that many engineers, lay-offs are one step above cutting free snacks on the usefulness scale when it comes to trying to stop bleeding.
> Out of curiosity, how does a company lay off ~220 employees yet still have many open positions on its website?
Quite easily if they are different roles, or if they are trying to fill but with less experienced candidates at lower pay (you could do a pay cut, but the morale impacts of that make it more practical to do a layoff and hire.)
> I looked at the jobs section for snap and it seems like they have a plethora of engineering jobs despite laying off 120 engineers.
Engineers aren't completely interchangeable, and management views them as less adaptable than they are.
> Not laying off engineers is probably more about how hard it is to hire engineers today, and knowing that when they get past these problems, it'll be easier to re-hire reps than re-hire engineers.
I don't think labor hoarding is a good theory for why they're keeping their product team. If they don't have work for them now and are winding down they would be getting rid of them.
Rather, I think they believe they don't have a product they can sell right now, but they believe they can change it to make it viable. You need engineers to change your product.
> Funny thing is I’ve seen this exact advice destroy a company. In March 2020 they did deep layoffs and cited the need to be “default alive.” Then their main market surprisingly quickly grew in the rest of 2020 , they wanted to capitalize on that, but they had laid off too many engineers who knew their infra and had enough outages and slow product development that they lost to their competitors and are now way underwater on their valuation.
It sounds like it was an unhealthy company and just didn't realize it till the tide went out. Seems doubtful that a quarter or two of fewer engineers slinging code was the root of its inability to attract & retain customers in a growing market.
> If you even think about doing 70% layoffs you clearly over hired and are not making good leadership decisions leading up to the layoff.
100% agree with this part.
Going default alive was not the cause of whatever this company was dying. At best, it would slow or kill your growth, not your company. It sounds like it was mismanaged and prioritized something else over fixing their product. It is not bad for a company to focus on profitability.
More employees also does not mean faster product development, every developer knows this is often the complete opposite.
> you can rapidly shrink your workforce through attrition.
That would be a terrible move. The people who change jobs are generally the ones with better options. If you just do attrition you'll end up losing only the good people and you have no control over which projects / departments you starve of resources.
> But what's the solution? I think it's just a result of having a large org.
Right. Maybe Elon's approach is correct, and all these layoffs are a chance for companies to trim the fat and focus on what matters.
We're only now realizing the bubble the tech industry was in, and that pursuing endless growth is not sustainable.
> But when risk appetite is high and the company can afford to throw money at experiments, it makes sense to still pay for the rest of the 80%.
Does it, though? You're paying for full-time engineers to work on bets that might be completely misaligned even if they succeed, which also might be unlikely. And this makes up the majority of your company? It sounds ludicrous in any market.
> Layoffs do not solve what is often the underlying problem, which is often an ineffective strategy, a loss of market share, or too little revenue. Layoffs are basically a bad decision.
I don’t really think that Amazon, Google or Microsoft are suffering from any of those issues.
Facebook on the other hand…
And many of the tech layoffs are coming from unprofitable companies that over hired.
> Plus, while the overall employment situation is strong, the tech downsizing wave may not be over and if you can get people to self-select out, you can maybe avoid having to officially have layoffs.
Are you sure announcing layoffs hurts share prices? I mean, companies only recently were doing it while still being highly profitable.
> The company’s solution was to mass hire to make up for the losses.
Yeah, this company is in life support, then.
There is this other company where there are a handful of the shittiest managers I have ever heard of in my whole career. As a result, most key engineers are leaving, and the company is ramping up hires.
They don't seem to understand that it doesn't matter how many more people you hire, if all the know-how and leadership has vanished already.
> It's another if you lose the most qualified and respected 6%.
I doubt that’s the case. The people deciding to lay off are just getting rid of 6% of their ‘resources’, they don’t consider that those 6% might be doing 50% of the work.
So 3 years on they’re just wondering why their engineering team is so useless, and thinking back to the good old times.
It depends on what side of the layoff you are on and how these positions were signaled. It is what it is - I just think that these things should be considered by all employees in the future when jumps in market demand happen - especially all of these companies participating in mass layoffs.
What I don't particularly like is how companies will signal that the massive rise in business is because they're such a great company and are doing so well. Then they'll turn around and shit-can thousands overnight with justification that it was an unforeseen market shift that they could've never prepared for.
I loved working in the trades, but couldn't weather that frequent storm that had evolved to become the norm. I'd hate to see that become the norm in tech. Not to mention what high supply / low demand does for wages.
> the cuts expected this month will be the first to affect tech departments, including engineers, which has surprised employees
Huh? The earlier layoffs definitely affected tech. I know of a bunch of former colleagues in engineering roles that were laid off in the first round. Sure, recruiting was affected more, which makes sense when hiring was reduced to almost zero, but this is very much not the first time engineers will be included in layoffs.
> This is the first one where I've noticed that they have X amount of days to find another job in the company. I wonder how that works and what percentage of the 100 will actually not end up laid off.
A lot of this going on right now. Business is strong and companies don't necessarily want to let top talent go, but they simply can't afford the R&D expenditures anymore; it's all going to interest payments.
Have a compelling product that generates revenue. Unless your workforce is 100% saturated and you don't really _need_ that many engineers, lay-offs are one step above cutting free snacks on the usefulness scale when it comes to trying to stop bleeding.
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