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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have more of a problem with who they laid off than the fact that they laid people off. I'm probably biased as an engineer, but IMO the people who actually create your products should be the last ones to be laid off, not the first. And if the company is struggling, highly paid execs should take a pay cut before you start laying off lower-paid 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.
The issue is that the layoff will disproportionately affect protected groups. Engineering is disproportionately male, east asian, south asian, and white. Companies with explicit diversity targets make up for this by compensating in other company orgs (HR, marketing, sales, admin) making them disproportionately female, black, and hispanic.
This means when you keep good engineers but lay off HR, marketing, sales, and admin employees, the layoffs look really bad in terms of affected protected groups.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My employer loses a few valuable engineers every month to layoffs and resignations. Most of them are specialists (i.e. not full stack engineers or generalist types), which makes replacing them really hard.
We haven't hired anybody for months, and the team keeps shrinking. I'm starting to think it's a really unsexy place to work, which could kill the company.
You wouldn't come to this conclusion if you saw our ads, which paint a very different picture.
What I'm learning from this is that [in this economy] startups should work hard on making their employees happy and hiring the right people as early as possible.
> 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).
Incompetent engineers and fat to trim I feel are seperate issues.
Layoffs seem pretty bad at identifying the incompetent from the competent from my experience. It seems to cut on all front, you're not sure if you're left with the best or the worse ones, but you saved a lot of payroll cost either way.
Or if you try to handicap teams by understaffing them, even competent engineers will need to reduce the quality of their output. This is when fat is trimmed in a bad way, where instead of getting rid of low ROI venture/projects/services/products and focus on the important, you just tighten the budgets accross the board for example.
> 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.
The problem is that we now have a massive surplus of skilled engineers so good luck getting hired when you're inevitably arbitrarily let go.
Your mindset is only valid in the explicit context of a company
A) not having cut you
B) having cut others prior to you
As soon as that context is lost in the next two years when you get fired or find a new job, you're back to square one, except you're also competing against Joe Google Engineer.
Far be it from me to try to change your mind here, but based on my first hand experience this isn't true.
Myself, and all of members of my team in my location, were laid off 2 weeks ago from one of the big 4 tech companies. Within the 4 people on my team one was stack ranked within the top 20% of the org of ~75 engineers earlier this year and another was in the process of being promoted. The other two were new to the team.
From a strategic perspective as a company, firing us can be considered trimming the fat, but it isn't a reflection on the quality of the engineers. It's a reflection on the leadership of the engineers and if they believe they will be essential for the operation/growth of the org over the next few years.
Before this happened to me I had the same mindset that you had here -- that there was some responsibility the fired engineers had for being fired. I can tell you, from the other side, that just isn't so. The world is bigger than any single person and this stuff happens regardless if you are skilled at your craft or even liked by your coworkers.
It's painful right now for everyone who has been laid off, but from a holistic perspective, I agree with this article. It will be interesting to see what all of these people do with their talents.
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.
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