I thought this until a few days ago! At my “smaller company” of 150 or so employees, they just laid off a third of the company, and virtually everybody outside of the C suite was blindsided.
I think the posters who remind people that the employer/employee relationship is a business one have it right. We as engineers should strive as best as possible what our specific value is to a company. We should not delude ourselves into thinking we are more to the company than that. When we cease to have that value, or they cease to desire going down that path, they might end the relationship.
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.
> Unfortunately, it's also very easy for an engineer to jump ship after their training - meaning a very expensive loss of time and effort.
Keeping your employees is your job, not theirs. No relationship lasts when one partner starts neglecting the other and another interested partner comes in.
Being one of 14,000 employees let go because they chose to eliminate that entire half of the company doesn't necessarily mean anything. Being one of four engineers chosen to be let go from a team of 20 can say something about your skill level.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The personal brand thing is interesting. I feel like I've had plenty of job security, and I've been through company downsizing, but the layoffs never got big enough to be any threat to me. But I was an Army officer before I got into engineering, and it's obviously a different culture for a very good reason, but due to the fact that the mission is bigger than any person and the organization needs to operate and succeed in environments where all individuals can be killed at any moment, it was always drilled into us to be constantly training your replacement. Make sure you are never the only person who knows what you know or can do what you can do. I've taken that mindset with me and continue to meticulously document everything I do and constantly train others, so that I certainly hope no organization ever fears losing me will drive them out of business, though I don't think they want to lose me, either
I had a very notable team member at my last employer who was an exact picture of everything opposite to that. He was a complete rock star, always the person called in to put out any fire, always being moved around and temporarily assigned to augment whatever team was having the most trouble. He'd been there longer than anyone else and personally built out a whole lot of bespoke automation tooling with no peer review, no documentation, and no one else really understood it. That specific program really might go under and the company would lose an enormous contract if he ever left.
But is that really a good thing? The only reason they're in that situation is because of the way he works in the first place, combined with outdated processes where the management and senior technical leadership is so narrowly blindered by their focus on user-facing features that they have no awareness of what is happening in the realm of platform and developer automation tooling and how reliant on it they are.
This is a conflict between individual and organizational rationality. And I don't expect individuals to solve it or blame them for being individually rational at the expense of organizations. By all means, keep up the hustle and do what is best for you and your family. But man, there has to be a better way to accomplish collective action.
If an employee is so valuable that it hurts when they leave, maybe they should have been given more incentives to stay.
You can't say that an employee is selfish when they're the ones doing all the hard, laborious technical work and getting almost nothing out of it aside from a below-average startup salary.
This might come as a shock to some, but engineers have feelings and ambitions too. In this highly competitive market, it makes sense to give your employees more equity if you want to hold on to them. When you consider supply and demand, the ratio of founders to engineers is now much higher than it ever was. Great engineers are rare.
I've left quite a few companies, even a promising startup - Would I have left if I held even 5% equity in that company? Probably not.
If you don't give your 'valued' employee decent equity then you are the selfish one and I hope that they do leave (if only out of respect for the profession).
I've seen too many self-important founders who think that they deserve twenty times more equity than their best employee (just because they're friends with a rich investor). Taking risks is easy (and kind of fun), doing mind-numbing programming every day for 10 years is not (and working for a single company, in a single problem domain for that long IS mind numbing).
Also, let's not pretend that engineers aren't taking risks. 5 years of a young engineer's life is a huge risk especially when you consider that a lot of engineers start to slow down as they get older.
This is true with all layoffs. If you can't explain your direct role in creating your product/service, you're going to be higher on the chopping block.
Sales, marketing, HR, admins, PMs, etc. are usually the first to go because they don't "keep the lights on" and it's hard to measure their impact.
While it's true that it's also hard to measure a single engineer's impact, it's scarier to fire someone who may be expensive to replace and who may take institutional knowledge of the inner workings of the product with them.
For the more biz-minded commenters out there: does laying off sales + recruiting signal a specific scenario (other than the obvious recent legal woes)? Rather than laying off engineers?
I just got laid off from a ~1.5k-employees private company that applied the same method to split up a large monolithic cash cow (crafted from scratch by a small clique of hackers who met early in life) into microservice and microfrontend internal products because it looked like a good long term plan in Q2 of 2020 and we thought we could scale that forever and start selling our dog food as a service.
Something went wrong, and we hit a ceiling very early. The amount of waste that was generated by the rigid management ecosystem that was created to sustain such a large scale up (for tracking purposes) became so strict that any and all attempts to use the scientific method to solve anything by the then-outnumbered engineering staff became impossible to justify to any non-engineering roles.
If the task didn't fit in a 2 week sprint, it couldn't be planned.
If it can't be planned to be shipped from scratch in a 2 week sprint, from analysis by both your BE and FE devs to both of them shipping at the same time by end of the sprint, it couldn't be done.
If you needed to solve for "what do people wish they could buy?" instead of optimizing for "what are the most humans currently using?", it couldn't be done.
We constantly regretted not sticking to our engineering principles.
The system collapsed. A lot of nice-to-have-but-working-at-a-distance positions were eliminated, as well as a few individual contributors that management hadn't realized were important to their core functions but were hired too recently and didn't have time to adjust to the point system.
I wish I could tell you what happened next, but the layoff happened. Most of us thought it would happen because management would finally realize the (human) system was designed poorly and without a good feedback loop while growth happened. But it turns out they might have only reverted to a previous commit of the organization structure and are still intent on trying again with the same rulebook.
Slower but infinite growth is still the objective, excessive tracking is still the norm.
Their marketing had been doing poorly in recent years, and the layoff wasn't even mentioned in the news, but it seemed like it affected a lot of devs in my neck of the woods despite the near complete lack of media coverage.
Does this happen often? Is this what scaling up always looks like?
Every time some failing startup does a large layoff round, there's always questions of "why does X need Y many engineers?". Too many cogs in a broken organization is just burning dollars and electricity.
I don't know of a "significant amount" of employees, but my LinkedIn feed this morning had two engineers post that they had left. But also had one guy say that he had just joined. Take that for what it's worth.
When I saw layoffs at a small company (i.e., you could know all the engineers in the company) you could have probably guessed who they would have been by how well they seemed to perform. When I saw it in a big company, not much rhyme or reason tbh.
I think the posters who remind people that the employer/employee relationship is a business one have it right. We as engineers should strive as best as possible what our specific value is to a company. We should not delude ourselves into thinking we are more to the company than that. When we cease to have that value, or they cease to desire going down that path, they might end the relationship.
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