You lose great people, you take a huge hit to culture and productivity, you spent a lot of capital that you otherwise wouldn’t have. It create doubts in leadership and cut projects with maintenance debt.
People quit after layoffs, which means attrition isn’t as balanced as when the layoffs were planned. Talent isn’t distributed equal to business need, meaning the company will lose great people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Depending on how it’s executed, the company could burn bridges. Even if they do it well, some people would never come back.
It’s not like the people hired were working for free so I’ve never personally put much stock in the, “employees were screwed over.”
But again, it depends on some of the items above. If a company is doing well, less-direct revenue teams are fine. In a sketchier environment, not so.
Depends: did you really get that much value out of those new people in the time you had them employed? It usually takes a while for a new tech employee to become productive, and just hiring a person costs a lot of money. If you, for instance, hired 10,000 new engineers and then laid them off after only 1 month, you would definitely lost a LOT of money, and not have gained anything for it.
Who lost? Everyone who got laid off wouldn't have had at a job at all if they weren't hired, and they probably got severance packages for more than the average American makes in a year.
> Everyone who got laid off wouldn't have had at a job at all if they weren't hired
Maybe I've been lucky, but every time I've been looking for a job I've had AT LEAST two options.
People move cities, sell houses, buy houses, give up apartments, plan their finances, and plan their career around their job all the time. Investing a year learning the ropes at a company, finding ways to fit into the structures, etc. only to have the rug pulled out from under you just as you're starting to get the hang of things...
> and they probably got severance packages for more than the average American makes in a year.
Maybe I've been unlucky, but I've never had a job where my expectation of a severance package was anything more than 2-4 weeks wages.
> Maybe I've been lucky, but every time I've been looking for a job I've had AT LEAST two options.
You got many offers precisely because a lot of companies were (over)hiring. And the fact that you had many options on the table allowed you to get a better compensation (either because you negotiated, or because everyone else did so the industry standard increased). You benefitted from these hiring binges.
When that was the case, I saw a grand total of 0 complains by tech workers that tech companies were hiring too much; it benefitted them immensely but that did not translate in any article praising CEO for taking these risks.
Could these companies keep on these workers ? Many can ! But a hallmark of good governance is having a budget and taking care of your expenses.
At your household level, you can probably afford to pay for Netflix, Disney+, HBOMax and Amazon prime at the same time. And maybe you did during COVID because you were watching TV more.
But now that you are back to doing more "real life" things, you maybe don't need them all. It's not that you risk being evicted because you can't pay rent; you are probably still saving a bit of money every month. But that is not a reason to not ask yourself "do I really need these all now ?" and if the answer is negative, to do something about it like cutting one or two. What is someone then told you "But look, you can currently afford all these streaming services ! You should keep paying for them all for as long as you can, and since you have them, make sure you reorganise your life to schedule some time to watch them all !".
Can we stop using the household budget analogy for megacorps, governments and economies? It’s overly simplistic and wrong.
(For just one example, a household has a single non-varying income stream and everything else is expense. Large companies have many revenue making depts, lines of business, products, etc)
> People move cities, sell houses, buy houses, give up apartments, plan their finances, and plan their career around their job all the time
Then those people are naive. I never plan my life around an employer. I plan my life around my employability. I wouldn’t move somewhere that there weren’t other jobs in the area. Well now I wouldn’t work at any company that wasn’t fully remote
>I wouldn’t move somewhere that there weren’t other jobs in the area.
While a good principle, I'll posit there are a lot of more or less specialized professional jobs--especially at more senior levels--where you can't just walk across the street and slide into a similar role at a different company. Even if it's in the same general area, a 2 hour commute each way is probably not sustainable.
And thats why I have a 25 year of paranoia about being overly specialize.
Yes I’m self aware enough to understand the irony of the only reason I fell into my role at $BigTech at 48 years old is because I did become overly specialized in enterprise dev + cloud.
It's hard not to be at least somewhat specialized as a very senior person.
If you're an embedded systems programmer, maybe you can hack on some Javascript but no one is probably going to pay you very senior comp to do junior programmer work.
It is certainly true you don't want to be too specialized in general. You didn't want to be the Y2K guru in 2001 or the world's expert in performance optimization for some specific computer architecture that isn't manufactured any longer.
When I took my current job, there were probably a few companies in the general area that would have been somewhat obvious potential matches. But it was sheer coincidence that the one I connected with first through a connection happened to be the closest major tech company to my house.
Is that really true though? How many of the 2.7 million developers in the US are just your generic enterprise CRUD developer writing apps using Java, C#, etc? They are basically interchangeable and for most of my career, I could throw a resume up in the air and get multiple offers for yet another generic enterprise CRUD job.
On the other side, how many jobs are (were?) available to the generic software engineer who could do the DS&A monkey dance (junior/mid) and “design Twitter” and talk about “scope” and “impact@ in STAR format (senior).
There are not “millions” of people being laid off. Unemployment is still at a historic low. It’s mostly the tech sector. I’ve been through this type of economy at least three times - 2000, 2008, and for a brief second 2020.
Even back in 1996 when “having mine” meant making $33K a year as a hybrid computer operator/programmer, I saved aggressively. Again, I was 22 years old and had enough sense to be paranoid about depending on one specific job.
If you feel like this, you shouldn’t take a job that can’t guarantee in writing that they will keep you for X number of years. If you took a calculated risk and took the job anyway, well that’s on you.
> If you feel like this, you shouldn’t take a job that can’t guarantee in writing that they will keep you for X number of years.
Those jobs don’t exist. If there are they are such a minuscule number of openings it is not worth thinking about them.
> If you took a calculated risk and took the job anyway, well that’s on you.
Let me break it to you: almost everyone works because otherwise they would go hungry, loose their home and die in sad circumstances. People who don’t are statistical anomalies.
Are you saying that by having the misfortune of not being born independently rich and working basically any job the poster “took a risk” which is “on them”?
> Are you saying that by having the misfortune of not being born independently rich and working basically any job the poster “took a risk” which is “on them”?
He is saying that. Its the Puritan Christianity's mentality of blaming the poor for not working hard. Repurposed into the modern free market capitalist ideology where its used to blame the ills of the system on the victims - "You havent worked hard enough" "You werent smart enough" etc...
This is nonsense because the people that were laid off at Google (as one example) were not selected by their tenure or having been hired during pandemic or during the remote phase, nor was it based on performance reviews.
People who had been there 12, 13, 16 years; people who had been just promoted. People who were senior management. People who were engineers. People who were on mat leave...
Management there effectively fed people's employee numbers through a random generator. And people who (IMHO naively/foolishly) gave their lives to the company suffered.
Decisions to overhire during the pandemic impacted people who had nothing to do with that decision. And not just because of the layoffs, but also because the company growth during that period was so intense that it led to onboarding and project mgmt difficulties as well.
But my experience when working there is that there are definitely people whose emotional (and physical) engagement with their jobs goes well beyond just what is required to get that compensation.
> Everyone who got laid off wouldn't have had at a job at all if they weren't hired,
Incorrect. Many of those people already had a job when the moved to Amazon/Microsoft/wherever.
Since no one makes a horizontal movement, all the roles they vacated when moving where lower roles. And this argument goes recursively when the old company fills those roles.
This means that most people who did not have a job prior to the hiring explosion and had a job after the hiring explosion, had low-paying jobs, in very low roles.
I don’t get it. What did they lose? They got paid good money during the mean time and have the fact that they worked for $BigTech on their resume. What did they spend all of the money on? Coke and strippers?
I was also hired for a remote role at $BigTech in mid 2020. Fortunately I didn’t get laid off. But I wouldn’t exactly be bitter that I got paid 50% more during the interim. I save/invested/paid off debt with 80% of the difference in take home pay.
Yes, I’ve been laid off before when I was making a lot less in 2012. I made sure I had savings then
Textbook capitalism is a society in which (among other things) companies belong to investors. In other words, when a company bets, it is typically with other people's money. In that case, it's other people's jobs, which extends a bit this textbook case, but not by much.
edit Rewritten to take into account sokoloff's remarks, thanks!
Capitalism defines nothing about whether the money invested in a company is yours or other people’s. In practice, it often is, but “in practice” is not nearly the same as “by definition”.
