Look for mutually beneficial ways forward - reassignment to relevant projects, retraining where necessary, generous layoff package for those for whom neither hits. Realistically the vast majority of PhD employees are going to be highly motivated and want to work on something useful just as much as you want them to.
Unless you're a sociopath, you let natural attrition run its course. If their skills weren't relevant when you hired them, then it's your fault. If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault. The only just thing to do is find a way to make their work meaningful until they move on.
No, you give them a fat severance and eat the losses. Maybe 6 months + 1 month per year of tenure, something like that. You're break even by the end of the fiscal year, you just gave someone a lifechanging amount of money, and they don't have the crushing morale problems of "the work I do is pointless" and get to collect unemployment in addition to severance.
If you are honest and generous with people, they aren't mad that you made a mistake and let them go. It's companies that try to give 2 weeks + 1 week per year of severance that are making a mistake, not the entire concept of layoffs.
(Without delving into the systemic reasons that layoffs are inevitable of course. If the system was different, they wouldn't have to happen, but we live in this system at the moment.)
Imagine you're a middle tier functionary making $70k a year. Are you telling me $90k in cash after tax plus unemployment for ~6 months isn't lifechanging? That's a downpayment on a house, or your student loans paid off, or $4000 a year in permanent income for the rest of your life.
> If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault.
Nobody can predict market conditions or technological advances.
If you don’t change course (mission, people) the company will likely fail and then everyone is out of a job, shareholders, pensioners, and 401k holding laypeople look money.
I do think that leadership is not held accountable enough for their mistakes and failures.
The situation of Intel is much more the result of bad management than the output of their current workers. For all purposes, they're effectively doing what they're were supposed to do when hired. So the logical conclusion is that Intel workers are the ones who should have the power to fire the entire management and put someone in place to fix the issue, not the other way around.
The output of workers is always a leadership problem, imho.
I disagree that the workers are the ones who should have the power to fire management unless they are shareholders. I think this should (and it does) fall upon the board and the shareholders. If the workers are shareholders, all the better.
Regardless, it's clear the current system needs work.
What a sad waste of talent in that case. A waste that could be mitigated by them finding a more productive way to help society than sticking to a pointless job.
Agree. We lean hard into sunk cost fallacy when it comes to job training.
“If your name is Farmer you’re a farmer.” mentality but self selected euphemism. “I trained as a software engineer and that’s what I am for 50 years! Dag gubmint trynna terk my herb!”
Service economy role play is the root of brain dead job life we’re all suffering through.
Managers are also employees. Nobody's arguing they should be spared and I'm not sure that you can argue top management at Intel hasn't been let go over the years.
Also laying off incompetent managers alone won't solve the problem of having hired the wrong people
Do they have any clear direction for the future of the company? As it seems they don't, the idea that these workers are the wrong people is completely unfounded.
> I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives of the project were remote to his skills, and he told me this is what his entire team was made of. Seems like a lot of bloat present in this company, and it makes sense they feel the way forward is layoffs.
But this is just his point of view. Intel was hiring people and training them to do the job they wanted. And if they continued employment this means they were doing what was expected.
Microsoft <3 Linux so much, they ruined Windows so people would switch to Linux. Thank you Microsoft!
Seriously though, I switched to Linux late last year and haven't looked back. It has everything I need for a computer and a lot of the "problems" people say is holding them back from switching full-time are greatly exaggerated. Like if you're not willing to make some small compromises so you can have a computer that respects you as a human and not a metric then I don't know what to tell you.
This has been my take. They even made Windows 11 look like a linux desktop so they can do a switcheroo later on.
Microsoft could kill off Windows as a desktop operating system and it wouldn't dent their financials in a major way. You'll know they're truly serious, though, when they start making contributions to Wine and also makes bash the default command line interpreter in windows.
"Avoid misuse"? This is the United States Military we're talking about here. They're directly involved in the ongoing genocide in Gaza at this very moment. There is no way to be ethically involved. Their entire existence is "misuse".
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