It was purely a business decision for them, but I left dazed and wondering what to do. I had always planned job changes on my terms. But it was also freeing in that I now could find opportunities I would've missed. I'm much happier where I am now.

Highest grosser in the region 5 years straight. Aced the performance review. Brought in several clients, a few of which are YC graduates. But because Bob in NY wanted us to hit 25% growth for the 5th year in a row and we were only going to reach 5-10% YOY, someone had to get cut so the partners wouldn't see a drop in expected take-home payments. And I was the most expensive employee in the region.

Fuck loyalty.

On the bright side, my new job was only a small pay cut, but literally half the work load and all the vacation I could ask for. In a sick way, getting laid off worked out for the best. But those weeks between jobs were the most stressful of my life.

that starters don't have a clue.

Which is a different situation that needing to be employed to put food on the table.

So an employee leaving does have some impact. On the employee side, of course there is the food-on-the-table issue, which can be important if there isn't a safety net. Which is why it is critical to live within 75% of your paycheck, so that every year you can survive 3 months unemployment.

And then you get sudden medical bills or more months unemployment or some other sudden expense :-(

I thought I always had that somewhat-cynical outlook by default, coming from a leftist family; but still, the unfairness of this process (first time for me in 20 years of work) boils my blood. Metrics massaged to target this and that, backstabbing, disrespecting people who built the company... all that will forever scar the company, no matter what. Your best and brightest don't want to live in fear, once you scare them like this they will leave.

I don't understand why companies with troubled books don't just spin off the departments they want to cut: give people a chance to fend by themselves, keeping teams together and offloading risk without losing knowledge and propagating fear.

Definitely not the case for me at the moment, but I won't bore you with the details.

I don't think it would be cruel at all. If a company cuts entire chunks of the business (products, departments, what have you), it's because someone made a management call that they don't want to bear the risk and/or losses associated to that particular segment, or they cannot imagine new strategies. That does not mean that such a segment is completely unviable, it might simply be that it's not as profitable as that someone decided it should be, or requires more effort that that someone is willing to invest (money, time, creativity etc).

It might still be a perfectly viable lifestyle business for the people working there, who only want to make a decent living. Giving them a choice and a fighting chance, imho, is a win-win situation: the business offloads risk, knowledge is not dispersed, relationships are kept positive. At worst, the spin-off fails, the company has executed a cheap round of layoffs with no hard feelings; at best, the spin-off succeeds, they get some service for cheap and/or dividends, everybody is happy.

I'm surprised nobody said "well, the laid-off people can still do it themselves, nobody stops them" and that's absolutely true; but doing it in an organised manner, with support from an established "mother" entity, is much easier.

Say I switch to the cloud and don't really need most of my datacentre anymore. Instead of just chucking it all away, people and machines alike, I set them up as a separate hosting company where i'm a minority shareholder, buy from them a small contract for my little bit of legacy stuff, and let them free to go find new customers or do their thing. If they fail, nothing of value is lost and I still have access to their talent pool because no bridge was burnt; if they succeed, my shares are worth something and I keep getting good service for cheap.

In a way, it's similar to what Amazon did when they first introduced AWS: they had internal overcapacity for some services and just turned it into another business. (sure, it was a new system etc etc; but when you boil it down, it's just that: they had more internal resources than they needed, and rather than scaling them down, they started selling excess.)

I did see it and a win-win, but it takes a lot of resources from the company. I don't see a say 1000 employee company in the middle of some crisis (hence the layoffs) having the capacity to execute such things. Or at least it's easy to see why this would not be a priority.

I agree with allanienhuis, that it can work well for products.

I was myself working on a mobile app (before they were really a thing) at Nokia. The app was for analyzing golf swings. There was a department working on sports related products. Someone decided to streamline the company (around 2002 or so I guess - nothing major back then), and this department was killed.

We were allowed to spin off the app and related IP to our own company, and were able to continue working on it. At the time I think it was a win-win for both sides.

I worked for an employer who did exactly that when one of the new product/business they'd built wasn't growing (enough?) to warrant more investment. So he set up a couple of the developers working on the product with the rights to the product and helped work out new contracts with the existing handful of clients (it was large enterprise software). There was enough revenue (maintenance contracts) to support the two guys, and so the existing customers were taken care of in terms of maintenance. Worked out pretty well for everyone as far as I know.

Specifically, in the case of the article, spinning off the redundant employees leaving them in a new firm with no product and no revenue sounds like a cruelly dystopian option. And if the company was willing to put money into it, I'm pretty sure most employees would prefer that as a severance package instead.

In this case I expect he might have made a spot for those employees working on a different product, but that's not certain - technologies & skills were different & the vertical markets were completely different.

And in this specific case, the two staff thought it was an amazing opportunity for them - I think their short-term salary went up & they got a lot more flexibility plus potential upside if they could grow the business even slowly. Obviously some downsides in terms of benefits, etc. But even if it didn't work out it would have been a pretty good line item on their resume. :)

Possibly, but I think the employee should be given a choice. If even just 1% of laid-off people took the choice and succeeded, the entire economy would clearly benefit.

In the B2B space, the costs of switching vendors/products is often a really big deal. Spinning the product off released him from the obligation (allowing him to focus on more promising products), and avoided (most of?) the pain for his clients.

It's not just troubled books. Many have lay off quotas they need to fill: jack walsh style of management. It's just how modern day capitalism works.

There is however, one upside. All that laying off means they'll have to do a lot of re-hiring to replace all the employees they laid off.

It's not "feelings management" or "people support", it is HR for a reason.

But of course, it's function, to protect the firm from it's employees, won't change.

That's part of the problem right there:

"We only hire the best".

"We need to protect the company from the employees."

It seems like if you really did the first statement, there wouldn't be a need for the second. If you find yourself using the second statement to justify a management action, then your management (you or your company) has failed.

Isn't that just doubling down on what you were doing before, being a "good performer" and "critical" to the team? The problem is that external forces (to you, your team, division, or your company) can come in at any time and make people change the calculus to want to pay you. And there's nothing stopping them from pulling the trigger, and suddenly you're out of work. We do not have a system designed to help you, we have systems designed to save companies money. The only real solution is to constantly make sure you could move if you had to, and that you're marketable. Part of my newbie years were spent at a big company watching very competent but experienced people get the axe and be replaced by 2-3 new hires - sometimes its not even about the money they'll save.

Then, when you're out checking whether you're marketable, you can do regular checks to see if you really want to stay where you are.

Likewise, if you're working at a company (Facebook say) that has a scandal, get laid off, you're probably gonna be able to find another job.

A kinder way might be to say that no one is irreplaceable. I'd argue that that's actually a good thing.

But yes, the first time you go through layoffs it is shocking, especially if you've built your identity around your job.

I think it's mistake to recommend life-changing events like this so glibly. A given person may recover and become wiser and stronger. Another person may never recover in terms of career, relationships or mental health.

It's better to look and learn that the market is a harsh place and you should take steps accordingly. If you have to have that lesson engraved on your body, so be it but remember, each person has only so much productive career-time, some many opportunities to make and keep relationships, etc (fired-to-divorced, etc is a common path just for example).

How many here remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard Steve Jobs passed away? Almost like being able to recall where you were when 9/11 happened.

When I heard of his death I was shocked, I wondered how Apple would survive, how the world for that matter would move on? But sure enough the next day the sun still rose and and the earth still rotated. Today Apple is doing just fine without Jobs and is making record profits. Everyone is disposable and money will always make the world go 'round.

Is this sarcasm that I'm not picking up on? I literally can't remember what year SJ died. I can't even remember what generation iPhone was his last.

The results from what I’ve read have offered no answers. One place spent $20 million trying to answer how much productivity is gained from having email. Nothing.

I suspect it’s like the food industry and fossil fuels: they are selling us on nonsense and hiding the reality.

Economics was the latest long con, like religion before it, the masses buy in hook line and sinker

But yeah we DEFINITELY need to make more phone apps and web apps! Fawk yeah!