There's also an effect of wanting to do smaller, pulsating layoffs over the course of many months or even years rather than one massive layoff of the size you actually need, because ultimately no one knows exactly how the machine of a corporation works, and you have to be careful not to cut so deep that you go beyond cutting out fat and start to damage critical systems.

A rapid, 90% loss of workforce like what happened at Twitter might be what the company ultimately needed, but cutting that fast and deep is an insanely risky operation that could lead to a company hobbling along in a compensatory state until it finally falls to decompensatory systems collapse that you can't recover from.

I've heard people say this, but it seems contrary to how layoffs are run in practice:

• entire teams or divisions are often laid off with no eye towards individual employees' tenure, experience or skills

• decisions happen on a condensed time scale by higher-level executives—not exactly conducive to a nuanced view of individual employees' performance, which companies struggle to assess effectively at the best of times

The "common knowledge" about what layoffs accomplish and why they're necessary really doesn't match what happens on the ground.

For every one competent executive there seems to be 5 deluded narcissistic idiots who will slash and burn people who are overqualified and under-utilized for the positions they've been incompetently assigned.

Now before you think I'm a victim of layoffs, I'm actually the political navigator. I constantly survive layoffs as I see the most talented people get let go, the best teams get broken up and reassigned, it's nuts.

One of the best techniques is to get yourself into what I call a "management island" - essentially you have either 0 or many bosses, just not 1. The next one is to be associated with a small bet - essentially a cheap investment that may yield a great long-term payoff. A third technique is to not attend too many events. Vagueness works in your favor. People should know generally but not specifically what you do. With details comes critiques so keep it ambiguous by staying quiet.

If you survive a layoff then you must not let a good crisis go to waste. Use the fog of the firing and the power vacuum to resituate yourself into this political dynamic as the dust settles. Of course these techniques only work at large companies. I learned all of these techniques from years in management.

There's more but that's a good start

The point of "many bosses" is if your manager knows you work on other projects, it's easier to leave you off the list.

The point of "no bosses" is no manager is tasked with considering you. You're not on anyone's books.

If you have to play the 1 boss game it's harder. Some managers will want to keep their most talented people, other managers are looking for team cohesion and want the most friendly while others will break their project into roles and then assign people on a sheet of paper into those roles and get rid of what they consider redundant.

Some bosses will want to get rid of their most expensive people on the logic that they'll have the easiest time finding other work or maybe they'll have to get rid of fewer when they're more expensive, while others might want to get rid of their cheapest with the logic that they'll be easier to replace in the future.

There's really no silver bullet way to survive that. You have to know who is making the decision and somehow guess how they'll do it well in advance of the event.

Almost nobody acts based on some objective logic, instead they have predictable patterns of behavior and varying modalities. That's why you need to shake the org structure and get out of that situation.

1. Lower level managers usually find out them at the same time as IC's 2. Managers and directors can be part of the layoffs. 3. If a manager/director is part of the layoff, they are even less likely to be consulted in the process.

The rule of thumb is if they can't fire you they aren't really your boss.

For instance, at a previous firm, the COO, which ostensibly can be fired by the CEO was actually the brother of executor of the chief investment in the last round so the COO has a direct board connection and so he could actually fire the CEO with enough effort. Underneath the COO was a finance guy who had just come from a possible acquirer so really that guy could probably get them both fired if it meant a good payout for an acquire.

The tendrils are wacky which is why when a room of those people have to do actual work, it's not some shrewd rational calculated execution but instead just some hot mess

Can you speak more to this? I don't know that I've ever seen this somewhere I worked.

You can be entrusted to work on your own little bet project for somebody in a C suite and you become so low on the priority that you're out of mind.

During a power vacuum, you can play teams off each other in a multiple bosses strategy and appeal upstream in the org chart. The exploit here is the company hierarchy in practice is closer to the Habsburg monarchy than some binary tree.

The multiple boss play can get you to a no boss play in this situation because each one will assume you're doing important things on other projects.

All of this requires a keen skill at social engineering. I worked at a place where I didn't have a meeting with anybody for about a year. I played the meetings off each other at first and they all slowly became optional and eventually I got them off my calendar.

I should probably use my time doing better things but I'm really lazy.

These are all hacks. YMMV.

Probably the most approachable explanation of this phenomena is in Reid Hoffman's blitzscaling.

Hold on while I switch to a desktop in order to find a link and I will come back and edit this soon.

And then you have to be explicit about what you want in your next role.

Do you have two different resumes?

No idea really

I seriously doubt these layoffs are from actual, measurable consumer responses.

Yeah, unfortunately, this is believed by so many low level employees that it hurts their confidence, if they ever are part of layoffs. I wish organizations really educated employees how layoffs work.

I was part of layoffs in 2008 in which my whole department was eliminated, including managers and their managers. The developers who were hurt the most, were the smartest ones who could not believe that C-level executives didn't see their contributions. Their egos were bruised and some even switched from development to other fields.

Would also be curious to know what % of the 11k are engineers/breakdown by department/org, etc.

The point in my second paragraph is that if the company actually needs a 15% layoff to maintain itself long term, it would be safest to do it in three smaller 5% waves rather than one fell swoop. After each layoff, you let the system settle and recover, making sure that the body is still generally healthy before continuing with the next operation.

This disregards the effect of repeated layoffs on the morale and mental health of human beings, which affects how "the system" settles and recovers.

How many competent people do you expect to stay until the end?

I think it really depends on the overall health and strength of the corporate body and the external environmental conditions it's struggling to survive in. Sometimes ripping off the bandaid quickly is the best of many bad options.

However, you also have to consider that seeing a larger percentage of your teammates cut loose might be more psychologically damaging than just that one guy who everyone kind of knew was a poor performer anyway.

Why would the paperwork be any different, whether it's a small layoff or a big payoff? Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V is cheap, Microsoft implemented it many times in many products.

Much easier to do a Thanos-style snap and get rid of X% all at once, with no pre-warning or reasons required besides "challenging economic conditions".

Layoffs have a huge psychological impact on the people who didn't get cut. If you do layoffs at a time when the economy is booming and jobs are easy to find, you risk losing your best performers who don't want to be at a company that fires friends of theirs.

It's easier to fire people when jobs are scarce and people are already spooked and disinclined to try to switch jobs.

That would be true for poor performing projects. Try a bunch of projects; many don't take off; cut the chaff all at once.

What I've seen in various companies were cuts of all kinds of employees, regardless of their individual performance. Large cuts weren't about the employees but about the projects or teams. I've also lived through a cut which was basically reducing headcount across all teams. Cutting 11k employees isn't a micro-management thing; individual performers get hit all the same.

The fallback of some such cuts was that it took years to later re-acquire competent employees, especially since they were offering work conditions average for the market.

TLDR don't stay too long on projects or teams which aren't lucrative for the company, unless they are fun and you don't mind getting ejected from the company when cut comes.

This is repeated a lot but having lived through 3 layoffs (and survived 2) in my career, that has never been the case. Every time it seemed random, one in particular where EMs were upset that they didn't have the chance to pick their faves.

Layoffs are probably a bad idea, in general, given how expensive it is to hire new devs and bring them up to speed, but on the other hand, it's probably a pretty good way to eliminate orgs you wanted to get rid of anyway while blaming the economy. I'm sure it's not a coincidence that so many of Amazon's layoffs came from Alexa.

If you fire when everyone else is hiring, the market asks you if your growth prospects have dimmed.

If you fire when everyone else is firing, the market says you're being financially responsible.

Why?

If you are so good at identifying poor performers, fire them, and reap the profits of being leaner, more effective organization.

"The market" is a boogeyman used to rationalized everything.

Ok, that can possibly happen. But if it constantly happens, you have problems.

Plus the more people that you have, the faster you can get competitive products out to market

Could be a damned if you do, dammed if you don’t situation

This is not always true. Do you have citation to back this up?

It’s not always true but you can’t do the work of 6 people with 2.

I’ve definitely been on teams blocked by the number of people where getting even one more QA person sped things up a lot.

The world doesn’t work that way.