I think people over focus on poor performers when in reality layoffs are a great chance to get rid of teams and departments that don't make economic sense anymore.
Assume a constant need to fire a decent chunk of the company.
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.
> Assume a constant need to fire a decent chunk of the company.
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.
Re:Microsoft to lay off 11,000 employees
by yCombLinks on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @04:04PM
(#34419091)
Because every time you want to build a new product you risk that no one ends up wanting the product, or not enough people to justify keeping it going. Alternately once you have depleted all of your current ideas you don't have anything productive for those people to do.
Re:Microsoft to lay off 11,000 employees
by marcosdumay on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @05:26PM
(#34420352)
> Alternately once you have depleted all of your current ideas you don't have anything productive for those people to do.
Ok, that can possibly happen. But if it constantly happens, you have problems.
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.