I've never seen a cold and calculated layoff. It's always been exasperated irrational arm-waving risk mitigation. The "good" people aren't kept - instead it's the ones that can navigate the political waters.

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

Yup, most mass layoffs are done without consulting the directly/skip managers who actually know who the strong performers are.

No. Most layoffs are done by the managers being given either quotas or burn rate caps and tasked with producing lists of people to layoff.

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.

At least in my circle, I've found (for mass company wide layoffs)

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.

Sure. That's because the org chart isn't ever the real chart. I mention elsewhere the real chart looks more like the Habsburg family tree especially the higher up you go - a bunch of surprising actual plays.

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

> The point of "no bosses" is no manager is tasked with considering you. You're not on anyone's books. There's numerous ways of doing this if you're interested.

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

I've only heard of this happening during really large mergers or situations where you are managed by someone so high up in the organization, you're effectively on your own.

Sure.

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.

Good advice. It reads like the start of a modern corporate version of "The Prince".

The modern version of this is the 48 Laws of Power.

you should write a substack or a podcast. Lots of ppl are oblivious to this stuff.

Most of the tricks are easily discoverable hacks. It's best not to advertise it too loudly

Great write up and very useful in an industry where a lot of people seem to think "doing a good job" is enough to get recognised, lots of money and continuous promotions. The transition from IC into Management really needs a head shift and I think a lot of software engineers aren't prepared for the machinations of modern corps.

I've gone in between both roles. I can be a CTO of a $50 million company and just another senior engineer at a $5 billion one.

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.

How do you position yourself when looking for a job? Divergent background of this sort could be a liability.

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

Do you have two different resumes?

I haven't had to look for a job in over a decade. They come to me.

No idea really

I have an alternative theory. In bad times consumers no longer want to pay for a cherry on top. So you go back to basics and lay off the people putting it there.

I'd adjust this and say the execs believe that, so they do it, whether or not it's true.

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

> Mass layoffs give you the opportunity to quickly purge poor performers without as much paperwork. It's advantageous to have regular rolling layoffs because of this if you can justify them by economic conditions.

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.