Re:Why “Copycat” Layoffs Won’t Help Tech Companies – Or Thei...
by gumby on Sunday January 22, 2023 @08:11PM
(#34484220)
> but you get to select the worst-performing people.
Anecdotally I'm not necessarily seeing this. Amazon's cuts were concentrated in groups. Some parts of Amazon, like AWS were essentially untouched, except for recruiters. In a comment a few days ago I pointed out that the headlines could have said "Amazon pulls back on Alexa efforts", "Amazon reduces its bet on retail" rather than just the number of people...though that would have hurt the stock price, while cutting people often raises it :-(. And AWS appears to still be hiring at some rate (source: couple of friends who mentioned interviewing candidates in the past couple of weeks). I am sure, of course, that if Amazon did cut half of the Alexa team, where they had a choice they chose the lower performing one.
The same is true of Microsoft's cuts, AFAICT. Slaughter in the hololens team, for example.
Google's cuts seemed to include some people I have worked with in the past and who are IMHO good. Notably they are long termers, though, so perhaps google was considering people who were more expensive. My gf mentioned to me that someone she knew was laid off, and they had just been promoted.
Anecdotally I'm not necessarily seeing this. Amazon's cuts were concentrated in groups. Some parts of Amazon, like AWS were essentially untouched, except for recruiters. In a comment a few days ago I pointed out that the headlines could have said "Amazon pulls back on Alexa efforts", "Amazon reduces its bet on retail" rather than just the number of people...though that would have hurt the stock price, while cutting people often raises it :-(. And AWS appears to still be hiring at some rate (source: couple of friends who mentioned interviewing candidates in the past couple of weeks). I am sure, of course, that if Amazon did cut half of the Alexa team, where they had a choice they chose the lower performing one.
The same is true of Microsoft's cuts, AFAICT. Slaughter in the hololens team, for example.
Google's cuts seemed to include some people I have worked with in the past and who are IMHO good. Notably they are long termers, though, so perhaps google was considering people who were more expensive. My gf mentioned to me that someone she knew was laid off, and they had just been promoted.