This is perhaps the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. The goal of layoffs is to make the company stronger and survive, not kill it.

Interesting implications!

Care to elaborate?

Edit: Downvoted for expecting to hear more about how management never, ever, makes mistakes.

Nice, real nice

"Some of you may lose your jobs but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make to save the company" is weak sauce to the thousands of people at Disney who had no influence over their corporate policy and will be out of a job.

Managers and executives are first in line for bonuses and praise so it follows that they are first in line for the chopping block. See: executive pay rates vs rank-and-file employee pay over the past 40+ years. You want increased reward? You get increased risk.

You are thinking of layoffs as a failure or punishment. It's not.

To understand it, you need to think of it from the businesses perspective. People are capital equipment that consume money and output productivity in a particular area.

There is a cost to hiring (recruiting, onboarding, training) and firing (severance, reallocation of responsibilities) these people, which is why corporations are not run like an Uber-style demand-based gig for the most part. There is "stickiness" to hiring someone.

However, when the required productivity or capital availability changes (external forces, bad forecasting, change in market conditions), as a company you decide whether the pain of changing the labor force is worth it. These may be the result of bad bets or dumb luck, but that doesn't matter. The goal is to adjust the companies' production to its ability to finance those production machines (people).

Imagine you're in the photocopying business, and you lease photocopiers from Xerox. Depending on demand, you may want to increase the number that you lease. Or maybe the market is in a economic downturn, and people are photocopying less. You try run the numbers and decide if paying the penalty for breaking the lease on x machines is worth it vs. paying the monthly fee for them. That's the simple calculus.

You may as well have responded with "let them eat cake".

You can try to reason your way out of the position with your simple calculus but at the end of the day people are more than just a line item on a budget.

To summarize: It's not a punishment for your boss to treat you like a disused photocopier.

> You are thinking of layoffs as a failure or punishment. It's not.

It doesn't matter if that's the intent or not. If you're being laid off, the effect is identical to being punished. And most people will internalize it as failure.

Companies are not improved by successive rounds of 997 people being laid off with whatever the zombie minimum waiting period in-between is.

There is the law and there is the spirit of the law. I'm sure a motivated lawmaker could write something a bit more ironclad than a one-line HN post.

I’m equally sure that wherever the line is placed in law, companies will often elect to run right up to, but not over, the line. This will often be worse for employees than just getting it over with.

I sincerely disagree. Even just slowing down the churn rate would give more employees a chance to find other jobs without a "can't make rent" gun pointed at their heads. It would also avoid flooding the market of this or that sector, which exacerbates all problems around joblessness.

Policy doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to push in directions different from naked market forces.

Maybe. I can certainly see a scenario where a vp/manager disagrees with growth in a new product area, is then proven right, but still must eliminate positions. Should they still be fired? Non rhetorical, I can see the case either way.

No, he should just find other, less-stupid jobs for the people who were hired to do something stupid.