Losing half your staff is going to hurt you no matter what the labor market looks like. It’s likely that they’ll be losing a disproportionate number of high performers, and it’s going to take more than a year to work that many people through the hiring pipeline, and ramp them up fully.

And good luck hiring anyone respectable after that show of disloyalty.

Jokes on the people that stayed. The CEO should thank them for their sacrifice in working overtime constantly “for the good of the company.”

The people who stayed can give their two week notice next week and argue that they are way more critical now.

Unless they do it en masse, it won't work.

actually if they do it one by one it's just better.

Yeah they can have folks trained up a year from now assuming they can fill the spots immediately. For the next year or so, they'll probably be far below capacity.

You're overlooking the main issue with firing half your staff: you've just lost a huge swath of your institutional knowledge. That's what turns your living codebase into legacy code. A new hire, even a fantastic code ninja guru rockstar 10x unassailable god king new hire, is going to have to spend a lot of time learning your codebase. Even when they are at a level when they can productively dig through it to do bugfixes and feature implementations, they'll likely have big holes in their knowledge: Was this weird hack a temporary solution gone permanent, or the result of an important tradeoff between elegance and performance? Is the new hire going to find the relevant pre-existing extension point to add their new feature, or are they just going to build a new one?

The reason you hire software engineers on salary instead of just hiring contractors is because you need vessels to store knowledge in. That knowledge can be passed down and maintained with a relatively low rate of turnover, which is the opposite of "in 2 days we're replacing half our workforce".

I agree - but I think this decision was made pretty consciously. As in, they did internal equivalent of PE buyout. Accept you're not growth company, get rid of large portion of the staff, cut all new developments and prospects, rest of remaining stuff just supports existing business. And extract all the wealth from this position that you can.

Oh, in this case it was just shameless union busting. Taking an axe to your company yourself is a helluva lot cheaper than hiring the Pinkertons.

It'a a mix of a declining economy and convinient union busting. Many other companies are ding this sot layoff strategy and don't have looming unions to worry about.

I am really surprised more CEOs don't do this.

If I got a business to a few million in recurring revenue it would be very tempting to slice expenses down to just maintenance mode, take a huge salary while riding it into the dirt for a few years and then retire.

The market doesnt reward to, effectively.

The real thing is to treat a product as a sustaining engineer product, so minor new features, catering to the users you already have rather than trying to chase growth, etc.

publicly traded companies don't want steady profits. They want infinite growth, and growth requires investment in R&D. Hence the huge hiring sprees over the pandemic.

But prospects point towards a recession, the boons of the pandemic are over, and interest rates aren't dirt low anymore. Which is why companies are indeed shifting down to "maintenance mode".

One of the more insightful comments I've read on HN, thank you.

real life example: there are comments in code I've seen that are like "don't delete this or it breaks X"

but there is no X, no mention of what X does in any Confluence page, and deleting it borks stuff badly. asking around and no one is sure what X is or does, and short of refactoring the code, no one has bothered to get rid of it.

a simple question of "wtf is X?" turns into multiple meetings, failed QA tests, general custerfuckery, all of which have a $$$ cost in hours wasted.

the people that knew are gone and DGAF, but would happily consult for a heafty fee.