Within six months, about a quarter of our employees, mainly top performers who could easily find other jobs, left voluntarily.
The whole thing self-destructed within another year, and the product we worked on was abandoned.
> We got acquired
Can I just ask about the reason for this? Was it owners wanting off the ride?
Buyers bought it because they had a very specific problem that the product was designed to solve, and thought that it would be a competitive advantage to deny the solution to their competition. On paper, it was a good decision.
That sounds grotesque. Who would choose to work at a company with that sort of bullshit dangling over your head?
Some percentage of top performers report to deadbeat managers, so in an environment doing mandatory layoffs, they'll know that it doesn't matter how much they knock it out of the park, their manager will screw them. So of course they'll leave.
I read posts here all the time about how hard it is to hire. How do top performers distinguish themselves as they go out for new jobs? When did this become easy?
During an interview process, and by using your network. Top performers aren't usually slinging applications through LinkedIn in my limited experience
> When did this become easy? It isn't, they're referred to as top performers for a reason. It's easier for folks who excel in their fields, and that holds true across domains.
In most cases, someone you worked with before who liked working with you suggests to their employer or someone in their professional network they hire you. Could be an old classmate, coworker, open source collaborator, even someone you know through a hobby.
The top people have the best opportunities elsewhere, so they leave first.
Even if they don't quit outright, they are likely to quiet quit, because why put in the effort when it is rewarded with disloyalty?
This all sounds like a hand wavy hypothetical.
Though I've never personally been laid off, it's a black mark on the company that I think you can never recover from. It means I will never trust anything said at a quarterly all-hands. The projections they give us employees are spun to be more positive than they really are.
During COVID, my company told us that we were going to be able to save money by breaking the lease on our office building and stop paying for amenities like the snacks in the break room and catered lunches (since nobody could use them anyways). This, they said, should save us enough money that we don't need to lay anyone off!
10% of the company was laid off a week later. The next day, I would later discover, the company applied for a PPP loan: they had laid people off pre-emptively so that they wouldn't be penalized for it next year when they sought to have their PPP loan forgiven.
It illustrated to me that you can't trust leadership, ever. Once a company initiates a layoff, it's a permanent black mark on that company
It gutted moral, basically.
But lying off isn’t firing someone for performance - it’s admitting “we don’t have enough money to pay you”
And that’s something that should be scary to everybody in the company.
When your shitty coworker gets fired, you shrug and say, yeah, saw that coming. When your shitty coworkers get laid off, you look around nervously and think phew, l lucked out.
Sometimes layoffs are unfair, and sometimes the wrong people are let go. But often it's entirely necessary and the right people are let go.
[1] - Which makes the whole gruelling, multi-month hiring process positively ridiculous. It would be much better for this industry if companies hire fast and fire fast, instead of delusions that they're finding the magical employee base that will be with them forever.
https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/why-googles-high-turnover-rat...
This isn't some Google specific thing. The cargo cult "look at our super exhaustive, endlessly demanding hiring process" is a farce everywhere. It's actually a bit paradoxical because it actually selects for employees who don't want to actually stay with you, they just want to be able to say they were willing to endure your gauntlet.
I’ve worked in places where people stuck around for years because they believed in the company and technology and wanted to successfully ship a product. In fact, I still view repeated 18-month stints as a bit of a red flag.
It’s a big industry. There’s a difference between a norm and something that a sizable subset of people do.
Also, Google's median tenure of <1 year was due to hiring, not employees leaving. In other words, that number included people who hadn't left yet. I think if you look at people leaving Google, average is about 3 years.
Google would have to be growing at >300% per year for this math to make sense.
But even if it's 3 years ({X} doubt), that's still cartoonishly low for a hiring process that drags on for months and months.
>I think if you look at companies like Citadel, which routinely fire the bottom 10% as part of the job description
Almost all tech companies target firing/pushing out a considerable percentage of employees per year. It actually is incredibly common, even if it usually doesn't make the news. They used to do it overtly via stack ranking, but now they just do it more quietly. Microsoft punted 2000 "low performers" in the first two months. Brutal firings with zero severance, immediate cancellation of health coverage, etc.
> Almost all tech companies target firing/pushing out a considerable percentage of employees per year.
Not firing, but managing out. It's very different culturally.
The guy I replied to did say median tenure (where I was talking about mean or average tenure), so relative to a median tenure sure, doubling the staff would do that.
But you said average, in which case no that isn't true. Google is a 26 year old company. If you randomly distributed tenures across a hypothetical employee base (1-26 years), it would take something like 1200% growth to get the average tenure under 2 years. And of course Google's actual employee count growth rate over the past decade and a half is more in the range of 12%, so a couple of factors off for that.
Even when people say the average tenure is 3 -- doubtful -- that still requires an insane level of turnover for a company growing so slowly, relatively, and being so old.
Every layoff I have ever survived the staff inevitably ends up talking about how so and so manager and his favorite buddies are still out golfing every friday. Why the f are they still here etc.
This resentment builds and builds.