In practice, due to the phenomenon described here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43662738, it's less relevant than you think. Specifically at Google, there have been reports of high performers, recently promoted with excellent ratings before and after the promotion, getting the sack.
In my experience, people who do good work do so because they enjoy the work and feel motivated, not due to any kind of performance management system or threat. Destroy the joy or motivation, and you've just destroyed a large part of the performance of these self-driven people.
People often talk about "10x engineers", but not how it's possible to destroy a 10x engineer and turn them into a (let's be generous) 2x engineer, and I think capricious layoffs are a great way to do just that.
Usually there is a hidden variable that you don't know. It is your salary. That is why it sometimes looks surprising when senior roles are cut that look extremely valuable to the company from the outset. Maybe they were that valuable but still deemed to expensive.
Is it ultimately short sighted? Probably. But good luck connecting point A and point B in these situations when everyone is thinking quarter to quarter.
If you need to hit a specific number, guess which one is going to be less paperwork….
This is frequently the case. I've worked at big employers (comparable in level of corporate-ness to Google if not absolute size) where the layoff process, roughly was:
1. Aggregate layoff target gets set and apportioned amongst functional leaders, then targets cascaded down to the line manager level.
2. Managers fill out a stack ranking spreadsheet for their team across a few metrics including a boolean "diversity" field[0]. There were many rumors about the "diversity field", most notably that anyone so flagged would not be fired, but so far as I could tell these were false (see point #4)
3. People to be fired are developed based on these lists (I.e., if a manager has to fire two people, then the two lowest-ranked employees per the spreadsheet are selected.)
4. HR does a meta-analysis of all to-be-fired employees, ensuring that a disproportionate number of employees from protected classes are not impacted. If too many are, then some of the next-lowest-ranked employees are selected to be fired in their stead.
As far as I could tell, the only part of the process where any sort of individual, human consideration was occurring was maybe at the line manager level if they decided to tweak the stack rankings based on who they felt deserved to be protected. And then, to the extent that happens, you have all the problems with bias and favoritism that come into play.
0 - I realize this is probably controversial, but I saw it with my own eyes.
- layoff plans must be communicated ahead of time. Minimum 30 days notice, usually much more
- Needs to be negotiated with worker representatives (works council, syndicate if there is one)
- LIFO principle for layoffs, newest employees are let go first. Stack ranking not possible
- Any kind of discrimination is forbidden
- At a minimum, you get 2 months pay + accrued holidays
It's baffling to imagine that you could learn about your job disappearing from one day to the next, and be immediately left out in the cold.
Newer employees often see this as incredibly unfair.
Parents being able to take sick days to care for their kids, or 50yo being able to take leaves to take care of their dying 80yo parents are also unfair to kids in their 20s just starting out.
Looking at the larger picture, what otherwise tends to happen is that older people get pushed out. Then we have a massive issue of them ending up unemployed because nobody wants to hire them. This is compounded by the retirement age being pushed further and further away.
Is work performance not a key deciding factor? One could argue that’s absurd.
I don’t think the way it’s done in the U.S. is “right”, but i don’t think what you listed is right either.
If some employees are underperforming they should already be on their way out. That also is a process protected by law (no at-will employment here), otherwise layoffs would just be an excuse to expedite firings without going through the necessary steps. In short, being employed assumes you can perform at a satisfactory level, which makes sense to me. The flipside is that hiring is a much bigger commitment as people are not disposable.
Voluntary severance packages are usually offered ahead of layoffs, and include compensation based on years worked, so things can balance out a little.
The whole regulations are more about the social impact. Younger employees have an easier time re-arranging their lives and finding new jobs, are less likely to apply for welfare, and still have time left to switch careers, so this benefits everyone.
But since this subthread is discussing LIFO layoffs, the problem is that generally the last in is also the lowest paid - not always of course - but if so it means that to hit your operating cost point you might need to reduce more people than you would if you could pick and choose.
More senior employees have usually figured out how to get leverage on the employer over time.
Non-seniority are usually ‘cheapest is best’, or ‘do what I say, or else’.
Both have pros and cons for everyone involved. There is always some system though, even if it’s emergent.
In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]
> - LIFO principle for layoffs, newest employees are let go first. Stack ranking not possible
This is functionally equivalent to a stack ranking in that it is a forced-distribution scheme. It is just based on a single factor that is outside of the employee's control. Say what you want about stack ranking, but people do have a large degree of control over their job performance.
> Any kind of discrimination is forbidden
In the United States any kind of job discrimination against members of protected classes[1] in illegal. Even inadvertently disparately impacting[2] members of a protected group is illegal.
0 - https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/termination/plantclosings
1 - https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-who-protecte...
* https://www.osbar.org/public/legalinfo/1095_DiscriminationEm...
* https://pedersenlaw.com/practice-areas/discrimination/
Secondly, I used the phrase "protected group" referring to disparate impact, and here, your assertion (to the extent it has any validity at all) is simply incorrect. The entire idea is to ferret out subtle acts of discrimination that have an outsize impact on a group consisting of members of a protected class, and in the case law you see the phrase "protected group" used explicitly. For example:
On the contrary, the ultimate burden of proving that discrimination against a protected group has been caused by a specific employment practice remains with the plaintiff at all times (Watson v Fort Worth Bank & Trust, 487 US 977 - Supreme Court 1988[0])
This seemed quite surprising to me, and from reading your reference, I don't think it's nearly as broad a protection as it seems to me like you're stating it. the law seems to apply to companies that you describe, but the types of events that they need to provide notice for don't seem like "most planned layoffs" to me; the employee guide lists the following as potentially being covered:
• A plant closing (see glossary)—where your employer shuts down a facility or operating unit (see glossary) within a single site of employ- ment (see glossary and FAQs) and lays off at least 50 full-time workers;
• A mass layoff (see glossary)—where your employer lays off either between 50 and 499 full-time workers at a single site of employment and that number is 33% of the number of full-time workers at the sin- gle site of employment; or
• A situation where your employer (see glossary) lays off 500 or more full-time workers at a single site of employment
I don't think most layoffs in the US are due to shutting down an entire office, a third of an office with at least 150 people, or 500 people from the same office. I'd expect most layoffs to either be much less concentrated in a single location or not large enough to hit the defined thresholds.
[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn [1] https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/Worke...
While federal law has:
Plant closings involving 50 or more employees during a 30-day period.
Plant closure affecting any amount of employees. Layoff of 50 or more employees within a 30-day period regardless of % of workforce. Relocation of at least 100 miles affecting any amount of employees. Relocation of a call center to a foreign country regardless of the percentage of workforce affected.I'm not sure how that works, because I've been at a US company that did layoffs and they suddenly announced the layoff saying the impacted employees would be notified within a day.
Except for France and other European countries, where they announced the beginning of the process meaning the number and list of people let go wasn't decided yet (it would have been illegal).
Firing individual employees for performances or because they made a serious offense is a different completely process. Whether they get a severance package or not depends on the reason of the firing.
If this was even in the spreadsheet, whether or not it were used, the current administration would love to hear about it.
Not defending the process(the right way to break this equilibrium is statutory requirements for layoffs a la the WARN act) but that's why you see the outcomes you do.
Granted, but it seems like the current way of salary-first, performance-blind cutting obliterates it even harder.
Laying off people who you rank as "low end" on the acceptable performance scale, might mean you kill structurally important bricks that were not optimizing for being higher than "high enough" on that scale, and cannibalizes people working on anything valuable long-term but hard to justify to management short-term.
Laying off high performers means people don't want their head to be poking up, so they sabotage their own visibility to try being "good enough", while also killing people's motivations.
Laying off randomly kills people's morale directly worst of all, because that implies there's nothing they can do to change the outcome, and impotence is worse, arguably, than anything else for many people.
Of course, if you ask me, a more sensible plan to keep morale and lower costs would be getting rid of a few executives, but what do I know? I'm just a number on a spreadsheet.
If I try to hire someone in the future, and I'm talking straight with a candidate, about how we do things and what we're looking for, and they just nod their head, like I'm going through BS rituals that your stereotypical MBA thinks is professional to say but not mean... I will be sad.
And if, while they're BSing me, they're congratulating themselves on having "mastered how the game gets played"... I will be angry.
(This is another reason I won't Leetcode interview. It's signalling that the company is all about disingenuous baggery theatre.)
I have worked for "good companies" before - and they have a tendency to make money and be targets for bad companies, add enough zeroes and even the good guys sell.
Having a shitty attitude for that much of your life is no way to live.
That is literally the only way to live. Disaster stalks us an is only ever one misstep away (sometimes literally). In rare instances people can even just fall over and die.
In the sense that there should be food and shelter for everyone, even poor people; strictly speaking I think most countries have already agreed to that. Although how well that gets implemented is open to a lot of debate. But beyond that everything can always change at a moments notice.
I still tried doing a good job every day, and feel very good about that.
To me, being realistic about the risk of losing my job at any time means having enough money that I can be unemployed for 6-12 months.
The major way good programmers get jobs is by being recommended by people they've worked with at previous companies. That doesn't happen if you deliberately do as little good work as you can get away with.
My "shitty attitude" comment is maybe more a personal philosophy that something universal. But I do not want to spend each work day being bitter and resentful. You may intend to punish your shitty employer, but I think you're mostly poisoning your own mind.
And with less dedication, I can spend far less than half my time there ;)
No, you shouldn't. I know it feels like "but I thought that if I like cleaning my own apartment then getting a job as a janitor would leave me deeply fulfilled" but that's not how it works.
An employment relationship can offer a lot of things for both sides. For the employer, your labor of course. For the employee, a salary of course. But it can also offer experience, access to other talented and intelligent individuals and access to capital to learn and try things, networking, relationships, opportunities for promotion and perhaps opportunities to find better employment elsewhere, or the skills and/or connections to start your own business.
Your attitude toward work should be the same as the attitude you take towards the rest of your life. You can "rot" or you can make the most of every opportunity.
It doesn't matter how good my evals are or how big my contributions. It doesn't matter that there are multiple multi-million-dollar revenue streams which exist in large part due to my contributions. It doesn't matter that I have been told I am good enough that I should be promoted to the next level. Raises barely exist, let alone promotions. Because theoretically some other engineer could have done the same work I actually did, the fact that I'm the one who did it doesn't matter and I deserve no reward for doing it beyond the minimum money necessary to secure my labor.
Under those conditions, why should I - or anyone - do any more than the minimum necessary to not get fired for cause? If the company doesn't see me as more than X dollars for X revenue, why should I?