So Good They Can't Lay You Off

As far as I can tell from anecdotal reports by friends at some of these companies, many of these tech layoffs have been done with little rhyme or reason - at least with regard to technical skill, individual contribution, and team cohesion. There's inklings of metrics that the suits decided on, but it is murky and unclear.

It seems like few to no people in any of their managerial chains were consulted.

I'm curious to hear from HNers if any of you were in the room that got to decide who got to stay and who had to go.

  - entire business unit or team
  - everyone hired after date X
  - everyone in geography Y
  - everyone with some level and at or below a certain perf threshold

I was the CTO of a tech company where we needed to do layoffs or go out of business in a month. Layoffs extended our runway by 2 years if all else remained the same. It didn't last that long though. We got acquired a few months later and once debt was paid and the VCs got their cut there was just enough left to provide 3 months of severance to employees (my co-founder and I used our payouts to cover that - I walked away with less than $1k when all was said and done).

When I had to do layoffs, who got picked to be laid off was almost entirely random.

I say "almost" because before picking who would go, we first selected teams with redundant roles. For example, if a team had two mid-level backend engineers, they had redundant roles, and one of those two roles would be eliminated at random.

That was literally the only "thought" put into who got cut or not. Where we didn't have redundant roles, it was random. Directors got laid off, QA testers, facilities people. It was one of the worst experiences of my life.

Today I'm convinced that the only people safe when it comes to layoffs is the board of directors.

It doesn't go a long way to help people feel better, but if you're laid off, it's nearly 100% likely that it had nothing to do with your performance, whether or not you were "liked", tenure/seniority, or how much you got paid.

No one - no one - is irreplaceable. Long after you leave, your organizations will continue on, as they should.

Counterintuitively, trying to be irreplaceable will hamper your ability to share information, power, and credit. It’s much better to just be as generous as you can.

One way to think of this is take a look back at the previous positions you've held, then left. Did any of those companies go out of business because you left? Were they (or the department) seriously injured? Now, ask yourself if they knew they would have major issues to overcome if you left. If they didn't, then even if they fell apart when you departed, then there was nothing stopping them from laying you off if a strong enough reason came about. If, however, they realized how bad things would be if you were gone, then they were negligent by not hiring redundancy.

What you need to do is make yourself as valuable to the company as you are willing to do (avoid burning yourself out though). Make sure you have a deep enough emergency fund, and enough expenses that you can cut to survive an extended unemployment. Chances are that if you are part of a mass layoff, that won't reflect as badly on you as if you got fired for other reasons. And if there is a severance package, don't panic right away -- you have time to address the situation properly.

Oh, and if you have enough time off before you land your next position, make sure you take care of yourself. The lack of work stress will do wonders to re-energize you, making you perform at a higher level at the next gig and hopefully exceed expectations (thereby setting you up for promotions etc).

Absolutely not. You have to understand how indiscriminate and capricious layoffs often are, especially for large organizations. Frequently the criteria for a layoff is crafted first in foremost with the goal of not being sued for discrimination. I worked for a very large, very well known global industrial giant. When the economic winds were too unfavorable they cooked up a layoff that was based entirely upon where the employee was located, and whether it was aligned with their "site strategy". So if you sat in the wrong location, you were gone, regardless of how good you were. They actually laid off one of the best and most valuable engineers that I ever worked with.

At least at a big company, RIF decisions are made at higher levels than anyone who knows anything about you or your work. Obviously people on PIP are in trouble, but beyond that there's not much you can do, unless you're Jeff Dean level.

I know two people at Google who were slotted for T (transformative) and O (outstanding) GRAD ratings who were laid off, along with their entire teams. There's only so much you can do.

The larger the company, the less likely your performance even matters. When they are laying off entire teams and divisions based on entries tabulated in a spreadsheet, no one gives a shit that you are the one that gets called on the weekend to help troubleshoot a critical service that no one but you really understands. Your salary and benefits are just a tally in the "costs" column that has to be reduced.

For software engineering orgs, I try to push a practice of lightweight effective internal documentation.

Part of my argument sometimes -- to handle objections about job security from keeping info in one's head -- has been that people shouldn't worry about it hurtig job security, because the people who are conscientious about documenting will be recognized as too good of engineers to lose.

But when we're seeing a frenzy of layoffs across the industry (even by companies making huge profits), it's harder to say that job security isn't a concern.

(I'll still push on documentation, because it's important good practice for the team's success, and we're doomed if individuals start thinking they need to hoard the company's knowledge. But I'll have to be thinking of better ways that people's livelihood interests can be covered.)

This article is horribly naïve.

We can start with the obvious part, everyone, literally EVERYONE, from the part time intern janitorial contractor, to the demigod CEO are completely replaceable.

If you dropped dead today, the team you’re on will have already divided up your tasks and recovered by the end of the week. Your division, let alone the company, will never even notice you’re gone.

That’s just the honest truth.

The second hard truth is, getting laid off is not your fault or a reflection of your abilities. It’s about an edict that came down from the c-suite. This is why entire teams are laid off. There’s very little rhyme or reason to these things. Don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s inevitable that you’ll eventually get hit.

If anything, it reflects on the incompetence of upper management. Microsoft admits to hiring 10,000 too many people? Whose fault is that, Jake in SRE? No! It’s Satya Nadella’s fault.

I sometimes wonder if these seemingly random layoffs at top tech companies, irrespective of whether they were high performers would cause reputational damage to a level where they would have to pay even more money the next time they need to hire talent.

I'm assuming top tier talent isn't going to want to work for you if you're gonna be randomly laid off, not to mention people on work visas who need to maintain a job to stay.

Unfortunately there's no such thing.

The problem is being essential isn't the same as job security. You can wind up with new leadership that dislikes the old guard, or entire divisions or businesses being wiped out by a small circle of executives and accountants that don't actually understand how anything get done in practice.

Job security is the ability to go get another one. I suppose that's a place where being really good and someone people like working with can be extremely helpful.

The dot com bust was so much worse (so far) because you had teams and companies and markets just vaporize. Made me pretty sour for a few years, but realizing it helps now to one, keep the current cuts in context (not too bad), and two, that even if the world seems to be falling apart, things do get better.

Another silver lining is the junior devs not asking "Why are you still working at your age? I'll be retired by 35" :-)

Many years ago Chris Espinosa (Apple Employee #8) gave a talk at MacHack about how to stay in a job at Apple for so long. (This would have been around 2000 and he had been there since the 70s.) His conclusion was that you should be obscure but irreplaceable. That is do something that nobody else understands, but that is necessary to keep things running. Seems to have worked for him!

No one is so good that they can't be laid off. The entire point of the way production is practiced is to ensure that labor fungible. To think otherwise is an exercise in ego stroking.

Everyone being replaceable is a concept that is emotionally hard to wrap your head around, especially when you're the one being replaced, but it is undoubtedly true. Even Caesar was replaced, I think they can replace a programmer or PM/AM, etc.

That being said, I did leave my previous company for a better opportunity and am on occasion reached out to from that company or even that company's own customers for assistance on specific items. Still replaceable, but there is learned knowledge that can be a deficit for a while or even forever, especially if it is simply not profitable to have someone learn it or it exists without maintenance for so long that no one remembers or knows how to fix/remedy if it ever does need maintenance.

I don't think this post really views this from the perspective of the company. Why do companies do layoffs? Well, many reasons, but in general they feel a need to spend less money but intend to get better results. To some extent that means laying off people who are poor at their jobs and keeping people who are good at their jobs. This is almost impossible, because the good people are the most willing to leave, and the bad people are most motivated to politic. So the company is going to lay people off and realistically, it's not going to be about who is good or bad. There is some sense though, cuts are not going to hit core parts of the business first.

One of the curiosities of this is that the rockstar engineers often want to go and build something incredible and new. But those are the exact types of places where management will turn around and say "Yo! Why do we have 50 extremely expensive engineers working on this weird project bringing in no money". So you can go where the interesting work is, but often that's the most precarious position. Do you think the mediocre engineer working on Facebook's timeline is more or less at risk than the Rockstar building a new UI for Meta's next headset? I know who shareholders would want to keep.

The only way to get so good they can't lay you off is to be in the room where selection criteria happens. That's typically middle management (not line management to be clear).

On the one hand, the severance packages at all of these places are so generous that I would want to get laid off in order to work on side projects, take a vacation, play with some startup ideas...

Maybe that's why I don't work at any of these places. I'm sure many of these folks are dependent on their very high salaries to maintain their lifestyle, but seems like a golden opportunity for some temporary freedom that we're not often afforded in the USA.

if you’re sooo good they can’t lay you off, that means you’re too good to get promoted too.

So good you OWN the company is the only safe way. It's true. Build something awesome - build something people want.

Yes. If you start your own company. Your company may go bankrupt, but it is unlikely that you will be laid off.

You need to be providing obvious alpha (positive return on investment) and you won’t be fired

On the flip side you need to reduce your alpha to maximize your own personal compensation.

This ends up in a balancing act. Don’t play it too safe.

Even if you aren't replaceable they will still replace you. It could be detrimental to them but they'll do it anyway

An industry term I used to hear was 'golden handcuffs', but that was didn't necessarily mean being 'so good' over rather some culture of corporate politics.

Employee A: documents all work, delivers documentation, cares abour business continuity, helps others, thrives in transparency

Employee B: withholds information, accumulates information, excludes others, exploits information asymmetry, selfish fuck, thrives in obscurity

Who is more likely to be laid off? Employee A

This is why frequent layoffs create companies of parasitic unethical toxic jerks.

So a lot of people not being laid off are not "good", but rather just unethical parasites.

M$FT laid off 10K workers while it boasted record-breaking profits. Sure they'll try to justify it. Doens't make it _not_ obscene.

There is literally nothing of substance in this article.

Nobody's so good that they can't be laid off, because layoffs are rarely about function or skill. Layoffs are mostly political; They're about which parts of the company are successful as a whole viewed by the CEO.

You can be so good that the business will fail without you[1], but you cannot be so good that the business cannot lay you off.

[1]though that itself should be a firing offense; It's impossible to tell that from "job security through code obscurity" and the latter should be assumed.