Layoff Season(s)

Well, it’s layoff season again, which pretty much never stopped this year? I was going to bury a link or two to an article in that last sentence, but you know what? There’s too many. Especially in tech, or tech-adjacent fields, it’s been an absolute bloodbath this year.

So, why? What gives?

I’ve got a little personal experience here: I’ve been through three layoffs now, lost my job once, shoulder-rolled out of the way for the other two. I’ve also spent the last couple decades in and around “the tech industry”, which here we use as shorthand for companies that are either actually a Silicon Valley software company, or a company run by folks that used to/want to be from one, with a strong software development wing and at least one venture capital–type on the board.

In my experience, Tech companies are really bad at people. I mean this holistically: they’re bad at finding people, bad at hiring, and then when they do finally hire someone, they’re bad at supporting those people—training, “career development”, mentoring, making sure they’re in the right spot, making sure they’re successful. They’re also bad any kind of actual feedback cycle, either to reward the excellent or terminate underperformers. As such, they’re also bad at keeping people. This results in the vicious cycle that puts the average time in a tech job at about 18 months—why train them if they’re gonna leave? Why stay if they won’t support me?

There are pockets where this isn’t true, of course; individual managers, or departments, or groups, or even glue-type individuals holding the scene together that handle this well. I think this is all a classic “don’t attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence” situtation. I say this with all the love in the world, but people who are good at tech-type jobs tend to be low-empathy lone wolf types? And then you spend a couple decades promoting the people from that pool, and “ask your employees what they need” stops being common sense and is suddenly some deep management koan.

The upshot of all this is that most companies with more than a dozen or two employees have somewhere between 10–20% of the workforce that isn’t really helping out. Again—this isn’t their fault! The vast majority of those people would be great employees in a situation that’s probably only a tiny bit different than the one you’re in. But instead you have the one developer who never seems to get anything done, the other developer who’s work always fails QA and needs a huge amount of rework, the person who only seems to check hockey scores, the person whos always in meetings, the other person whose always in “meetings.” That one guy who always works on projects that never seem to ship.¹ The extra managers that don’t seem to manage anyone. And, to be clear, I’m talking about full-time salaried people. People with a 401(k) match. People with a vesting schedule.

No one doing badly enough to get fired, but not actually helping row the boat.

As such, at basically any point any large company—and by large I mean over about 50—can probably do a 10% layoff and actually move faster afterwards, and do a 20% layoff without any significant damage to the annual goals—as long as you don’t have any goals about employee morale or well-being. Or want to retain the people left.

The interesting part—and this is the bad interesting, to be clear—is if you can fire 20% of your employees at any time, when do you do that?

In my experience, there’s two reasons.

First, you drop them like a submarine blowing the ballast tanks. Salaries are the biggest expense center, and in a situation where the line isn’t going up right, dropping 20% of the cost is the financial equivalent of the USS Dallas doing an emergency surface.

Second, you do it to discipline labor. Is the workforce getting a little restless? Unhappy about the stagnat raises? Grumpy about benefits costing more? Is someone waving around a copy of Peopleware?² Did the word “union” float across the courtyard? That all shuts down real fast if all those people are suddenly sitting between two empty cubicles. “Let’s see how bad they score the engagement survey if the unemployment rate goes up a little!” Etc.

Again—this is all bad! This is very bad! Why do any this?

The current wave feels like a combo plate of both reasons. On the one hand, we have a whole generation of executive leaders that have never seen interest rates go up, so they’re hitting the one easy panic button they have. But mostly this feels like a tantrum by the c-suite class reacting to “hot labor summer” becoming “eternal labor september.”

Of course, this is where I throw up my hands and have nothing to offer except sympathy. This all feels so deeply baked in to the world we live in that it seems unsolvable short of a solution that ends with us all wearing leather jackets with only one sleve.

So, all my thoughts with everyone unexpectedly jobless as the weather gets cold. Hang on to each other, we’ll all get through this.

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1. At one point in my “career”, the wags in the cubes next to mine made me a new nameplate that listed my job as “senior shelf-ware engineer.” I left it up for months, because it was only a little bit funny, but it was a whole lot true.

2. That one was probably me, sorrryyyyyy (not sorry)