zlacker

I'm trying to count the rounds of major layoffs in my career (e.g. 10% or more of the company let go at once). I _think_ it's 5, but it might be a bit more. I've been lucky each time, but that also means I wasn't one of the ones taking risks. Layoffs cut from both sides of the performance curve and leave the middle, in my experience.

I wish I'd done this more.

In some cases there was no way to. For example, we once woke up to find that the European half of our team had been laid off as part of huge cuts that weren't announced and even our manager had no idea were coming. There's no good way to do layoffs, but I think that "sudden shock" approach is worst of all, personally. You don't get to say goodbye in any way and people don't get to plan for contingencies at all. (The other extreme of knowing it's coming for a year and applying for your own job and then having 2 months to sit around after you didn't get it also sucks, and I've done that as well. You can at least make plans in that case, though.)

On the other hand, in a _lot_ of other cases, you do have a chance to say goodbye. Take it. This is really excellent advice. It's worth saying something, at very least to the people you really did enjoy working with.

There's a decent chance you work with some of those folks in the future, and even if you don't, it really does mean something to be a kind human.

>>jofer+(OP)
Theres no good way to do a layoff, but there are tons of bad ways to do them and it seems like we keep finding new ways to make it worse.

>>jofer+(OP)
The "sudden shock" approach is a risk mitigation. You have to ask yourself though, what risk were they mitigating?

There's no good answer to that question I can come up with that should make you want to stay at that company.

>>chesch+Zx
There's a lot of companies with IP that can be extracted or systems that can be sabotaged by a bitter employee. There's also the extreme cases of someone who knows they are being fired who can do a shooting/arson/some other extreme scenario.

I'm not saying I agree with the shock approach but there are definitely some generic risks that I don't think paint a bad picture of the company by their existence.

>>chesch+Zx
As a company, we entrust our employees with a lot of agency and access to our systems, networks and data. We do not spy on our employees nor have intrusive systems to prevent them from seeing/copying internal IP.

Therefore, while these operating procedures foster an agreeable environment for our collaborators to thrive and do actual things without too much segmentation, it makes it painful when a hard decision results in people getting suddenly both very angry against the company, and very capable to inflict damage upon it.