Worst downsizing I ever went through (short of "company is bankrupt, go home") was 10%, and that fucked our operational efficiency for a quarter. Spotify laid off 17% and are suffering. The C-suite were fools to assume there was 17% slack in the system, much less that middle management would choose the right 17% to fire (or that competent workers wouldn't see this coming and jump ship to better jobs, leaving time-servers behind). https://toot.cafe/@baldur/112325661237678117
@cstross I think management really underestimates the secondary effects regarding competent workers.
Layoffs are a shake-up. On my team, we had a re-org that resulted in some half the staff getting cut (technically "not rehired"). And then my team, personally, lost one of our most creative and pioneering engineers simply because he no longer felt like the company was interested in letting people build a legacy there, and he'd rather work somewhere he could do that.
Layoffs signal to employees that the company is short-term focused.
@cstross yes, and it's not just the direct loss of the 10% that bites you. It's the trauma, and the fact that everyone starts keeping their head down on their own work, and no one feels like helping other people.
@rogerlipscombe@cstross or worse, they’re spending all of their time promoting their work and slagging perceived competitors. There are so many negative ways people can respond.
@NohatCoder Profit is a line on a balance sheet and the profit line is what the corporation pays tax on. The real bottom line is revenue. Smart corporations shuffle revenue from profits into capital expenditure, thereby making a paper loss but increasing the value of their total assets.
While I worked at old-SCO the company IPO’d. They always made a loss, for 15 years, growing from just two guys to $200M/year revenue. Until for the IPO they turned profitable for three consecutive quarters.
@cstross I don't get how one would just do that, I mean you can't just choose whether or not you have a massive debt from quarter to quarter. One can spend on advertising, or other growth measures, in order to counterbalance profits. But I don't see how that would make sense for Spotify, they are near market saturation.
@NohatCoder Yup, Spotify should be too big for stunts like that. But? Say they spin out "Spotify IP SA" as a separate company, then "Spotify Inc" does a deal to buy in a license to use all that IP at some outrageous price, thereby hiding their profits under an outgoing: meanwhile "Spotify IP SA" is incorporated in Luxemburg (2% corporation tax -- AMZN used this trick for years to avoid EU corporation taxes in their main operating countries). It's an accounting scam.
@cstross Do you actually know what they did at Spotify? Or are you just suggesting creative accounting techniques? I know there are ways of masking profits of varying legality, but I'm not completely convinced that that is all there is to it.
Also SCO probably just reinvested profits into growth, growth is the main purpose, not paying tax on reinvested profits is just a nice bonus.
@NohatCoder Nope, I have NO idea what Spotify in particular were doing—just, this sort of tax avoidance is near-universal at corporate level (indeed, anywhere with revenue over about $10M/year).
@cstross The worst one I experienced was 16,000 to 3,000. All the hidden bigotries emerged when that happened, so some of us didn't survive very long after. It was a federal department and that's when (to no-one's surprise) Australia's education system and employment policies completely changed.
After delaying for a year past most of the industry, $EMPLOYER started laying people off "quietly" late in 2023 and continuing through 2024 so far, including people like FPGA engineers who are not easy to find in the first place, let alone replace.
Surprise! Now key workers are quitting for other jobs or retiring early, some groups' important projects are running behind schedule and our group is getting people yanked off it - again - to go work on other groups' projects.
@cstross the incentives for the folks left are utterly fucked up, too. I mean, right now I’m firmly in the “lay me off? Ok, fine, early retirement with an extra bonus chunk of cash!”camp and while it’s surprisingly chill here I also have exactly zero fucks to give about an employer that’s dived head first into the abyss on multiple occasions.
@BoredomFestival@cstross I think the positive outcomes here are mostly chill during the present, and lots of time to prep for being done working. My husband got hit with a surpris layoff that eventually transitioned into retirement and it took him a good eighteen months and a hellish stint at a hedge fund to finally get him to accept retirement. I… won’t take nearly that long.
"Why do we have this fire extinguisher on premises? When we need a fire extinguisher, we'll contract out for one. Meanwhile, it's taking up valuable space that could be occupied by a highly profitable child laborer"
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