The thing about #tech#layoffs that people who haven’t been through it often don’t understand is that morale never recovers. The employees who remain will never have the same relationship with that company, bosses or peers.
Watching people you respect pack their stuff and crying on the phone with their spouses is something that never goes away. When I survived a layoff in my 20s I became a “do exactly what the ticket says” person. I stopped suggesting ideas, providing feedback, believing anything a manager told me.
If you are a company considering layoffs, especially a profitable company, you should approach it as “this department will have 100% turnover”. The second I got another job offer I left that company and six months later nobody who had been there at the time of layoffs remained.
@matdevdug@femme_mal When I was laid off from a tech co. in 2013 it altered my world view. I had won an award for performance only 2 months earlier! I’ve never trusted an organization to have my back again.
@matdevdug the first time I went through a #tech#layoff I really struggled with “what did I do wrong?” It took me a long time to recover from that.
My first time as a manager having to lay people off was one of the toughest days of my 35 yr career. A year after that there was 100% turnover in that team, including me.
My current place has had a round of layoffs. We learned to manage employee growth in a way that we haven’t had to do it again. We’re now profitable and have an amazing team.
@matdevdug The first tech company I ever worked for got bought by a private equity-backed company in 2011. Within a few months, the layoffs started. I could see the writing. I got out before the next round of layoffs, and the layoffs after that. Before, I had that idealism you mention - the belief I was a part of something. After that, I stopped making my job a core part of my identity, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
@juliancday@matdevdug in 1999 I moved 3000km to a job in a .com startup. I left inside 3 months, before the .com bust, because I could see it was all bullshit. They kept talking about their IPO and our shares from it but nothing added up. Went and found a job at a “real” company and watched the implosions from the sidelines.
It did give me a sense of scam hype. Felt the same way about crypto currency from the start. Feeling the same way about LLMs now.
@aradke This is something I tell my younger coworkers - I missed the .com bust by a few years, but remember it playing out vividly. A lot of people I've worked with have only ever seen good times.
@matdevdug It has always been like this. It has always been about control. The difference here is that in times past, these companies weren't doing these layoffs all at the same time, so it gave tech workers the illusion that it wouldn't be so bad because there were other jobs to be found in a couple of weeks. But now that they're all doing it together, there aren't going to be other job offers for those who remain. They have nowhere to go.
The pandemic temporarily shifted the power to the workers and the corpos panicked and had to adapt. It showed the workers the truth that all those perks were designed to keep them "engaged" and "productive" - and under control. Now that the lockdowns have ended, this is the industry pushing back to restore the status quo and reassert control. They're doing it now en masse to reset the market using fear and intimidation - the venerable "hey, at least you still have a job" trope.
What they want are factory workers and the plain, sad fact of the matter is that there will always be young devs willing to do that factory work to make their bones in the industry. These companies do not care about the brain drain because they have an endless supply of young workers to brute force their way through it, and the users who are already locked into those platforms can't leave.
@Npars01 I lived in the UK when Thatcher broke the backs of the unions through an engineered recession. They lost badly. Tech workers don't stand a chance.
Thatcher launched her attacks on unions at the beginning of a wave of neoliberalism.
The data is in, neoliberalism is a failure in every respect except rebuilding the conditions for fascism, global war, frying the planet, mass famine, & enriching the rich.
Tech workers are launching theirs at the end of 50 years of failed policy from those wonks
@matdevdug my current company did layoffs back in June with pathetic severance packages.. and people have been quitting enmasse ever since.
The other thing to remember is that many of these former employees will end up at customers or potential customers who will now NEVER look at your product and will actively discourage other people from even taking your calls...
There is a knock on effect to layoffs.
For two weeks severance I'm not signing a non disparagement agreement.
@matdevdug As a GenXer, I remember as a child watching friends disappear overnight because of mass layoffs in the 80s. Houses suddenly vacant, abandoned. My dad was never laid off, but the effect you describe is exactly what he came home with. GenX supposedly learned to never trust companies for anything (not sure if we really did in the long run).
Tressie McMillan Cottom reminds that the institution does not love you back. Every bit as true for corporate orgs as for higher ed.
@StephanieMoore@matdevdug as a kid growing up in Thatcher's Britain, the nightly news was factory after factory closing, much of it due to government monetary policy of raising interest rates to crush inflation - and bring the workers to heel.
The factories never came back. These layoffs remind me of that - not just a "correction" but the end of a whole class of work.
@matdevdug@dave Went through the dot-com blowup of 2001 and the banking fuckup of 2008 and various other layoffs. Every time, the remaining people spent months mostly with polishing their resumes.
I’ve never seen any upside, since frequently promising projects or client relationships died in those layoffs, certainly eating up any conceivable savings from the lower payroll.
@matdevdug Well said. If there is one small upside of these layoffs, hopefully it will help dispel the Silicon Valley mythology that these companies often traffic in.
Free lunch and a foozeball table is a poor substitute for job security and human-focused management.
@matdevdug I think in most of today's layoff this is done on purpose though. Tech companies in hypergrowth mode needed happy employees taking creative initiative. When they pivot to controlling expenses and maximizing quarterly profit they need obedient drones paralyzed by fear.
@matdevdug
The only time that works when a n isolated department / company part is separated from the company or shut down - AND the workers are obviously not retrainable.
For example the sheet metal benders and packing people when the hardware section is shut down and only the software products survive.
The problem with this argument is that for huge companies like Google, Microsoft, et al, there will always be a large turnover of staff and a ready supply of starry-eyed potential recruits.
Those potential recruits, wanting to flesh out and improve their CVs with "prestige" employment, are the ideal clay with which to mould a compliant and motivated (out of fear, mainly) workforce.
So the main issue for the company is not lack of motivation but lack of continuity and experience. These factors, of course, lead to a lack of real progress and the repetition of past mistakes.
@matdevdug Don't have a "relationship" with your company in the first place. your relationship is just a contract. It can be cut at any moment. The less you have feelings about where you work, the better. This is not a big family.
@matdevdug i am pretty sure back then (I was there) and now (I am here) #tech corporations know exactly what they are doing and understand that whoever stays after a mass layoff will mostly likely resign within 6 months. That’s what happens in mergers (me: 2000) and that’s what’s happening now (X, Google, Salesforce…). The correct calculation they make is that new blood will fight to go through the door, undercut the market & espouse the new culture in hope of a quick promotion.
@matdevdug
Did your experience with layoffs change your relationship with just that company, or did it make you reluctant to trust any similar company? I confess that after my treatment by one tech company I left the industry and can't really trust any similar company again.
@matdevdug
This is a difficult subject for many people who don't work in tech. On the one hand, it's awful that skilled tech workers are treated like so many interchangeable cogs by their executive overlords. But on the other hand, these same workers are beneficiaries of a rapacious, profit extraction machine that is literally undermining civil society: none of the tech workers are complaining before the layoff rounds, when bonuses and stock options are plentiful. These same workers take their outsized income and drive up property and commodity prices to the point of harming their own communities and society at large.
We want to support working people. But please, tech workers, be honest with yourselves about the underbelly of the tech economy: instead of feeding at the trough until the bosses cast you aside, how about more of you save up your bonuses to start your own small businesses, to contribute to your community? @jstatepost
@darwinwoodka@strangeculprits@matdevdug@jstatepost If no employees can ever be blamed, regardless of behaviour or agreement with the compensation structure, then neither can bosses. Not even the CEO. Reproduction of a system is hard to free oneself from, but the more privilege you have, the more leverage you have. Unfortunately also less incentive, because you have more to lose.
@ahltorp@darwinwoodka@matdevdug@jstatepost ^This. When some people benefit financially from a manifestly unjust system (and we contend that the current tech economy is precisely that), and then commit none of those disproportionate benefits to help offset the harms wrought by that system, please don't ask for our sympathy when that same system does to you what it's always done to the rest of us.
That's not "blaming workers," it's calling out collaborators.
@matdevdug I have been laid off, survived layoffs, found another job only to go through another round of layoffs. This behavior is endemic to how business is done in the U.S. at least.
@matdevdug When I worked as a Nurse in care homes, the key indicator of poor management and low staff morale was turnover rate of staff...this was well-known amongst all my colleagues and it was plain to see whilst I worked at some such establishments. I'm sure this is a phenomenon that exists throughout industry.
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