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Comment by rcatcher

12 hours ago

> Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.

How did the company decide who to lay off? They didn't even ask EMs?

Almost 99% sure that They hired a consultant firm (MBB) that told them who to cut; this is pretty standard practice now at public tech corps. Especially if EMs weren’t in the loop. This looks like purely a margin improvement exercise thats hiding weaknesses in the company’s financial performance.

  • I’m sure they don’t know what they are doing or necessarily care, but I’m still curious what the consultants even claim to be looking at to make the list? Job description, git activity, team level profitability, salary, etc?

    • They probably claim all of it, but likely only job description.

      "You have 20 guys that can code, so you can get rid of two of them".

  • EMs are never in the loop for layoffs for companies of this size, because the whole company would just get forewarning of the layoffs

This style of layoff seems far more common post-2020 than targeted "restructuring". I've lived through a few layoffs now, survived most of them, but each time and at each company I've gotten by on an apparent roll of the dice and nothing more. Every time I've seen some truly important ICs get let go, their EMs having no input.

I really don't know. My org now has 40+ engineers with 2 managers. Down from 6. I really don't know how they will do it. Each one of us were handling critical shit, and desperately needed more engineers. PMs made things run and they got hit even harder

No one had any idea. My director got the same email

Companies have so much data on employees/products/customers etc these days the EM's opinion is just noise.