Comment by r_smart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by r_smart | Hacker News Reader

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It seems weird that they would choose to do this. From what I understand, they're a company in need of something big happening for them. Laying off 20 people, who are probably some of the lowest paid on their staff, doesn't really seem to do anything for them as I can understand it. It's basically $0 in Twitter dollars. Why not just turn it into an R&D department and see if they churn out anything interesting? Otherwise, just don't replace them as they leave.

Having worked in the semiconductor industry (oh boy, annual layoff time!), once you start firing people, rumors start and morale tanks. Sometimes you have to do it, but I just don't see how 20 people in India helps at all, but will get rumors churning internally.

I guess it just seems to me like saying: "I've realized I'm going to have a hard time ahead of me financially. To that end, I"m going to start buying generic dish soap. I'm now saving about $0.3 / month!" You haven't fixed your financial problem, and now your dish soap doesn't bubble up like it's supposed to.

Please enjoy that labored analogy :)

Firing a offshore team usually improves morale for the onshore teams.

I don't know about your experience, but in my own case, the opposite of this is true, and in a major way. The last company I worked at fired tons of people overseas and it managed to cripple an already withered morale. It may not have hit people as hard as if the person sitting next to them was let go, but I assure you, it was not seen in a positive light.

This is the saddest thing I've read in a while.

It might be sad, but I have a hard time thinking it's true. It certainly runs counter to my own experience.

Under the assumption that it will increase onshore hiring. But it prolly won't in this case. So onshore team will feel more insecure and keep thinking which low cost team is next.

>It's basically $0 in Twitter dollars.

It's probably a significant number in a VP's expense line who is under pressure to cut costs or allocate those dollars to another team.

Beyond the money it allows them to focus more on something else, which can be extremely valuable.

We're talking about a company with just short of 4,000 employees. I can't possibly imagine dumping 20 of them lets them refocus the company in any meaningful way. Their overall impact has to have been relatively insignificant.

>> It's basically $0 in Twitter dollars.

It's not when it happens to 10, 50, and then 100 teams

Right, but that's not what they're doing right now. They fired what are probably the 20 lowest paid engineers in their company. They've closed the office as well, but it was probably the cheapest real estate in their company.

Most people who have been in the position of laying people off that I've met have said that it's better to do it all in one big cut. Laying off team after team over a period of time is disastrous for morale, and you can expect the performance of your company to tank. If that's their plan, it's probably a bad one. If they decided to clean up their books (in preparation for sale or whatever), and this was all they came up with, then I think they've failed to send the right signalling to potential buyers.

Cheap does not mean good value for the money. Let's say it costs them 1M to run that office and they get 0.5M in value from that office. Well, shut it down.

Hell, it could have just been an experiment. Let's see if doing this is a good idea. If No shut it down, if Yes scale it up.

PS: Another concern is how much effort it takes to manage. It can be really expensive to have a small team in another country. Often your better off with either nobody or large teams.

I don't disagree with anything you said, but I think my main point might have been lost, so let me reiterate: The value saved is unlikely to outweigh the cost in morale.

I feel like this is especially true when you're talking about a small number of people with much lower wages. Twitter is getting a lot of negative press lately, laying people off is guaranteed to get press (as we see), and will start rumors flying. In exchange for that they've maybe saved a couple million dollars. You're welcome to disagree, but to me, it doesn't seem like a good exchange for them.

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