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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that sounds so poorly handled. Not figuring out a way to tell everyone affected at (nearly) the same time is probably the worst sin.

Best layoff I ever went through was when my boss came to our team and said, "look, don't tell anyone, but we have a layoff coming in a few days. I have to let one of the three of you go. Do you want me to decide or do you want to decide amongst yourselves?". She knew we were good friends outside of work and would probably make a better choice than her.

I ended up volunteering because one other guy had just bought a house and had a baby and the other guy had debts to pay off and I didn't. Ended up working with both those guys again. One of them ended up leaving and getting a new job, then he pulled me in after 1.5 years of unemployment, and then we pulled the last guy in after he eventually got let go.

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> Best layoff I ever went through was when my boss came to our team and said, "look, don't tell anyone, but we have a layoff coming in a few days. I have to let one of the three of you go. Do you want me to decide or do you want to decide amongst yourselves?"

Judging from your reaction, it sounds like yall had a great work environment, and that this was a good way to handle the layoff for your team. It sounds like it went smoothly, which is 100%, A+, great.

But HOOO BOY, that was a HIGH RISK move by your boss. I sincerely can't imagine the clusterf** that would've resulted from that at some of the places I've worked. Good GOD. This is an invitation for a lawsuit on a silver platter, holy guacamole.

Fwiw there is a more normalized practice that resembles this and is, afaik, not a massive hr risk: openly offering a voluntary severance with defined benefits.

Obviously it's not a great signal to those who don't take it about the health of the company, and you might lose a bunch of people you'd rather not, but I think allowing some level of self-selection is good when it's possible.

I find it rather rare that a relatively compentent dev couldn't get approximately equal compensation working for some other company. So if offered $X for volutary severance, where $X at least N months total compensation, most devs who can get a similar job in less than N months will leave. This leaves you with least capable people, which is (usually) not what's wanted when doing layoffs. (This is of course assuming that interview performance is correlated with work performance, which is not necessarily a great assumption to do)

I think you need to consider that we're in the context of a job market that has been hoovering up devs for the last 10 years. There are 30 year olds who graduated into a fairly good market who are now expeirenced developers who have never seen a really difficult job market. It's all fun and games if you're a fungible 20 something who can go off to be another cog in another machine. But if the market dries up - as is starting to happen with all the big names slowing, it's a very difficult situation to be in, and long term unemployment isn't just a financial burden, it can be a massive emotional burden as well. One thing that has always troubled me in my career is that I look around and I don't see many 50+ or 60+ year old engineers, and partly it's that our industry is still emerging and 60 year old engineers pre-dated the industry. But some of it could well be that at some point attrition pushes people permanently out of the industry.

I think there are two problems with this in practice:

1) In the end those people will leave anyways once it's obvious the ship is sinking, so I think you wind up with a double whammy of attrition.

2) Mass layoffs don't usually allow for a particularly good perspective on who is a high preformer because it's hard to vet decisions on that scale. Also this assumes that performance is the primary axis, and not cost or tenure. You will likely lose high performers along with low and medium in a top down layoff.

What are reasonable ranges for N in a typical severance package?

The issue with voluntary severance, is that the strongest employees tend to be the most likely to take it.

This way you probably lose the best people, the ones who is in high demand on the market (probably having several informal offers right now), and left with mediocre ones, who are too afraid to look for new jobs.

If you had offers and your company announced layoffs but you weren't one of the people being laid off, would you stay?

My primary interest in any work is the product, the team and the compensation. The later is negotiated beforehand, so if the team is not severely impacted (brilliant people who I happy to work with are staying) and there is no big changes in product (I still feel that I am doing something meaningful and useful for people) - there's no reason to leave.

If your team is unaffected by layoffs then you're very very lucky. This sounds like you're imagining basically the spherical cow of layoffs.

Layoffs don't happen when everything is hunky dory and just needs some tweaks.

Nobody in their right mind fires brilliant people. And brilliant people are the ones who are fun and delight to work with. It may sound harsh, but leaving some ballast weight behind may be even healthy for a team.

Brilliant people are expensive. Bleeding companies need to cut costs. Layoffs are usually a mix of poor performers, high cost talent, and tenure ordering. Sometimes entire departments full of brilliant people go because the department isn't profitable.

Again, you have in your mind a spherical cow of a layoff.

Oh yeah for sure. The only reason she could do it is because we all got along.

I would not recommend this approach for most managers. :)

What would the grounds of the lawsuit be? I can think of reasons to not announce a layoff in advance, but I can't think of why what the boss did was illegal.

Person X argues they only volunteered because Y is pregnant. ‘If I had stayed, I would’ve been the subject of retaliation because I’d look like a bad person.’

In discovery, it’s found that person Z pinged a friend and said ‘yea, we totally couldn’t let C be laid off. What kind of person would fire a pregnant woman?!”

That’s pretty strong proof that membership in a protected class factored directly into a retention/compensation decision.

This is why managers are (/should be) trained to handle this with lawyers involved.

I know right, what a firecracker.

Maybe she had just watched The Hunger Games and was feeling inspired.

Why would this invite a lawsuit? Layoffs are part of business.

Wow, that sounds awful for me. Being a boss means making hard decision, he just dumped that on the three of you. Glad it worked out for you, but I can't imagine this working in most situations.

*she

That is awesome for a cohesive, high functioning team. I worked at a company with some obvious (to everyone else) under performers, and as much as I wish they had not been a layoff, I would have been pissed if some of the nicer members of the team had volunteered to take the bullet.

That said, the standard layoff protocol only got rid of one of them, and the other only left after reacting badly to the slight uptick in performance feedback (suggesting his lack of self awareness)

Yeah, so the company ended up losing the most confident/competent person (since they have the highest chance of quickly getting another job).

99 out of 100 times this would have been 3 spidermen pointing at each other.

Glad your manager was able to recognize your team could handle this decision themselves. But, wow.

How was that the “best layoff”?

Instead of being an actual fucking leader and making a difficult decision, your boss just said “lol so who wants to leave.”

I swear sometimes the shit I read here makes me go insane.

She was a great leader. She recognized that our team was cohesive and could make a better decision than she could. She was one of the best managers I ever had.

she is supposed to be part of the team and have the same knowledge and thus be able to make an equally or more informed decision

The reports were all good friends, she knew that, and gave them the option for her to decide or them. She apparently didn't know the personal lives of the reports as well as they did themselves.

Don’t bother man. These people will bend over backwards to justify inane decisions like “who wants to lay themselves off”.

I guess it might be attributable to how much managers consider themselves to be, or actually are (subject to org limits), a part of the team, vs just managing it

Sometimes there is no good decision, and empowering the underlings to make it is best term for everyone.

Context and relationships matter. Apparently this manager had a relationship with her reports where that would work. It's obviously not going to work in nearly any other situation, but kudos to her for figuring out what would work in this situation.

Bottom line is that all of the reports involved were reasonably ok with the outcome--no one is ever happy about getting laid off--and that is far better than the situation in most layoffs.

Sometimes people are planning to leave anyways, and wouldn't mind a potentially generous severance package.

By quoting her wrongly you missed precisely the reason why her's was considered a good approach to communicating this.

This sounds like a worse way of doing a layoff. It specifically worked for you in your situation. I doubt it would work for anyone else.

> I ended up volunteering

You are a good person.

Just wanted to say, that's a great story, and you should tell it often.

Yea but try doing that with 700 people.

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