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Comment by SergeAx | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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