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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

Layoffs in profitable companies are always counterproductive.

At best, it signals the company is done with growth and is going for a high-profit, low investment (including low innovation) policy.

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That's not always true. Layoffs can spur growth if you are dropping dead weight, for example by eliminating under performing business units, consolidating redundant functionality, or simply correcting previous bad decisions that led to over-hiring.

If you are looking for freeing resources that you can redirect, firing your "resources" won't help redirecting them... unless you think you don't need the people that are working for a while at your company and can get better ones by hiring.

But if it's the second one, well, you'd be stupid and my best possible explanation up there doesn't apply anymore.

Firing 50 employees with skillsets you don't need to hire 50 employees with the skillsets you actually need will very much help redirect your resources. It's pretty tough to transmute an accountant into an engineer.

Those aren't layoffs - at least as they're commonly implemented - they're performance based firings. Layoffs are done in a mass manner and tend to be highly inaccurate - they're often based off of BS kpis.

Performance based firings are when you fire individuals for their performance. Every example I gave is a layoff where large numbers of positions are eliminated and the employees let go regardless of their performance.

Depends on how it is measured as to whether it is a success.

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