Comment by fuck_AI | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fuck_AI | Hacker News Reader

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By your description it sounds like layoffs should be at the management level for incompetence, not for employees.

What would you do with all of the employees who are currently working in jobs or on projects or with skills not relevant to the company?

Unless you're a sociopath, you let natural attrition run its course. If their skills weren't relevant when you hired them, then it's your fault. If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault. The only just thing to do is find a way to make their work meaningful until they move on.

What a sad waste of talent in that case. A waste that could be mitigated by them finding a more productive way to help society than sticking to a pointless job.

Agree. We lean hard into sunk cost fallacy when it comes to job training.

“If your name is Farmer you’re a farmer.” mentality but self selected euphemism. “I trained as a software engineer and that’s what I am for 50 years! Dag gubmint trynna terk my herb!”

Service economy role play is the root of brain dead job life we’re all suffering through.

> If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault.

Nobody can predict market conditions or technological advances.

If you don’t change course (mission, people) the company will likely fail and then everyone is out of a job, shareholders, pensioners, and 401k holding laypeople look money.

I do think that leadership is not held accountable enough for their mistakes and failures.

The situation of Intel is much more the result of bad management than the output of their current workers. For all purposes, they're effectively doing what they're were supposed to do when hired. So the logical conclusion is that Intel workers are the ones who should have the power to fire the entire management and put someone in place to fix the issue, not the other way around.

The output of workers is always a leadership problem, imho.

I disagree that the workers are the ones who should have the power to fire management unless they are shareholders. I think this should (and it does) fall upon the board and the shareholders. If the workers are shareholders, all the better.

Regardless, it's clear the current system needs work.

No, you give them a fat severance and eat the losses. Maybe 6 months + 1 month per year of tenure, something like that. You're break even by the end of the fiscal year, you just gave someone a lifechanging amount of money, and they don't have the crushing morale problems of "the work I do is pointless" and get to collect unemployment in addition to severance.

If you are honest and generous with people, they aren't mad that you made a mistake and let them go. It's companies that try to give 2 weeks + 1 week per year of severance that are making a mistake, not the entire concept of layoffs.

(Without delving into the systemic reasons that layoffs are inevitable of course. If the system was different, they wouldn't have to happen, but we live in this system at the moment.)

A year or two of salary is generally not life-changing.

It doesn't have to be lifechanging to be meaningful. I'd happily take 6 months of severance over working ineffectually on a doomed product.

Imagine you're a middle tier functionary making $70k a year. Are you telling me $90k in cash after tax plus unemployment for ~6 months isn't lifechanging? That's a downpayment on a house, or your student loans paid off, or $4000 a year in permanent income for the rest of your life.

If yiu get severance, generally you don’t also get unemployment

Look for mutually beneficial ways forward - reassignment to relevant projects, retraining where necessary, generous layoff package for those for whom neither hits. Realistically the vast majority of PhD employees are going to be highly motivated and want to work on something useful just as much as you want them to.

Let them make cool stuff the company can sell, increasing revenue and reversing the decline.

How to draw an owl: draw the owl.

They tried that, it didnt work.

I would argue that should be done at a lot of companies.

What purpose would it serve? Remember, the purpose of a company is not to make good products.

Managers are also employees. Nobody's arguing they should be spared and I'm not sure that you can argue top management at Intel hasn't been let go over the years.

Also laying off incompetent managers alone won't solve the problem of having hired the wrong people

I think management has historically argued as such.

Who said they have the "wrong" people? They are doing exactly what they were hired to do.

wrong for the needs of the company. this isn't an assessment of their worth as an individual or as a professional

Do they have any clear direction for the future of the company? As it seems they don't, the idea that these workers are the wrong people is completely unfounded.

The whole thread started because of this comment

> I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives of the project were remote to his skills, and he told me this is what his entire team was made of. Seems like a lot of bloat present in this company, and it makes sense they feel the way forward is layoffs.

But this is just his point of view. Intel was hiring people and training them to do the job they wanted. And if they continued employment this means they were doing what was expected.

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