Layoff season

Da fuck is layoff season? Is that a real thing?

96

As an American I have not heard of it either

48
- First time I'm hearing of it and apparently I've already been infected.
  
  9
End of fiscal year, companies will sometimes do a round of layoffs to juice reports (e.g. lower ongoing costs expected for the next year). Some industries also ditch older (read: more highly paid) employees for a new batch of interns to keep average salaries down.

41
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/01/1101505691/short-term-profits-and-long-term-consequences-did-jack-welch-break-capitalism

The CEO that managed to take GE from being the single most valuable technology company and turn it into a poorly performing stagnant mess popularized the idea of survival of the fittest within companies. He asserted that by cutting the bottom performers and even whole divisions regularly that it would leave a stronger, better company. He set targets to lay off the bottom 10% every year regardless of whether it was financially necessary.

In the short term, this strategy makes efficiency metrics look really good, and with good looking metrics, the stock goes up temporarily. However, there are major costs to layoffs that take months, years, and decades to materialize. Eventually, forced churn ruins the best of companies, from GE to IBM. Unfortunately, this management style is still incredibly popular amongst publicly traded companies. Most of the investors are willing to accept the eventual demise of a company if it means a decade of really good returns in the meantime.

39
- In addition to what you said, laying off the bottom 10% performers gives your employees a conflict of interest. Now it's better for them if their coworkers perform worse, and worse performing coworkers hurts the company. This may crop up in workers not helping each other out, or deliberately writing bad documentation.
  
  28
- It's absolutely insane how big and important a company GE used to be compared to how trash they are now. Same with IBM, HP, Xerox, all those old tech companies. They didn't fall to pieces because the new generation were just better, they were killed from within.
  
  GE, for example, built a bunch of our early nuclear reactors.
  
  11
- So a form of Enshittification
  
  2
I think that's a virtual "season", more like time period until market stabilizes enough not to throw away people just in order to show pretty graphs to shareholders

18
It is 100% a real thing. American tech companies go through this cycle where they over-hire (on purpose) and then later on they lay a bunch of people off to "cut costs" and appear "financially responsible". This is also easier to manage (if you're a lazy dipshit) because you don't need to worry about your exact headcount so much, you can adjust later if you have too many or too few people. (It also gives a good excuse to get rid of people you don't like but who would otherwise be very hard to fire.)

Investors eat that shit up.

Since companies tend to report earnings and things around the same time, companies engaging in this strategy all tend to lay people off at the same time.

Here's a page tracking this phenomenon.

18
- All these companies playing the layoff game at the same time, destabilizing the lives of million of people and their family. Is there any report on the damage to the economy at a whole?
  
  8
- This is unthinkable in the EU. If a company isn't sure about the needed force, they need to hire temps.
  
  If you don't have a technical or economical reason, you are not even allowed to lay off an employee.
  
  And you have to give notice for a period, which is proportional to the time you worked for the company, or you have to pay this fully as severance and this can be more than a year.
  
  Protected employees (voted as union representatives) are even harder to fire.
  
  This does come with the downside that some, almost not productive, colleagues never get fired. But I guess it beats the alternative of having almost no protection.
  
  2
It's also an election year, gotta keep everyone one their toes during our quadrennial Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich festival.

9
My largish company has had layoffs at roughly the same time of year for the past few years. I think of it as a season. I think when it happens depends on upper management/board at each company.

6
Not in most of Europe, because we have worker protection laws in place that disincentivize this type of behaviour (sometimes so much so, that critics say it makes the job market too "rigid").

2
- Depends on the countries, in France yeah, in the Netherlands I saw almost yearly layoffs at the tech companies I worked at.
  
  2

I got a huge severance package after only 1 year at my company. That's because of labor laws im Canada. It equates to over a year in salary.

My US counterparts didn't get that, not sure if that 35% applies to the US, but if it does it's much more expensive everywhere else. And yeah, all this so it looks good on paper.

56

Labor laws vary by province and I don't know of any labor law that makes it an obligation to pay over a year of salary after a year of employment, the most probable reason you got that is the employment directives/your employment contract you had with your previous employer.

18
- It's the law in almost every Canadian province for collective layoffs. 50-100 people is like 8 weeks, then 100-200 is 12 weeks and 200 plus is 16 weeks, or something. It's on all the provinces labor law websites. My teammates in BC and Alberta got the same type of protections from what we discussed.
  
  They had to pay out my stocks that would have vested if I kept my notice. Then because it was a mass layoff of more than a few hundred people they had to give me 16 weeks notice, plus my schedule and accrued vacation up until then and up until the notice period ends (in 16 weeks). Meaning the have to keep me on payroll with full benefits.
  
  To sever that and entice me to hop off payroll and benefits, they gave me an addition 3 months pay. That gives me roughly my yearly salary.
  
  Here is the law in Quebec
  
  20
- It sounds like the company has cash and they're trying to keep up morale. Over a year of severance for employees with less than a year of employment isn't required by Canadian law that I know of^(not that I'm super knowledgeable about labour law).
  
  1
90 days is pretty standard in the US, at least with bigger companies that have to abide by the WARN Act

5
- We don't do yearly layoffs, but at my employer it's 90 days plus a week for each year of service, and benefits for a year. And if you're eligible to retire, you get to do that also. Last time there was a rumor of layoffs, all the long-timers were hoping they got laid off.
  
  1

I’m in Canada and my bank sent out the annual layoff season email about how there is support for me (in the form of a high interest loan).

51

It's good to know they have your back(pocket).

26

Layoff season being thing should remind everyone why you should always do the minimum and why you should never have loyalty to an employer

39

Oh, then they might lay you off first because you’re underperforming compared to your peers.

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- I'll let you in on a secret: they can't tell. There's absolutely no way to know how productive someone is. It's a popularity contest with extra steps.
  
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- You think they bother checking thousands of employees' performances before laying them off? The only performance they check is who is better bud with management
  
  7

Yeah… that’s probably sometimes true. But I also work in a tech company and holy fuck do we have a lot of dead weight.

28

That's a management problem. Managers should be getting poor performers up to speed (or firing them). Dealing with it through layoffs juices the stock and makes investors think the company is LeAn

39
- I agree with you but boy, here in America, employees are disposable assets, not potentially highly useful and reliable experts worth any kind of actually useful investment in or training.
  
  12
- I think thats a (shocker) overly simplistic approach to the dynamic. Layoffs are never a good look - and we’ve had an unprecedented boom time in tech for the last 20 years.
  
  Companies were hiring just so competitors couldn’t. That doesn’t really happen anymore outside of AI.
  
  We had what felt like make-work jobs, some nice guy or gal that no one wanted to fire who was “involved” but literally not responsible for anything.
  
  Broad layoffs in the industry gave everyone cover to make unpopular decisions because everyone is doing it.
  
  I don’t think - at least the ones I saw directly - it was the wrong choice.
  
  10
- Sooo... good strategy then, if you're a capitalist sociopath...
  
  1
Unfortunately cuts don't usually target the dead weight. I've worked in IT consulting for a while now, and cuts to consultants is always the first step. Just across the board, companies slash their consulting budgets blindly. Most of the time, we are leaving behind company critical systems to be supported by the "dead weight" people that couldn't tell their ass from a hole in the ground.

I'm currently on an integrated team, meaning half our developers are consultants and half are regular employees. The consultants consistently put out significantly higher quality work in a fraction of the time. But as of Jan 1, we cut almost all of them. And as of June, we're cutting the rest. What's going to be left behind is half the number of people that will put out less than a quarter of the results than before.

But the reality is that consultants are easy to cut. You don't have to call them layoffs or pay them severance.

14
- That's because the better people leave to become consultants. People aren't going into consulting to make less money.
  
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And does the dead weight get cut during layoff season? Or does it affect people who are capable but won't take bullshit from management?

12
- I've seen both, sometimes middle management gets gutted and things are reorganized, sometimes it's more focused on the grunts.
  
  You can only generalize it so far
  
  7
- I actually think we did a pretty good job - but our “layoff” was a mini one. Fractions of a percent. But of the people I knew, wasn’t worried about any of them. Felt bad for the people, they were all nice, but none of em were good at their jobs.
  
  Quite a few sr directors and VPs were let go, or allowed to leave….
  
  3
- For me it finally did. A long time team member who in the past year probably had negative productivity was let go. Sucks for that person, but a big relief for everybody else.
  
  Now this is Sweden where unions are strong, so usually it’s difficult to fire long time employees like that.
  
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- Broadly from what I saw, it was pretty much all the people that didn’t do anything useful.
  
  In fact a lot of them were the guys who didn’t give anyone shit, because they didn’t do shit.
  
  1
I'm in tech and there's a lot of dead weight in my company, but our layoffs don't really target those people. We just lost several of the best engineers in my department for stupid reasons (introducing a new c-suite position), and it caused problems immediately.

8

3rd Quarter Report: "Wow, they've cut operating costs by nearly a third!"

1st Quarter Report: "Wow, they've taken their profits and hired thousands of new employees!"

24

I didn't realize it at the time but I was part of this horrible trend. I was doing support for a large software company that's big in system administration circles.

I was laid off just prior to the end of the year. December 15, if I recall correctly (somewhere around there regardless). Shortly after me, will into layoff season, my entire support center was decommissioned and all of my co-workers joined me in unemployment. Within a few months the center went from hundreds of employees to zero.

They took the companies name off the building a year later. This was a bit less than 10 years ago and I'm still bitter; especially since the CEO visited the center about a month before he laid off the entire center, directly in the wake of laying off the front line customer support team in my center and outsourcing their jobs to low cost geographies; he had the gall to lecture is about how the layoff of the CS team didn't and shouldn't imply anything about the support team. Blah blah blah, different business unit, different operating criteria, yadda yadda yadda.... All bullshit to try to get us to work harder right up until the bitter end.

They gave everyone two months pay as severance with no consideration to how long you had worked there. Many people were shown the door after the better part of a decade, with no additional consideration than what people who were there less than a year recieved. I still don't like that CEO, and he's doing rounds in the tech circles with people singing his praises. Makes me sick.

21

I don't understand why we can't name and shame these days. They shamed you. They have tarnished your rep by making you redundant. They showed no professional courtesy. Fuck them. Name and shame.

These cunts continue to do the rounds because no one ever outright calls these cunts out.

12
- I don’t understand why we can’t name and shame these days
  
  Power. Respect for authorities.
  
  You need to be hired somewhere else. The new company you apply at don't know what actually happened, it's all hearsay and bad employees may make shit up to get more pity or make them look less bad if they were fired for legit reasons. In the confusion they'll want to defend their interest, and some may just be bad people to begin with.
  
  And then there might be repercussions because they have more means than you do.
  
  2
- I'm not so angry about it. It was almost downright traumatic at the time, suddenly being unemployed but bluntly, I wasn't a good fit for the job and I was thinking about quitting after the holidays anyways.
  
  The biggest difference for me was that if I had quit of my own accord, I would have lined up a new job before I did, so the down time between jobs would have been minimal.
  
  The CEO visiting and spouting the crap he did was probably the worst offense in my mind. I can't say that he lied specifically, more like, intentionally misled the workers into a false sense of security. I never bought it and it was one of the minor factors in my decision to leave (even though I hadn't fully committed to that decision yet). The biggest factor to depart for me was that the workload was very high and it was designed like a call center. About halfway through my employment there, which only lasted about a year, they changed cubicles (keeping in mind this happened maybe 6-10 months before the center had no workers), to increase worker density. They crammed us in and loaded us with more work than was reasonable. Most were at some stage of drowning, some were treading water, and only a handful were actually thriving in that environment. I was solidly on the "I'm drowning" side.
  
  The reason why is easy to see. I'm a very detail oriented person, so I usually take a little more time to complete things than most of my counterparts. I also struggle with continually changing contexts that I'm working under. So being customer facing to a company with literally tens or hundreds of thousands of customers, the context was always different.
  
  I didn't handle all that very well. I would have been far better as an escalation resource, but at the time, I lacked the skillet to get that kind of position. That place taught me a lot.... And the lessons learned are things I'll never forget.
  
  I'm now much happier in a senior support role for a much smaller company. It's still customer facing (think managed service provider), but the scale is much less than what I experienced at that job. I'm not bitter and I don't have prejudice towards the company, only that CEO who no longer works there. He's now at a company that makes hardware, with a blue logo and a name that comes to mind when you say "CPU". But you didn't hear that from me.
  
  2

But we cut costs by 5% for the quarterly report and got a nice bonus for that. That's all that counts, after all.

17

Line goes up!!

12

For my company, layoff season is traditionally Q4. I assume they do that so they can load all the expense in the year ending as a "one time" charge that they then subtract from the adjusted earnings, as if it never happened. And then do it again every year.

Unfortunately, starting last year in Q2, we seem to have moved to rolling layoffs. There's a high likelihood that my team will be reorganized twice in 9 months (while still implementing the last round). That will also be the 3rd round of layoffs in 9 months. My boss thinks I'm safe in the next round, but I'm doubtful.

12

I've been in your shoes. I hope you are interviewing. Your boss will not tell you the truth, but what you need to hear.

5
We got 3 rounds in the last 12 months. At this rate I'm expecting another by March.

4