I’ve been laid off three times and not once was my layoff a result of a coherent strategy or reflective of my utility/value to the team.
The first time, I was an accounting mistake. The company quite literally hired me and numerous other contractors by accident. The bean counters in corporate simply weren’t talking to each other and hiring managers somehow got their reqs through.
The second time, I along with my new hire cohort was laid off a month after my start date. I’m not even sure how a company is so disorganized that they can go from approving new hires to laying off those same new hires within a time period that couldn’t have been longer than 3 months.
The third time was similar except that it took place in a slightly longer timespan, still less than a year. Company management handled growth immaturely and irresponsibly, choosing to bulk hire then lay off the cohort rather than growing more conservatively. Paying 5 employees for almost a year could have paid for one employee for over 3 years, no layoff necessary.
- Layoff to hopefully bump stock price prior to M&A negotiations
- Layoff to "streamline" before new CTO start date whether or not the CTO was expected to change directions and before incoming CTO even evaluated the existing teams. Further simplified: layoff to hopefully bump stock price due to speculation about CTO transfer being theoretically messy on paper.
There's definitely a common thread in my layoffs of some dull ideas to please some form of stock investor's short-term, single Quarter thinking, maybe influenced by actual stock investors. That's also something that there seems to be some data on in 2022/2023 layoff cycles in general how much of them have been "activist" shareholder lead, as much or more than board strategy (though the Venn Diagrams between boards and "activist" shareholders is sometimes quite close to a circle, go figure).
I like to believe executives know their workforce will shrink more than the layoff numbers. They must know this. They also must know it will be harder to hire new people. They know this, right? Please someone tell me so.
What time horizon are you thinking? People will forget '22/'23 layoffs very quickly. This is especially true if you made it through these last years, the market picks up and you want to move.
But anyone looking for a job ought to do due dilligence when things pick up again and at least set the correct expectations about how long their relationship with the company could last if the market turns bad again.
I've got an employer that I've held a grudge against for nearly two decades now and another that friends of mine have held grudges against since at least two corporate rebrandings ago, all just off the top of my head. We'll all happily talk dirt in a LinkedIn DM or over beers and who is to say how many of us all posted some anonymous strongly worded letter to something like Glassdoor.
Labor is still a market, for now, and while it isn't as liquid or as free of a market (in terms of open price [wage/salary] information, in terms of too many near monopsonies and/or trust-like behavior) as it should be in America, and companies should stop treating it like a one-way street. Bad labor relations hurts brands and eventually the market uses that information. It's not always efficient at using that information especially because it isn't liquid/free enough, but it uses that information.
This is the shared theme of most of the recent layoffs.
I don't know where the GP is coming from. Layoffs with clear and local causes seem to be a tiny minority.
