Fear of layoffs has increased productivity over the last 6+ months. CEOs are coupling this with their forced return-to-office policies to paint a convenient story to further both of their goals - trimming the fat and getting back to a status quo they prefer.
You have a source for "fear of layoffs increases productivity"?
That hasn't really been my experience at companies I've worked at which experience layoffs. There's a huge morale hit from the layoff and survivors soldier on, but certainly not with renewed pep.
From my experience it's quite obvious that people with families amidst layoffs and a difficult job market will work harder (or look like they are) to ensure they keep their jobs.
This is no longer a worker's market, meaning your labor has been devalued and competition has increased. Increased globalization and rising unemployment rates (latest report has a .5% increase) will spell disaster for those of us who keep the same attitudes we enjoyed the last couple decades. I'm just a worker like most people on here, but I'm really steeling myself for what's to come. I don't think now is the time to sit on your laurels and hope that your tenure is enough to keep your job around.
> Fear of layoffs has increased productivity over the last 6+ months
That is never the case. You get the desperate types sucking up to management more perhaps. And people complain less about the snacks in kitchen. But people who already deliver start biding their time, looking around, and do the minimal needed to look acceptable.
Yeah, my experience is you don’t really want the people whose “productivity” goes up after a layoff. There are the people who don’t actually produce much, but are able to look like they do. Then there’s the people who used to provide the most value but are now dead inside. They are the one whose measurable productivity may go up, but the output is “wooden”, or maybe hollow, now. It lacks the creativity and big picture thinking that really moves the needle. So you may think you’re getting more output but it’s not impactful anymore.
Unprofitable companies will die regardless of theater. Commercial real estate will take the hit eventually. Structural demographics means labor supply shortages for at least a decade. Someone has to get paid to declare the King’s (collectively speaking) intent I suppose.
(disclosing bias, contributing to tech organizing efforts and scholar of the macro)
It'll be more than that. They just report on FTE's... not all the contractors and other part time people who they don't have to talk about. Design shops not getting contracts renewed... etc...
> I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago and no one ever told him, but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, he still gets a paycheck. So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.
Similar phrases have been in circulation since at least the 1700s including a similar passage in Voltaire's Candide: "But in this country it is good to kill an Admiral from time to time to encourage the others."
In 1863 the words of Voltaire were alluded to in a memoir by Lord William Pitt Lennox who described the hazing experienced by pupils at the Westminster School in England: "...of having a flogging, to encourage the others, as a Frenchman said of the execution of Admiral Byng."
The first known reference to the specific wording "...until morale improves" dates to a 1961 US Navy comic:
After that cartoon was published we see many different variations on the phase pop up such as, "The layoffs will continue until morale improves" from 1964.
The first reference to the specific phrase, "The beatings will continue until morale improves" is from a 1989 Usenet post on soc.culture.nordic:
Ohh yeah, definitely. I mentioned it in the context of perpetual layoffs. Almost every Friday, you’d have more people laid off because the company didn’t magically double its revenue since the previous Friday.
Yeah, automotive and insurance both are regular layoff industries. This is also a relatively small layoff, not like the huge "interest rates so the sky is falling" stuff we saw previously.
No but really, this is like 20 product managers at Snap (> 5,000 employees), Zillow with 2 dozen (> 5,000 employees), and some undisclosed small number from the others.
Employees can feel how they want to feel but most of my peers seem to have much a much greater fear layoffs than they should have. Many of those folks just haven't been laid off before. I've personally been laid off at least 3 times that I can recall. Once it's happened to you a few times that whole fear goes away, at least in my opinion.
"Wondering if your job is safe" is really not productive. There's no such thing as "safe" in at-will employment.
Companies announcing layoffs causes their stock price to increase. Merely having this in the headline was worth it for the companies involved and the newspaper that got clicks.
As someone who was recently laid off in the most non-empathetic way, I feel pretty strongly that these companies should have a lot of attention on them. If their strategy is to start doing more frequent so-called "micro"-layoffs to fly under the radar more, then it should get attention.
In my experience, layoffs are the most lazy but antagonistic way to treat those being laid off and the employees that remain. They are almost 100% due to either shareholder/investors wanting a quick cost savings and/or poor executive management and decisions. They don't have anything to do with the employees themselves, although the employees are the ones taking all the risk and receiving the consequences of others' actions.
I dislike Google and Amazon as much as the next guy (which is a lot), but - why do you believe software developers get cut so much less often than other kinds of employees?
I haven't been keeping my finger on the pulse of the issue recently, but in prior rounds of layoffs, engineering had been much less impacted than sales, marketing, HR etc.
It’s all pretty much the same right now. But I’m also posting in a bad mood so it’s likely
my fault. Economic turmoils. One day thing will turn around but for now, it’s a minefield no matter where you are
I was always under the impression the significant majority of PMs of companies like that were either also software engineers themselves or at least knew enough about it to capably pretend to be one on a good day. Is that not the case?
Not necessarily. A PM should understand the sorts of things that SEs could do, but there are several PMs who can't code themselves, but could say what are important features that the product should have.
