Maybe they wanted to be at Pixar because it was a successful company with safe jobs, but don't want to be at the new less successful layoff-threatened Pixar anymore? And the "best talent" also tends to have better salaries, and management decisions are often not really well-informed, so IMHO thinking you are immune from layoffs because you're better than average is hubris...
This is tempered by everyone's financial situation.
Even in tech a large group of people don't have the resources to sit on the shelf for a few months unpaid. Even if they know a severance package is included the amount is unknown and there are not a ton of animation studios that can probably compete with Pixar on salary, a few but not a lot.
Its a big risk to just wait it out and see if you are not financially secure.
My experience is different. _When_ (not always!) I was considered a top performer, you had a 1:1 or small group meeting with senior leaders who told you point blank: "Layoffs are coming. You are top performers. None of you will be laid-off." People would sigh with relief, then go back to their desk. The layoff announcement would come moments later.
This happens only when layoffs are small and targeted. In reality of big corps your whole department would be cut including the managers promising you that you wouldn't be affected
> This happens only when layoffs are small and targeted.
Thank you for speaking on my behalf. No, it does not. In my experience, I am never concerned with small and targeted layoffs because I am never in the bottom 25% performers in my team. Instead, when the layoff are mass and broad, only then, have I experienced those personalised meeting with senior management. (To be crystal clear: I was only invited to those meetings when I was viewed as a top-top performer. Not always.)
Even if they don't leave, I was at a company that warned us 3 months before a 20% layoff, and basically everyone treaded water for 3 months until they knew if were staying. Huge company loss of productivity.
I think this is one of those situations where the optimal strategy for one interaction is very different to that for multiple, iterative interactions. The company has to presumably hire again in the future, and having a reputation for firing without notice may make it harder to attract the people you want.
on the other hand, top talent is also likely to feel disrespected by having layoffs sprung on their team with no warning. It was a trigger for 3 of my job changes during my career, each time a "regretted attrition."
"firing without notice": First, not legal in California where most of their highest skilled people work (Emeryville, last that I knew). These people will probably will receive (very) large severance packages worth months of pay. Plenty of time to find a new job. If they are very high skill, it will be easy to find a new role. Also, reputation for an employer is quickly forgotten if salaries are high enough. Please don't forget how many people went to work on dumb projects at the height of Facebook. After the Metaverse was cancelled and many people were laid off, suddenly a bunch of blog posts appeared: "That place was awful to work, but they paid me lots of money." (Example: Eric Lippert) Investment banking is similar. In short, if you pay enough, there are enough (plenty of?) people who don't care about your reputation.
I am so done with "awful but lots of money." I won't even do boring but lots of money any more.
I recently took a shocking pay cut to get "not awful and very fun."
Being bored was killing me. Draining your soul for money is not wise. Your mind takes on a personality you can't relate to and sinks to an imperceptible malaise. It's a form of torture. Leaving that to discover purpose again is an unforgettable relief. I feel young again and I'm flooded daily with feelings of optimism, something I thought was just lost to youth. Like being released from prison.
> I am so done with "awful but lots of money." I won't even do boring but lots of money any more.
This is rich thinking. Most people that I met from developing countries who grew up poor would sell their soul for shitty unfulfilling work that pays huge salary / bonus / stock. I cannot blame them; I would do the same in their situation. I don't pass (too much) judgement on where and why people work. Mostly, it is a luxury to decide when / where / how you work, including for less than the maximum that you can be paid.
Personally, my biggest professional problem is that I get bored on a project after two years. It is incredibly rare in my career to stay more than four years on the same project. Yet, time and time again, my managers are surprised when I resign for a new role.
> I am so done with "awful but lots of money." I won't even do boring but lots of money any more.
> I recently took a shocking pay cut to get "not awful and very fun."
Curious what your financial situation looked like between these two stages. It's easy to be willing to take a major pay cut to work on a fun project when you've already got 6 figures stashed in savings and your house and car are paid off.
I wish people would not use that term "x figures". It is too vague. Are we talking about 100K USD or 900K USD? There is a huge difference, yet both are "6 figures".
Thanks for sharing! I hadn't heard of either of those, so good to know. For anyone reading, the federal act only applies to employers with 100 or more employees and the Cal act requires 75 or more.
If I may suggest am interpretation: different kind of professionals may see different things. E.gm I'm told the market rate for react devs dropped like a brick, which is not the case for other software engineers.
If you call yourself a react dev, then I’m sorry you’re not a software engineer. That’s like calling urself a Facebook marketer instead of a marketer. Good way to box yourself into a niche that may run out of demand
> If you can collude on layoffs, that means industry demand for labor is down and salaries are reflecting lowered demand.
No it doesn't. You make a "gentleman's agreement" to do your layoffs and trust your chums to keep to it. Are you arguing that industry collusion is impossible?
Yes, because companies need labor. They aren't going to willingly crash their growth if the economy is booming and other industries are growing, because that will destroy themselves. It is insanely better to shed labor when the economy is poor than when the economy is great.
When you shed labor during poor economic conditions, it is not collusion, even if they, hypothetically, "colluded" to do it.
When a bunch of people see that a stock is crashing and decide to pull out together, it is not stock manipulation. It is a rational decision. (And don't nitpick the analogy on things like "buy low sell high", you probably understand the point I'm making.)
Companies need some labour, sure. But they can absolutely do things like hiring 10% more or 10% less, bringing a layoff forward a few months or pushing it back.
> When you shed labor during poor economic conditions, it is not collusion, even if they, hypothetically, "colluded" to do it.
> When a bunch of people see that a stock is crashing and decide to pull out together, it is not stock manipulation. It is a rational decision.
That's backwards logic. If a bunch of people agree to sell a stock at the same time so that none of them are left holding the bag, that is stock manipulation, even if they sold at a time when it was "rational" to sell. The fact that companies can act as a de-facto cartel without the kind of explicit coordination that our current anaemic anti-trust regime might punish is an argument for stronger anti-trust laws, not for ignoring the cases when we do catch them red-handed.
The "silicon valley anti-poaching agreement" is a known case where it happened a few years ago. So it's not too implausible to think that the current round of layoffs might be being coordinated in a similar way.
All you have to do is look at how these things play out. One large company announces they're considering layoffs, which primes everyone else to compile their own lists.
After a month or two one company announces they're going through with layoffs, and that sets off a chain reaction for the rest to execute their own plans as soon as possible. It always happens like this. Everyone just decides now is the time to clean house, all at the same time, and we all decided to do this independent of each other...
The "collusion" is a dog-whistle protocol happening in plain sight. There is no "evidence," no damning email to be found, only behavioral patterns to observe. It's the same playbook every single time.
I don’t know which of you is right, but I think you’re saying different things. They’re saying positions that are actually open right now are paying less, and you’re saying salaries for existing employees are flat. They could be right if the positions which are open are only recruiting those with lower salary expectations.
No, I’m saying pay for new openings is flat. I just went through a job search, the numbers in the level.fyi data match my own job search experience looking at current openings.
- soda is up about 50% for name brand, and generic soda is up around 80%
- diesel is up, what 50%? how much is regular gas in california?
- housing "values" where I am at are up 25-40% in the last two years
- Potato chips are up at least 40%
- Apples are much more expensive
- Restaurants are up at least 25%, some 50-75%
Many of these products went up by these amounts yet also engaged in shrinkflation. The biggest example of this is Chipotle which almost doubled the cost of its burritos but also shrunk them in size by about a third.
Governments are motivated to reduce inflation in inflation statistics. Perhaps the cost of goods for the ultra-rich hasn't really changed much, but for the poor (or cheap) they have all gone up quite dramatically in two years.
oh god, how will SF SWEs survive with more expensive potatoe chips and soda. Maybe stop drinking poison and processed foods and you'll be fine. A whole rotisserie chicken is only $8.99 at whole foods
boo hoo, how will SWE survive on a paltry $150k per year for adjusting drop down menu fonts. The salaries in tech were ridiculous and an insult to other professionals that actually improved the world. Now that 0% interest rates are gone and most tech is mature and cranking up margins by pushing more ads, you don't need as many SWEs. Michelin-chef meals, onsite daycare, 400K salaries, and nap rooms were not a sustainable long term thing
Isn't that the case in all layoffs, regardless of announcement timing? I'd argue all layoffs are, as a rule, foolish and short-sighted, because they tend end up with so many unintended consequences like that.
Couldn't disagree more strongly. Saying "The best way to do a layoff is to never have one" is really saying that you want to hire so cautiously that you will prevent people from getting the opportunity to have a job in the first place.
Look, so much of layoffs from the past 1.5 years or so are the result of massive overhiring during the pandemic. Sure, it's easy to argue companies were short sighted, but even if they hadn't been, why would it be better to never have hired all those people to begin with? That is, even if a company had thought "the pandemic has really just pulled demand forward - we need a lot more workers now that we won' need when the pandemic ends", why shouldn't they hire workers for that period? Yes, I totally agree this is bad form to disrupt someone's career tenure if it's for a very short period, but a lot of these pandemic hires lasted several years. All those people got great experience and salaries, and I don't think the better thing would have been to never have hired them in the first place.
I wish people would move away from the mindset that a layoff is the most awful thing possible, as long as people are treated respectfully and with adequate severance. When a company hires me, I don't expect to work there for life, nor do I expect them to have an obligation to keep me employed for life. As long as we give each other enough heads up if we decide to separate (and folks can have an honest debate over how long "enough" is), I don't see the problem.
> The best way to do a layoff is to never have one
Sure, in fantasyland. This is unrealistic. What if you have a severe business downturn? No choice, but to layoff. In services, your number one cost is always people (talent).
People will make choices to leave either way. If you do not give advance warnings and just fire people, remaining people will still make decisions to leave.
Your best talent at a company like this knows they aren't going to get fired.
In fact at a company like this, your best talent probably wishes the bottom 10% would get trimmed because they produce so little relative to higher performers.
Large layoffs are rarely, if ever, performance anchored at the IC level. They're anchored in the performance at product/unit level. So the major decider for layoffs is whether you're working on something that is deemed as business positive or not.
The best talent is often the highest paid and that gets factored into these decisions as well when the company is trying to hit specific budget targets.
And this is the sort of thing that can be especially problematic in creative companies when the layoffs are being run by bean-counting executives who have no presence in the day to day work of ICs.
Will top talent get sacked at Pixar? I have no idea, but as a 50 year old tech worker I've seen a number of layoffs first-hand and have heard anecdotal reports of dozens more that lead me to the conclusion that being among the "top talent" does not make you immune when it comes to large belt-tightening layoffs.
Layoffs could also mean trimming the dead weight at the company that is sitting around and collecting paychecks, which in my experience is super common in california tech. Hit L4/L5, attend that weekly standups, and rest and vest till 50, then FAT FIRE and move to New Zealand
Unless you’re the one conducting layoffs, what you think is dead weight and what people conducting layoffs think is dead weight might be different people.
Plus that L4/L5 employee might look stellar on paper. Or even be stellar, just not very vocal about what they’re doing.
I thought that was true as well but the tech layoffs that have been happening have all been about being leaner to grow faster. Look at Meta, for example, that did layoffs in spite of massive continuous growth.
For a lot of people going through a first layoff, it would be shocking.
This company that keeps telling them they are all family here just cut x% of them. Its a slap in the face and makes them understand that there is no loyalty from the business to the employee so why be loyal to the business?
This drives people to take a more mercenary approach to work and look for better pay elsewhere.
In Titanic the folks that got on lifeboats early survived, the ones that didn't got caught up in whatever traps as the rest of the ship goes down. If the ship is going down, its good to not ride it to the depths.
If it's not going down, then maybe it's not worth jumping. That's thr skill in it I guess, knowing which is which.
Things change with layoffs - whatever they liked about company before is not there anymore. The relationships get worst, there is a lot more political infighting due to unclear competencies and changes. The people who stay after layoff tend to be demotivated in general too.
Layoffs usually occur within the wider context of a more cost constrained/austere environment.
Essentially the high performers understand that they'll be expected to do more with less (people, resources, benefits, ...).
Likely the layoffs won't affect the layers of grifters above them, so it becomes a question of whether they really want to work harder for little or no personal gain, just to support the layers above them who are making and being rewarded for the bad decisions, or whether the high performers should look elsewhere for something more aligned with their personal happiness.
often the decisions for the cuts are not made at the manager level, the people who know who the best performers are. The C Suite just says we are cutting these departments often including the managers. Its not done with a scalpel but with an axe and only the very best, known to the c-suite get a stay of execution.
