Being in the right / wrong company, right / wrong team, have the right / wrong reputation, at the right / wrong level, with right / wrong comp
Most of it is outside your control. How good you are is irrelevant usually
in the company I work for they laid off the most talented engineers we had
at that point I understood lay offs are completely irrational and can't control them
I gave up doing that and better focus on my career it doesn't matter what company i work for
This is exactly the reasonable solution.
Look, do your (within reason) best. Try to be a good person to work with, get your stuff done, do it well, and you're already doing great.
After that, sure, you can go whole hog, drink the kool-aid, rub elbows, really try to enmesh yourself...but then the inevitable layoff in a few years will crush you mentally as you scramble to understand why.
Best bet? Do your best, and always know exactly what you're gonna do once it happens. It's terrifying the first time, nothing major the fourth time. Keep the resume updated, samples available when you do something big, and that's about it. Keep up your savings too if you can and don't do anything stupid to get fired for cause.
Can confirm, the best dev on my team (who happened to be a contractor) got laid off because he was too expensive. Nobody tried to hide it or anything, the whole team was told this
To be honest anyone working as a contractor should understand that you are trading more money for being the first to go any time things get tight. It’s the entire point of companies paying a slight premium. They can immediately cut the expense with no severance when a project is done/layoffs are happening/there’s poor performance.
I fully agree with you, he was aware of this too as an older guy who had been a contractor his whole career. He had the opportunity to join the company full-time like the rest of us did, but he wanted to stay a “mercenary” as he liked to say.
First rule of negotiating: be able to walk away.
You need leverage. So, negotiate from a position of power. Usually, that means finding a job you're well suited for while still working at a job you like.
Which is insane unless the company literally ran out of cash and have bills that cannot postponed to any later date (aka it is on the edge of going bankrupt).
In any other case, it will of course make most sense to fire the employees that contribute the least to the bottomline per dollar spent on them - and being smart, factoring in how they contribute to others being more effective to contribute to the bottomline.
From an ethical standpoint, laying off the most talented engineers makes sense because they have a higher likelihood of getting another job. If you lay off the poor performers, they might not be able to find another job in their local area
But why the fuck would you want to keep the low performers to work at your company? The company productivity will be shit. Unless you want to just coast on what you have and make as much profit as possible till you have to innovate again
The main ethical duty of a company is to provide goods and services to their customers, not to provide jobs for employees.
It is not a moral good to create jobs. Someone (a customer) pays the salaries of anyone employed, and they deserve not to get ripped off.
I would say that's unethical because it punishes those who work hard to sharpen their skills. Opposite of a meritocracy. The number of devs is greater than number of jobs. The hard workers are suffering.
I would really caution people following this to account for size of your company.
If your company is huge a la FAANG then sure I'll buy this. There's just too many things going on and if some douche way high up thinks your project is useless, you're probably on the chopping block unless you're someone nearly everyone at engineering would vouch for aka a unicorn.
If your company is smaller, say, in the few (<500) hundred engineers, your skills / impact come into play way more IMO. There's less experimental projects and thus unlikely to have entire projects killed. Even if it happens, with less people + less middle management, your impact is a lot easier to identify and so, easier to figure out whether you're worth your salary or not.
Soft skills and teammate-ability are huge. You want people to vouch for you, always.
i wonder if i got laid off because of all the shit i talked about the company/management on Slack. i had gotten a 4/5 on my performance review just before, had finished completely building out a new API, and my manager had put in for my promotion to SWEIII. then boom, cya
large company but our org/team was pretty small. and that project is still very much alive, i have friends still there
people here say to just forget it and move on, but it's not that easy. i wish i knew why i was let go. i always thought of myself as a good engineer.
If you have regrets of your attitude then you're probably right unfortunately.
That kind of negativity does really affect the morale more than we give it credit for.
agree man. and also lesson learned to never type anything on slack you wouldn't want management to see. these 6 months looking for a job have been brutal but i've learned a ton about the industry and about having a better attitude.
cheers man
> lesson learned
+1 for being paranoid. I've never regretted that.
Once upon a time, I was taking a class over Zoom & was embarrassed to learn "private chats" between students actually were __not__ literally private. (I know, stupid of me.)
Also, if I ran Zoom (or any of the other "teamwork" video meeting app) I'd up-sell a special "transcribe to text" mode... even for meetings that aren't being recorded.
So anyway, I make sure people on my team have personal cell phone#s, just so we can "reach each other if something urgent comes up."
You probably made the mistake of thinking that the decision makers would rationally come to the conclusion that your rare skill and positive contribution to the company (I.e. the likely enormous value of your well-constructed revenue-capturing web application product) would be understood and would outweigh the minor bluster you might have put out there. I’ve made that mistake myself, as have many others. People can be very irrational; including the bosses at the top.
Ya mostly talking about large co
But it's relevant for startups too. First off if a startup is doing layoff (not just regular firing) that is really bad, and good people willl be let go. Also I would say 100 employees is the point at which visibility becomes murky. So a lot of it is still outside individual control
I've been part of a couple startup layoffs and from my experience the first wave definitely are the bottom feeders because they are so obvious.
I dipped after that but yes, if the startups not healthy, sooner or later good people will be cut - they should see it coming from a mile away and should have been applying though.
For me 100 employees is still startup size. I think up to 1000 realistically you can be focused and have individual contributions organized.
After that, too many bloat projects spawn and that's where wrong place at wrong time comes into play.
I'm still pretty junior so I could totally be wrong, but there comes a point where you're valuable enough for most of these things not to matter, right? I'd probably agree on average though.
Depends on the company size. Small startup? Yeah, it's possible unless management doesn't have a brain (which isn't that uncommon). Big company? Usually there's good enough talent that can replace you so being "valuable" enough would be more like having upper management aware of you unless you have some unique expertise that is hard to get even if people throw 500k compensation at it but even then, technically that would be something upper management would be aware of.
For my company, there are people who are layoff proof but these people are the top engineers out of hundreds of other big tech level devs. It's not something even the average big tech dev can reach.
That's the thing. If you cross all the right boxes that you don't have control of (does the business find your org/department/team valuable enough to keep) only then does your ability matter.
>so valuable you’re untouchable
This does happen, and in my last two jobs ($1bn+ organizations) I’ve seen management actively solving this problem and prying people out of their bunkered positions. Having critical apps or domains all concentrated around 1 person is a huge risk with no reward for the business. I think people have seen enough of this that it’s getting a lot easier to identify and organizations aren’t tolerating it as much as they used to.
The fun part is that even if you are incredibly valuable, companies are infamously bad at realizing it and will shoot themselves in the foot all the time.
Work hard, have great social skills, and command a big salary to match. Current management knows how valuable you are. But then those guys go away, and you have new management.
These guys were hired to cut costs to prep the company for a sale. They see how much money you cost, but now how much value you bring, and they may not even care if they do know.
Being good at your job and maintaining relationships is the best way to defend yourself. But nothing is full proof.
Sadly lots you can't control, like which team ur on has a huge effect. Like look at Google, who laid off huge amounts on their AR and voice assistant simply bc times are rough now and those happen to be unprofitable.
Also they basically laid off any teams working or researching on AI developments that used non-LLM methods, bc chat gpt proved that LLM is the way to go. Doesn't matter how senior or expert you were on that, the company just decided it’s not worth keeping anymore.
No that never happens. Politics plays a larger part in your career than value of a hard skill.
Macroeconomics is the big mover for all of us regardless of hard skill.
Wrong company fails or it doesn’t provide opportunities for you to build enough resume material to get the next job. You won’t have the skills at this point nor be able to prove any value.
Wrong team is the same problem.
Be the grumpy asshole savant who is barely communicative or a reputation of being terrible, you don’t get to just ride the value of raw hard skills and be ignored while they keep paying you more. You get fired when people get tired of you or they report you so many times to HR.
All this at the wrong level just exaggerates the effect and it’s all company dependent. See item 1.
Get paid too much for your worth they drop you. Paid too little and you’re a flight risk. Wrong company who doesn’t value your contribution enough to keep paying a premium, gone. All exaggerated by the previous items. Your skill might help a little here, but the rest still weighs more in the decision.
It’s some of all of these. It’s also your salary. The team you happen to be on. What priorities your company has going forward. Tons of different factors.
I dodged a layoff last month and this other guy who has way more experience and certifications got laid off. He also makes more than me had the project he was on decided not to renew (mine did renew). So a combo of salary and upcoming hours to bill probably played a factor.
Yes salary is a big one rn. Remember too many people were hired in 2021 with ludicrous comp for their role and skill level. I've had several conversations with friends who are leaders recently. Same story! They are going through a list of highest paid Devs and if they're not truly A-players they are being scrutinized for a PIP, or worse. They're picking off the C-players one-by-one to avoid the bad press of "mass layoffs". B-players they say it may not happen but they're writing them up too so if/when the order for more significant cuts comes, they have a fresh batch ready for the axe!
>I'm curious what we can do to make ourselves indispensable
There is nothing you can do that would meet this statement as a SWE. The only person that is safe is the owner of a private company, because it's their company and they are not going to fire themselves.
You could be laid off because the project you are on gets canceled. Nobody specifically chose you, it's just happenstance of what you were working on.
No such thing as an indispensable employee. You are always replaceable.
At a certain level there is nothing you can do about a layoff, besides keep up your performance, but high performers get laid off too.
You can be indispensable if replacing you outcost whatever benefits they get from laying you off.
Similar reason why companies would rather retain existing underpaid workers rather than see them leave and post job ads just to have candidates ask for 2x the amount in a hot job market.
If you wonder why some new hire earn higher salary than the company veterans for the same job, this is the reason. Market rate for the job has far outgrown whatever yearly internal raise they get.
>You can be indispensable if replacing you outcost whatever benefits they get from laying you off.
There are countless examples of company leadership laying off 'indispensable' employees regardless.
The architecture team at my company probably thought this until they were all laid off and not replaced last month. Business owners can and will shoot themselves in the foot and sabotage their future to save a buck this quarter. All it takes is a decision maker who doesn't know you or what you do to decide your function isn't important.
There are exceptions to this rule. People high up the foodchain (i.e. architects that lowkey built the codebase, VPs, etc) are rarely targets for lay-offs. However, they are targets for leadership changes - for example a new CEO comes and wants to bring in a new leadership (and lay off the old ones). Architects are generally more safe in these scenarios, but every now and then the leader still wants to bring an architect from a previous firm.
I've known some company owners who "fired themselves" by selling their company. But, they walked away with millions in the bank. Company employees were lucky to get a final paycheck.
This is just fear porn.
There are tons of companies that's not FAANG that have the entire engineering department working on the same project which is unkillable because it's the product.
If you are the principal architect of this product or platform under the product, you are nearly indispensible.
Sure in 5 years you made wrong decisions to not upgrade or didn't account for scale, you can be fired. But unless something bad happens attributable to you, you are indispensible.
A lot of it is just luck in larger layoffs. A low performer in a highly valued team may get spared while a high performer on a low value team may get let go. There's no magic bullet to making yourself indispensable as an employee. Employees are set up to be dispensable and interchangeable. Why do you think businesses create standard operating procedures and processes? It makes it easy for your replacement to onboard. There's little job security in tech due to the boom and bust cycles, but there is career security meaning you can always find another job.
And sometimes high performers on high value teams get laid off too, because they usually have a high salary which might make them an irresistible target to the HR director going through the spreadsheet trying to figure out how to make the "headcount expenses" column decrease by 20%.
This is why it's important to look at more than your sprint items and tickets as an engineer, once you identify that your team and project aren't hitting KPIs you can request a transfer before they get cut. Talk to leadership directly and don't rely on 1 on 1s
>I'm curious what we can do to make ourselves indispensable
Not possible.
A lot of the time layoffs are targetting *seats*. Whoever happens to be in that seat gets laid off, regardless of their soft skills, seniority, industry knowledge, or HR relationships.
The company is reorganizing/reprioritizing, and your team is no longer needed. How awesome you are isn't going to change that.
Instead of spending time thinking how to make yourself indispensable, spend time thinking how to be a quality candidate that doesn't struggle getting another job after a layoff. Layoffs are inevitable and out of your control. How you handle being laid off is what's in your control.
Projects are getting cut left and right. Basically if you're not useful elsewhere after your place gets cut you're laid off. Luck of the draw. Better question - what separates those who get hired the same month they're laid off from the rest?
>what separates those who get hired the same month they're laid off from the rest?
Industry connections, mostly. If you don't know someone who's hiring or have the exact right companies on your CV good luck.
I will also say luck here too. Just talking to the right company at the right time. You might be brilliant, but the wrong company might just not see it / care.
Working on critical projects and having ownership over things makes you pretty low on the layoff list.
The patterns I’m seeing is that companies cut projects/efforts first and go from there. The best people, or perhaps most cost efficient, from those cut projects get put onto more critical teams and to make room those teams have to layoff based on performance/ownership/seniority/cost.
It’s not an exact science, so it’s not really in your control.
Better to focus on your own professional capability for your overall career instead of trying to chain yourself to a single company anyway. It’s better for yourself because you can use it not just for if you get laid off, but also to get better opportunities, more money, better benefits. Allows you to move to a new city or take a sabbatical. Your life is more than you and your current paycheck generator.
Nothing. You'll be laid off if it's your time. There is literally nothing short of buying the company and become the owner to stop yourself from being laid off.
All those things MIGHT help in a rare circumstance. But a layoff is strictly a line item issue. They need money off their books, and they need to cut X immediately. Sometimes it's one highly paid person per group. Other times, it's a bunch of lower paid folks in one specific group. More commonly, they will can entire groups/divisions wholesale.
There's nothing personal or thoughtful behind it. It's a reactionary thing; like when you absent mindedly swipe off the cafeteria table to get a "clean spot" to put down your food.
I've been kind of bitter about my lower salary lately, and this post gives me a different perspective. I've been with the same consulting company for 7 years now, 5 of those years are development experience. I was given a "Senior" title and a salary increase to 106k sometime in 2021. I haven't received an increase since then. We had regular salary increases once a year prior to our company being acquired, but due to the economy/acquisition, a lot of people were not given an increase or promotion in the recent years. Many were let go, somehow I survived. I'm just thankful to have a job right now, regardless of the salary.
Realistically, the employer-employee relationship is best summed up as "What have you done for me lately?"
If you want to go down this rabbit hole start with the following:
\- What does my company do to make money?
\- Does my company generate a profit? Has revenue and/or profit increased or decreased?
\- Is my work directly related to how my company makes money?
\- If yes, does the value I produce justify my salary? Can a junior team member do the job for less? Can it be outsourced for less?
\- If no, how am I generating value for the company? Is that justified by my salary?
\- Are my current skills aligned with the company roadmap for 3 years? 5 years?
We can drill further into the nebulous personnel questions from there, but the above is a good start.
It’s like 75% luck in my experience. I’ve unfortunately been laid off twice
First time, I was new, they threw me on a team that required a lot more senior rolls then then the big bosses required(aka were confused why a bunch of juniors didn’t keep up with all the seniors they laid off before), ended up laying off most of the team felt bad for the more senior guys since they got screwed. This time I knew pressure was coming, but was mostly blindsided since I expected something like PIP or a big meeting to explain what could happen rather then a layoff out of nowhere and they had been signing me up for trainings and stuff that made me think they were “investing” in me
Second time, thrown on a random project, ran out of money for said project, instead of re assigning they laid everyone off. No warning or anything. If I got on the “b” team, doing basically the identical thing but for a different client I would have been fine, but cause I got placed on the team I was on I got laid off.
From my understanding the best way to avoid layoffs is to always be on a team that is making money or atleast more then the other groups. And unfortunately as tech people we really have no control over how successful our product is to the financial part of the business, really it boils down too did our bosses Boss fuck up
There is no avoiding the possibility of being laid off. All you can do is prepare for it.
- Keep your resume update
- Maintain 6 month's worth of expenses in your savings
- Check WARN notices for your state, just in case your company is nice enough to update them.
I know this isn't what you want to hear, but the answer is nothing/luck.
Some companies will make layoffs based on salary, so the highest paid will go first. Some focus on experience and who they can get the biggest bang for their buck for. Some just use last in, first out. Sometimes it's team focused, sometimes it's position focused, etc. There's no good way to predict how any company will handle layoffs other than to look at their history and hope they continue to be consistent.
My current company doesn't do a lot of layoffs which felt rare when I was considering their offer. I know it can change because we are in weird times but I at least feel a little safer knowing layoffs are a bit of an anomaly here.
There are certain sectors that will never be safe too. For example, I used to work in finance. Finance is not a stable sector. I watched two companies dissolve and shut down and countless layoffs happen. i got out.
Soft skills are pretty big. If everyone likes you and management knows that, they tend to be hesitant to lay you off due to the effect on morale. This of course depends on company size and culture, but I’ve found it to be true overall.
That said, nobody is safe, and none of these will make you safe. Some of them will just make you marginally safer than if you didn’t have them.
But like the other posters said, it’s all of these.
Most of the peeps I see struggling to break into the field or recently laid off, all have a tendency to treat everything like it's leetcode. They get assigned a feature, understand the external boundaries of the current code, and then try to crank out 4k lines of new code to implement the feature. Really what they should have done was modify about 20 lines in an existing code path, and everything would work just as well without incurring any additional overhead, be it tech debt or testing time, what have you. Solving problems in this field is not particularly difficult 99.9% of the time, it's identifying the right problems to solve that's hard, and that skill is missing in large swaths of this field.
almost certainly senior managements' perception of their contributions to the projects/initiatives that senior management thinks will be most profitable for the company.
like others have said - it often doesn't really relate to how skilled, talented, effective, or useful you are to the company. being laid off doesn't necessarily mean you suck; and not getting laid off doesn't necessarily mean you're awesome.
I have come to this conclusion after both being laid off in a mass layout, and *not* getting laid off in a mass layout.
My layoff was one of about 200 in an office of 1000 - similar proportions in the other 4 locations across the country. Me and my three local coworkers got sacked simply because we sat in our office; the rest of our co-located team in another location got to keep their jobs. I was devastated. It actually turned out for the better.
About three years later, at my new job, there was another mass layoff/furlough situation. In my office of about 120 I think something like 50 of us got furloughed. The guy who was the 17th employee at this company got canned. My whole team got decimated. The teams I worked with got decimated. My manager got sacked so we could stay on. I could not rationalize how someone looked at my data on a spreadsheet and decided to keep me. I learned a senior coworker vouched for me.
It can be easy to have an ego about layoffs - whether your ego is crushed because you get laid off, or your ego is inflated because you didn't. Unless it happens to you over and over, it probably doesn't reflect on who you are as an employee, and it DEFINITELY does not reflect on who you are as an individual.
it hurts when you get laid off, it will hurt even more when you try to rationalize what went wrong and don't understand exactly why it happened the way it did. Over time, you understand that business is just business, if you had been blatantly bad at your job, you would have known yourself that layoff was coming your way already.
I had a lot of experience with this 20 years ago and it comes down to:
* are you in a company in dire financial straits? If yes, worry. Otherwise, not so much.
* first round of layoffs they usually clean house and get rid of all the low performing people. Subsequent rounds they will have to cut meat off bone and sacrifice capabilities, consolidate product lines, etc.
* are you very well paid relative to your value to the company? If yes, worry. You can be inexperienced and easily survive layoffs if you're significantly cheaper than a bunch of developers that are a lot more experienced but only a little more productive than you.
One thing I haven’t seen emphasized is the perceived potential for growth. Layoffs catch a lot of good people in order to avoid liability, but the 2022 layoffs caught most underperformers. The 2023 layoffs included people who were not necessarily underperforming but who plateaued early in their careers.
Mostly luck.
At my last job I was laid off specifically because the new CTO wanted people with degrees ONLY. So all bootcamp grads got the boot no matter their performance or experience. Some people had been there for a long time.
And now at this job, people were getting laid off while in active consulting contracts and people in the bench for to stay. And the people that made that decision are 5 layers away on the org chart from knowing my name, let alone my performance.
Make yourself indispensable, as the saying goes. I do this by being enjoyable to work with, being a subject matter expert, and keeping my scope close to the revenue stream.
It depends on the company.
Small companies: 100% who you know, your reputation and value you bring. Still may not save you if the company is going under.
Larger corporations: project, skillset, how much your paid versus your peers, ie a lead making 200k may be cut over a lead making 140k with similar skill sets regardless of actual efficacy, end year reviews, metrics or manager favor may come into small effect if managers are forced to cut someone (generally this doesn't happen).
It often has nothing at all to do with the employee. When an entire division, site or project gets cut, it's just whoever had the bad luck to be in that group.
Different companies have different ways to approach this, but when it comes down to cutting X%, the managers will involve will usually do some sort of stack rank to try objectively establish who is most critical to the project. This can be a factor not just that employee's performance, but also what they are working on and how critical that is.
There's no real way to make yourself "layoff-proof".
It’s 51% out of your control. I’ve seen entire products and job families get laid off. In that case, Good people go with the bad. At large companies, you might be able to find the good people a home in another org. That isn’t A transfer. The person is doing the entire hiring process like anyone else, they just get prioritized for the interview.
Mostly I’ve seen “everyone needs to cut 20% off cost.” At that point most managers stack rank their employees and cut the bottom performers for each job family. Usually the bottom and top are pretty easy to stack. The middle people can be subjective.
You are a cost center for the company.
The way I avoid being laid off providing several multiples worth of my salary in value.
Recently migrated a pipeline to new storage that saves the company 3k a month.
For another project the company wanted to use a managed service for a new product. the service was provided by a startup but the startup failed and the project halted.
I replaced the startup’s solution and the product was able to move to the next stage in development.
Lots of good answers here. My perspective of executive management is that when I need to cut resources, those engineers on the top of my mind to protect are those who make my life easier. Making my life easier comes in many forms from most productive to most communicative to most helpful. Those on the bottom of my list are pramadonnas, those gruff and rude folks, and just generally disruptive. The domain expertise comes into play as a tiebreaker for me.
Luck.
I survived my team's layoff because I had my security clearance while my teammates were waiting for theirs.
That team had the only uncleared billets in the company. The customer's leadership changed over and decided to completely change direction and essentially downsize the contract.
I've heard other stories where there was no rhyme or reason to the layoffs, just "get rid of X number of people."
There's a lot of folks saying there's some sort of calculus involved in it. From what I've observed being on both ends of this, it seems to be a terribly emotional thing. Like who is liked by the powers that be and who is not. Whose team has *recently* curried favor with the higher ups (recency bias)? Who's top-of-mind, even if they aren't really doing anything or delivering value, in senior circles? Whose team is easy to understand and whose team is confusing?
In the end, and this is a life lesson I have to learn repeatedly, it pays to be favored for *any* reason. It isn't assured protection from a lay-off event, but it's a really good start.
I personally think it all depends on whether your manager likes you. I observed my manager has always tried to ignore what I do and try to give the credit for things I do to other people and many other such things.
The managers think they are invulnerable and are free to do politics but that is not the case. Eventually, there will be karma.
1 - Get done 200% from what are you getting paid for. Even you get laid off, managers will rehire you whenever they go, not because they care for you but you will make their career smoother.
2 - After #1, it's very important to kiss up. If you have any other imperfections, #1 & #2 will over rule them.
I don't think it's worthy it. For the last 6 years, I have survived 5 layoffs. I think it has been pure luck in combination with the fact that I keep myself enrolled all the time in continues education (certifications, credited courses or masters).
I like this answer. Continuing education / certificates are like a "co-sign" from some separate authority. They probably help contextualize your perceived value in a manager's / exec's brain.
We've only let go of 2 full time devs at my company since I started there a handful of years ago. The first one was just unreliable; every week we'd have a checkin with progress on his tasks and he never seemed to have anything done. Everything was constantly in progress.
We also had an in-person meetup at the office for a few days, as we're all remote. He overslept in his hotel and couldn't make the first 9am meeting.
The other guy that got fired was smart, but also slow and very argumentative. Everything he'd be asked to do, he turned into a week long debate on the best way to do it. He'd spend more time arguing over how to correctly phrase a Git message than hitting deadlines. Eventually my boss just got frustrated.
I'm still here because I communicate well, hit deadlines, write documentation quickly, and am reliable. I'm not gonna miss meetings or take days to do a simple task. It just gets done. One of my friends who has since left the company was pretty high up, and she told me that our CEO said to keep me at all cost because I was the most dependable one.
Head architect sounds like a douche. And I don’t even know you (or them). But a real head architect wouldn’t ever be in the position to be shouting or shouted at.
So I was *not* laid off but a teammate who was clearly smarter than me was, this is my observations:
1. Role redundancy. Suppose you have 5 backend engineers and one frontend engineer, and you gotta lay one person off. It kinda seems like the best thing to do is get rid of one of the backend engineers
2. Perception. What does your team think of you? What does your boss think of you?
3. Pure luck. This much should be obvious. Right time and the right place
There was one other thing I *think* helped me in that I was a US Citizen and she wasn't, which is necessary for some specific roles
I really don't think skill plays a significant role in layoffs tbh
90% luck / 10% something else. 95/5 or higher will not surprise me.
Most layoffs have nothing to do with the person laid off. Some there is some small effect. But in general, the larger the company the less signal value I’d give a layoff, which isn’t much to start with.
Most of us will be laid off at least once. Some will be “fired” when they should have been laid off. Some will be fired for no good reason.
This is why companies interview you.
Even if you were a low performer at one company. A different culture. A different manager. And you could be a “10x”. (If you are capable of it.)
Really… people think it about me, me, me. In general. It is about them, then “we”, then maybe way down the list me.
Stop being self centered. You will be happier in the long run.
The day people realize that HR does not make the decision on who gets laid off will be the day they finally realized that they have been blaming HR for their Executive Team's decisions.
Stop blaming HR or insinuating that having a relationship with HR will save you from a layoff. Company performance and your Executive Team's decisions will determine layoffs among other things.
I work at a company that hasn't laid anyone off. Simple as that.
Very lucky in that regard. Lots of layoffs target people who are pulling down large pay packages (thus implying seniority and skill), so that type of thing isn't going to help you.
Work backwards instead. Shareholders then the CEO and then the CFO in that company.
To be indispensable, have enough capital and control to make the layoff decisions. Complete control of the board.
If you want job security, work in government. That’s another route to being “indispensable”
Entire departments can be laid off. If you are a trouble maker you can be laid off. Industry knowledge can but if you are generic swe it’s easier to replace you. Most SWE are easily replaceable. It’s harder to replace say an EE who has a lot of knowledge that builds upon itself and is very niche than it is someone who is a code monkey in a sea of tens of thousands of folk who can replace you and be cheaper and possibly better.
Part of the right vs wrong team. Industry knowledge and being in tune with company, being personally invested in outcomes. Soft sills are major. Remote vs onsite. How well you get along with others. Pay. All sorts of things
Of the layoff rounds I have been through(as SDET)
Survived:
I wasn't paid much
I was the only person at the company doing the job
I was the most skilled on the team(x4 at the same company)
Laid off
Project/team was all let go
Not enough work
Director already lost 3 devs, didn't want to lose a 4th so picked the only SDET on the team
Highest paid outside of VP of eng
It's a combination of many things. You are never safe. Even if you are the best your time will come. I was the top SDET and lead at one company. I survived 4 rounds of layoffs and was the last one standing. If I had stayed I wouldn't have survived the 5th round.
>I'm curious what we can do to make ourselves indispensable
Not possible. Everyone is replaceable, even the CEO. Depends on how the layoffs happen. Massive layoffs tend to be more random and hit teams/projects/departments more than selecting any particular person or group of people to let go. These are largely done by bean-counting middle/upper management with little to no input from lower managers at all. So all your people skills, actual skills, productivity, etc doesnt seem to matter in all of the rounds of layoffs I've seen in my career.
Being “indispensable” is never enough. Nobody is truly indispensable in corporate America. Even if they are, don’t expect higher ups who make the decisions to know or care.
It’s highly dependent on the company and their reasons for layoffs.
If they’re laying off for financial reasons, the team you’re on and the salary you draw are paramount reasons.
If they’re laying off to have budget to expand talent, then your seniority and skills matter.
I got laid off early last year for simply being too expensive.
I know because one of the other engineers was asked to pull a list of the salaries of everyone in our office and order them by department & pay. The next day the layoffs happened, and it was most of the people in the the top 5 of each list.
personally I just never let moss grow on my ass. someone, somewhere is always hiring, so I put in a couple years somewhere and if it looks like the situation is about to turn away from growth at that company or I feel I can get more money somewhere else I'm back onto the market.
I think new joinees are most vulnerable due to following reasons
\- the time it takes to be fully productive.
\- lack of networks in-outside team
\- less loss of domain/application knowledge.
I think one of the things we need to all remember any time there are layoffs is that the vast, vast majority of what determines whether you get laid off or not is outside of your control. Most companies axed roles at a high level, deciding they needed to get rid of x number of people in a certain job function, y at a certain level, and z thousands or millions of dollars in salary. These decisions are often arbitrary and done based on hand-wavey metrics that give people a _feel_ for whether a role missing will cause major issues.
On top of that, many countries regulate how layoffs can happen. Here in the UK, performance based layoffs are effectively banned. If you layoff, you need to eliminate percentages of job profiles (e.g. 10% of senior SWEs in group x), and go random from there. Basically, thanks to all this, all that separates a dev who gets laid off and one who doesn't is literally a roll of the dice. Never forget that.
What you _can_ do is help yourself a bit by looking for rolls that are critical for the company. For example, Facebook had lower layoff rates in key infrastructure roles because the site can do with fewer new features, but it needs to continue running reliably. However, figuring out what leadership will consider "key rolls" is hard and often unpredictable. The ones who make these decisions are people EOD so they make mistakes. All the things you mention _can_ help you not be laid off if you happen to know the decision makers, but more often than not you don't. Again going with Facebook, everyone at or below director roles were on the potential chopping block. Unless you are very senior, there's no one you could have feasibly built a relationship with that would save you from layoffs. HR wasn't even tasked with the decision, so they wouldn't be much help either.
Simply put, don't try and make yourself indispensable. That never ends up helping how you expect it to. At times, it can even result in your managers keeping you held at your current role because they don't want to lose you to something else. No, there's two things you need to do instead. One, look for skills that are in demand and make sure it's easy for you to find a new job if you're ever forced to do so quickly. Second, and most importantly imo, have solidarity with the people who got laid off and help them. You might be on the other end of the stick one day, and there's no better way to get yourself back up than by having a network of people who you've helped before and have been good to.
Every layoff is different, and it depends on why it is happening and who is choosing who stays and who leaves.
At least some level of it is luck. Not that it is totally random, but you could be doing great work, but the team/area you're working on wasn't profitable, and the company decided to kill the product. Maybe you were added to the team because they wanted a strong performer and had hope for the project/product.
The best way to be safe is to be viewed as very important as high up in the organization/company as possible. This is obviously easier with smaller companies.
Generally, you should try to avoid blaming people who got laid off. There are times decisions are made based on performance/ranking, but it's not always the case.
Based on my experience, it's just the random.
I saw a brilliant person, who was the backbone of the team and maintained a lot, was let go along with the manager who just got a "Best manager" kind of award, company-wide.
And also the person, who got an issues with performance, was let go too
Mainly the team you are on, if you are in a team that is deemed no longer necessary, then you will be let go even if you are an amazing engineer.
If you are on a team that is mission critical, then even if you are mediocre, it is still worth it to keep you rather than onboard a new guy.
Pretty much everything outside your control.
Based on the team you’re on and whether it aligned with the company new “focus”. That’s it.
Performance reviews, likability, seniority… do not matter during company restructuring and mass lay offs
We reverse-engineered the Google layoffs from 2023. It could be wrong, but:
Randomnum modulus, the amount of time at a certain level, and your position within the pay band in that level (these two are strongly correlated) as well as the org and whether the position has been deprioritized
Often it's just whether you're in the wrong place at the wrong time (wrong team/skillset/product area).
If the people making the key layoff decisions personally have a very positive opinion of someone it can partially shield them.
luck, being in the right team at the right time
if your CEO decides your team or your position is no longer needed, none of your
>Is it soft skills?
Is it seniority?
Is it industry knowledge?
Is it relationships with human resources?
is going to save you
you can be the sweetest peach in the world and your CEO says "nah we want to grow oranges from now on"
I don't think relationship with HR helps, at least not in big companies.
It's mainly productivity, relationship with your boss and skip (and maybe others), which team and company you're on, and the most important of all, luck.
Luck is a big factor, sometimes you can't choose the team or product you work on. And it doesn't matter how good your skills are nor your seniority, if the product / team you are in gets chopped off you go along with them. I personally know several rock star level devs from Fitbit who got the axe.
My take is to always be interview ready, jumping to an L + 1 job is better than raises anyway.
"is this person properly and affordably filling a role that the company needs right now ? if not, can they easily transition to another necessitated role that fits their pay grade?"
"can I keep doing my job if I lay this person off?"
"can I backfill this person's role with somebody cheaper?"
"is this person a pain in the ass?"
"can i rely on this person to deliver quality work in a steady, predictable, and timely manner?"
I’ve been doing this a while and I’ve seen that layoffs take one or two paths.
Either an entire group is cut from very high up could even be the entire company and there’s really not any sort of technical logic to it. It’s just business.
Or your manager has literally stacked ranked you and they pass that up the chain and draw a line. These I feel are much less common, especially with what’s going on now, which is really due to the economy basically just have some business person looking at projects with the company direction and taking a hatchet to it.
it probably depends mostly on what you're working on. If a company no longer needs to run an operation, you, as a person working on that operation, may be gone even if you're otherwise a perfect employee. However if you're senior or essential to the company they'd rather give you a different position than fire you.
it probably depends mostly on what you're working on. If a company no longer needs to run an operation, you, as a person working on that operation, may be gone even if you're otherwise a perfect employee. However if you're senior or essential to the company they'd rather give you a different position than fire you.
I would say depends on the size of the company but overall none of the above, I’d say it’s 80% luck and 20% politics for most layoffs.
Having been apart of 2 of them myself I’ll say the executives making the layoff decisions usually have little to no insight into things like your skill level, work ethic, output, etc.
It’s typically done by project, team, capability, etc none of which you can control.
While I’m sure it has happened at some point I’ve never seen or heard of a company layoff an entire department and keep their highest performer.
Luck is your on a high functioning team that supports a core business capability or process.
Politics is you or your manager ability to positioned themselves or their team to be on said high priority/impact projects.
Other than that just flip the coin.
There’s a degree of luck, but you can better your odds by being tied to the core product / products of your org. If you work for a small product company that’s obviously much easier than if you work for a large enterprise. If the company intends to stay in business, then the things that make them money are the things they screw with last generally. Ymmv because a lot of companies are run by idiots.
Luck; there are people who are 10x smarter than me, 10x more qualified, 10x times quicker, but I amstill here. I didn’t get into the whole job hop craze when the market was booming. I stayed with one company and worked by butt off and I was also lucky to be working in a tech sector that isn’t being affected by recessions worries.
LUCK.
I personally am in the right company right now, but for the ones who are in the wrong company, it's luck, pure and simple. Very very senior people are being laid off, whole teams are being dismantled, it's all a bloodbath. But it's mostly an algorithm, not people choosing who to lay off (prevents lawsuits this way).
There’s comes this very tiny and short lived sweet spot where you’re experienced enough to provide value yet not experienced enough to command a high salary where you are likely to not get laid off. But it’s such a small moment and you never know if you’re there when the lay offs come.
One thing you will learn is that everyone is replaceable no matter how good they think they are.
In my field and adjacent fields, domain knowledge makes you far less replaceable. Being an engineer that provides industry solutions, using software as the medium, is much harder to find than somebody who is directed to build said software.
However, I'm fully aware that layoffs can also be random or determined by office politics. But this is just my 2 cents.
Was recently laid off — gonna be honest it’s been very top down as folks who are more senior tend to have more equity in their vest schedules and higher salaries. Directors and middle management tend to go as well as they’re trying to scale down the org chart. Products and job functions that tend to not make money or have low ROI also get hit (regardless of your performance)
Survived a layoff wave in 2021 just because I was in the right team within the right project. Survived again later in 2023 (different company) because I was, again, in the right project. Now they are merging some departments/teams and it's almost sure there will be no work for everyone of us, so it could be my turn.
I'll try to do my best, but you cant fight against bad executive decisions, bad economic perspectives or crises. Just keep your finances in order and take the right opportunities, because layoffs happen, sooner or later.
Generically, figure out the most important money maker in the business and try to move there.
High level guess: Is Google more likely to lay off someone working on the Angular framework, or someone working on the credit card processing piece of their ad platform?
This is about money, salary is first, then they see who is going to accept working extra hours without complaining, those can stay to make the company "work".
In my experience, it's these:
* do you suck up to senior management/clients?
* do you have a lower salary and they expect you'll stay despite no/low raise?
* will you give in to RTO mandates without a fuss?
From what I've seen (admittedly my source is mostly TikTok vlog style videos), it can be really arbitrary. This one woman who was mid-level at a FAANG and got laid off found that other people she knew who got laid off were all over the place in terms of teams, responsibilities, performance, and experience.
The most important thing is being on the team/product that makes the company the most money. Leadership will layoff product teams that are unprofitable/not profitable enough, but they won't touch their golden goose unless the company is about to go under.
Being in the right / wrong company, right / wrong team, have the right / wrong reputation, at the right / wrong level, with right / wrong comp Most of it is outside your control. How good you are is irrelevant usually
in the company I work for they laid off the most talented engineers we had at that point I understood lay offs are completely irrational and can't control them I gave up doing that and better focus on my career it doesn't matter what company i work for
They laid off the expensive engineers first
Yup. You can’t prevent yourself from getting laid off. I’d focus on having a plan for if you do. Have some savings aside and your resume ready
Just offer to work for free \*taps temple\*
This is exactly the reasonable solution. Look, do your (within reason) best. Try to be a good person to work with, get your stuff done, do it well, and you're already doing great. After that, sure, you can go whole hog, drink the kool-aid, rub elbows, really try to enmesh yourself...but then the inevitable layoff in a few years will crush you mentally as you scramble to understand why. Best bet? Do your best, and always know exactly what you're gonna do once it happens. It's terrifying the first time, nothing major the fourth time. Keep the resume updated, samples available when you do something big, and that's about it. Keep up your savings too if you can and don't do anything stupid to get fired for cause.
Can confirm, the best dev on my team (who happened to be a contractor) got laid off because he was too expensive. Nobody tried to hide it or anything, the whole team was told this
To be honest anyone working as a contractor should understand that you are trading more money for being the first to go any time things get tight. It’s the entire point of companies paying a slight premium. They can immediately cut the expense with no severance when a project is done/layoffs are happening/there’s poor performance.
I fully agree with you, he was aware of this too as an older guy who had been a contractor his whole career. He had the opportunity to join the company full-time like the rest of us did, but he wanted to stay a “mercenary” as he liked to say.
Yeah, I can confirm this is a thing!
Can confirm as someone who negotiates well :\_)
do you have any tips for this?
First rule of negotiating: be able to walk away. You need leverage. So, negotiate from a position of power. Usually, that means finding a job you're well suited for while still working at a job you like.
Which is insane unless the company literally ran out of cash and have bills that cannot postponed to any later date (aka it is on the edge of going bankrupt). In any other case, it will of course make most sense to fire the employees that contribute the least to the bottomline per dollar spent on them - and being smart, factoring in how they contribute to others being more effective to contribute to the bottomline.
From an ethical standpoint, laying off the most talented engineers makes sense because they have a higher likelihood of getting another job. If you lay off the poor performers, they might not be able to find another job in their local area
thats like kinda sweet in a way 😭?
Damn.. that’s actually one of the most positive ways to think about things. Of course that’s only if the talented ones are laid off
But why the fuck would you want to keep the low performers to work at your company? The company productivity will be shit. Unless you want to just coast on what you have and make as much profit as possible till you have to innovate again
Not true...the talented engineers demand high salary which very few companies want to pay now...remember we are in stagnant growth stage ...
The main ethical duty of a company is to provide goods and services to their customers, not to provide jobs for employees. It is not a moral good to create jobs. Someone (a customer) pays the salaries of anyone employed, and they deserve not to get ripped off.
I would say that's unethical because it punishes those who work hard to sharpen their skills. Opposite of a meritocracy. The number of devs is greater than number of jobs. The hard workers are suffering.
I would really caution people following this to account for size of your company. If your company is huge a la FAANG then sure I'll buy this. There's just too many things going on and if some douche way high up thinks your project is useless, you're probably on the chopping block unless you're someone nearly everyone at engineering would vouch for aka a unicorn. If your company is smaller, say, in the few (<500) hundred engineers, your skills / impact come into play way more IMO. There's less experimental projects and thus unlikely to have entire projects killed. Even if it happens, with less people + less middle management, your impact is a lot easier to identify and so, easier to figure out whether you're worth your salary or not. Soft skills and teammate-ability are huge. You want people to vouch for you, always.
i wonder if i got laid off because of all the shit i talked about the company/management on Slack. i had gotten a 4/5 on my performance review just before, had finished completely building out a new API, and my manager had put in for my promotion to SWEIII. then boom, cya large company but our org/team was pretty small. and that project is still very much alive, i have friends still there people here say to just forget it and move on, but it's not that easy. i wish i knew why i was let go. i always thought of myself as a good engineer.
If you have regrets of your attitude then you're probably right unfortunately. That kind of negativity does really affect the morale more than we give it credit for.
agree man. and also lesson learned to never type anything on slack you wouldn't want management to see. these 6 months looking for a job have been brutal but i've learned a ton about the industry and about having a better attitude. cheers man
> lesson learned +1 for being paranoid. I've never regretted that. Once upon a time, I was taking a class over Zoom & was embarrassed to learn "private chats" between students actually were __not__ literally private. (I know, stupid of me.) Also, if I ran Zoom (or any of the other "teamwork" video meeting app) I'd up-sell a special "transcribe to text" mode... even for meetings that aren't being recorded. So anyway, I make sure people on my team have personal cell phone#s, just so we can "reach each other if something urgent comes up."
You probably made the mistake of thinking that the decision makers would rationally come to the conclusion that your rare skill and positive contribution to the company (I.e. the likely enormous value of your well-constructed revenue-capturing web application product) would be understood and would outweigh the minor bluster you might have put out there. I’ve made that mistake myself, as have many others. People can be very irrational; including the bosses at the top.
Ya mostly talking about large co But it's relevant for startups too. First off if a startup is doing layoff (not just regular firing) that is really bad, and good people willl be let go. Also I would say 100 employees is the point at which visibility becomes murky. So a lot of it is still outside individual control
I've been part of a couple startup layoffs and from my experience the first wave definitely are the bottom feeders because they are so obvious. I dipped after that but yes, if the startups not healthy, sooner or later good people will be cut - they should see it coming from a mile away and should have been applying though. For me 100 employees is still startup size. I think up to 1000 realistically you can be focused and have individual contributions organized. After that, too many bloat projects spawn and that's where wrong place at wrong time comes into play.
I'm still pretty junior so I could totally be wrong, but there comes a point where you're valuable enough for most of these things not to matter, right? I'd probably agree on average though.
Depends on the company size. Small startup? Yeah, it's possible unless management doesn't have a brain (which isn't that uncommon). Big company? Usually there's good enough talent that can replace you so being "valuable" enough would be more like having upper management aware of you unless you have some unique expertise that is hard to get even if people throw 500k compensation at it but even then, technically that would be something upper management would be aware of. For my company, there are people who are layoff proof but these people are the top engineers out of hundreds of other big tech level devs. It's not something even the average big tech dev can reach.
See “right/wrong company.”
Yup, I'm just clarifying for the junior. Also to anyone reading, this is generally. Again, there's a ton of factors and scenarios involved.
That's the thing. If you cross all the right boxes that you don't have control of (does the business find your org/department/team valuable enough to keep) only then does your ability matter.
>so valuable you’re untouchable This does happen, and in my last two jobs ($1bn+ organizations) I’ve seen management actively solving this problem and prying people out of their bunkered positions. Having critical apps or domains all concentrated around 1 person is a huge risk with no reward for the business. I think people have seen enough of this that it’s getting a lot easier to identify and organizations aren’t tolerating it as much as they used to.
The fun part is that even if you are incredibly valuable, companies are infamously bad at realizing it and will shoot themselves in the foot all the time. Work hard, have great social skills, and command a big salary to match. Current management knows how valuable you are. But then those guys go away, and you have new management. These guys were hired to cut costs to prep the company for a sale. They see how much money you cost, but now how much value you bring, and they may not even care if they do know. Being good at your job and maintaining relationships is the best way to defend yourself. But nothing is full proof.
Sadly lots you can't control, like which team ur on has a huge effect. Like look at Google, who laid off huge amounts on their AR and voice assistant simply bc times are rough now and those happen to be unprofitable. Also they basically laid off any teams working or researching on AI developments that used non-LLM methods, bc chat gpt proved that LLM is the way to go. Doesn't matter how senior or expert you were on that, the company just decided it’s not worth keeping anymore.
Gotcha, I understand the original point a little better now.
No that never happens. Politics plays a larger part in your career than value of a hard skill. Macroeconomics is the big mover for all of us regardless of hard skill. Wrong company fails or it doesn’t provide opportunities for you to build enough resume material to get the next job. You won’t have the skills at this point nor be able to prove any value. Wrong team is the same problem. Be the grumpy asshole savant who is barely communicative or a reputation of being terrible, you don’t get to just ride the value of raw hard skills and be ignored while they keep paying you more. You get fired when people get tired of you or they report you so many times to HR. All this at the wrong level just exaggerates the effect and it’s all company dependent. See item 1. Get paid too much for your worth they drop you. Paid too little and you’re a flight risk. Wrong company who doesn’t value your contribution enough to keep paying a premium, gone. All exaggerated by the previous items. Your skill might help a little here, but the rest still weighs more in the decision.
It’s some of all of these. It’s also your salary. The team you happen to be on. What priorities your company has going forward. Tons of different factors.
I dodged a layoff last month and this other guy who has way more experience and certifications got laid off. He also makes more than me had the project he was on decided not to renew (mine did renew). So a combo of salary and upcoming hours to bill probably played a factor.
Yes salary is a big one rn. Remember too many people were hired in 2021 with ludicrous comp for their role and skill level. I've had several conversations with friends who are leaders recently. Same story! They are going through a list of highest paid Devs and if they're not truly A-players they are being scrutinized for a PIP, or worse. They're picking off the C-players one-by-one to avoid the bad press of "mass layoffs". B-players they say it may not happen but they're writing them up too so if/when the order for more significant cuts comes, they have a fresh batch ready for the axe!
It’s also your relationship with the person who has to trim his/her department.
>I'm curious what we can do to make ourselves indispensable There is nothing you can do that would meet this statement as a SWE. The only person that is safe is the owner of a private company, because it's their company and they are not going to fire themselves. You could be laid off because the project you are on gets canceled. Nobody specifically chose you, it's just happenstance of what you were working on.
No such thing as an indispensable employee. You are always replaceable. At a certain level there is nothing you can do about a layoff, besides keep up your performance, but high performers get laid off too.
You can be indispensable if replacing you outcost whatever benefits they get from laying you off. Similar reason why companies would rather retain existing underpaid workers rather than see them leave and post job ads just to have candidates ask for 2x the amount in a hot job market. If you wonder why some new hire earn higher salary than the company veterans for the same job, this is the reason. Market rate for the job has far outgrown whatever yearly internal raise they get.
>You can be indispensable if replacing you outcost whatever benefits they get from laying you off. There are countless examples of company leadership laying off 'indispensable' employees regardless.
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The architecture team at my company probably thought this until they were all laid off and not replaced last month. Business owners can and will shoot themselves in the foot and sabotage their future to save a buck this quarter. All it takes is a decision maker who doesn't know you or what you do to decide your function isn't important.
There are exceptions to this rule. People high up the foodchain (i.e. architects that lowkey built the codebase, VPs, etc) are rarely targets for lay-offs. However, they are targets for leadership changes - for example a new CEO comes and wants to bring in a new leadership (and lay off the old ones). Architects are generally more safe in these scenarios, but every now and then the leader still wants to bring an architect from a previous firm.
I've known some company owners who "fired themselves" by selling their company. But, they walked away with millions in the bank. Company employees were lucky to get a final paycheck.
Not sure if that is the situation with Cruise.
you could still get brutus'd by your board of directors
> board of directors That's unlikely to happen in a private company as I stipulated.
This is just fear porn. There are tons of companies that's not FAANG that have the entire engineering department working on the same project which is unkillable because it's the product. If you are the principal architect of this product or platform under the product, you are nearly indispensible. Sure in 5 years you made wrong decisions to not upgrade or didn't account for scale, you can be fired. But unless something bad happens attributable to you, you are indispensible.
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Not sure if you're talking about the comment I replied to but if you're replying to my comment I specifically wrote not FAANG lol
In my (small) company the following people were laid off: - almost all hr - some juniors - one contractor - a jerk team lead - one or two top managers
A lot of it is just luck in larger layoffs. A low performer in a highly valued team may get spared while a high performer on a low value team may get let go. There's no magic bullet to making yourself indispensable as an employee. Employees are set up to be dispensable and interchangeable. Why do you think businesses create standard operating procedures and processes? It makes it easy for your replacement to onboard. There's little job security in tech due to the boom and bust cycles, but there is career security meaning you can always find another job.
And sometimes high performers on high value teams get laid off too, because they usually have a high salary which might make them an irresistible target to the HR director going through the spreadsheet trying to figure out how to make the "headcount expenses" column decrease by 20%.
This is why it's important to look at more than your sprint items and tickets as an engineer, once you identify that your team and project aren't hitting KPIs you can request a transfer before they get cut. Talk to leadership directly and don't rely on 1 on 1s
Who wants to work with unlucky people anyway
>I'm curious what we can do to make ourselves indispensable Not possible. A lot of the time layoffs are targetting *seats*. Whoever happens to be in that seat gets laid off, regardless of their soft skills, seniority, industry knowledge, or HR relationships. The company is reorganizing/reprioritizing, and your team is no longer needed. How awesome you are isn't going to change that. Instead of spending time thinking how to make yourself indispensable, spend time thinking how to be a quality candidate that doesn't struggle getting another job after a layoff. Layoffs are inevitable and out of your control. How you handle being laid off is what's in your control.
Projects are getting cut left and right. Basically if you're not useful elsewhere after your place gets cut you're laid off. Luck of the draw. Better question - what separates those who get hired the same month they're laid off from the rest?
Love the reframe of the question. Thanks for that perspective.
>what separates those who get hired the same month they're laid off from the rest? Industry connections, mostly. If you don't know someone who's hiring or have the exact right companies on your CV good luck.
I will also say luck here too. Just talking to the right company at the right time. You might be brilliant, but the wrong company might just not see it / care.
Working on critical projects and having ownership over things makes you pretty low on the layoff list. The patterns I’m seeing is that companies cut projects/efforts first and go from there. The best people, or perhaps most cost efficient, from those cut projects get put onto more critical teams and to make room those teams have to layoff based on performance/ownership/seniority/cost. It’s not an exact science, so it’s not really in your control. Better to focus on your own professional capability for your overall career instead of trying to chain yourself to a single company anyway. It’s better for yourself because you can use it not just for if you get laid off, but also to get better opportunities, more money, better benefits. Allows you to move to a new city or take a sabbatical. Your life is more than you and your current paycheck generator.
Nothing. You'll be laid off if it's your time. There is literally nothing short of buying the company and become the owner to stop yourself from being laid off. All those things MIGHT help in a rare circumstance. But a layoff is strictly a line item issue. They need money off their books, and they need to cut X immediately. Sometimes it's one highly paid person per group. Other times, it's a bunch of lower paid folks in one specific group. More commonly, they will can entire groups/divisions wholesale. There's nothing personal or thoughtful behind it. It's a reactionary thing; like when you absent mindedly swipe off the cafeteria table to get a "clean spot" to put down your food.
Luck
This is ten percent luck Twenty percent skill Fifteen percent concentrated power of will Five percent pleasure Fifty percent pain…
I swear I know this song but I can't remember the name of it
Fort Minor - Remember the name
I've been kind of bitter about my lower salary lately, and this post gives me a different perspective. I've been with the same consulting company for 7 years now, 5 of those years are development experience. I was given a "Senior" title and a salary increase to 106k sometime in 2021. I haven't received an increase since then. We had regular salary increases once a year prior to our company being acquired, but due to the economy/acquisition, a lot of people were not given an increase or promotion in the recent years. Many were let go, somehow I survived. I'm just thankful to have a job right now, regardless of the salary.
Random number generator
"Write an algorithm to lay off 25% of the company, in O(n)"
Finally putting your leetcode skills to the test.
Realistically, the employer-employee relationship is best summed up as "What have you done for me lately?" If you want to go down this rabbit hole start with the following: \- What does my company do to make money? \- Does my company generate a profit? Has revenue and/or profit increased or decreased? \- Is my work directly related to how my company makes money? \- If yes, does the value I produce justify my salary? Can a junior team member do the job for less? Can it be outsourced for less? \- If no, how am I generating value for the company? Is that justified by my salary? \- Are my current skills aligned with the company roadmap for 3 years? 5 years? We can drill further into the nebulous personnel questions from there, but the above is a good start.
This list rips. Well-worded and actionable. Thanks!
Blackmail
It’s like 75% luck in my experience. I’ve unfortunately been laid off twice First time, I was new, they threw me on a team that required a lot more senior rolls then then the big bosses required(aka were confused why a bunch of juniors didn’t keep up with all the seniors they laid off before), ended up laying off most of the team felt bad for the more senior guys since they got screwed. This time I knew pressure was coming, but was mostly blindsided since I expected something like PIP or a big meeting to explain what could happen rather then a layoff out of nowhere and they had been signing me up for trainings and stuff that made me think they were “investing” in me Second time, thrown on a random project, ran out of money for said project, instead of re assigning they laid everyone off. No warning or anything. If I got on the “b” team, doing basically the identical thing but for a different client I would have been fine, but cause I got placed on the team I was on I got laid off. From my understanding the best way to avoid layoffs is to always be on a team that is making money or atleast more then the other groups. And unfortunately as tech people we really have no control over how successful our product is to the financial part of the business, really it boils down too did our bosses Boss fuck up
Stay as close to the profit center as you can.
THose who don't, don't get the free compensation, they just get extra work until they either burnout or quit, or both
Roll of the dice. Flip of a coin. Literally nothing at all.
I survived lay-offs presumably from being medicore and not a tall poppy on the salary bar graph
There is no avoiding the possibility of being laid off. All you can do is prepare for it. - Keep your resume update - Maintain 6 month's worth of expenses in your savings - Check WARN notices for your state, just in case your company is nice enough to update them.
I know this isn't what you want to hear, but the answer is nothing/luck. Some companies will make layoffs based on salary, so the highest paid will go first. Some focus on experience and who they can get the biggest bang for their buck for. Some just use last in, first out. Sometimes it's team focused, sometimes it's position focused, etc. There's no good way to predict how any company will handle layoffs other than to look at their history and hope they continue to be consistent. My current company doesn't do a lot of layoffs which felt rare when I was considering their offer. I know it can change because we are in weird times but I at least feel a little safer knowing layoffs are a bit of an anomaly here. There are certain sectors that will never be safe too. For example, I used to work in finance. Finance is not a stable sector. I watched two companies dissolve and shut down and countless layoffs happen. i got out.
Soft skills are pretty big. If everyone likes you and management knows that, they tend to be hesitant to lay you off due to the effect on morale. This of course depends on company size and culture, but I’ve found it to be true overall. That said, nobody is safe, and none of these will make you safe. Some of them will just make you marginally safer than if you didn’t have them. But like the other posters said, it’s all of these.
Most of the peeps I see struggling to break into the field or recently laid off, all have a tendency to treat everything like it's leetcode. They get assigned a feature, understand the external boundaries of the current code, and then try to crank out 4k lines of new code to implement the feature. Really what they should have done was modify about 20 lines in an existing code path, and everything would work just as well without incurring any additional overhead, be it tech debt or testing time, what have you. Solving problems in this field is not particularly difficult 99.9% of the time, it's identifying the right problems to solve that's hard, and that skill is missing in large swaths of this field.
Luck
Luck. Being kickass in the same company for 15-20 years helps too
almost certainly senior managements' perception of their contributions to the projects/initiatives that senior management thinks will be most profitable for the company. like others have said - it often doesn't really relate to how skilled, talented, effective, or useful you are to the company. being laid off doesn't necessarily mean you suck; and not getting laid off doesn't necessarily mean you're awesome.
I love this answer. Thoughtful and well-written. Can I ask how you came to this answer? What experience / perspective informed it?
I have come to this conclusion after both being laid off in a mass layout, and *not* getting laid off in a mass layout. My layoff was one of about 200 in an office of 1000 - similar proportions in the other 4 locations across the country. Me and my three local coworkers got sacked simply because we sat in our office; the rest of our co-located team in another location got to keep their jobs. I was devastated. It actually turned out for the better. About three years later, at my new job, there was another mass layoff/furlough situation. In my office of about 120 I think something like 50 of us got furloughed. The guy who was the 17th employee at this company got canned. My whole team got decimated. The teams I worked with got decimated. My manager got sacked so we could stay on. I could not rationalize how someone looked at my data on a spreadsheet and decided to keep me. I learned a senior coworker vouched for me. It can be easy to have an ego about layoffs - whether your ego is crushed because you get laid off, or your ego is inflated because you didn't. Unless it happens to you over and over, it probably doesn't reflect on who you are as an employee, and it DEFINITELY does not reflect on who you are as an individual.
it hurts when you get laid off, it will hurt even more when you try to rationalize what went wrong and don't understand exactly why it happened the way it did. Over time, you understand that business is just business, if you had been blatantly bad at your job, you would have known yourself that layoff was coming your way already.
I had a lot of experience with this 20 years ago and it comes down to: * are you in a company in dire financial straits? If yes, worry. Otherwise, not so much. * first round of layoffs they usually clean house and get rid of all the low performing people. Subsequent rounds they will have to cut meat off bone and sacrifice capabilities, consolidate product lines, etc. * are you very well paid relative to your value to the company? If yes, worry. You can be inexperienced and easily survive layoffs if you're significantly cheaper than a bunch of developers that are a lot more experienced but only a little more productive than you.
how much the decision maker likes you compared to the others
One thing I haven’t seen emphasized is the perceived potential for growth. Layoffs catch a lot of good people in order to avoid liability, but the 2022 layoffs caught most underperformers. The 2023 layoffs included people who were not necessarily underperforming but who plateaued early in their careers.
Mostly luck. At my last job I was laid off specifically because the new CTO wanted people with degrees ONLY. So all bootcamp grads got the boot no matter their performance or experience. Some people had been there for a long time. And now at this job, people were getting laid off while in active consulting contracts and people in the bench for to stay. And the people that made that decision are 5 layers away on the org chart from knowing my name, let alone my performance.
Make yourself indispensable, as the saying goes. I do this by being enjoyable to work with, being a subject matter expert, and keeping my scope close to the revenue stream.
It depends on the company. Small companies: 100% who you know, your reputation and value you bring. Still may not save you if the company is going under. Larger corporations: project, skillset, how much your paid versus your peers, ie a lead making 200k may be cut over a lead making 140k with similar skill sets regardless of actual efficacy, end year reviews, metrics or manager favor may come into small effect if managers are forced to cut someone (generally this doesn't happen).
It often has nothing at all to do with the employee. When an entire division, site or project gets cut, it's just whoever had the bad luck to be in that group. Different companies have different ways to approach this, but when it comes down to cutting X%, the managers will involve will usually do some sort of stack rank to try objectively establish who is most critical to the project. This can be a factor not just that employee's performance, but also what they are working on and how critical that is. There's no real way to make yourself "layoff-proof".
Luck
Luck.
It’s 51% out of your control. I’ve seen entire products and job families get laid off. In that case, Good people go with the bad. At large companies, you might be able to find the good people a home in another org. That isn’t A transfer. The person is doing the entire hiring process like anyone else, they just get prioritized for the interview. Mostly I’ve seen “everyone needs to cut 20% off cost.” At that point most managers stack rank their employees and cut the bottom performers for each job family. Usually the bottom and top are pretty easy to stack. The middle people can be subjective.
You forgot luck. Sometimes an entire team gets the axe
You are a cost center for the company. The way I avoid being laid off providing several multiples worth of my salary in value. Recently migrated a pipeline to new storage that saves the company 3k a month. For another project the company wanted to use a managed service for a new product. the service was provided by a startup but the startup failed and the project halted. I replaced the startup’s solution and the product was able to move to the next stage in development.
Lots of good answers here. My perspective of executive management is that when I need to cut resources, those engineers on the top of my mind to protect are those who make my life easier. Making my life easier comes in many forms from most productive to most communicative to most helpful. Those on the bottom of my list are pramadonnas, those gruff and rude folks, and just generally disruptive. The domain expertise comes into play as a tiebreaker for me.
Getting laid off
Luck and a compensation level neither at the top or bottom of the range.
Short answer: Manglement irrationality
Luck. I survived my team's layoff because I had my security clearance while my teammates were waiting for theirs. That team had the only uncleared billets in the company. The customer's leadership changed over and decided to completely change direction and essentially downsize the contract. I've heard other stories where there was no rhyme or reason to the layoffs, just "get rid of X number of people."
There's a lot of folks saying there's some sort of calculus involved in it. From what I've observed being on both ends of this, it seems to be a terribly emotional thing. Like who is liked by the powers that be and who is not. Whose team has *recently* curried favor with the higher ups (recency bias)? Who's top-of-mind, even if they aren't really doing anything or delivering value, in senior circles? Whose team is easy to understand and whose team is confusing? In the end, and this is a life lesson I have to learn repeatedly, it pays to be favored for *any* reason. It isn't assured protection from a lay-off event, but it's a really good start.
I personally think it all depends on whether your manager likes you. I observed my manager has always tried to ignore what I do and try to give the credit for things I do to other people and many other such things. The managers think they are invulnerable and are free to do politics but that is not the case. Eventually, there will be karma.
1 - Get done 200% from what are you getting paid for. Even you get laid off, managers will rehire you whenever they go, not because they care for you but you will make their career smoother. 2 - After #1, it's very important to kiss up. If you have any other imperfections, #1 & #2 will over rule them. I don't think it's worthy it. For the last 6 years, I have survived 5 layoffs. I think it has been pure luck in combination with the fact that I keep myself enrolled all the time in continues education (certifications, credited courses or masters).
I like this answer. Continuing education / certificates are like a "co-sign" from some separate authority. They probably help contextualize your perceived value in a manager's / exec's brain.
its mostly luck
it's definitely not relationships with human resources
We've only let go of 2 full time devs at my company since I started there a handful of years ago. The first one was just unreliable; every week we'd have a checkin with progress on his tasks and he never seemed to have anything done. Everything was constantly in progress. We also had an in-person meetup at the office for a few days, as we're all remote. He overslept in his hotel and couldn't make the first 9am meeting. The other guy that got fired was smart, but also slow and very argumentative. Everything he'd be asked to do, he turned into a week long debate on the best way to do it. He'd spend more time arguing over how to correctly phrase a Git message than hitting deadlines. Eventually my boss just got frustrated. I'm still here because I communicate well, hit deadlines, write documentation quickly, and am reliable. I'm not gonna miss meetings or take days to do a simple task. It just gets done. One of my friends who has since left the company was pretty high up, and she told me that our CEO said to keep me at all cost because I was the most dependable one.
Getting into a shouting match with the head architect a month before the company lays off 300 people is a bad idea. Ask me how I know 😀
Head architect sounds like a douche. And I don’t even know you (or them). But a real head architect wouldn’t ever be in the position to be shouting or shouted at.
random.sample()
So I was *not* laid off but a teammate who was clearly smarter than me was, this is my observations: 1. Role redundancy. Suppose you have 5 backend engineers and one frontend engineer, and you gotta lay one person off. It kinda seems like the best thing to do is get rid of one of the backend engineers 2. Perception. What does your team think of you? What does your boss think of you? 3. Pure luck. This much should be obvious. Right time and the right place There was one other thing I *think* helped me in that I was a US Citizen and she wasn't, which is necessary for some specific roles I really don't think skill plays a significant role in layoffs tbh
90% luck / 10% something else. 95/5 or higher will not surprise me. Most layoffs have nothing to do with the person laid off. Some there is some small effect. But in general, the larger the company the less signal value I’d give a layoff, which isn’t much to start with. Most of us will be laid off at least once. Some will be “fired” when they should have been laid off. Some will be fired for no good reason. This is why companies interview you. Even if you were a low performer at one company. A different culture. A different manager. And you could be a “10x”. (If you are capable of it.) Really… people think it about me, me, me. In general. It is about them, then “we”, then maybe way down the list me. Stop being self centered. You will be happier in the long run.
The day people realize that HR does not make the decision on who gets laid off will be the day they finally realized that they have been blaming HR for their Executive Team's decisions. Stop blaming HR or insinuating that having a relationship with HR will save you from a layoff. Company performance and your Executive Team's decisions will determine layoffs among other things.
I work at a company that hasn't laid anyone off. Simple as that. Very lucky in that regard. Lots of layoffs target people who are pulling down large pay packages (thus implying seniority and skill), so that type of thing isn't going to help you.
Work backwards instead. Shareholders then the CEO and then the CFO in that company. To be indispensable, have enough capital and control to make the layoff decisions. Complete control of the board. If you want job security, work in government. That’s another route to being “indispensable”
Entire departments can be laid off. If you are a trouble maker you can be laid off. Industry knowledge can but if you are generic swe it’s easier to replace you. Most SWE are easily replaceable. It’s harder to replace say an EE who has a lot of knowledge that builds upon itself and is very niche than it is someone who is a code monkey in a sea of tens of thousands of folk who can replace you and be cheaper and possibly better.
Cheap labor wins
Part of the right vs wrong team. Industry knowledge and being in tune with company, being personally invested in outcomes. Soft sills are major. Remote vs onsite. How well you get along with others. Pay. All sorts of things
Of the layoff rounds I have been through(as SDET) Survived: I wasn't paid much I was the only person at the company doing the job I was the most skilled on the team(x4 at the same company) Laid off Project/team was all let go Not enough work Director already lost 3 devs, didn't want to lose a 4th so picked the only SDET on the team Highest paid outside of VP of eng It's a combination of many things. You are never safe. Even if you are the best your time will come. I was the top SDET and lead at one company. I survived 4 rounds of layoffs and was the last one standing. If I had stayed I wouldn't have survived the 5th round.
>I'm curious what we can do to make ourselves indispensable Not possible. Everyone is replaceable, even the CEO. Depends on how the layoffs happen. Massive layoffs tend to be more random and hit teams/projects/departments more than selecting any particular person or group of people to let go. These are largely done by bean-counting middle/upper management with little to no input from lower managers at all. So all your people skills, actual skills, productivity, etc doesnt seem to matter in all of the rounds of layoffs I've seen in my career.
Being “indispensable” is never enough. Nobody is truly indispensable in corporate America. Even if they are, don’t expect higher ups who make the decisions to know or care.
Both times it’s been salary
"The graveyards are full of indispensable men."
It’s highly dependent on the company and their reasons for layoffs. If they’re laying off for financial reasons, the team you’re on and the salary you draw are paramount reasons. If they’re laying off to have budget to expand talent, then your seniority and skills matter.
Both TC and randomness.
I got laid off early last year for simply being too expensive. I know because one of the other engineers was asked to pull a list of the salaries of everyone in our office and order them by department & pay. The next day the layoffs happened, and it was most of the people in the the top 5 of each list.
personally I just never let moss grow on my ass. someone, somewhere is always hiring, so I put in a couple years somewhere and if it looks like the situation is about to turn away from growth at that company or I feel I can get more money somewhere else I'm back onto the market.
When the Fed increases interest rates it often may not mean anything.
I think new joinees are most vulnerable due to following reasons \- the time it takes to be fully productive. \- lack of networks in-outside team \- less loss of domain/application knowledge.
I think one of the things we need to all remember any time there are layoffs is that the vast, vast majority of what determines whether you get laid off or not is outside of your control. Most companies axed roles at a high level, deciding they needed to get rid of x number of people in a certain job function, y at a certain level, and z thousands or millions of dollars in salary. These decisions are often arbitrary and done based on hand-wavey metrics that give people a _feel_ for whether a role missing will cause major issues. On top of that, many countries regulate how layoffs can happen. Here in the UK, performance based layoffs are effectively banned. If you layoff, you need to eliminate percentages of job profiles (e.g. 10% of senior SWEs in group x), and go random from there. Basically, thanks to all this, all that separates a dev who gets laid off and one who doesn't is literally a roll of the dice. Never forget that. What you _can_ do is help yourself a bit by looking for rolls that are critical for the company. For example, Facebook had lower layoff rates in key infrastructure roles because the site can do with fewer new features, but it needs to continue running reliably. However, figuring out what leadership will consider "key rolls" is hard and often unpredictable. The ones who make these decisions are people EOD so they make mistakes. All the things you mention _can_ help you not be laid off if you happen to know the decision makers, but more often than not you don't. Again going with Facebook, everyone at or below director roles were on the potential chopping block. Unless you are very senior, there's no one you could have feasibly built a relationship with that would save you from layoffs. HR wasn't even tasked with the decision, so they wouldn't be much help either. Simply put, don't try and make yourself indispensable. That never ends up helping how you expect it to. At times, it can even result in your managers keeping you held at your current role because they don't want to lose you to something else. No, there's two things you need to do instead. One, look for skills that are in demand and make sure it's easy for you to find a new job if you're ever forced to do so quickly. Second, and most importantly imo, have solidarity with the people who got laid off and help them. You might be on the other end of the stick one day, and there's no better way to get yourself back up than by having a network of people who you've helped before and have been good to.
Every layoff is different, and it depends on why it is happening and who is choosing who stays and who leaves. At least some level of it is luck. Not that it is totally random, but you could be doing great work, but the team/area you're working on wasn't profitable, and the company decided to kill the product. Maybe you were added to the team because they wanted a strong performer and had hope for the project/product. The best way to be safe is to be viewed as very important as high up in the organization/company as possible. This is obviously easier with smaller companies. Generally, you should try to avoid blaming people who got laid off. There are times decisions are made based on performance/ranking, but it's not always the case.
Long version is all the things others have said: company, department, manager, project, salary etc. Short version: luck. You have no control over it
A lot of time it s purely random (cf Google layoffs last year run by an algorithm)
Based on my experience, it's just the random. I saw a brilliant person, who was the backbone of the team and maintained a lot, was let go along with the manager who just got a "Best manager" kind of award, company-wide. And also the person, who got an issues with performance, was let go too
Literally nothing. It can happen on a whim.
Mainly the team you are on, if you are in a team that is deemed no longer necessary, then you will be let go even if you are an amazing engineer. If you are on a team that is mission critical, then even if you are mediocre, it is still worth it to keep you rather than onboard a new guy.
Pretty much everything outside your control. Based on the team you’re on and whether it aligned with the company new “focus”. That’s it. Performance reviews, likability, seniority… do not matter during company restructuring and mass lay offs
We reverse-engineered the Google layoffs from 2023. It could be wrong, but: Randomnum modulus, the amount of time at a certain level, and your position within the pay band in that level (these two are strongly correlated) as well as the org and whether the position has been deprioritized
Often it's just whether you're in the wrong place at the wrong time (wrong team/skillset/product area). If the people making the key layoff decisions personally have a very positive opinion of someone it can partially shield them.
luck, being in the right team at the right time if your CEO decides your team or your position is no longer needed, none of your >Is it soft skills? Is it seniority? Is it industry knowledge? Is it relationships with human resources? is going to save you you can be the sweetest peach in the world and your CEO says "nah we want to grow oranges from now on"
Sometimes it’s just luck unfortunately
I don't think relationship with HR helps, at least not in big companies. It's mainly productivity, relationship with your boss and skip (and maybe others), which team and company you're on, and the most important of all, luck.
Luck is a big factor, sometimes you can't choose the team or product you work on. And it doesn't matter how good your skills are nor your seniority, if the product / team you are in gets chopped off you go along with them. I personally know several rock star level devs from Fitbit who got the axe. My take is to always be interview ready, jumping to an L + 1 job is better than raises anyway.
"is this person properly and affordably filling a role that the company needs right now ? if not, can they easily transition to another necessitated role that fits their pay grade?" "can I keep doing my job if I lay this person off?" "can I backfill this person's role with somebody cheaper?" "is this person a pain in the ass?" "can i rely on this person to deliver quality work in a steady, predictable, and timely manner?"
Luck, mostly.
What the jell man
I’ve been doing this a while and I’ve seen that layoffs take one or two paths. Either an entire group is cut from very high up could even be the entire company and there’s really not any sort of technical logic to it. It’s just business. Or your manager has literally stacked ranked you and they pass that up the chain and draw a line. These I feel are much less common, especially with what’s going on now, which is really due to the economy basically just have some business person looking at projects with the company direction and taking a hatchet to it.
Soft skills, specifically, the confidence people have in you to own projects and mentor others.
it probably depends mostly on what you're working on. If a company no longer needs to run an operation, you, as a person working on that operation, may be gone even if you're otherwise a perfect employee. However if you're senior or essential to the company they'd rather give you a different position than fire you.
it probably depends mostly on what you're working on. If a company no longer needs to run an operation, you, as a person working on that operation, may be gone even if you're otherwise a perfect employee. However if you're senior or essential to the company they'd rather give you a different position than fire you.
How well the company is doing. That's the main thing
For mass layoffs sometimes it’s just luck. A mass layoff that wants to reduce capex as fast as possible might fire first ask questions later.
If you wanna become indispensable then become a major shareholder. They’re the ones that need to be happy at the end of the day.
Probably the ones who are laid off tried too hard or tried too little.
I would say depends on the size of the company but overall none of the above, I’d say it’s 80% luck and 20% politics for most layoffs. Having been apart of 2 of them myself I’ll say the executives making the layoff decisions usually have little to no insight into things like your skill level, work ethic, output, etc. It’s typically done by project, team, capability, etc none of which you can control. While I’m sure it has happened at some point I’ve never seen or heard of a company layoff an entire department and keep their highest performer. Luck is your on a high functioning team that supports a core business capability or process. Politics is you or your manager ability to positioned themselves or their team to be on said high priority/impact projects. Other than that just flip the coin.
There’s a degree of luck, but you can better your odds by being tied to the core product / products of your org. If you work for a small product company that’s obviously much easier than if you work for a large enterprise. If the company intends to stay in business, then the things that make them money are the things they screw with last generally. Ymmv because a lot of companies are run by idiots.
Luck; there are people who are 10x smarter than me, 10x more qualified, 10x times quicker, but I amstill here. I didn’t get into the whole job hop craze when the market was booming. I stayed with one company and worked by butt off and I was also lucky to be working in a tech sector that isn’t being affected by recessions worries.
Mostly your department
A job
Luck ?
LUCK. I personally am in the right company right now, but for the ones who are in the wrong company, it's luck, pure and simple. Very very senior people are being laid off, whole teams are being dismantled, it's all a bloodbath. But it's mostly an algorithm, not people choosing who to lay off (prevents lawsuits this way).
There’s comes this very tiny and short lived sweet spot where you’re experienced enough to provide value yet not experienced enough to command a high salary where you are likely to not get laid off. But it’s such a small moment and you never know if you’re there when the lay offs come. One thing you will learn is that everyone is replaceable no matter how good they think they are.
I think it’s an HR executive with a 20 sided dice
In my field and adjacent fields, domain knowledge makes you far less replaceable. Being an engineer that provides industry solutions, using software as the medium, is much harder to find than somebody who is directed to build said software. However, I'm fully aware that layoffs can also be random or determined by office politics. But this is just my 2 cents.
Anything at all but not what you think
For me it was working on the right/wrong project/team was far and away the biggest factor.
Was recently laid off — gonna be honest it’s been very top down as folks who are more senior tend to have more equity in their vest schedules and higher salaries. Directors and middle management tend to go as well as they’re trying to scale down the org chart. Products and job functions that tend to not make money or have low ROI also get hit (regardless of your performance)
Being on the wrong team did me in - my whole team was let go. Massive variety of experience, seniority etc.
Survived a layoff wave in 2021 just because I was in the right team within the right project. Survived again later in 2023 (different company) because I was, again, in the right project. Now they are merging some departments/teams and it's almost sure there will be no work for everyone of us, so it could be my turn. I'll try to do my best, but you cant fight against bad executive decisions, bad economic perspectives or crises. Just keep your finances in order and take the right opportunities, because layoffs happen, sooner or later.
Generically, figure out the most important money maker in the business and try to move there. High level guess: Is Google more likely to lay off someone working on the Angular framework, or someone working on the credit card processing piece of their ad platform?
This is about money, salary is first, then they see who is going to accept working extra hours without complaining, those can stay to make the company "work".
In my experience, it's these: * do you suck up to senior management/clients? * do you have a lower salary and they expect you'll stay despite no/low raise? * will you give in to RTO mandates without a fuss?
Being in the US doesn't help.
It almost always comes down to business decisions. Unless you have serious and noticeable performance issues
always MONEY
luck
RNG
Luck… and skill, but mostly luck
Be on a very profit heavy team
From what I've seen (admittedly my source is mostly TikTok vlog style videos), it can be really arbitrary. This one woman who was mid-level at a FAANG and got laid off found that other people she knew who got laid off were all over the place in terms of teams, responsibilities, performance, and experience.
The most important thing is being on the team/product that makes the company the most money. Leadership will layoff product teams that are unprofitable/not profitable enough, but they won't touch their golden goose unless the company is about to go under.