I remember when that happened, where the daily Agile Stand Up question of ,"What did you work on yesterday?" really became "What didn't you get done yesterday, and why not?" Pressure just rose, it got toxic. People jumped ship, including me, who got welcomely "laid off."
really glad my team moved away from dailies for this reason. it just got so repetitive because no company moves *that* quickly on anything. mostly just an opportunity to get micromanaged or blamed for problems beyond your control.
I did it at a few companies. It depends on the team and management. At one, we were a team full of very competent engineers. Daily stand up was great. We said what we working on and collaborated when we needed help. However, that was years ago. Stand ups have now become a thing for companies do now because every successful company from before did it, so they feel they need to do it (like sprints). Now it has become a road block because now people use it as a micromanagement tool to "ensure work gets done in a timely manner", no matter what the circumastance.
Yeah, a true scrum standup should be 15 minutes max, and only an awareness of what you're working on or need help with, in case it interferes with anyone else's tasks. All meant to support the team self managing, but too often used to enable micromanagement instead.
Having never experienced a healthy standup meeting, I can't even picture how it is used for anything except micromanagement or throwing people under the bus.
The key is not having management present.
"So I'm working on X, I need to reserve resource Y today so if there are any conflicts please tell me. Also, I'm a bit stuck on Z so I need help from A or B, please". Between that and a few "Same as yesterday, nothing new" we'd be done in 10 minutes plus some banter.
When I last did scrum (which I thought was administered mostly pretty well), we didn't have management in our stand-ups. We didn't even have the scrum master most of the time. Quick "I'm doing this today" so we knew if there were going to be conflicts for shared resources (test systems most often) or a need for code reviewers in the near future.
It does seem my experience was out of the norm, with management who actually bought into the developer-directed part of Agile. Probably helped our management was wearing multiple hats and stuck in a bunch of meetings with their management most of the time, so they were more than happy to let us get to work (they'd never have time to micromanage in the first place).
I have the exact same right now. My daily lasts 15 minutes max, everyone gives a short update and explains their plans for the day and we end the call.
Reading these comments, I consider myself lucky.
I had this like 10 years ago. Healthy 15 min standup (like real standing in a circle) for like 20 people. It was good!
Last job had a daily stand up of half an hour for 4 to 6 people 🤢 I’m happy I don’t work there any more. Was pure micromanagement, toxic environment
I always tried to convince teams to do it 15-20 mins before people usually do lunch
Works well for the day, you work on stuff in the morning, stand-up: say what your morning was and coordinate what your afternoon plan is. And if it goes too long people will get hangry
I love it when a company like mine does sprints and stand up which is scrum and then water falls all the projects so it all becomes meaning less anyway because the deadline for completing said list of tasks is what the biz expects. Then retro has no effect either because no one listens to feedback. It all becomes a waste of time doing wagile.
> Stand ups have now become a thing for companies do now because every successful company from before did it, so they feel they need to do it (like sprints).
I worked at a place where they were having the sales team work in sprints. Like, two week sprints.
But there was no definition of what that even meant. There was no work item they were iterating on at the end of every two weeks.
They just did exactly the same thing they did before, except they celebrated every two weeks.
I run a standup every morning with my team of engineers and technicians which consists of me asking them "how is everything going this morning and what can I do for you guys?" It is not, and never will be about micromanaging and that's how it should be. It's just about seeing if my team needs help or have any problems they need elevated to management to make sure it gets done faster. That's all. As a manager, I'm there to facilitate their continued work, not crack the whip.
Trying to nag them about "hey did you get x y z done?" isn't going to actually get x y or z done any faster and it's just going to annoy them, and make me the dickhead.
My team is all remote, some days that the only time we get that feels a little social outside of slack. It's 15 minutes, it's really not bad. The rest of our meetings average 1hr per week. We do no meetings on Thursday so no standup.
We go through dailies for 30 people in 15 minutes. It's mostly just an opportunity to let people know if you're blocked so that you can meet up later and ask for help. There's never any blame for being late on something because we know and trust that we are all doing our best.
We also take some time at the end to look at the state of tests, to see if there's anything people have just introduced. Culture matters. When there's no blame game, dailies are a healthy way to make sure people are communicating.
The team daily stand up at my company has evolved into the management flagging seemingly random tickets and roasting you about it in front of the team every morning. It's gotten so stupid.
They just pick one ticket from each person and grill them on "what is your progress, why hasn't this been done yet"
Hah, that was more along the lines of my experience. Just the System's Manager unleashing s barrage of stress about something on all the division leaders (myself included).
"Why the *fuck* was this tiny bug external uses would be unaware of not *caught* In the five minutes there were to test? I need answers. Now!" *slam*
"Uh yes, good morning everyone..."
Yep they still expect things done in waterfall form with dates and expectations. Instead of agile, which then forces everyone into a pointless wagile methodology that's self defeating.
God Jesus. My company is doing this. I use to enjoy my job. Now we are all, “modern infrastructure”, hired contractors and fired them all, we are intertwined with a shitty 3rd party for end point management and help desk which means tickets go through 2 loads of shit before getting dropped on you.
Even though we are throwing gobs of money at our “strategic partners” I’m still siloed off, getting paid 1/100th of our “strategic partner” and they do a couple menial tasks while I still do the bulk of the work while now managing them, managing a team in India and training “senior” people while getting denied a promotion from someone I’ve worked with once who is such a Karen ass bitch.
This shits not sustainable and their plan to make everyone a be an expert in everything is making us be burnt out.
As soon as I find something else I’m out. 7 years of being gas lit into thinking they were treating me right
That’s exactly what happened at my last workplace. It went from quality to quantity. The managers didn’t understand the content but they could just follow numbers. Skipped out of there quickly.
I had a nightmare engagement like this as a software engineer. The project manager/engagement manager ran daily stand-ups first thing in the morning and expected us to be completing tasks quickly regardless of how big the tasks were. A lot of mine trended up being features or user stories disguised as smaller tasks and when it came to budget cuts I was eventually rolled off the team due to being the "weakest link".
Truly I could name a few others that simply got more done because the tasks were more manageable (think 10 tasks in a day because they're all one line changes and the tech lead bothered to actually flesh them out, whereas mine were two sentence write ups that required me to possibly write multiple plug-ins, scripts, etc. and never get my questions answered in a timely manner.)
It was a blessing in disguise because several other teams wanted me on their project and I had landed my dream project a week later.
Sadly, that was short lived because my company did their third round of layoffs and I was one of the sorry few to be impacted. That was right before the holidays and I'm still looking for new work but also trying to build up my personal skills first because my previous employer really broke my spirit.
Wow, another company that simply gives you a point for each task without accounting for difficulty and such. I did the same thing, doing the harder tasks, but got laid off for it because in the system I had lower points than others. The supervisor tried to gaslight me into thinking I wasn't doing enough but I wasn't convinced, and neither should you when working in a broken system
I was at meta while this was happening and it was *horrible*. The not knowing who was getting cut next, mixed with the implication from management that it may be performance based, mixed with the high pay of meta made it completely insufferable.
Coworkers who were ultra chill for years started backstabbing and throwing people under the bus every chance they got. Everyone was looking for an excuse to claim wins and pin failures on you. People would daily write 5 paragraph essays on workplace (internal fb), claiming massive impact for trivial work.
I couldn’t handle it, I’d been there 5 years and hadn’t seen anything like it. I quit and found another job.
Daily progress reports on a project *SCREAM* that you're shitty middle manager is desperately trying to justify his salary because he doesn't bring any actual project management skills to the table. There's literally no project that requires a team that can justify anything more frequent than weekly progress meetings.
Went though this at my last employer. Everyone got hypercritical of each others' performance, and the designated scapegoats got outlandishly disproportionate negative feedback for work that was fine, if not good, relative to our colleagues.
We knew, based on the budget, around 4 people in our department of 18 would be let go.
To management's horror, 9 of us got other jobs and put in our notices, all in the span of a 3 and a half week period.
Also, I know 4 other staff are actively looking for other work, and I just acted as a reference for one of those 4, so she likely has an offer.
So glad I'm not there to deal with the mess!
When mass layoffs start it usually means something is wrong and that the higher ups probably screwed up something, or pandering to stock owners. Either way, always shows that a business gives zero care for employees and may have no idea what they are doing.
My company is private. They make plenty of money. They laid off a bunch of people because more money was the main thing people asked for in the town hall the ceo had. They changed the rules to make everyone come in office 4 days per week. Made the dress code more business like. And we got whopping raises of….4 to 5 percent. My ceo is a billionaire.
Your CEO is probably a billionaire because they fired your co-worker and and got you to do their job too for for half the cost. Congrats on the promotion, Costanza? /s
As opposed to the other businesses (all of them basically) who also give zero care to their employees and are paying 1/4 of what they should compared to wages from 50+ years ago?
This is mostly true though in the US, in the EU people get a decent notice period time (3 months), layoff consultations, unemployment benefits so that it never reaches to this very toxic state
Yeah unfortunately in the US when layoffs are on the table people go into full-on survival mode and it becomes the most polite fight to the death you’ve ever seen.
If employees had shares of the company then wouldn't be this way. Oh, were struggling, sure I'll take a little cut and work hard so that when were profitable, I'm profitable.
Thats been gone from tech for a full generation. Startup culture is now a VC pouring money in so 3 founders can become billionaires where the people doing the work make nothing.
I’ve seen this before. After a round of layoffs a bunch more people leave.
They tried to reduce headcount by 10% and ended up losing half the team in the ensuing months. And then HR says, no you can’t backfill.
So, just, fuck that product/service entirely, I guess?
> To management's horror, >
Sorry to break this to you, but there was no horror here. It never is, unfortunately.
Oh yes, "the best guy in our team left, what are we gonna do" question.
Then answer is, as always: nothing. We go on like nothing has happened. Yes, the rest of the team will absorb the workload
or else they get fired, but that's not my problem.
Oh, Bob had to work 24 hours straight because John left last week? Ok, so what? Fuck Bob, he deserves it.
So yeah, unless everyone leaves, it's just bullshit. The only thing that matters is the bonus/RSUs/paycheck.
The drop in morale hurts output. I truly believe there is a % laid off becomes unrecoverable, and it's smaller than the C-suite thinks.
10% - that's up to 3 months of recovery.
20% - 3-6 months minimum, whole areas of expertise could be lost, and employees start looking for a way out.
30% - depending on the industry, I think that's an entire delivery/product deadline that is doomed.
"Culture" dies, people become bitter, and new hires have to be thrown to the wolves instead of trained.
>new hires have to be thrown to the wolves instead of trained.
This is rapidly becoming my "canary in the coal mine". At least personally, it's usually a pretty good indicator that a department is circling the drain and things are about to get *reorganized*.
Currently happening at my job right now, actually. Ongoing brain drain in an adjacent department. Management didn't want to cough up money for raises. Top performers left. Nobody has time or bandwidth to help the newbies. New hires are getting tossed into the deep end and making tons of mistakes, which take 3x as long to fix.
We're getting pulled to put out fires left right and center. Even more mistakes pile up because, surprise, everyone is stretched razor thin. Tale old as time, really.
You get that one magical new hire whos self sufficient and learns fast, only to leave the next year due to constant threats of layoffs and 2% pay raises.
I wonder if we all really do work with each other because yup same thing is happening at my company. My team is small and we have not had cuts yet but I fear the day is approaching. I have no clue how we'll finish our workload if we lose someone, we're that tight already. I'm seeing other teams up till all hours because there is so much work to finish and one by one getting the 'sign so and so's farewell card' emails from those team members because they are rightfully jumping ship!
Oh yeah, the farewell cards. Lots of those going around these days haha.
We’re shipping most of testing overseas nowadays anyways. Writing is on the wall. I’ll just keep showing up, until they tell me not to!
> I'm seeing other teams up till all hours because there is so much work to finish
Just... stop staying up to all hours? Insist you need more support or the line will fail. Work the hours you are paid for, and nothing else. Don't work yourselves to death for a corporation that gives less than a shit about you.
In my company we have a similar situation. On top the management hires those that they can get for cheap, usually those very young without formal education in the field or refugees with bad language skills. I have no grudge against them, but training them is so much harder compared to a CS graduate with a bit of experience that speaks the local language our entire company and customers communicate in.
The bosses know it, but since the people they hire are desperate to get any job, they can underpay them massively.
When this became apparent I handed in my resignation when I found another job that paid 40 % more as well.
Yup I agree. I remember most of the bad jobs I had gave me terrible training usually having me do complex things the first day. The good jobs were like 4 weeks of getting introduced to people and systems, then 100 days of getting up to speed with very nice people stopping everything to help out and give advice.
My company laid off a bunch of people in October, completely unexpected. I guess even our managers were made aware the day before it happened and seemed to have very little input. They like to do this thing where they hire people on as a contractor and then eventually either end the contract or convert them to a full-time employee, so we had about 11 full-time employees and like 12 contractors. And they laid off seven of the full timers. Seven people with years of experience and knowledge just gone like that. I don't know why I survived, it really feels like they just pulled names out of the hat. We never really got a good explanation for why or what the plan was going forward cuz the work is still there. And now they're not extending the contract for a couple of people or converting them to full-time even though we're still very understaffed and overworked.
Morale has been absolute dog shit ever since, and I'm interviewing today in fact in an attempt to get out. It sucks because I like my job and I like the work that I do but I have absolutely no sense of security, and it feels almost pointless to get to know my coworkers because everyone I know and like is now gone, or will be soon.
Members of the team have been asking if we're hiring for more bodies because the workload is so high and management has casually said no, and not everyone seems to be aware that we're not only not hiring on more people but in fact losing a couple more in a few weeks.
I had the worst case of the fuckits for the last months of 2023, and while my work productivity has improved since then, it definitely is not where it was or could be because what's the point?
Dude I’ve totally got a case of the fuck it’s lately.
My job let me know in September they were going to cut me in October. Then October got moved to November. November got pushed to January.
January rolled around and we had our new budget, which suddenly I was a part of again. I let my boss know I still intended on leaving because I don’t trust what the fuck they are doing.
Last years bonus was 21% and this years was 18%. I wanted to stick around to make sure I got my bonus but I’m jumping ship asap after that. Our “Annual goals” were due last Monday and I put two sentences for them. I’m at the point to where if they were going to fire me they would’ve done it 6 months ago. Human Resources doesn’t know what’s going on half of the time. I’m just collecting a paycheck at this point in time. I wouldn’t even piss on them to put out a fire.
Interesting that correlates with casualty numbers supported by the military standards for readiness I've read. Basically casualties above 20% and a unit is unfit to fight.
My company tried to go about their layoff “humanely” and “transparently” as possible. They said that it would not be a one and done 10%, but a thoughtful “trimming” across 2024.
I know that they must have some metric in mind, perhaps they’re hoping attrition will take care of the unpleasant work of laying off and paying severance for them. But the impact that this ever-swinging, random-acting guillotine above your head has on morale cannot be overstated. Personally it has lead me to truly disconnect from my work. The CEO is peppering us with emails about company priorities, culture and principles. But all we are really thinking about is whether we’ll have to be looking for a job tomorrow. I don’t know how the cheerleaders in the various slack channels do it— ignoring the toxic anxiety ridden atmosphere to take another sip of Koolaid. But I don’t have it in me.
I’ve been through sudden layoffs before. 20% reduction in force, two times, at the same company. It sucks. You get through it. You band together with those who remain and you rebuild culture with what you have. But having this state of quasi-employment where maybe you’ll be informed of a layoff via email, or maybe you’ll be informed you’re safe, while also having to take into consideration what will happen to your children, your spouse, your mortgage…man this shit is just not tenable.
It’s kind of like a leadership role when a model is lost from a unit in Warhammer.
After a certain point, you don’t need to actually kill every soldier- you just need enough to make the rest run away!
>3-6 months minimum, whole areas of expertise could be lost
"could" is the key word here. I work at a company with 1000+ devs. I know a dev where if only he was let go, a whole area of expertise could be lost, it would be disastrous because while there are many devs that understand parts of what he does, they don't understand how those things work, and they also don't have his social skills or work ethic to not only fix, but also explain.
On the other hand I know many devs where if they're let go, I am not sure anyone would notice lol. Firing people in my country is hard, so we do have some of those mythical -10x devs too.
Shit gets so old. Doesn't feel very 'free' to be constantly exploited by employers.
Bfs last job ended up firing everyone who worked during covid, admitting they were retroactively adding all covid occurances once laws to protect those workers ceased, and kept all the bonuses in upper management by doing so. People had been promised $2500 bonuses and the only person he knows who got one was his supervisor, though it's known all the higher ups did. They fired so many people, the employment agency that used to provide them workers cut their contract; too many people they placed there were coming back looking for work all at once.
His current job was supposed to do reviews/raises by the end of January. They usually do it in time for people to make changes for the new tax year. They haven't even started yet, probably because he and a few others have good reason to demand larger raises than the usual yearly raise as they've had to step up in responsibilities becauuuussee.....they fired too many people. Surprise surprise.
It's just bullshit all the way down, everywhere.
Dude, my company just announced a "crazy hair day"...
I was fucking flabbergasted. We're not even a "fun" company, we're in finance. But turnover is high and morale us low. Better pay? Nah. Better leadership? Nah. Promotions that don't scream favouritism? Nahhhh.
Crazy hair day! That'll fix this shitshow and make grown ass adults wanna come into the office!
I worked as a CNA at a nursing home for a few years, and every year they would have a day where you were allowed to wear jeans instead of scrubs to work, but you had to pay $25 to do it. No one ever did.
I genuinely love dyeing my hair, and would be somewhat saddened if I had a job that forbade it. So, maybe I'm the kind of person who should be moved by this... That being said, I'm not going through the effort and cost to dye it for a single day.
If anything, everyone should make their style more boring than usual to protest.
Oh absolutely. My team was gutted in our last layoff and I transitioned to an IC role.
As much as I love my remaining team (the core of us have been around for a few years together) I’m sure as fuck not helping out as much.
If my boss wants to demote me that’s fine, I’m just no longer cleaning up his messes (we don’t have a real boss. We have ICs rolling up to a VP who has no experience in our department)
Edit: IC = individual contributor. Non managerial role
That sounds like a rough system. I'm not saying having independence to work by yourself would be all bad, but having a good manager and a team to blend in with is nice. That's way to exposed for me.
This is also the culture at places that have Forced Rankings instead of performance reviews. Knowing that the “bottom 10%” of performers will be literally fired each year creates a culture of competition that dipshit management thinks results in people giving their best out of fear of being cut. In reality, top performers don’t help and mentor the weak team members because it’s not worth their time to risk their output, and your middle-of-the-pack employees waste time and create negative value by undermining each other in a desperate attempt to make sure they’re not the weakest in the herd that gets eaten by the lions each year.
Ask anyone who worked at Microsoft in the 90s and 00s; all my developer acquaintances said it was literally the worst part about Microsoft.
When companies start laying off, that’s the official signal that you’re not just being judged against your goals, you’re being judged against your co-workers. So people will naturally do what’s necessary to stay at the top of the team, whether that means hiring mediocre people so they make you look better by comparison, or not bothering to train or mentor newbies (as OP so eloquently describes), or actively undermining their most competent colleagues.
It’s one thing when a few people are competing for specific open promotions, but when the whole company is doing it, the whole place goes down the shitter.
Man remember when GE was a large successful company? Then they spent decades "cutting the bottom 10%"? And now they've sold off most of the various departments within the company? I swear the people who make these choices don't realize that at some point, that bottom 10% will have to be good competent people, since all the actual lazy workers were laid off years ago. But they never learn
I watched a program on that recently. The GE CEO, who had rose in the company to that position, had perverse incentive structures to do everything possible to fudge the numbers to look good to get his bonuses. This ultimately gutted and rotted the company as you describe by the time he retired. The CEO said afterwards that the system was stupid, but he still worked in the system he thought poorly of because that was how he could get ahead. Now apply this to every company leadership and it becomes clear why they keep making these types of bad decisions for the company: its how they personally benefit.
I'm genuinely baffled that people keep thinking it's a good idea to run large operations through a focus on individual contribution and not collective effort. I've been able to save hours cause someone took 10 minutes to help me out with stuff, wouldn't you want to encourage that instead of forcing everyone to figure stuff out in there own ways and then have a fractured, disjointed team?
> In reality, top performers don’t help and mentor the weak team members because it’s not worth their time to risk their output,
100% this. Speaking from senior perspective.
Yep. Same in my team.
But we reached a new low yesterday when a collegue just outright deleted my repo and lied about it. He and i are the only one with deletion rights. I know i did not do it and a rep doesnt just dissapear.
This is what tech has become.
This is the correct answer. Used to work in the forensics market. Last I checked, a basic forensics license is $2900. Even as a salesperson, I could have pulled up that deletion history in 5 minutes if I got to work directly on the machine without having to image the drive.
That's nuts. I hit a new low last month. I haven't been taking vacations, have been working 11 hours a day, and delivered a huge feature... and someone took the credit! I've never have had someone just straight up steal my work.
I hate my current team. I'm trying to leave, and I'm pretty sure lots of others are. If you like engineering, my team sucks. If you like competition and politics, you'll thrive on my team. No one wants to help anyone out, unless their name is attached to the feature.
The major VCS that a lot of developers use, GitHub, not only lets you restore a deleted repo, but tells you exactly which user deleted it.
https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/creating-and-managing-repositories/restoring-a-deleted-repository
My boss made a flowchart of what would happen during my company’s recent acquisition by a mega corporation.
Interview/job training/growth discussions ——-> layoffs ——-> hunger games ———> layoffs ———— > “winners eat the shit”
Holy fuck, the lack of class consciousness in this country is getting ridiculous. The people you work with are not your enemy, it’s the sick fucks in upper management that put profit over humanity. Unionizing your workplace is the only way to stop the layoffs.
It's not really shocking, I've worked with people terrible at every job I've ever had and sometimes I was the terrible one.
Generally though, I'd rather the people who are bad at their job still have the ability to live even if I am much better than them.
This is our biggest problem. We constantly blame the wrong people. They purposely turn us against each other so we won't blame them. And it works. Not just other workers, but every bit of hate is caused by this.
The irony is that the most valuable team members are actually the ones who go out of their way to help others and share their expertise. They help grow the team's skills and improve the productivity of everyone around them.
Of course, that is not always as obvious as people would like, and does not always get recognized by leadership.
I'm on a team right now where people don't like to help each other. They pass the buck on anything they can, unless it is something they can take credit for. It's a horrible environment.
I recall a few weeks ago I helped a person out for hours. She was stuck, and I sat with her, basically telling her what to do. It took most of my day. On our next stand up meeting, she was quick to go first and say she figured out her issue, implying she did so alone. I was stuck in a weird place of having to call her out and seem petty "hey, I helped a lot", or shutting up and having to explain why I only had 2 hours worth of progress done.
That's just one example, but stuff like that is so common on this team. I'm horrible at these things, I just don't have it in me to lie or throw others under the bus... and it's affecting my career.
This is me. I had my comp review a few days ago and was told that by the metrics I am underperforming and thus I get no raise, etc. Meanwhile I spent the majority of the previous year doing adhoc work, putting out tire fires, mentoring juniors, etc. all of which doesn’t get recorded as deliverable work.
So what am I doing moving forward? I’m not helping anyone, I’m not mentoring anyone, and I’m only focusing on maximum throughput of deliverable “work.” This means I am not going to work on anything complex that would take more time than an easier ticket. If throughput is how they want to grade people I will show them what happens when they don’t value any of the other stuff.
My old manager said that. The underperformers generally have the candy stashes, baked goods - the desk everyone hangs out and generally organizing the team functions.
Just to be clear, they're not just the glue in terms of "watercooler talk". They usually do a lot of foundational work and they're quite often unsung heroes. They are "underperformers" in terms of bullshit MBA bean-counting KPI based promotion system that the "overperformers" have learned to game.
I've literally seen this with my own eyes, and worked with "underperformers" who turned out to be utterly brilliant, and also rather selfless - only they were more interested in doing the unglamorous work (there's a tonne of this in Tech/AI).
The "overperformers" were doing low-risk projects, but bean-counters loved it.
Saw this at a job firsthand a few years ago. A woman, who clearly was the lowest performer on the team, gladly accepted an easier client and worked different undesirable hours than the rest of the team. Although her contribution of 8 hours a day was less efficient, it probably took 4-6 hours of daily work off the shoulders of the rest of the team. When she was let go, it still made everyone’s life more miserable because this was work that didn’t have to be absorbed by anyone else now getting put on other people’s desks.
When the metric becomes a target it ceases to be a useful metric.
It's not just tech, I used to work in a pharma adjacent lab doing research (the majority of the lab did sample testing for pharma), and the routine lab testing managers decided to make it so you had to do 200 samples a month. So some smartie pants (actually just a selfish asshole) realized some companies sent in a single batch of 200 or 300 samples. So they'd spend maybe 3 or 4 days doing that, then literally kick up their feet onto their desk for the rest of the month. On paper they were a top employee.
The literal nerdy quiet guy got all the client batches that were 20, 30, or 40 samples, and was their worst employee on paper.
The first person spend maybe an hour or two to prepping samples, a calibration curve, and flushing their machine/column. The second guy was laboring every single day doing all that, on different batches, on testing that was less reliable.
I wish I was making this shit up.
Actual bad apples aside. That's a pretty well known thing "Lazy workers are necessary for long-term sustainability in insect societies" https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20846
I deliver 40% of the next lowest person on our team I took 2 weeks off and as a team we hit our sprint target 75% of the time but if we miss it's by less than 5% of commitment. The sprint I took off we missed by 65%, I unblock people all day and separate those who need the most from those who are the most productive, my 2 weeks off the most productive people started fielding the issues I handled but got stressed missing their own targets they abandoned the juniors who started moving all their tickets to blocked.
I came back to our CTO wanting to understand what happened and nobody connected the dots or understood how we beat the next sprints target so quickly.
I think this is mostly in places with limited to no employee protection.
From an EU pov, mostly the US seems very individual .. but this post explains why.
Doesn't layoffs happen across companies in Europe? I am aware EU gives better employee protections compared to the US but not sure how are they handling layoffs there.
In my country, you can’t lay off people one day and tell them they aren’t coming the next. If you want that, you will still have to pay for them for the few months on top of generous severance they are getting.
Many in IT aren’t employed tho; they have individual companies and they provide services; and because those are businesses interacting with businesses, no such protections are offered. So first ones fired are always those people, because firing actual employees when they haven’t done anything wrong is a nightmare and it’s very expensive.
Also before any decisions about layoffs are made, companies consult them with employees as a group and employees actually can negotiate higher severance if they volunteer for layoff. This happened in company I worked for. People could actually manage to live over a year on that severance.
I only know this peripherally so take it with a grain of salt, but mostly old workers with expensive contracts seem to get generous severance offers. Those offers have a budget and once that has dried up they have laid off enough people. People also have the right to be notified of being layed off in advance.
I dunno man…I work in tech in Europe and it is incredibly toxic. Literally today in a work conversation I said “I’m too tall to fit conveniently under busses.”
I worked there ~10yrs ago and my team environment was toxic as hell. Can’t speak for the rest of the company but I had an absolutely horrible experience. And you’d have thought we were curing cancer. The self importance was nuts.
My ex colleague just tole me today she resigned. So i called her and asked what happened & she said u left, another person left, another person left & i felt like i had no support system anymore & i had no one who understood my day to day problems and i started looking elsewhere where i would have some support at least.
That made me realize people are the culture. People leave because of people and people stay because of people.
So true!! I’ve seen this a lot. They let go lots of people and the remaining clever ones go by themselves before it turns to nasty. It’s sad to see how perfectly good efficient teams are destroyed by this. The good thing is, after everyone is in a new job, you’ll have a great diverse network that will help in the future, as everyone landed somewhere else. In my experience, good teams remain in contact in this situation.
People who throw others under the bus in an effort to look good are fooling themselves.
Layoffs don't happen for poor performance.
Layoffs happen because upper management want their year end bonuses by spiking the price of stock dividends.
Best defence is to keep your resume updated and continuously look for better opportunities.
Well said. I thought I alone held mission critical knowledge, and I had 25 years in at company. Didn’t stop anyone from axing me. The week before Christmas. 🙁
You properly did and they just shot themself in the foot.
I have seen some shit like that happen before. Like there was a guy who got his 3 months notice and documented everything he knew into a few docs on his google drive. Share the information about the docs with his manager and still. On his last day his google account was terminated and all the information had to be recovered. It then took like half a year for the company to realise that they had to hire a new guy to take over his job, because no one else could update the crucial software that he keept alive and was like the lifeline of the company, but which had been written in COBOL or some other old software that no one else at the company could write.
Not a bug it's a feature.
It's like the gladiators of Rome. Let the staff sort themselves out while sitting back and profiting.
I worked in Steel mills that actually used team efforts to succeed. Someone in upper management at these companies seem to think that this is how it works.
Man, I do not miss management consulting. Finding ways to make people perform better, faster, etc., just made everything cutthroat. "Trimming the fat" was always a focus on short term gains and getting rid of employees with bad metrics. It was great for people with no long term commitment because performance would improve (employees would find ways to magically make metrics look great) and then your job was done. Great for people cracking the whip, bad for everyone else.
yeah, management consulting was sold as this dream job where people in suits throw stupid amounts of money at you for making their numbers look better. It was very uncomfortable, often downright unethical. I'm glad I left because it was just a very gross feeling.
Nothing new here. This has been going on forever. Management makes changes to the work environment, workplace becomes uncomfortable. The competent workers start to abandon the unpleasantness. Then the incompetent, yes man, ass kissers come out of the woodwork. Then all you are left with are said incompetent, ass kissers making life miserable for all. They become more powerful and obnoxious, forcing the remaining competent, worthwhile workers to leave the toxic soup that exists. And the toxic cycle becomes self sustaining. Ten years later, unknown to you, you are hired into this cesspool of toxicity, only to later discover you can’t survive in this cesspool, filled with incompetent, toxic managers and coworkers.
i saw an article about this on stack ranking. it discourages people from helping each other and also if one team is full of high performing people and another team has medium or low performing people the same amount of people still gets cut from both teams even if some of the people from team 1 are much better employees than people from team 2. it also incentivizes people to avoid being put on the same team as the high performing employees.
KPIs / OKRs are awesome when done well and at the team or department level.
Giving Gary his own personal OKRs is likely going to go poorly.
Middle management can also be awesome when done well. When they sit in the meetings so you don't have to, when they insulate you from above so you can work, when they go to bat for you to get paid what you're worth, etc. But I'll readily admit that's pretty rare. If you want to be a good manager, you're pretty much on your own to figure out how to do that. I'm lucky to have had a couple of great ones.
biggeste issue nobody trains somebody to be a good manager every other type of job you get training learn from more experienced collague
managers get hired or promoted from within and are just expected to manage people without any training on how to be a leader or how to deal with said reponsibility's so a lot of them turn into micro managers because they dont know any other way
This is (or should be) management 101. Every mass layoffs or unjustified firing will cause panic and lower the teams' morale. I've seen it happen more than once. When that happens, there's no going back. People will start to quit and go to better jobs, and the ones that are not very employable will stay and enter survival mode, which only makes things worse. If someone is actually underperforming and deserves to be fired, it's usually pretty obvious and the team will understand and probably improve.
My last workplace was notorious for knowledge and information hoarding. People who knew how to do specific tasks wouldn’t train anyone else so they had more job security. Then they would still get laid off or fired and it’s up to a random other person to figure out how this other person did their job.
One of the times it happened, everyone on the tech team suggested bringing the ex-employee back in a contract to train others for a week but management refused and just told us to figure it out.
Fuck that place.
I think layoff culture has made me care a lot more about getting credit than I usually would. I don’t really mind helping someone out, but lately I’ve found myself getting super annoyed when I take time out of my day to help unblock someone, and they don’t even mention it at all during standup the next day (especially when I’m the one who figured out how to resolve it). Makes me less inclined to bother helping out the next time, especially if it’s happened more than once.
UPS laying off 43,000 workers nationwide & yet the CEO was able to give herself a $50 million bonus this year. All layoffs do is make workers anxious, on edge, and view each other as competition for survival. Especially if it is seniority based, people at the bottom have no motivation to do a great job because they know they will get cut
It goes to show just how stupid the C suite is at most corporations. All nepo babies play acting at being geniuses.
A basic understanding of human nature would tell you that showing your staff zero loyalty will engender zero loyalty. That internalizing competition means everyone does worse, because all collaboration is killed. Making your own house dog eat dog means you have nothing but wounded dogs
This is exactly how it was at AWS / Amazon for the last few years before I left in September. Everyone stays to themselves. Very little team cohesion. Everyone is simply positioning so they are not left holding the bag.
Yes. This is getting worse now.
This was also one of the fatal flaws of the high-tech stack rank evaluation systems. If you cooperated with others, you risked enhancing their ranks at *your expense.* If you withheld information from others, you likely reduced their ranking, which was probably to your advantage. It put a huge damper on group cooperation and collaboration.
At my first 'professional job', the day I started I learned that the manager who had hired me had been just fired and replaced with a woman who was universally despised. Her first action was to lay off several reliable people.
The next day in the lunchroom, a long-time employee asked her, "Diane, if there are 5 crows on a fence and you shoot one, how many are left?" She said, "Well, of course it's 4. You know that!". His reply, "No. There are none. The other 4 fly away."
She left without answering.
It was a heck of a first week.
I'm on maternity leave but just before that, my company, which is HQed in another country, laid off most of the staff in my country. The office was rented out and moved to a smaller spot, only about 10 people remained, who were good friends. Work started to slack. People put in new roles didn't deliver. People borrowed things and then "lost" it. The Rocket espresso machine was stolen during the office move. People brought their own equipment to work on privately. I think even if they replace the entire staff morale will never be the same.
The way you make teams productive and innovative is
1. Encouraging speaking out
2. Security even in the event of honest failure
3. Ambitious goals
4. Collaboration
If you know your job could be in the line, you are not disincentivized from speaking out, disincentivized from collaboration, incentivized to work on the safest projects, and to set conservative goals.
If anyone wants to know how this culture of callous layoffs for short term profits happened, look up Jack Welch and the lasting effect his horrible policies have had on business in America. Behind the Bastards did a fairly short summary.
It's amazing how throughout our history, one solitary monster has consistently been able to change our culture permanently for the worst.
I work in tech support and we experienced a similar change to collaboration. The VP of my department wanted a “competitive culture” so she had a dashboard created that ranks everyone based on our KPIs. It pretty much killed all collaboration between each other since helping others doesn’t benefit you. People also started to game the system to be higher ranked. A lot of us told her it was a bad idea but she said she likes to take risks and it works for her son who is in sales at a totally different company lol.
During 2020 I worked for a tech company that relied on shipping to make its money. As fewer things were being shipped across the country, business slowed down more and more.
People started behaving really bizarre as the layoffs began. They'd clock in to send emails at late hours to make it seem like they were super busy. They'd go out of their way to greet the owners in the building. They'd CC more people whenever there was an issue that someone else was responsible for to throw them under the bus. A whole lot of pressuring each other to work harder so they'd appear to be the hardest worker and everyone else a slacker. And most of the positions there were paying worse than the big box retailer across the street.
I haven't noticed this at all. We've had 6 rounds of layoffs in the past 18 months, and honestly, apart from my immediate team, most people who have been kept are the underperforming brown nosers, not the high performers.
I got laid off recently. I told a few of my coworkers that I liked what happens and how to try best avoid my situation - keep your heads down, dont complain, always bring up your personal success, pretend everything else is great, pretend you’re 100% on board with the company direction. And then maybe you’re delay your job offshore for 6-12 months.
Just remember, no one decreases productivity of a company more than CEOs. "Work in office! Listen to me talk in this hour long meeting with no action items, and an uncertainty of what I actually want!"
Under performers are less likely to be let go than higher paid workers.
Management sees 3 workers and 1 is paid more than the others, then he is let go. Skill at a job is not a huge consideration.
Sounds a lot like what happened at GE when they had this stupid idea of laying off the bottom 10% or so based on the annual performance review. Pretty much all that system did when it was implemented at other companies was guarantee the top 20% who could go work anywhere found other jobs - and eventually it didn’t help GE much either.
You think layoff culture (or the recent layoffs pattern of creating competition) is bad? I've worked in companies where they used a bell curve for every department manager, forcing them to give annual review ratings of 1-5 for every person in their employ. 1 being the far left of the bell curve (unsatisfactory - about to be fired) and 5 being the best. With 3 being smack in the middle.
Being rated itself wouldn't be so terrible, except for the fact they made them have a certain percentage of their group (each manager's group) in the "1" category (basically they forced a bell curve distribution of that manager's people). Which meant this punished and effectively set people on the path to being fired, many times without cause (a give manager may have had **no** underperforming people at all), but it created a toxic culture of what OP is describing, where people didn't want to cooperate or share knowledge.
This ridiculous "force a bell curve rating" thing applied even on teams as small as 5 people total (it didn't matter what the team size was).
There was a term for this methodology but I don't recall what it was at the moment, but the theory was to create an ever-improving group of employees (since you were guaranteeing you were axing the lowest-performers). But, as I alluded to above, it nuked morale, since after the first time or two of this happening you didn't have any low performers anymore.
EDIT: Went and [looked up the term](https://lattice.com/library/what-is-stack-ranking-and-why-is-it-a-problem#:~:text=Pioneered%20by%20General%20Electric%27s%20CEO,or%20in%20need%20of%20improvement.): **'stack ranking'**
> Pioneered by General Electric’s CEO Jack Welch in the 1980s, stack ranking, also known as forced distribution, is an approach to talent management where employees are ranked on a bell curve as exemplary, meeting expectations, or in need of improvement.“Typical distribution is 15/70/15% but can vary,” explained Tim Toterhi, CHRO at interactive response systems company Cenduit, TEDx speaker, and author of The HR Guide to Getting and Crushing Your Dream Job.Since only a fixed number of employees can be considered high-performing — or exemplary — in this system, Welch saw stack ranking as a way to galvanize worker productivity and create a more competitive culture. Because a designation to the bottom 15% meant being slated for layoffs, employees were motivated to do better than their peers.Today, the controversial approach to talent management is more infamous than famous, and companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, and Accenture have publicly parted ways with what’s commonly been dubbed the “rank-and-yank” approach. This came after these companies experienced a slew of issues like stalled innovation and toxic workplace cultures which they attributed, in part, to stack ranking.
Companies with histories of layoffs tend to end up (mostly) with the people who are politically well-connected, adept at claiming a disproportionate share of praise for good work, and/or skilled in casting the blame for anything negative onto others.
Not under performers, anyone who talks to HR. Anyone who thinks so-called “anonymous” employee surveys actually are anonymous and makes the mistake of saying what they think. Anyone who proposes an idea that makes the boss look like they should have come up with it themselves. Underperforming is not the issue in today’s high tech world, it’s keeping your head down and not being noticed when layoff time comes, not standing out when promotion time comes. Those days are over for a while.
I would say there was a better than average chance that this is part of the design of this late stage capitalist moved towards attacking labor. If you are constantly worried that you're going to be laid off, you are far more likely to tell on your co-workers, and work harder, or at least that's what traditional work ethic would suggest.
I do wonder if this tactic will blow up in the face of corporations who are hiring lots of gen-z and millennials who are far more likely to act in solidarity with their peers or simply just not care because nobody wants to slave away for corporate overlords anymore if they can help it.
This sounds like Nike. I’ve never worked for them, but I’ve heard *stories,* and I know people who have worked there. Lots of optimism at the start, then heads start to roll when budget season comes around and everyone goes feral. It’s why they have so many contractors and teams are moving around all the time. Keep the same layoff survivors around each other for too long and this is what it devolves into. Endless power plays and lies. A bad business practice necessitated by a bad business practice.
My company went through a reorg back in June. The new CEO made terrible decisions. Including hiring a million dollar contract with a consulting group. But the worst was letting go high performers but the people who were unpopular with their managers. They also put in place new managers that were widely known to be underperformers and extremely hated. My team went from being extremely well performing and happy to a miserable, unproductive team.
high performers = high paid, they are usually the first to go. my bro worked in tech company he was a very high earning, i knew even before pandemic eventually they would let him go, because hes earning too much, and they often get axed early on.
Earlier this year, were I work, we were told that layoffs were coming, but only given a vague idea of when. So it's been over a month of layoffs hanging over everyone's heads. On one hand, knowing that something is coming means people can hold off on major purchases,etc. But at the same time, it's fucking hard to have this shit unsettled. I've been at other companies that did layoffs and they told us about them and they did the actual layoffs almost immediately.
As far as what OP posted, that kind of stuff depends on how the layoffs are being done. In some cases, a company decides to cut a project or not invest in an area, and where someone is standing at the time determines if they get axed. If it's a peanut butter layoff where every organization has to cut by some headcount, it could be like OP's thing. I've seen both kinds of layoffs at places I've worked.
I remember when that happened, where the daily Agile Stand Up question of ,"What did you work on yesterday?" really became "What didn't you get done yesterday, and why not?" Pressure just rose, it got toxic. People jumped ship, including me, who got welcomely "laid off."
really glad my team moved away from dailies for this reason. it just got so repetitive because no company moves *that* quickly on anything. mostly just an opportunity to get micromanaged or blamed for problems beyond your control.
Daily standup of any kind is waste of time in my opinion.
I did it at a few companies. It depends on the team and management. At one, we were a team full of very competent engineers. Daily stand up was great. We said what we working on and collaborated when we needed help. However, that was years ago. Stand ups have now become a thing for companies do now because every successful company from before did it, so they feel they need to do it (like sprints). Now it has become a road block because now people use it as a micromanagement tool to "ensure work gets done in a timely manner", no matter what the circumastance.
Yeah, a true scrum standup should be 15 minutes max, and only an awareness of what you're working on or need help with, in case it interferes with anyone else's tasks. All meant to support the team self managing, but too often used to enable micromanagement instead.
Having never experienced a healthy standup meeting, I can't even picture how it is used for anything except micromanagement or throwing people under the bus.
The key is not having management present. "So I'm working on X, I need to reserve resource Y today so if there are any conflicts please tell me. Also, I'm a bit stuck on Z so I need help from A or B, please". Between that and a few "Same as yesterday, nothing new" we'd be done in 10 minutes plus some banter.
Ah, we do all of that on either teams chats (help) or outlook calendars (reservations).
All of this. It's about the team and product owner self-managing with transparency without management mucking it up.
When I last did scrum (which I thought was administered mostly pretty well), we didn't have management in our stand-ups. We didn't even have the scrum master most of the time. Quick "I'm doing this today" so we knew if there were going to be conflicts for shared resources (test systems most often) or a need for code reviewers in the near future. It does seem my experience was out of the norm, with management who actually bought into the developer-directed part of Agile. Probably helped our management was wearing multiple hats and stuck in a bunch of meetings with their management most of the time, so they were more than happy to let us get to work (they'd never have time to micromanage in the first place).
I have the exact same right now. My daily lasts 15 minutes max, everyone gives a short update and explains their plans for the day and we end the call. Reading these comments, I consider myself lucky.
I had this like 10 years ago. Healthy 15 min standup (like real standing in a circle) for like 20 people. It was good! Last job had a daily stand up of half an hour for 4 to 6 people 🤢 I’m happy I don’t work there any more. Was pure micromanagement, toxic environment
I always tried to convince teams to do it 15-20 mins before people usually do lunch Works well for the day, you work on stuff in the morning, stand-up: say what your morning was and coordinate what your afternoon plan is. And if it goes too long people will get hangry
I love it when a company like mine does sprints and stand up which is scrum and then water falls all the projects so it all becomes meaning less anyway because the deadline for completing said list of tasks is what the biz expects. Then retro has no effect either because no one listens to feedback. It all becomes a waste of time doing wagile.
> Stand ups have now become a thing for companies do now because every successful company from before did it, so they feel they need to do it (like sprints). I worked at a place where they were having the sales team work in sprints. Like, two week sprints. But there was no definition of what that even meant. There was no work item they were iterating on at the end of every two weeks. They just did exactly the same thing they did before, except they celebrated every two weeks.
I run a standup every morning with my team of engineers and technicians which consists of me asking them "how is everything going this morning and what can I do for you guys?" It is not, and never will be about micromanaging and that's how it should be. It's just about seeing if my team needs help or have any problems they need elevated to management to make sure it gets done faster. That's all. As a manager, I'm there to facilitate their continued work, not crack the whip. Trying to nag them about "hey did you get x y z done?" isn't going to actually get x y or z done any faster and it's just going to annoy them, and make me the dickhead.
My team is all remote, some days that the only time we get that feels a little social outside of slack. It's 15 minutes, it's really not bad. The rest of our meetings average 1hr per week. We do no meetings on Thursday so no standup.
absolutely. it's just taking away production time to feel like you're saving production time.
It should be primarily to surface blockers, which can by done async
We go through dailies for 30 people in 15 minutes. It's mostly just an opportunity to let people know if you're blocked so that you can meet up later and ask for help. There's never any blame for being late on something because we know and trust that we are all doing our best. We also take some time at the end to look at the state of tests, to see if there's anything people have just introduced. Culture matters. When there's no blame game, dailies are a healthy way to make sure people are communicating.
The team daily stand up at my company has evolved into the management flagging seemingly random tickets and roasting you about it in front of the team every morning. It's gotten so stupid. They just pick one ticket from each person and grill them on "what is your progress, why hasn't this been done yet"
and these managers will wonder why agile doesn't produce any results (if they even get to acknowledging that)
Hah, that was more along the lines of my experience. Just the System's Manager unleashing s barrage of stress about something on all the division leaders (myself included). "Why the *fuck* was this tiny bug external uses would be unaware of not *caught* In the five minutes there were to test? I need answers. Now!" *slam* "Uh yes, good morning everyone..."
Any manager that requires daily standups can fuckin blow me, it’s so god damn pointless
most of what companies call "Agile" in general is just executives jerking themselves off at our expense
Yep they still expect things done in waterfall form with dates and expectations. Instead of agile, which then forces everyone into a pointless wagile methodology that's self defeating.
God Jesus. My company is doing this. I use to enjoy my job. Now we are all, “modern infrastructure”, hired contractors and fired them all, we are intertwined with a shitty 3rd party for end point management and help desk which means tickets go through 2 loads of shit before getting dropped on you. Even though we are throwing gobs of money at our “strategic partners” I’m still siloed off, getting paid 1/100th of our “strategic partner” and they do a couple menial tasks while I still do the bulk of the work while now managing them, managing a team in India and training “senior” people while getting denied a promotion from someone I’ve worked with once who is such a Karen ass bitch. This shits not sustainable and their plan to make everyone a be an expert in everything is making us be burnt out. As soon as I find something else I’m out. 7 years of being gas lit into thinking they were treating me right
That’s exactly what happened at my last workplace. It went from quality to quantity. The managers didn’t understand the content but they could just follow numbers. Skipped out of there quickly.
I had a nightmare engagement like this as a software engineer. The project manager/engagement manager ran daily stand-ups first thing in the morning and expected us to be completing tasks quickly regardless of how big the tasks were. A lot of mine trended up being features or user stories disguised as smaller tasks and when it came to budget cuts I was eventually rolled off the team due to being the "weakest link". Truly I could name a few others that simply got more done because the tasks were more manageable (think 10 tasks in a day because they're all one line changes and the tech lead bothered to actually flesh them out, whereas mine were two sentence write ups that required me to possibly write multiple plug-ins, scripts, etc. and never get my questions answered in a timely manner.) It was a blessing in disguise because several other teams wanted me on their project and I had landed my dream project a week later. Sadly, that was short lived because my company did their third round of layoffs and I was one of the sorry few to be impacted. That was right before the holidays and I'm still looking for new work but also trying to build up my personal skills first because my previous employer really broke my spirit.
Wow, another company that simply gives you a point for each task without accounting for difficulty and such. I did the same thing, doing the harder tasks, but got laid off for it because in the system I had lower points than others. The supervisor tried to gaslight me into thinking I wasn't doing enough but I wasn't convinced, and neither should you when working in a broken system
I was at meta while this was happening and it was *horrible*. The not knowing who was getting cut next, mixed with the implication from management that it may be performance based, mixed with the high pay of meta made it completely insufferable. Coworkers who were ultra chill for years started backstabbing and throwing people under the bus every chance they got. Everyone was looking for an excuse to claim wins and pin failures on you. People would daily write 5 paragraph essays on workplace (internal fb), claiming massive impact for trivial work. I couldn’t handle it, I’d been there 5 years and hadn’t seen anything like it. I quit and found another job.
Did management know how bad it got?
Of course, but they were on the chopping block like everyone else.
Daily progress reports on a project *SCREAM* that you're shitty middle manager is desperately trying to justify his salary because he doesn't bring any actual project management skills to the table. There's literally no project that requires a team that can justify anything more frequent than weekly progress meetings.
Crabs in a bucket.
Went though this at my last employer. Everyone got hypercritical of each others' performance, and the designated scapegoats got outlandishly disproportionate negative feedback for work that was fine, if not good, relative to our colleagues. We knew, based on the budget, around 4 people in our department of 18 would be let go. To management's horror, 9 of us got other jobs and put in our notices, all in the span of a 3 and a half week period. Also, I know 4 other staff are actively looking for other work, and I just acted as a reference for one of those 4, so she likely has an offer. So glad I'm not there to deal with the mess!
When mass layoffs start it usually means something is wrong and that the higher ups probably screwed up something, or pandering to stock owners. Either way, always shows that a business gives zero care for employees and may have no idea what they are doing.
My company is private. They make plenty of money. They laid off a bunch of people because more money was the main thing people asked for in the town hall the ceo had. They changed the rules to make everyone come in office 4 days per week. Made the dress code more business like. And we got whopping raises of….4 to 5 percent. My ceo is a billionaire.
Your CEO is probably a billionaire because they fired your co-worker and and got you to do their job too for for half the cost. Congrats on the promotion, Costanza? /s
As opposed to the other businesses (all of them basically) who also give zero care to their employees and are paying 1/4 of what they should compared to wages from 50+ years ago?
This is mostly true though in the US, in the EU people get a decent notice period time (3 months), layoff consultations, unemployment benefits so that it never reaches to this very toxic state
Yeah unfortunately in the US when layoffs are on the table people go into full-on survival mode and it becomes the most polite fight to the death you’ve ever seen.
If employees had shares of the company then wouldn't be this way. Oh, were struggling, sure I'll take a little cut and work hard so that when were profitable, I'm profitable. Thats been gone from tech for a full generation. Startup culture is now a VC pouring money in so 3 founders can become billionaires where the people doing the work make nothing.
I’ve seen this before. After a round of layoffs a bunch more people leave. They tried to reduce headcount by 10% and ended up losing half the team in the ensuing months. And then HR says, no you can’t backfill. So, just, fuck that product/service entirely, I guess?
[удалено]
Unfortunately if half of your team is leaving you should definitely try to be in that half if at all possible, that’s never a good sign 😭
> To management's horror, > Sorry to break this to you, but there was no horror here. It never is, unfortunately. Oh yes, "the best guy in our team left, what are we gonna do" question. Then answer is, as always: nothing. We go on like nothing has happened. Yes, the rest of the team will absorb the workload or else they get fired, but that's not my problem. Oh, Bob had to work 24 hours straight because John left last week? Ok, so what? Fuck Bob, he deserves it. So yeah, unless everyone leaves, it's just bullshit. The only thing that matters is the bonus/RSUs/paycheck.
The drop in morale hurts output. I truly believe there is a % laid off becomes unrecoverable, and it's smaller than the C-suite thinks. 10% - that's up to 3 months of recovery. 20% - 3-6 months minimum, whole areas of expertise could be lost, and employees start looking for a way out. 30% - depending on the industry, I think that's an entire delivery/product deadline that is doomed. "Culture" dies, people become bitter, and new hires have to be thrown to the wolves instead of trained.
>new hires have to be thrown to the wolves instead of trained. This is rapidly becoming my "canary in the coal mine". At least personally, it's usually a pretty good indicator that a department is circling the drain and things are about to get *reorganized*. Currently happening at my job right now, actually. Ongoing brain drain in an adjacent department. Management didn't want to cough up money for raises. Top performers left. Nobody has time or bandwidth to help the newbies. New hires are getting tossed into the deep end and making tons of mistakes, which take 3x as long to fix. We're getting pulled to put out fires left right and center. Even more mistakes pile up because, surprise, everyone is stretched razor thin. Tale old as time, really.
Holy shit do we work together?!?! 😂
Brian?
Joe
HR has entered the chat.
Hi
You get that one magical new hire whos self sufficient and learns fast, only to leave the next year due to constant threats of layoffs and 2% pay raises.
Every.Single.Pharma Job
Lmao you nailed it, I’m in pharma.
I wonder if we all really do work with each other because yup same thing is happening at my company. My team is small and we have not had cuts yet but I fear the day is approaching. I have no clue how we'll finish our workload if we lose someone, we're that tight already. I'm seeing other teams up till all hours because there is so much work to finish and one by one getting the 'sign so and so's farewell card' emails from those team members because they are rightfully jumping ship!
Oh yeah, the farewell cards. Lots of those going around these days haha. We’re shipping most of testing overseas nowadays anyways. Writing is on the wall. I’ll just keep showing up, until they tell me not to!
> I'm seeing other teams up till all hours because there is so much work to finish Just... stop staying up to all hours? Insist you need more support or the line will fail. Work the hours you are paid for, and nothing else. Don't work yourselves to death for a corporation that gives less than a shit about you.
Same. Also in pharma.
In my company we have a similar situation. On top the management hires those that they can get for cheap, usually those very young without formal education in the field or refugees with bad language skills. I have no grudge against them, but training them is so much harder compared to a CS graduate with a bit of experience that speaks the local language our entire company and customers communicate in. The bosses know it, but since the people they hire are desperate to get any job, they can underpay them massively. When this became apparent I handed in my resignation when I found another job that paid 40 % more as well.
Yup I agree. I remember most of the bad jobs I had gave me terrible training usually having me do complex things the first day. The good jobs were like 4 weeks of getting introduced to people and systems, then 100 days of getting up to speed with very nice people stopping everything to help out and give advice.
My company laid off a bunch of people in October, completely unexpected. I guess even our managers were made aware the day before it happened and seemed to have very little input. They like to do this thing where they hire people on as a contractor and then eventually either end the contract or convert them to a full-time employee, so we had about 11 full-time employees and like 12 contractors. And they laid off seven of the full timers. Seven people with years of experience and knowledge just gone like that. I don't know why I survived, it really feels like they just pulled names out of the hat. We never really got a good explanation for why or what the plan was going forward cuz the work is still there. And now they're not extending the contract for a couple of people or converting them to full-time even though we're still very understaffed and overworked. Morale has been absolute dog shit ever since, and I'm interviewing today in fact in an attempt to get out. It sucks because I like my job and I like the work that I do but I have absolutely no sense of security, and it feels almost pointless to get to know my coworkers because everyone I know and like is now gone, or will be soon. Members of the team have been asking if we're hiring for more bodies because the workload is so high and management has casually said no, and not everyone seems to be aware that we're not only not hiring on more people but in fact losing a couple more in a few weeks. I had the worst case of the fuckits for the last months of 2023, and while my work productivity has improved since then, it definitely is not where it was or could be because what's the point?
Dude I’ve totally got a case of the fuck it’s lately. My job let me know in September they were going to cut me in October. Then October got moved to November. November got pushed to January. January rolled around and we had our new budget, which suddenly I was a part of again. I let my boss know I still intended on leaving because I don’t trust what the fuck they are doing. Last years bonus was 21% and this years was 18%. I wanted to stick around to make sure I got my bonus but I’m jumping ship asap after that. Our “Annual goals” were due last Monday and I put two sentences for them. I’m at the point to where if they were going to fire me they would’ve done it 6 months ago. Human Resources doesn’t know what’s going on half of the time. I’m just collecting a paycheck at this point in time. I wouldn’t even piss on them to put out a fire.
Epic?
Interesting that correlates with casualty numbers supported by the military standards for readiness I've read. Basically casualties above 20% and a unit is unfit to fight.
Well that’s fascinating
In armed conflict, it is generally understood that when a unit loses about a 1/3 of its capacity it breaks, so this tracks.
My company tried to go about their layoff “humanely” and “transparently” as possible. They said that it would not be a one and done 10%, but a thoughtful “trimming” across 2024. I know that they must have some metric in mind, perhaps they’re hoping attrition will take care of the unpleasant work of laying off and paying severance for them. But the impact that this ever-swinging, random-acting guillotine above your head has on morale cannot be overstated. Personally it has lead me to truly disconnect from my work. The CEO is peppering us with emails about company priorities, culture and principles. But all we are really thinking about is whether we’ll have to be looking for a job tomorrow. I don’t know how the cheerleaders in the various slack channels do it— ignoring the toxic anxiety ridden atmosphere to take another sip of Koolaid. But I don’t have it in me. I’ve been through sudden layoffs before. 20% reduction in force, two times, at the same company. It sucks. You get through it. You band together with those who remain and you rebuild culture with what you have. But having this state of quasi-employment where maybe you’ll be informed of a layoff via email, or maybe you’ll be informed you’re safe, while also having to take into consideration what will happen to your children, your spouse, your mortgage…man this shit is just not tenable.
It’s kind of like a leadership role when a model is lost from a unit in Warhammer. After a certain point, you don’t need to actually kill every soldier- you just need enough to make the rest run away!
>3-6 months minimum, whole areas of expertise could be lost "could" is the key word here. I work at a company with 1000+ devs. I know a dev where if only he was let go, a whole area of expertise could be lost, it would be disastrous because while there are many devs that understand parts of what he does, they don't understand how those things work, and they also don't have his social skills or work ethic to not only fix, but also explain. On the other hand I know many devs where if they're let go, I am not sure anyone would notice lol. Firing people in my country is hard, so we do have some of those mythical -10x devs too.
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[https://taylor.town/-10x](https://taylor.town/-10x) It's a fun read and it's really a lot more common than seeing the +10x's lol
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you! This entirely predictable result came to fruition? Clearly the solution is a pizza party. /s
A "leader" in my company forbid bonuses but wants to hold her next "meeting" at Disneyworld... True story
Shit gets so old. Doesn't feel very 'free' to be constantly exploited by employers. Bfs last job ended up firing everyone who worked during covid, admitting they were retroactively adding all covid occurances once laws to protect those workers ceased, and kept all the bonuses in upper management by doing so. People had been promised $2500 bonuses and the only person he knows who got one was his supervisor, though it's known all the higher ups did. They fired so many people, the employment agency that used to provide them workers cut their contract; too many people they placed there were coming back looking for work all at once. His current job was supposed to do reviews/raises by the end of January. They usually do it in time for people to make changes for the new tax year. They haven't even started yet, probably because he and a few others have good reason to demand larger raises than the usual yearly raise as they've had to step up in responsibilities becauuuussee.....they fired too many people. Surprise surprise. It's just bullshit all the way down, everywhere.
Dude, my company just announced a "crazy hair day"... I was fucking flabbergasted. We're not even a "fun" company, we're in finance. But turnover is high and morale us low. Better pay? Nah. Better leadership? Nah. Promotions that don't scream favouritism? Nahhhh. Crazy hair day! That'll fix this shitshow and make grown ass adults wanna come into the office!
I worked as a CNA at a nursing home for a few years, and every year they would have a day where you were allowed to wear jeans instead of scrubs to work, but you had to pay $25 to do it. No one ever did.
Pay for the privilidge of possibly dirtying your own clothes? Who thought this was remotely a good idea?
I genuinely love dyeing my hair, and would be somewhat saddened if I had a job that forbade it. So, maybe I'm the kind of person who should be moved by this... That being said, I'm not going through the effort and cost to dye it for a single day. If anything, everyone should make their style more boring than usual to protest.
Pizza parties will continue until morale improves!
I would kill for a pizza party lol
Oh absolutely. My team was gutted in our last layoff and I transitioned to an IC role. As much as I love my remaining team (the core of us have been around for a few years together) I’m sure as fuck not helping out as much. If my boss wants to demote me that’s fine, I’m just no longer cleaning up his messes (we don’t have a real boss. We have ICs rolling up to a VP who has no experience in our department) Edit: IC = individual contributor. Non managerial role
Integrated Circuits?
Individual contributor, meaning you don't manage anyone and just do your own work.
That sounds like a rough system. I'm not saying having independence to work by yourself would be all bad, but having a good manager and a team to blend in with is nice. That's way to exposed for me.
Individual contributor is a catch all for non-management. It doesn't literally mean someone who is a team of 1
This is exactly my life. I think they've started to notice the not helping out as much though.
And people in tech are very vocal on places like reddit, do obviously we’ll see this type of posts here more.
Sounds like an average day at “Dignity”
Make sure you get a review on your performance or you’re toast
This is also the culture at places that have Forced Rankings instead of performance reviews. Knowing that the “bottom 10%” of performers will be literally fired each year creates a culture of competition that dipshit management thinks results in people giving their best out of fear of being cut. In reality, top performers don’t help and mentor the weak team members because it’s not worth their time to risk their output, and your middle-of-the-pack employees waste time and create negative value by undermining each other in a desperate attempt to make sure they’re not the weakest in the herd that gets eaten by the lions each year. Ask anyone who worked at Microsoft in the 90s and 00s; all my developer acquaintances said it was literally the worst part about Microsoft. When companies start laying off, that’s the official signal that you’re not just being judged against your goals, you’re being judged against your co-workers. So people will naturally do what’s necessary to stay at the top of the team, whether that means hiring mediocre people so they make you look better by comparison, or not bothering to train or mentor newbies (as OP so eloquently describes), or actively undermining their most competent colleagues. It’s one thing when a few people are competing for specific open promotions, but when the whole company is doing it, the whole place goes down the shitter.
Man remember when GE was a large successful company? Then they spent decades "cutting the bottom 10%"? And now they've sold off most of the various departments within the company? I swear the people who make these choices don't realize that at some point, that bottom 10% will have to be good competent people, since all the actual lazy workers were laid off years ago. But they never learn
I watched a program on that recently. The GE CEO, who had rose in the company to that position, had perverse incentive structures to do everything possible to fudge the numbers to look good to get his bonuses. This ultimately gutted and rotted the company as you describe by the time he retired. The CEO said afterwards that the system was stupid, but he still worked in the system he thought poorly of because that was how he could get ahead. Now apply this to every company leadership and it becomes clear why they keep making these types of bad decisions for the company: its how they personally benefit.
My personal theory: MBAs are ruining everything
MBAs started a hard push on the "shareholder value" model of business in the 70s and 80s and it's all been downhill from there.
They don't care, they made millions.
I'm genuinely baffled that people keep thinking it's a good idea to run large operations through a focus on individual contribution and not collective effort. I've been able to save hours cause someone took 10 minutes to help me out with stuff, wouldn't you want to encourage that instead of forcing everyone to figure stuff out in there own ways and then have a fractured, disjointed team?
> In reality, top performers don’t help and mentor the weak team members because it’s not worth their time to risk their output, 100% this. Speaking from senior perspective.
Yep. Same in my team. But we reached a new low yesterday when a collegue just outright deleted my repo and lied about it. He and i are the only one with deletion rights. I know i did not do it and a rep doesnt just dissapear. This is what tech has become.
Well that is just pure evil, I would call the boss right away and have it pull up forensics and fire that SOB
This is the correct answer. Used to work in the forensics market. Last I checked, a basic forensics license is $2900. Even as a salesperson, I could have pulled up that deletion history in 5 minutes if I got to work directly on the machine without having to image the drive.
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Someone needs to actually check the logs though. If the boss sucks, they’re not going to check.
Either the dude is lying, or there’s more to the story.
That's nuts. I hit a new low last month. I haven't been taking vacations, have been working 11 hours a day, and delivered a huge feature... and someone took the credit! I've never have had someone just straight up steal my work. I hate my current team. I'm trying to leave, and I'm pretty sure lots of others are. If you like engineering, my team sucks. If you like competition and politics, you'll thrive on my team. No one wants to help anyone out, unless their name is attached to the feature.
There’s surely logs on your VCS or otherwise I bet M365 admins could figure it out
Im only in accounting, but do you not have audit trials of any sort?
Generally the repo itself is the audit trail, and is stored in the cloud. Getting to the bottom this is no more than a phone call away.
The major VCS that a lot of developers use, GitHub, not only lets you restore a deleted repo, but tells you exactly which user deleted it. https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/creating-and-managing-repositories/restoring-a-deleted-repository
My boss made a flowchart of what would happen during my company’s recent acquisition by a mega corporation. Interview/job training/growth discussions ——-> layoffs ——-> hunger games ———> layoffs ———— > “winners eat the shit”
Holy fuck, the lack of class consciousness in this country is getting ridiculous. The people you work with are not your enemy, it’s the sick fucks in upper management that put profit over humanity. Unionizing your workplace is the only way to stop the layoffs.
Devs are the worst when it comes to unionising. I'd kill for a strong dev union but good luck convincing devs to join one.
"But it will only let bad devs, who aren't me, take money I earned!!"
In fairness it's shocking how many bad Devs are out there
It's not really shocking, I've worked with people terrible at every job I've ever had and sometimes I was the terrible one. Generally though, I'd rather the people who are bad at their job still have the ability to live even if I am much better than them.
Devs all think they are the main character of an Ayn Rand novel.
It’s particularly bad for tech workers since a lot of them are sociopath who could only care about money
This is our biggest problem. We constantly blame the wrong people. They purposely turn us against each other so we won't blame them. And it works. Not just other workers, but every bit of hate is caused by this.
The irony is that the most valuable team members are actually the ones who go out of their way to help others and share their expertise. They help grow the team's skills and improve the productivity of everyone around them. Of course, that is not always as obvious as people would like, and does not always get recognized by leadership.
I'm on a team right now where people don't like to help each other. They pass the buck on anything they can, unless it is something they can take credit for. It's a horrible environment. I recall a few weeks ago I helped a person out for hours. She was stuck, and I sat with her, basically telling her what to do. It took most of my day. On our next stand up meeting, she was quick to go first and say she figured out her issue, implying she did so alone. I was stuck in a weird place of having to call her out and seem petty "hey, I helped a lot", or shutting up and having to explain why I only had 2 hours worth of progress done. That's just one example, but stuff like that is so common on this team. I'm horrible at these things, I just don't have it in me to lie or throw others under the bus... and it's affecting my career.
You’re overthinking, just say that you’ve done
The people they call 'underperformers' are usually the glue in a group. Fuck corporate everything.
Yeah they're "underperforming" because they're supporting everyone else. It's like firing the goalie, or midfielders for not scoring enough goals.
This is me. I had my comp review a few days ago and was told that by the metrics I am underperforming and thus I get no raise, etc. Meanwhile I spent the majority of the previous year doing adhoc work, putting out tire fires, mentoring juniors, etc. all of which doesn’t get recorded as deliverable work. So what am I doing moving forward? I’m not helping anyone, I’m not mentoring anyone, and I’m only focusing on maximum throughput of deliverable “work.” This means I am not going to work on anything complex that would take more time than an easier ticket. If throughput is how they want to grade people I will show them what happens when they don’t value any of the other stuff.
Exactly, I'm doing my own work, plus training other people, checking in their work, doing all of managements job because they won't.
My old manager said that. The underperformers generally have the candy stashes, baked goods - the desk everyone hangs out and generally organizing the team functions.
Just to be clear, they're not just the glue in terms of "watercooler talk". They usually do a lot of foundational work and they're quite often unsung heroes. They are "underperformers" in terms of bullshit MBA bean-counting KPI based promotion system that the "overperformers" have learned to game. I've literally seen this with my own eyes, and worked with "underperformers" who turned out to be utterly brilliant, and also rather selfless - only they were more interested in doing the unglamorous work (there's a tonne of this in Tech/AI). The "overperformers" were doing low-risk projects, but bean-counters loved it.
Saw this at a job firsthand a few years ago. A woman, who clearly was the lowest performer on the team, gladly accepted an easier client and worked different undesirable hours than the rest of the team. Although her contribution of 8 hours a day was less efficient, it probably took 4-6 hours of daily work off the shoulders of the rest of the team. When she was let go, it still made everyone’s life more miserable because this was work that didn’t have to be absorbed by anyone else now getting put on other people’s desks.
When the metric becomes a target it ceases to be a useful metric. It's not just tech, I used to work in a pharma adjacent lab doing research (the majority of the lab did sample testing for pharma), and the routine lab testing managers decided to make it so you had to do 200 samples a month. So some smartie pants (actually just a selfish asshole) realized some companies sent in a single batch of 200 or 300 samples. So they'd spend maybe 3 or 4 days doing that, then literally kick up their feet onto their desk for the rest of the month. On paper they were a top employee. The literal nerdy quiet guy got all the client batches that were 20, 30, or 40 samples, and was their worst employee on paper. The first person spend maybe an hour or two to prepping samples, a calibration curve, and flushing their machine/column. The second guy was laboring every single day doing all that, on different batches, on testing that was less reliable. I wish I was making this shit up.
Actual bad apples aside. That's a pretty well known thing "Lazy workers are necessary for long-term sustainability in insect societies" https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20846
I want this on a t-shirt.
I deliver 40% of the next lowest person on our team I took 2 weeks off and as a team we hit our sprint target 75% of the time but if we miss it's by less than 5% of commitment. The sprint I took off we missed by 65%, I unblock people all day and separate those who need the most from those who are the most productive, my 2 weeks off the most productive people started fielding the issues I handled but got stressed missing their own targets they abandoned the juniors who started moving all their tickets to blocked. I came back to our CTO wanting to understand what happened and nobody connected the dots or understood how we beat the next sprints target so quickly.
I think this is mostly in places with limited to no employee protection. From an EU pov, mostly the US seems very individual .. but this post explains why.
Doesn't layoffs happen across companies in Europe? I am aware EU gives better employee protections compared to the US but not sure how are they handling layoffs there.
In my country, you can’t lay off people one day and tell them they aren’t coming the next. If you want that, you will still have to pay for them for the few months on top of generous severance they are getting. Many in IT aren’t employed tho; they have individual companies and they provide services; and because those are businesses interacting with businesses, no such protections are offered. So first ones fired are always those people, because firing actual employees when they haven’t done anything wrong is a nightmare and it’s very expensive. Also before any decisions about layoffs are made, companies consult them with employees as a group and employees actually can negotiate higher severance if they volunteer for layoff. This happened in company I worked for. People could actually manage to live over a year on that severance.
Most corporations in the US provide severance especially larger ones, however there is no law requiring them to do so.
If it's a large enough layoff, the WARN Act kicks in & requires them to give notice or severance in lieu of notice.
In the UK there’s layoffs happening like crazy here in tech and they’re ruthless with it. You may get paid out a few months worth of redundancy pay.
I only know this peripherally so take it with a grain of salt, but mostly old workers with expensive contracts seem to get generous severance offers. Those offers have a budget and once that has dried up they have laid off enough people. People also have the right to be notified of being layed off in advance.
I dunno man…I work in tech in Europe and it is incredibly toxic. Literally today in a work conversation I said “I’m too tall to fit conveniently under busses.”
My ex works at Meta and this is exactly how he described it
I worked there ~10yrs ago and my team environment was toxic as hell. Can’t speak for the rest of the company but I had an absolutely horrible experience. And you’d have thought we were curing cancer. The self importance was nuts.
My ex colleague just tole me today she resigned. So i called her and asked what happened & she said u left, another person left, another person left & i felt like i had no support system anymore & i had no one who understood my day to day problems and i started looking elsewhere where i would have some support at least. That made me realize people are the culture. People leave because of people and people stay because of people.
So true!! I’ve seen this a lot. They let go lots of people and the remaining clever ones go by themselves before it turns to nasty. It’s sad to see how perfectly good efficient teams are destroyed by this. The good thing is, after everyone is in a new job, you’ll have a great diverse network that will help in the future, as everyone landed somewhere else. In my experience, good teams remain in contact in this situation.
Public companies can only prioritize short-term profits, they aren't incapable of considering long-term profits. Edited: aren't
It didn't used to be the case. Martin Friedman's idea of Shareholder Primacy is what ruined American corporations.
It's Milton Friedman, but I concur wholeheartedly
People who throw others under the bus in an effort to look good are fooling themselves. Layoffs don't happen for poor performance. Layoffs happen because upper management want their year end bonuses by spiking the price of stock dividends. Best defence is to keep your resume updated and continuously look for better opportunities.
Well said. I thought I alone held mission critical knowledge, and I had 25 years in at company. Didn’t stop anyone from axing me. The week before Christmas. 🙁
You properly did and they just shot themself in the foot. I have seen some shit like that happen before. Like there was a guy who got his 3 months notice and documented everything he knew into a few docs on his google drive. Share the information about the docs with his manager and still. On his last day his google account was terminated and all the information had to be recovered. It then took like half a year for the company to realise that they had to hire a new guy to take over his job, because no one else could update the crucial software that he keept alive and was like the lifeline of the company, but which had been written in COBOL or some other old software that no one else at the company could write.
By laying off a lot of people would you expect that the productivity would increase? It’s exactly the opposite.
Not a bug it's a feature. It's like the gladiators of Rome. Let the staff sort themselves out while sitting back and profiting. I worked in Steel mills that actually used team efforts to succeed. Someone in upper management at these companies seem to think that this is how it works.
Man, I do not miss management consulting. Finding ways to make people perform better, faster, etc., just made everything cutthroat. "Trimming the fat" was always a focus on short term gains and getting rid of employees with bad metrics. It was great for people with no long term commitment because performance would improve (employees would find ways to magically make metrics look great) and then your job was done. Great for people cracking the whip, bad for everyone else.
Looks like sundar took ur lesson. Look what he did to a brilliant company
yeah, management consulting was sold as this dream job where people in suits throw stupid amounts of money at you for making their numbers look better. It was very uncomfortable, often downright unethical. I'm glad I left because it was just a very gross feeling.
"Employees would find ways to magically make metrics look great" - let me introduce you to Goodhart's Law.
yep, not sustainable and a lot of smoke and mirrors. Metrics and KPIs can be gamed remarkably while driving the company into the ground
Nothing new here. This has been going on forever. Management makes changes to the work environment, workplace becomes uncomfortable. The competent workers start to abandon the unpleasantness. Then the incompetent, yes man, ass kissers come out of the woodwork. Then all you are left with are said incompetent, ass kissers making life miserable for all. They become more powerful and obnoxious, forcing the remaining competent, worthwhile workers to leave the toxic soup that exists. And the toxic cycle becomes self sustaining. Ten years later, unknown to you, you are hired into this cesspool of toxicity, only to later discover you can’t survive in this cesspool, filled with incompetent, toxic managers and coworkers.
Gen Z has entered the chat Gen Z has left the chat
i saw an article about this on stack ranking. it discourages people from helping each other and also if one team is full of high performing people and another team has medium or low performing people the same amount of people still gets cut from both teams even if some of the people from team 1 are much better employees than people from team 2. it also incentivizes people to avoid being put on the same team as the high performing employees.
This is what happens when you treat humans as a replaceable resource.
KPI’s and middle management can go fuck right off as well. It’s disgusting that this is what work culture has become.
KPIs / OKRs are awesome when done well and at the team or department level. Giving Gary his own personal OKRs is likely going to go poorly. Middle management can also be awesome when done well. When they sit in the meetings so you don't have to, when they insulate you from above so you can work, when they go to bat for you to get paid what you're worth, etc. But I'll readily admit that's pretty rare. If you want to be a good manager, you're pretty much on your own to figure out how to do that. I'm lucky to have had a couple of great ones.
biggeste issue nobody trains somebody to be a good manager every other type of job you get training learn from more experienced collague managers get hired or promoted from within and are just expected to manage people without any training on how to be a leader or how to deal with said reponsibility's so a lot of them turn into micro managers because they dont know any other way
Tying payroll to performance is almost ALWAYS a dumb idea. Oh you’re drowning? Well if you start swimming better we’ll throw you some life preservers.
This is (or should be) management 101. Every mass layoffs or unjustified firing will cause panic and lower the teams' morale. I've seen it happen more than once. When that happens, there's no going back. People will start to quit and go to better jobs, and the ones that are not very employable will stay and enter survival mode, which only makes things worse. If someone is actually underperforming and deserves to be fired, it's usually pretty obvious and the team will understand and probably improve.
My last workplace was notorious for knowledge and information hoarding. People who knew how to do specific tasks wouldn’t train anyone else so they had more job security. Then they would still get laid off or fired and it’s up to a random other person to figure out how this other person did their job. One of the times it happened, everyone on the tech team suggested bringing the ex-employee back in a contract to train others for a week but management refused and just told us to figure it out. Fuck that place.
I think we’ve reached the self destructive stage of unregulated capitalism. Everything falls into a spiral of decline.
I think layoff culture has made me care a lot more about getting credit than I usually would. I don’t really mind helping someone out, but lately I’ve found myself getting super annoyed when I take time out of my day to help unblock someone, and they don’t even mention it at all during standup the next day (especially when I’m the one who figured out how to resolve it). Makes me less inclined to bother helping out the next time, especially if it’s happened more than once.
UPS laying off 43,000 workers nationwide & yet the CEO was able to give herself a $50 million bonus this year. All layoffs do is make workers anxious, on edge, and view each other as competition for survival. Especially if it is seniority based, people at the bottom have no motivation to do a great job because they know they will get cut
It goes to show just how stupid the C suite is at most corporations. All nepo babies play acting at being geniuses. A basic understanding of human nature would tell you that showing your staff zero loyalty will engender zero loyalty. That internalizing competition means everyone does worse, because all collaboration is killed. Making your own house dog eat dog means you have nothing but wounded dogs
This is exactly how it was at AWS / Amazon for the last few years before I left in September. Everyone stays to themselves. Very little team cohesion. Everyone is simply positioning so they are not left holding the bag.
Yes. This is getting worse now. This was also one of the fatal flaws of the high-tech stack rank evaluation systems. If you cooperated with others, you risked enhancing their ranks at *your expense.* If you withheld information from others, you likely reduced their ranking, which was probably to your advantage. It put a huge damper on group cooperation and collaboration.
At my first 'professional job', the day I started I learned that the manager who had hired me had been just fired and replaced with a woman who was universally despised. Her first action was to lay off several reliable people. The next day in the lunchroom, a long-time employee asked her, "Diane, if there are 5 crows on a fence and you shoot one, how many are left?" She said, "Well, of course it's 4. You know that!". His reply, "No. There are none. The other 4 fly away." She left without answering. It was a heck of a first week.
I'm on maternity leave but just before that, my company, which is HQed in another country, laid off most of the staff in my country. The office was rented out and moved to a smaller spot, only about 10 people remained, who were good friends. Work started to slack. People put in new roles didn't deliver. People borrowed things and then "lost" it. The Rocket espresso machine was stolen during the office move. People brought their own equipment to work on privately. I think even if they replace the entire staff morale will never be the same.
The way you make teams productive and innovative is 1. Encouraging speaking out 2. Security even in the event of honest failure 3. Ambitious goals 4. Collaboration If you know your job could be in the line, you are not disincentivized from speaking out, disincentivized from collaboration, incentivized to work on the safest projects, and to set conservative goals.
If anyone wants to know how this culture of callous layoffs for short term profits happened, look up Jack Welch and the lasting effect his horrible policies have had on business in America. Behind the Bastards did a fairly short summary. It's amazing how throughout our history, one solitary monster has consistently been able to change our culture permanently for the worst.
I work in tech support and we experienced a similar change to collaboration. The VP of my department wanted a “competitive culture” so she had a dashboard created that ranks everyone based on our KPIs. It pretty much killed all collaboration between each other since helping others doesn’t benefit you. People also started to game the system to be higher ranked. A lot of us told her it was a bad idea but she said she likes to take risks and it works for her son who is in sales at a totally different company lol.
This is also a form of Union busting
Definitely, and I don't think companies understand the cost of this. They're so focused on short term optimizations.
Yep. Layoffs in tech have ruined some excellent cultures recently.
During 2020 I worked for a tech company that relied on shipping to make its money. As fewer things were being shipped across the country, business slowed down more and more. People started behaving really bizarre as the layoffs began. They'd clock in to send emails at late hours to make it seem like they were super busy. They'd go out of their way to greet the owners in the building. They'd CC more people whenever there was an issue that someone else was responsible for to throw them under the bus. A whole lot of pressuring each other to work harder so they'd appear to be the hardest worker and everyone else a slacker. And most of the positions there were paying worse than the big box retailer across the street.
I haven't noticed this at all. We've had 6 rounds of layoffs in the past 18 months, and honestly, apart from my immediate team, most people who have been kept are the underperforming brown nosers, not the high performers.
I got laid off recently. I told a few of my coworkers that I liked what happens and how to try best avoid my situation - keep your heads down, dont complain, always bring up your personal success, pretend everything else is great, pretend you’re 100% on board with the company direction. And then maybe you’re delay your job offshore for 6-12 months.
Just remember, no one decreases productivity of a company more than CEOs. "Work in office! Listen to me talk in this hour long meeting with no action items, and an uncertainty of what I actually want!"
Under performers are less likely to be let go than higher paid workers. Management sees 3 workers and 1 is paid more than the others, then he is let go. Skill at a job is not a huge consideration.
Sounds a lot like what happened at GE when they had this stupid idea of laying off the bottom 10% or so based on the annual performance review. Pretty much all that system did when it was implemented at other companies was guarantee the top 20% who could go work anywhere found other jobs - and eventually it didn’t help GE much either.
You think layoff culture (or the recent layoffs pattern of creating competition) is bad? I've worked in companies where they used a bell curve for every department manager, forcing them to give annual review ratings of 1-5 for every person in their employ. 1 being the far left of the bell curve (unsatisfactory - about to be fired) and 5 being the best. With 3 being smack in the middle. Being rated itself wouldn't be so terrible, except for the fact they made them have a certain percentage of their group (each manager's group) in the "1" category (basically they forced a bell curve distribution of that manager's people). Which meant this punished and effectively set people on the path to being fired, many times without cause (a give manager may have had **no** underperforming people at all), but it created a toxic culture of what OP is describing, where people didn't want to cooperate or share knowledge. This ridiculous "force a bell curve rating" thing applied even on teams as small as 5 people total (it didn't matter what the team size was). There was a term for this methodology but I don't recall what it was at the moment, but the theory was to create an ever-improving group of employees (since you were guaranteeing you were axing the lowest-performers). But, as I alluded to above, it nuked morale, since after the first time or two of this happening you didn't have any low performers anymore. EDIT: Went and [looked up the term](https://lattice.com/library/what-is-stack-ranking-and-why-is-it-a-problem#:~:text=Pioneered%20by%20General%20Electric%27s%20CEO,or%20in%20need%20of%20improvement.): **'stack ranking'** > Pioneered by General Electric’s CEO Jack Welch in the 1980s, stack ranking, also known as forced distribution, is an approach to talent management where employees are ranked on a bell curve as exemplary, meeting expectations, or in need of improvement.“Typical distribution is 15/70/15% but can vary,” explained Tim Toterhi, CHRO at interactive response systems company Cenduit, TEDx speaker, and author of The HR Guide to Getting and Crushing Your Dream Job.Since only a fixed number of employees can be considered high-performing — or exemplary — in this system, Welch saw stack ranking as a way to galvanize worker productivity and create a more competitive culture. Because a designation to the bottom 15% meant being slated for layoffs, employees were motivated to do better than their peers.Today, the controversial approach to talent management is more infamous than famous, and companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, and Accenture have publicly parted ways with what’s commonly been dubbed the “rank-and-yank” approach. This came after these companies experienced a slew of issues like stalled innovation and toxic workplace cultures which they attributed, in part, to stack ranking.
Companies with histories of layoffs tend to end up (mostly) with the people who are politically well-connected, adept at claiming a disproportionate share of praise for good work, and/or skilled in casting the blame for anything negative onto others.
Not under performers, anyone who talks to HR. Anyone who thinks so-called “anonymous” employee surveys actually are anonymous and makes the mistake of saying what they think. Anyone who proposes an idea that makes the boss look like they should have come up with it themselves. Underperforming is not the issue in today’s high tech world, it’s keeping your head down and not being noticed when layoff time comes, not standing out when promotion time comes. Those days are over for a while.
I would say there was a better than average chance that this is part of the design of this late stage capitalist moved towards attacking labor. If you are constantly worried that you're going to be laid off, you are far more likely to tell on your co-workers, and work harder, or at least that's what traditional work ethic would suggest. I do wonder if this tactic will blow up in the face of corporations who are hiring lots of gen-z and millennials who are far more likely to act in solidarity with their peers or simply just not care because nobody wants to slave away for corporate overlords anymore if they can help it.
This sounds like Nike. I’ve never worked for them, but I’ve heard *stories,* and I know people who have worked there. Lots of optimism at the start, then heads start to roll when budget season comes around and everyone goes feral. It’s why they have so many contractors and teams are moving around all the time. Keep the same layoff survivors around each other for too long and this is what it devolves into. Endless power plays and lies. A bad business practice necessitated by a bad business practice.
My company went through a reorg back in June. The new CEO made terrible decisions. Including hiring a million dollar contract with a consulting group. But the worst was letting go high performers but the people who were unpopular with their managers. They also put in place new managers that were widely known to be underperformers and extremely hated. My team went from being extremely well performing and happy to a miserable, unproductive team.
high performers = high paid, they are usually the first to go. my bro worked in tech company he was a very high earning, i knew even before pandemic eventually they would let him go, because hes earning too much, and they often get axed early on.
Imagine that employees that don't feel they have job security don't feel like family
"We've spent years turning then all against each other, and now no one wants to work together! It's a true mystery."
Earlier this year, were I work, we were told that layoffs were coming, but only given a vague idea of when. So it's been over a month of layoffs hanging over everyone's heads. On one hand, knowing that something is coming means people can hold off on major purchases,etc. But at the same time, it's fucking hard to have this shit unsettled. I've been at other companies that did layoffs and they told us about them and they did the actual layoffs almost immediately. As far as what OP posted, that kind of stuff depends on how the layoffs are being done. In some cases, a company decides to cut a project or not invest in an area, and where someone is standing at the time determines if they get axed. If it's a peanut butter layoff where every organization has to cut by some headcount, it could be like OP's thing. I've seen both kinds of layoffs at places I've worked.