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    A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

    (mertbulan.com)
    1041 points mertbio | 12 comments | 27 Jan 25 08:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.818s | source | bottom
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    keiferski ◴[27 Jan 25 10:16 UTC] No.42839412[source]▶
    The thing that bothers me most about layoffs due to “financial difficulties” is when you observe management wasting absurd amounts of money on something in one year, then announcing the following year that they have to make cuts to baseline, “low level” employees that don’t cost much at all.

    This kind of managerial behavior seriously kills employee motivation, because it both communicates that 1) no one has job security and 2) that management is apparently incapable of managing money responsibly.

    “Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.

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    1. wisty ◴[27 Jan 25 10:29 UTC] No.42839482[source]▶
    Managers have a budget. They can't save it, and may spend big on consultants to create a buffer for their team when cuts hit. This is especially true in government, and big companies are similar.

    There is only one person who really can stop cycles hitting budgets and that is the CEO. IIRC Warren Buffett lamented the fact that the CEO is more of an investor than a manager and that spending budgets as a senior manager gives them almost no experience in setting those budgets.

    replies(4): >>42839756 #>>42840435 #>>42841081 #>>42841735 #
    2. iovrthoughtthis ◴[27 Jan 25 11:12 UTC] No.42839756[source]▶
    budget based economics may be the worst thing to happen to large organisations
    replies(2): >>42841016 #>>42841018 #
    3. seb1204 ◴[27 Jan 25 12:29 UTC] No.42840435[source]▶
    Governments have lost many skills to do fuck all. The consultant justification is just hiding the fact that years if not investing in skilled people have resulted in a lot of clueless administrators that can't do much.
    replies(1): >>42841021 #
    4. IggleSniggle ◴[27 Jan 25 13:38 UTC] No.42841016[source]▶
    Suddenly I'm connecting the relationship between "budget based economics" and "agile" as commonly implemented. It's trying to fit creativity into a budget. In the places that do it well, it's like "We're supposed to make some really great art, here's the crayons we can afford, sorry if it's not exactly right but it's what we could manage, do whatever you can, we will take it!" In places that do it poorly, it's like "we need you to make the Uber of the Mona Lisa, I'm gonna need you to find a way to make that work, but we can totally be flexible on this, which crayons do you need."

    The key differences being that in one case there's well defined constraints on resources but open ended results, and in the other the resource constraints are poorly defined but the end result is much more fixed.

    replies(1): >>42841945 #
    5. bmitc ◴[27 Jan 25 13:38 UTC] No.42841018[source]▶
    I have never even understood the approach. The sub-budgets within an organization seem so arbitrary and become games in and of themselves, often leading to frivolous purchases just to use up the budget and not get your budget slashed.

    Does anyone know when this came into favor? What was used before? What are the alternatives?

    replies(1): >>42841529 #
    6. scarface_74 ◴[27 Jan 25 13:38 UTC] No.42841021[source]▶
    The government would never pay their internal employees the amount that consulting companies pay theirs. It would never be approved.
    7. mytailorisrich ◴[27 Jan 25 13:45 UTC] No.42841081[source]▶
    Conversely, budgets are based on estimates and forecast of resources needed. It's not like a manager gets a random number out of the blue and then needs to find ways to spend it. Budgets in engineering, especially software dev., are mostly based on number of people (aka 'resources') needed in the team, so a manager will want to fill their headcount otherwise it means they don't actually need this number of people.
    replies(1): >>42842243 #
    8. wisty ◴[27 Jan 25 14:36 UTC] No.42841529{3}[source]▶
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

    Managers play games because they are looking out for their own team, not the company's bottom line. Budgets constrain this. Overspending is bad, but so is underspending, because they are tying up resources - companies will have a desired internal rate of return (maybe something like 10%) - if they can make 10% on their investments then a manger tying up capital is costing a lot.

    Maybe https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/10/the-identity-manag... is Joel Spolsky's suggestion - get the team behind the goal, keep morale high, and share information. Sharing information at least cuts down on some of the issues. Keeping morale high isn't always possible - you need someone to drive it, a great founder / CEO can do it to some extent (see Steve Jobs) but it has a limit at scale.

    Splitting orgs into more or less independent businesses gets done sometimes.

    Bezos just turns everything into a clockwork machine, I think.

    Ray Dalio has spent half his life and an unbelievable amount of money trying to solve this problem, some would say with very mixed results (see the book "The Fund" - my reading is he basically tried to create a system where everyone is indoctrinated and rated against his principals, but it just doesn't work as well as he hoped).

    There's better and worse ways to try to get around the Principal Agent Problem, but it's a very hard problem.

    9. aimanbenbaha ◴[27 Jan 25 14:55 UTC] No.42841735[source]▶
    This is what Palmer Luckey criticizes in how the DoD do procurement. The way contracts are signed makes it that contractors are only incentivized to provide solutions that maximize the budgets set by higher management in government focusing on filling out those reimbursements rather than delivering effective warfighters that the military needs.

    It seems that all this layoff discussions should shed light to the blight of managerialism that permeated modern business culture. It’s this system that encourages managers to obfuscate accountability for their high-stakes decisions, and while the low-level employees shy away from suggesting solutions that solve problems or identify bottlenecks because at the end of the day they're just part of the budget in an excel sheet table. It feels like a betrayal to the promises of capitalism.

    10. codr7 ◴[27 Jan 25 15:15 UTC] No.42841945{3}[source]▶
    Worse is trying to fit creativity into a tight schedule.

    Everything gets corrupted, today's agile is way worse than what came before in practice.

    11. cmbothwell ◴[27 Jan 25 15:40 UTC] No.42842243[source]▶
    Feel free to contradict me with personal experience, but I actually posit that (like many interesting phenomena in life), the truth is exactly the opposite. The number of people in a team expands to fill the budget allocated. That budget flows from a legible & convincing narrative told to the check-writers (internal or external) that may or may not overlap with reality.
    replies(1): >>42842421 #
    12. mytailorisrich ◴[27 Jan 25 15:55 UTC] No.42842421{3}[source]▶
    Managers have an interest in expanding their "fiefdom" and thus push to get more and more people (either by grabbing actual work or by generating work). This is indeed how you create a "legible & convincing narrative" to increase your budget (end goal being more people, more power).

    In some startup envrionments the execs may want to show growth by hiring as much as possible but that's not your typical company.