> It's a unique trait of tech companies to encourage cold but polite relations with your coworkers.

I don't know how you can assert this, among any other "stuck in a cubicle" office environment. Opportunities to be social are brief anyway. I'm on the side of 'give people time off enough to develop relationships outside of work'. 4 day work weeks would go a long way to helping people get the socializing we need.

Have you heard of the idea workplace democracy [1], and would this be something you'd start advocating for?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy

In demanding industries, people spend 2/3rds of their waking hours around their coworkers.

If you sleep 8 hours/night, this means you're spending 75 hours/week with your co-workers. That seems... a bit excessive?

I agree, but my mind only changed when I got to the company with good working conditions.

Until you have no decent work life balance, benefits and compensation, speaking of friendship and family looks like an sarcastic insult.

But to be true, most of my current friends are through work. Some are from hobbies or university, but nobody is from school.

There's a difference between professional warmth and "we're a family". The latter usually comes top-down, from management and is fundamentally disingenuous. It's often a self-serving way of trying to get you to treat the company as your family, while company leadership still won't hesitate to lay you off in a mass zoom meeting. It's fine to be friends with co-workers or managers, but don't let companies obscure the fundamental nature of the relationship.

Agreed wholeheartedly. I'm not certain it's the company encouraging it, though. IMHO it's far more the economic realities we find ourselves in, where holding onto the same job for an extended period of time is basically, according to all casual career advice, fucking yourself over in terms of compensation.

My generation has been encouraged by this reality since we entered the workforce to change jobs every few years, because companies are so stingy with raises. If you're planning to do that, you naturally keep distance with your coworkers; they're probably leaving before you are, and even if not, you are planning to.

Companies see no value in their existing workforce and it's honestly quite self-defeating and stupid. "Losing" any worker be it to their choice, or layoffs, or whatever it might be is a genuine LOSS to your team. It's however many months or years of experience not just with code, but with your code-base, your business, and your products going out the door. The fact that so many companies lose so many good people because they simply refuse to let an employee have a bit more money is honestly mind-bending; and once they're gone, they'll happily list their job online, often with a salary range even higher than the employee they just fired wanted.

Absolute corporate idiocy.

> It's cruel to encourage coldness in such an environment.

You're straw-manning. The person you're replying to never once mentioned being cold, let alone encouraged it.

They simply expressed a preference for companies that don't try to pretend that their mission and purpose is something other than what it is.

I've worked in tech exclusively my entire 25+ year career. And I've worked for way more companies that try to put on a front of "we're a family" than the opposite.

As someone who has worked as an employee and owned businesses (often simultaneously), I'm on board with the parent. I don't want coldness in the workplace. But I also don't want employees or co-workers who don't respect that we're here to build something that we're offering for sale on the marketplace either, least of all in a highly competitive landscape where we're under constant threat of going out of business if we don't get productivity and efficiency right.

I want my businesses to be enjoyable places to work. But at the end of the day, if I'm paying money for someone who isn't pulling their weight then I am extremely resentful of anyone who tries to get in the way of me correcting the fact that they are effectively ripping me off and, by doing so, hurting every single one of their co-workers by hurting their employer.

Succeeding in business is hard. And while there are a lot of shady businesses out there, and a lot of big corps do things we take issue with, 99.9% of businesses are making the world a better place for you to live by producing everything from the concrete that paves your sidewalks, to the shippers that get food from farm to your table. The anti-business, anti-capitalism attitudes that are so prevalent in the west are truly disturbing.

By all means be pro-worker. But there really ought not be a conflict between business and employee since, at the end of the day, it is a mutually beneficial relationship. Business can't succeed without its employees, employees don't earn a cent if the business doesn't earn a profit. And lets not forget that what a business can afford is irrelevant. The business doesn't exist to employee people. It exists to produce the goods or services that it set out to in order to turn a profit. And there is nothing wrong with that. An employee that hates the profit motive is one I don't want working for me. You're hopefully profiting by being employed. Otherwise I don't know what you're doing with your life. So stop the hypocrisy and double standards. We're not a family, and we don't need to be cold to each other, but we're in this shit show together so let's act like reasonable, rational actors and do our fucking jobs so we can all take home money and feed our families and savings.

>These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.

Isn't that most layoffs? Think of the layoffs post GFC. Did the subprime mortgage crisis suddenly make everyone incompetent, or are companies simply trying to trim budgets and need to hit some number? If it's actually due to poor performance, it would be through a PIP or similar.

> These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.

There’s no reason to think that you need to evaluate individuals to have a reason to let them go. I might be the best iOS developer in the world but if I’m working for a company that doesn’t need a custom iOS app, they should lay me off.

If I no longer want to pay for your services, I should be able to stop for any reason, or no reason at all.

> However the best work I ever did was done when I didn't have a pressure of being fired for offending the wrong person, and that I had the psychological safety to think longer term- since a short term "time-waste" often converted to better long term outcomes for everybody.

I felt the same way until I worked at a company where almost nobody ever got fired or laid off. Anyone who was hired was basically guaranteed their job until the end of time because the leadership didn't like letting anyone go.

It only took a couple years until every time you needed to do something you'd run into some employee somewhere who wasn't doing their job. Even many people who seemed capable and appropriately skilled started slacking off when they realized there were never any consequences at all.

It was like a broken windows theory for the workplace. As people looked around and saw that others were doing almost no work, it started to spread. The people who liked actually shipping things started leaving, turning it into a snowball effect.

So there's a balance. Always working under threat of layoff and seeing good coworkers let go when you're already overburdened isn't good. Working in a company where there is no pressure at all to perform isn't good either.

Guess it's their loss then. If companies are more productive by being more relaxed then we should see more of those companies survive and thrive.

In my experience, companies that are focused on being a well-run company rather than a politically/personality/emotionally driven shitshow also are the ones that have long-term perspective and avoid making kneejerk reactions to almost everything.

Been there - done that. Worked at a company with no employee pressure, and it was absolutely infuriating that I could work my tail end off, while another employee was provably committing borderline wage fraud, but it always got written off as "personal issues" rather than take the risk of intervening... ever.

To the point I even had a boss say that part of this happens because nobody is there to spank adults when they need it (seriously), rather than intervene too strongly and have to find a replacement or hurt feelings or something. Or another contract worker, I got an apology from said boss... but he insisted she's better now than she used to be, the latest incident is mild compared to incidents before I arrived. As though that fixes it.

Much happier now at a company which cuts dead weight; and accepts we can't afford it.

Productivity and performance are not the same thing. You can be a top performer on a project that flops and you're a net negative. Ideally you'd get transferred to a more productive role but there are a lot of variables involved.

To be fair, a handful of large companies have explicitly said[1][2] that their layoffs were largely about individual performance. All my experience as a manager in a large tech company says that that's almost certainly not the whole story, and unfair to many of the folks getting let go, but official word from the companies say otherwise.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/14/meta-targeting-lowest-perfor...

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/08/microsoft-confirms-performan...

Are you sure?

So getting rid of 20% of the workforce and selecting “the bottom 20%” is not a layoff?

> Companies rarely offer than consideration for employees

In almost all layoff situations, employees get severance even in the US no?

At least for the big tech layoffs that seemed to be the case.

By Legal definition. On the other hand, I have never seen a layoff that wasnt about individual employee performance

Layoffs are a signal that a company feels they don't see a way to get a high enough ROI on their productive capacity. That could be performance related, or it could be e.g. that the company does not see good R&D avenues to pursue, so they scale down their R&D org. Or market demand dries up so they scale down their sales org. Or interest rates change, changing the definition of "high enough ROI". In theory people working in computer fields are always building automation so it should be easy to scale down and coast in maintenance mode if the business wants to do that. That applies less to video games of course, but even there the top selling games each year consistently feature Call of Duty <current year>, Madden <current year>, and FIFA <current year>.

If we assume the company runs N projects with positive Net Present Value (NPV) at the start of the project and after re-evaluation some of the project NPV turned to be negative, closing the project and laying off the staff will actually make company worth more.

If the employees are productive, then why would laying them off increase the stock price?

I don't see how you can outlaw it without being authoritarian. If they buy it they can do whatever they want. They can liquidate the entire company.

Once you buy the company you are free to borrow money because it's your company. Why wouldn't you be allowed to do that?

> Alternatively, you can retrain the workers

Back in my PM days, I tried this with a couple old timer SWEs at my company. All except 2 blew it off and when pushed back they tried to play politics via the "old boys club" of buddies in Engineering Leadership (in PM vs Director or VP Eng, the Director or VP Eng always wins).

Retraining only works if the people who need to be retrained want to take the effort to retrain.

In an industry like tech where self-learning is so normalized and to a certain extent expected, the kind of person who needs to be forced to retrain just isn't the kind of person who actually wants to retrain.

Also, ime, age does not correlate to this. Being lazy is a personality defect orthogonal to being a gray beard or someone in your 20s.

> these costs are all too often hidden deep in the balance sheets, which makes just dumping off entire departments while hiring up other departments appear much more financially attractive than it is in reality, all costs considered.

Not really.

The process of hiring a new employee in aggregate costs at most around $10k on top of salary.

The cost of keeping a low effort employee is the salary along with the additional 30-40% paid in benefits, insurance, and taxes of retaining that employee.

As such, it's basically a wash at the individual level.

> executives get paid sometimes a hundred million dollars a year because of the "responsibility" they hold

Most don't though.

The person who ends up deciding to increase hiring is almost always an Engineering Manager or Director (depending on size of company).

VP and above only have visibility on top-line numbers, but the actual business case to hire is made by EMs or Directors.

There is zero top down accountability from supposed leaders these days. They will happily throw employees under the bus to cover for their own mistakes.

We dont build housing anymore so costs go up. That has little connection to our ability to afford living well

I completely agree with the goal, but I don't think that making it difficult to fire employees is a good way to achieve it. That's essentially funding welfare with a randomized and hidden tax on employers. It would be better if firing for performance was reasonably easy, but new jobs are plentiful and welfare programs allow a reasonable life between jobs. (And, of course, for those who can't work.)

> We have enough technological advancement in America that given strict immigration controls we can ensure the median American is able to raise a family of at least 2 kids while holding an entry level job (of which their should be plenty).

What evidence is there to support this? Kids are expensive, and entry level jobs do not produce enough value to generate an income that can support several people.

> Anything else is morally wrong

Why?

Society "tolerates" them because they have plenty of people willing to voluntarily give them money which totals billions of dollars for the bigger companies.

Jobs are a byproduct, not a hard requirement for a company to function, because the point of a company is to offer a service to customers, not to act as a jobs program for a town, state, country, or region.

Decoupling healthcare from employment would also be an improvement. My mom would have retired several years earlier if it weren't for my parents relying on the county government for healthcare. We don't have UBI, and unemployment is very limited. Getting laid off on a whim with no warning can literally be a death sentence.

I know I post Star Trek analogies a lot, but if Chief O'brien got laid off from Deep Space Nine because of cost cutting, he would be fine. (actually, he'd probably be much better off). We don't live in this world. We live in a world where losing your job can kill you.

Those who overhired should have been fired, I agree. It's incredible (or not) that the CEOs weren't eliminated.

Can't speak for every company, but most companies I've worked for with detailed hiring practices would evaluate the long-term outcomes of people that hiring managers chose.

If someone hired a lot of people who had to be laid off later, they would get more supervision and review of future hires.

The people who hired them may be long gone by now.

There's still too much fat, or rather people who just add net negative value. My org would benefit from firing easily 50%.

I'm not the poster you were responding to, but I have some experience in this. I am an engineering manager at medium size US company. If I want to fire a poor performer it requires a couple months of detailed documentation on their poor performance, and that's just so I can get them on a PIP (performance improvement plan). That's another 30-90 days. The PIP takes time to prepare and performance during the PIP also has to be rigorously documented.

This has been my experience at two different companies in multiple cases with egregious underperformance. I suppose if an employee assaulted/harassed someone or was doing something else outright illegal like theft or embezzlement, they would be shown the door immediately. But if someone is half-assing their work and dragging the team down, everyone has to put up with it for months as they get second chances, micromanagement, and other special attention before they can actually be let go.

I think it's due to the litigiousness of the US culture. Yes, US companies can fire people at will, but they can also file lawsuits at will, which are costly (time+money) no matter the outcome.

I worked for an agency company (mostly T&M contracts) that went through a round of layoffs almost entirely because they wanted to be "like a family" and the managers didn't let poor performers go. I think they ended up cutting something like 10% of their workforce, including underperformers and all new hires, in an effort to get cash flow moving in the right direction again.

It was incredibly rough- a lot of people who weren't being told they needed to shape up or ship out were instead simply told they're being shipped out. The only upside is managers got better about supporting employees later on who weren't performing, including putting people on PIPs rather than letting them coast.

It depends on the size of the company as to what needs to be documented to let someone go. SMBs can let people go much easier, and the smaller, the easier.

But what you cannot do in any circumstance is let people go "for any reason". There are laws against that at any size, and you are looking for a lawsuit if you give a reason.

It's best to just tell them their position has been eliminated due to restructuring (has to be provable if you're a big company), and give them no reason beyond that. If you don't give a reason, they have nothing to bring a lawsuit for.

In summary, reasons are not always required, but are always a liability.

There are internal reasons as well. Letting go of people can be highly disruptive and create uncertainty in your team. It’s a very unpleasant job that can also go wrong, especially if you have to fire loads.

Then there’s the perverse incentive that bigger teams usually equals a promotion. So if you’re the honest manager who manages a tight team and fires people, you won’t get promoted as often.

Top management knows this, of course. To sidestep these misaligned incentives a company-wide one-time layoff is really effective.

And the company can be sued at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. That does not mean the plaintiff will win, but against deep enough pockets, it can be worth a try. PIPs take time, and HR isn’t about to let you skip them, and bad employees know they’ve got six months to spend their workday looking for a new job while not doing their current job. I’ve worked at those companies, and sometimes managed at same, and when OP says they have stories, I believe them.

Post-covid layoffs happened before ChatGPT, so it's certainly not because of AI.

End of 0 interest rates is the more likely reason.

> jobs will not evaporate, but they will absolutely start cross-training engineers in the Middle East and building up new talent there

If this is what the union fears, this is the moment to negotiate safeguards.

Considering he paid to be a shareholder, and the company is paying the employees to be there, that makes sense.

The goal of most companies is to maximize returns to shareholders, not society or employees. If it wasn't that I wouldn't have invested.

The company would have to be severely undervalued (or perhaps perceived to be severely mismanaged) for this to be the case, which seems strange to me. Then again, the typical PE strategies (loading the company with debt and cutting investments in future products & services) also seem like very bad business strategies. I really don't understand why anyone would loan money for a buyout, or buy a (share of the) company which had recently been through it.

Not at all, this is exactly what the unions are saying. EA is firing US employees despite being profitable. When they need to rehire again they’ll do it in countries where the wages are lower.

See also: Microsoft

There are a few employers who have effectively guaranteed revenue in perpetuity through what's known as "forever games".

EA's sports division prints money. Valve prints money. Call of Duty prints money. Valorant/League print money. Fortnite prints money. Roblox prints money. Their products have been around for 10-20+ years and will seemingly never die.

But that's not representative of the industry as a whole, and is not representative for the average game dev. See https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025 and others.

The other bit to notice about EA in particular is that its share price has been flat for the last 7 years, they've continuously failed to figure out how to change that, which is a problem. Selling and layoffs are a lever to get out of that hole, although it remains to be seen how great of a move it turns out to be.

I wasn't specifically speaking of EA but I guess many people don't necessarily know it for the bad stuff they pull off but rather for Fifa and such? Even though I would never touch them with a 2m stick, I still fondly remember them for "EA sports, it's in the game" era.

>which is not well received by the customers (but makes them money),

stated preference vs revealed preference, or alternately, the people commenting about games on HN or reddit aren't reflective of the average EA customer.

Right, the 15 year old paying for Madden 32 doesn't realize that they could play Madden 08 released on the gamecube and have a nearly identical experience, including literally the same bugs and broken behavior as that game from 20 years ago.

Do people get that? Modern madden has worse oddities. Madden 08 wouldn't allow you to put more than 255 points on the scoreboard. Modern madden will completely break before you can even reach that point.

The animation/behavior systems have the exact same flaw where if you run a play for more than about 20 seconds characters just... shut off. They stop trying to run after the ball carrier even!

The knobs you can tweak on the simulation engine are the same on N64, Xbox 360, Xbox 1 X series X X'er hyper X, the damn Nintendo DS!

No wonder companies are so hostile to emulation. They would rather just resell the same game, sometimes with nicer textures.

Like I said, that's the engineering context of the word.

In business managerial side of operations, "stakeholder" is definitely a weasel word.

The word "stakeholder" in "stakeholder capitalism" as used by the World Economic Forum literally means "every single person on Earth". Unless you think Klaus Schwab also considers the possibility of life in the Andromeda Galaxy, it doesn't get anymore nebulous than that. The word "nebulous" describes something cloudy and ginormous- like a nebula.

I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but the rarity of the exception justifies the rule.

It's almost always a weasel word because if you meant customer you would just say customer. Saying "stakeholder" permits a level of ambiguity about whose interests are being represented.

> It also doesnt make senes that someone who creates all the value wouldnt just leave and capture all the value themselves. It's not like they're being forced to work for the parasite.

If they have a mortgage, kids in college, or just need routine health insurance coverage... they kind of are being forced to work?

Capturing the value yourself requires assuming a lot of risk, and most individuals can't access the kind of capital investment that a corporation can attract.