This is an excellent article, but I do take umbrage with the line "layoffs are a failure of leadership."
There are certainly many cases of over-hiring that result in the need for layoffs, but there are also moments such as 2000, 2008, 2018, COVID, and our current situation where even a tightly-run business can find itself with too high a cost structure to maintain the staffing level they have.
As a leader of a company, you often face very hard planning decisions, as under-hiring in a period of growth can lead to abuse of staff and poor working conditions just as over-hiring can lead to layoffs.
The ability to anticipate macroeconomic events and their effect on your business is something you can get better at, but not something anyone can do reliably.
Thanks Matt, there is always nuance to be found in every categorical statement, and you've found it in mine.
The truth is that most systems are not set up to support workers at all cost, because they're set up to ensure the survival of companies, the logic being that this caters to the needs of the many, instead of the few. This works okay in countries with strong welfare systems, where said workers can rely on unemployment benefits, and less well in places where people can easily lose livelihoods from one day to the next.
I don't mean to get into a political discussion here, but I think I was looking at it from the backdrop of my country of residence (Germany), where the welfare state is strong(er), and laying people off even during COVID was a choice. (The state subsidized businesses by offering to cover employee wages while reducing their hours.)
Regardless of context and reality, leaders to have to fire people. Perhaps if we were more inclined to view layoffs as a failure of leadership, we'd also first exhaust every other option. Because I think that what we've seen in tech recently is a lot of very trigger happy leaders getting away with it scot-free.
This is an excellent article, but I do take umbrage with the line "layoffs are a failure of leadership."
There are certainly many cases of over-hiring that result in the need for layoffs, but there are also moments such as 2000, 2008, 2018, COVID, and our current situation where even a tightly-run business can find itself with too high a cost structure to maintain the staffing level they have.
As a leader of a company, you often face very hard planning decisions, as under-hiring in a period of growth can lead to abuse of staff and poor working conditions just as over-hiring can lead to layoffs.
The ability to anticipate macroeconomic events and their effect on your business is something you can get better at, but not something anyone can do reliably.
Thanks Matt, there is always nuance to be found in every categorical statement, and you've found it in mine.
The truth is that most systems are not set up to support workers at all cost, because they're set up to ensure the survival of companies, the logic being that this caters to the needs of the many, instead of the few. This works okay in countries with strong welfare systems, where said workers can rely on unemployment benefits, and less well in places where people can easily lose livelihoods from one day to the next.
I don't mean to get into a political discussion here, but I think I was looking at it from the backdrop of my country of residence (Germany), where the welfare state is strong(er), and laying people off even during COVID was a choice. (The state subsidized businesses by offering to cover employee wages while reducing their hours.)
Regardless of context and reality, leaders to have to fire people. Perhaps if we were more inclined to view layoffs as a failure of leadership, we'd also first exhaust every other option. Because I think that what we've seen in tech recently is a lot of very trigger happy leaders getting away with it scot-free.