Comment by deweller 3 days ago
As a layoff strategy, I would expect it to be counterproductive. The people most likely to quit skew toward high-performing individuals who feel confident in their ability to get a remote job elsewhere. And vice versa.
I work with an Amazon engineer who has been working on storage systems since 1990 (NT kernel) and is an absolute wizard. He could probably write a durable concurrent B-tree in an afternoon.
Prob need a few dozens to build the frameworks and a few hundreds to glue them to the services that require them.
Layoffs in profitable companies are always counterproductive.
At best, it signals the company is done with growth and is going for a high-profit, low investment (including low innovation) policy.
If you are looking for freeing resources that you can redirect, firing your "resources" won't help redirecting them... unless you think you don't need the people that are working for a while at your company and can get better ones by hiring.
But if it's the second one, well, you'd be stupid and my best possible explanation up there doesn't apply anymore.
Sample of one, but around me best engineers came back to work soon after Covid ended, show up every day, communicate and collaborate.
The less productive are the ones dragging their feet, coming up with excuses to stay home and hide as much as possible from peer scrutiny.
Almost like best engineers enjoy coming and working with the team, while the worst dread it.
You have a point: the best engineers do tend to have an underdeveloped social life. On the other hand, the ones that love to suck up are the ones with the great social skills.
Again, sample of one, so take with the grain of salt, do not draw generic conclusions, etc.
Oh, I'm certainly taking it with a giant pile of salt alright, because what you said was insulting nonsense pointed directly at remote workers. And you can't say don't draw generic conclusions when you tried to do exactly that.
A lot of companies aren't trying to hire the "best" programmers. Places like Amazon won't let engineers use highly-skilled techniques anyway.
The high-profile RTO places tend to hire in bulk for programmers that will do as product tells them. Weeding out people who value quality over conformity is a goal.