When would tech companies realize that layoffs NEVER increase efficiency? The amount of work getting done is directly proportional to the amount of people at a company, because if a company can increase its work efficiency during normal operations it would have done so already.
Besides, its not just about efficiency, but about scope and use of resources. In economic boom cycles there is more capital to play around with non-essential ideas. When that access to capital dries up, so does viability of keeping extra resources for things that are not essential.
Again, we are talking about how cutting people during regular operation absolutely would not make the team more efficient, not adding people to a project last minute.
Late projects is just a theme used to convey the core ideas, as it is a common thinking/pitfall, but the reasoning of why late projects because later equally apply to initial software estimates.
The core idea is that software cannot be simple divided into “man months”. That is, saying this software will take 80 manhours, and therefore 10 engineers can do it in 10 days, and a 80 engineers could do it in a day. The reasoning being 1. Software tasks are complex and not easily partitioned, and 2. Software projects require a lot of communication and the more people you have the communication channels needed greatly increase. Essentially what happens is when you have too many people, more time is spent communicating what needs to be done and whose going to do it than doing the actual work.
In any case, efficiency is not really relevant because what happens in layoffs typically, is that entire teams/projects/or initiatives are dismantled. So its not about serving the same projects with less people, but reprioritizing whats essential.
That’s not the goal, the goal is to make profits go up now to appeal to shareholders. The future doesn’t matter, the CEO can just dip when their money has been made.
It’s not just tech companies, though - Twitter and Reddit are circling the drain for the same reason that you can never find an employee in Target and call center waits are so bad. There are two basic ways for a company to increase profits, and everyone is picking the wrong one.
The first way to increase profits is to invest some of them back into the company, by paying staff more/paying for more staff and getting better equipment to enhance the customer experience. This method relies on happy customers sticking with the company, but because of that, it takes time, and they can’t immediately tell if it’s working, so they might not know if their improvements are actually helping or not for quite a while. A very human analogy for this is trying to improve how much energy you have through self-care, exercise, and a good diet - it’ll probably work given time, but it won’t do much by tomorrow or next week, and it might even seem actively unpleasant at first.
The second way to increase profits is to cut costs. This is basically instant gratification for businesses: anything they cut is an immediate boost to their profits because it’s money that stays in the company’s coffers. The flip side of this is that it completely hamstrings their ability to do just about anything. Less staff means more stress on the remaining staff, increased turnover, and less man-hours to devote to projects that might increase profits when completed. Still, companies tend to choose this method because it makes the shareholders happy now and it makes the C-suite look like they made the company a bunch of money. To continue my analogy from earlier, this method is basically like trying to improve your daily energy level by doing cocaine: it works really well right now, but it’ll leave you feeling like garbage tomorrow, and if you keep doing it to maintain that energy, you end up feeling worse and worse without it, and eventually you might end up selling something that you need to get more.
So, in short, everything sucks because businesses are now trying to snort up all the cash like they’re a 1980s businessman doing lines off the changing table in a public restroom.
So, in short, everything sucks because businesses are now trying to snort up all the cash like they’re a 1980s businessman doing lines off the changing table in a public restroom.
A particularly apropos analogy because these kinds of business decisions reek of Reaganomics-era thinking.
That’s not at all my experience of 25 years in Tech both in that industry (Products, Services and even Startups) and others (mainly Finance).
More people (or more time - i.e. overworking) most definitelly do not mean more results and in some case can even mean less results.
If seen departments 3x as large producing less than half the results, and way more so when talking about small teams (in my area 4 senior devs familiar with each other can outproduce a whole department of mid/junior-level devs).
Curiously Tech Startups were especially inneficient, probably because they tended to hire young and enthusiastic people (“With a tendency to run really hard whilst not knowing were they’re trying to get to”) and don’t really have much in the way of software development processes whilst well established (but comparativelly boring) companies hired the kind of people in their 30s or more with families who want a good steady salary, and had well established team structures.
But don’t take my word for it, just read books like “The Mythical Man Hour”.
I think you misunderstood me. My point was if your company/project was already running incredibly inefficiently, cutting more people would not make the remaining people more efficient somehow out of fear, because what caused the inefficiency is still there, you just have more things for each of them to do now.
The way to increase efficiency is to figure out what part of the whole process is causing waste and aim to minimize that, but that is HARD because it requires understanding your process, which is why they just do the lazy thing and fire a bunch of people to appease the almighty shareholders, so that they can say they did something.
I think we’re thinking along the same lines on this.
What I’ve observed is that when there genuinelly is an excess of manpower, it’s always down to management problems, be it a culture of “empire building” (managing more people makes a manager’s CV look better and is a justification for higher pay plus some people just want to boss others) or trying to solve efficiency problems by throwing more “resources” at it (the whole mythical idea that more man-hours = more results) rather than understanding the process and improving it.
The very same management flaws that produce genuine situations of excess of manpower will also create all manner of somewhat related problems, such as environments of sistematic overwork and cutting down on personnel to given an appearence of “efficiency improvement”. I would even say that these are all just different facets of the same way of doing things, were different market competition situations and/or the ups and downs of a company’s life-cycle make each a different facet more likely.
When would tech companies realize that layoffs NEVER increase efficiency? The amount of work getting done is directly proportional to the amount of people at a company, because if a company can increase its work efficiency during normal operations it would have done so already.
This is absolutely not true.
This is one of the most well known writings on software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
Besides, its not just about efficiency, but about scope and use of resources. In economic boom cycles there is more capital to play around with non-essential ideas. When that access to capital dries up, so does viability of keeping extra resources for things that are not essential.
Again, we are talking about how cutting people during regular operation absolutely would not make the team more efficient, not adding people to a project last minute.
Late projects is just a theme used to convey the core ideas, as it is a common thinking/pitfall, but the reasoning of why late projects because later equally apply to initial software estimates.
The core idea is that software cannot be simple divided into “man months”. That is, saying this software will take 80 manhours, and therefore 10 engineers can do it in 10 days, and a 80 engineers could do it in a day. The reasoning being 1. Software tasks are complex and not easily partitioned, and 2. Software projects require a lot of communication and the more people you have the communication channels needed greatly increase. Essentially what happens is when you have too many people, more time is spent communicating what needs to be done and whose going to do it than doing the actual work.
In any case, efficiency is not really relevant because what happens in layoffs typically, is that entire teams/projects/or initiatives are dismantled. So its not about serving the same projects with less people, but reprioritizing whats essential.
That’s not the goal, the goal is to make profits go up now to appeal to shareholders. The future doesn’t matter, the CEO can just dip when their money has been made.
It’s not just tech companies, though - Twitter and Reddit are circling the drain for the same reason that you can never find an employee in Target and call center waits are so bad. There are two basic ways for a company to increase profits, and everyone is picking the wrong one.
The first way to increase profits is to invest some of them back into the company, by paying staff more/paying for more staff and getting better equipment to enhance the customer experience. This method relies on happy customers sticking with the company, but because of that, it takes time, and they can’t immediately tell if it’s working, so they might not know if their improvements are actually helping or not for quite a while. A very human analogy for this is trying to improve how much energy you have through self-care, exercise, and a good diet - it’ll probably work given time, but it won’t do much by tomorrow or next week, and it might even seem actively unpleasant at first.
The second way to increase profits is to cut costs. This is basically instant gratification for businesses: anything they cut is an immediate boost to their profits because it’s money that stays in the company’s coffers. The flip side of this is that it completely hamstrings their ability to do just about anything. Less staff means more stress on the remaining staff, increased turnover, and less man-hours to devote to projects that might increase profits when completed. Still, companies tend to choose this method because it makes the shareholders happy now and it makes the C-suite look like they made the company a bunch of money. To continue my analogy from earlier, this method is basically like trying to improve your daily energy level by doing cocaine: it works really well right now, but it’ll leave you feeling like garbage tomorrow, and if you keep doing it to maintain that energy, you end up feeling worse and worse without it, and eventually you might end up selling something that you need to get more.
So, in short, everything sucks because businesses are now trying to snort up all the cash like they’re a 1980s businessman doing lines off the changing table in a public restroom.
A particularly apropos analogy because these kinds of business decisions reek of Reaganomics-era thinking.
That’s not at all my experience of 25 years in Tech both in that industry (Products, Services and even Startups) and others (mainly Finance).
More people (or more time - i.e. overworking) most definitelly do not mean more results and in some case can even mean less results.
If seen departments 3x as large producing less than half the results, and way more so when talking about small teams (in my area 4 senior devs familiar with each other can outproduce a whole department of mid/junior-level devs).
Curiously Tech Startups were especially inneficient, probably because they tended to hire young and enthusiastic people (“With a tendency to run really hard whilst not knowing were they’re trying to get to”) and don’t really have much in the way of software development processes whilst well established (but comparativelly boring) companies hired the kind of people in their 30s or more with families who want a good steady salary, and had well established team structures.
But don’t take my word for it, just read books like “The Mythical Man Hour”.
I think you misunderstood me. My point was if your company/project was already running incredibly inefficiently, cutting more people would not make the remaining people more efficient somehow out of fear, because what caused the inefficiency is still there, you just have more things for each of them to do now.
The way to increase efficiency is to figure out what part of the whole process is causing waste and aim to minimize that, but that is HARD because it requires understanding your process, which is why they just do the lazy thing and fire a bunch of people to appease the almighty shareholders, so that they can say they did something.
I think we’re thinking along the same lines on this.
What I’ve observed is that when there genuinelly is an excess of manpower, it’s always down to management problems, be it a culture of “empire building” (managing more people makes a manager’s CV look better and is a justification for higher pay plus some people just want to boss others) or trying to solve efficiency problems by throwing more “resources” at it (the whole mythical idea that more man-hours = more results) rather than understanding the process and improving it.
The very same management flaws that produce genuine situations of excess of manpower will also create all manner of somewhat related problems, such as environments of sistematic overwork and cutting down on personnel to given an appearence of “efficiency improvement”. I would even say that these are all just different facets of the same way of doing things, were different market competition situations and/or the ups and downs of a company’s life-cycle make each a different facet more likely.
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