Ask HN: What's a "normal" amount of Layoffs to occur in one's career?

My company has layoffs a couple times per year it seems. Somehow I’ve been around almost 20 years, though I’ve rarely felt my job was secure in that time.

Sometimes the layoffs seem random or simply wrong. The people making the decisions often don’t know the people. Though I have seen where people end up on the list and the boss saves them somehow. Other times it’s totally out of their hands. Like the director who gave someone a bad review to send a message to the person to get their act together. It worked, the person really improved. However, the layoffs were based on those old reviews, so the wrong person got let go.

I’ve found that it’s not really about what you do for the customer, it’s about making your manager’s life easier. The people who seem like a lot of work to manage seem to be first on the list to go, weighted against perceived impact.

So if you’re relatively new to the company and haven’t actively and noticeably made your manager’s life better, and your impact to the final product is mainly seen by you and those right next to you, it could be easy to end up on the list to be laid off, even if the work you did was good. At least that’s how I’ve seen it through the dozens of layoffs I’ve watched happen.

Even within my team now, the person who should be laid off is our scrum master. He’s not good. However, the boss has this idea that the scrum master will make his life easier eventually, or getting rid of him will at least create a gap that he would need to fill until someone else can get into that role. So that guy is still here and has been given years of time, failing repeatedly. Meanwhile, the last guy who did get laid off did actual work. He was still a bit green and needed some direction and the occasional watchful eye, but he was a net positive to the team, and was getting better, while the scrum master actively hurts us and shows 0 improvement.

There are time periods when layoffs happen a lot.

From spring 2000 to late 2001 there were many layoffs.

From 2008 to 2010 there were a lot of layoffs.

In early 2020 there were layoffs in the economy, not too many in tech.

From late 2022 to now there have been many layoffs in tech.

So in the last 25 years there have been three periods in tech with many layoffs. The last two lasted about two years, but hiring did not pick up right after. We're not two years out from the late 2022 FAANG layoffs yet.

Some jobs are also safer than others. Recruiters tend to be the first to go. Senior SWEs tend to be a bit safer.

Also things vary by industries, companies and company sizes - a small startup with some angel funding that will need to raise venture capital in a few months is risky. A Fortune 500 company would tend to be safer than that.

It can also vary - Bay Area tech companies seemed to be hit harder than other companies in 2000 and the current period. Whereas in 2008 the problems were throughout the economy.

At my current company I have been here longer than my manager and his manager and his manager. My greater team is about 150 people, and only 5 of them have been here longer than me, and most of them not by much. Longevity isn't a guarantee, but I think management is confident I can fix most problems that can come up in my area, or get whatever feature needs to be done.

Despite all that, if the tech market gets rosier in the next year or two I could see jumping ship, if the salary boost was large enough.

Also - I have enough money saved up to live off my savings for years without changing my spending, so that lowers my worries too.

I was a consultant so was ready to be canned at a day's notice anytime, though only a fewf times got pushed in decades. And IIRC each time (other than one, which was mutual) that that happened the client tried to change its mind and have me back, but I was already sorted with something new. So IMHO it's often random and irrational, thus you shouldn't read too much into your experience, nor generally into apparent clusters of such events.

It suited me not to be at someone else's beck and call on their payroll...

To be honest, I don't think there is a 'normal' amount of layoffs. It depends how well run the companies you work for are, and how unlucky you/they are when it comes to societal trends as a whole.

For example, I experienced layoffs from my last two roles, simply because the companies in question got affected by Covid. One had a lot of clients in the events industry, so had to layoff 90% of their staff when the lockdowns occurred, and the other bet the farm on the pandemic era rise in users lasting past the world reopening (which it didn't).

So I don't think someone getting laid off 3 times in two years is that out of the ordinary. Feels like you just got really unlucky with the companies that hired you, which is gonna to happen to at least a percentage of the population.

If it turned out they got fired for poor behaviour/incompetence at every company they worked in that would be a red flag, but just working for incompetent/failing companies isn't really a red flag in itself.

Myself I've had three jobs that lasted more than a year and one of those was a "layoff" where the organization was facing an internal crisis, the other one I left because I felt unheard and a startup was going to pay me almost 2x what I was making to work on the kind of stuff I was doing side projects of.

I spent some time working as a consultant and also pitching an idea for an intelligent data transformation system.

I worked at a lot of companies that were unstable (e.g. startup that is just plain unstable, long standing companies that were breaking under the load of tech debt) or had lots of free junk food but no health insurance or a had a boss who had previously supervised both Dave Cutler and Linus Torvalds and had a lot of experience being the last manager to turn off the lights (DEC and Transmeta) but he fell down the stairs getting on a plane and was disabled and mean afterwards. In those cases usually I quit, once I got fired.

But really right now there is a lot of instability in startup land and I hear other people are having your problem.

To know what's normal would require a review of statistics, I think. I'll skip that and just give my opinion instead.

Anecdotally, I was laid of 2x in the last 2 years. Plus I resigned one year before the big rounds of tech layoffs started.

By the way, I'm objectively a highly talented engineer (largely within a niche). It's been almost 4 months between jobs now and this honestly is the worst I have felt in a long time.

Each of my 2 recent layoffs was because a decently funded but unprofitable startup faced extreme pressure. Which actually was maybe smart because those companies were not performing at those times. But it still sucked. I knew I was joining risky businesses. I bounced back from the first one pretty fast, to the second one.

I don't think going to a big co is necessarily any more stable than going to a small co, based on reading about the last couple years' layoffs.

So I think the thing to do is focus on doing something useful, important, and profitable with one's abilities, ideally building on the capability set one has been building up for a while already.

In big tech cycles, I this is expected to go on for a couple more years at least , then I imagine a gravy train will run for 6 or 7 years or so then, more of this, etc. It's episodic, I think. Early '90s bad, mid-late '90s awesome, 2001+ bad, then mid-2000's awesome, then 2009+ bad, then 2010's awesome, then 2022+ bad, etc.

Fundamentally, to be blunt, the problem with the last couple years (or longer?) is stupid companies doing stupid things. So that's not necessarily going to be too stable.

So I think it would be best overall to create or participate in efforts that are not stupid. That is harder said than done, but I think it is possible and worth doing. This is partially what keeps me optimistic.

Looking at other careers, they all have their pros and cons. But there are multiple decent ones.

I worked for an international company with more than 100,000 employees. They basically never stopped doing layoffs. It was just background noise all the time. I got laid off after 5+ years, but I was ready to go.

Before that, I was laid off from a company that was rapidly going out of business, no surprise and I was ready to go.

As a data point, I've had 5 software development jobs in 25 years and have been laid off twice.

Sounds like you've had some bad luck, but I suspect things are getting worse.

Is there a chance that you're old enough that these layoffs happening to you aren't quite as random as chance would have you believe?

I think it depends a lot on the kinds of companies you work for, and also on luck. In my 14 year career, I've never been laid off and only once had a company I've worked at done a layoff of other people.

I’ve never been laid off in my 10 year career. Suspect it’s just luck and which teams you join.