Should poor performers be immune from layoffs? When is a layoff justifiable?
I'm free to leave my job at any time, so why shouldn't my employer be free to leave me?
I invite you to read earnings reports from any of the FAANG companies in the last 5 years. Go ahead, I'll wait.
You need your employer to stay fed and housed.
There is a lot more downside for you than your employer, thus a massive power asymmetry. The only way to restore the balance is solidarity between workers and it’s usually a union (or a guild)
Realistically, if I were laid off today I'd likely land a better paying job than this one. I choose to stay because I like my boss, my work, and my coworkers.
If circumstances changed such that it made sense to lay me off then I should be laid off. Why should anyone be obligated to pay my salary if I'm not offering commensurate value?
You can invent strawmen like poor performers and failing companies all day long but the facts differ quite a lot from your perception.
I think that comes from seeing our field filled with people only in it for the money, doing the bare minimum that’ll keep them employed.
The bare minimum is what everyone should be doing, because nobody owes their employers more than that
It leads to scrum culture, because you need accountability for the people that aren’t self-motivated enough to proceed with work without extrinsic motivation (their ideal situation is nothing to do but still get paid).
That’s my theory anyway. Previously the assumption seems to have been that the nerd was gonna nerd, and the only thing you sometimes needed to do was reign them in.
No, it's because we know how good we have it. Yes tech layoffs can be brutal but we all signed up for that. I knew even back in college that tech jobs can be flaky and I was likely to be out on my ass a few times in career. But I took the deal anyways because I can make six figures wearing pajamas in my basement.
It's not just devs, but the crowd in here.
But what’s happening post covid is a mess and we’ll see how the future looks for us in tech.
