It seems like such a quaint idea that back in the 1960s and 1970s, people went to work for one company and spent their entire career there.
My father, for example, has basically had one employer his entire life. And while that's at a family business, from the '70s through the 2010s, that business had almost no turnover.
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People who worked in the warehouse learned the product so they got promoted to truck driver, because drivers had to pull the right items at each stop. After a few years, drivers then became salespeople, because they both dealt with customers and knew the product.
All the managers started at the bottom and worked their way up. Firings were rare and usually involved theft or some other terrible offense.
People hardly ever left, and while some years were tighter than others and things like holiday parties and executive bonuses would be scaled back in lean years, layoffs pretty much never happened.
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Now, at a company that maxed out at around 400 people, a bad enough downturn would have meant layoffs, but that would have been a last-ditch choice.
Big technology companies including Microsoft, Facebook (Meta), and Google (Alphabet) use layoffs too casually. They treat employees like numbers on a balance sheet or pawns on a chessboard.
That's something they pretend they have to do, but there are much better ways to handle staff.
Layoffs don't have to be an ax hanging over all employees
When you work at Microsoft, where I was a vendor/contractor for about a year in 2012, the sword always hangs over your head. I worked with countless talented people who were full-time employees, and over the years, all of them — literally every single person I knew — got laid off.
That happens because Microsoft (and it's not different at Meta or Google) constantly shift priorities. Many of the recent people cut in a 9,000-person layoff at Microsoft, for example, came from the gaming division, which has become less of a priority.
Microsoft, however, does not have a hiring freeze, so why not give every impacted employee a period where they remain employees and get time to find another internal role?
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Better yet, the company could set up a small human resources team that would work to find in-house roles for these workers. Not everyone would find a job and some would not want to change their area of focus, but at least some positions would be filled without an expensive outside hiring process.
Laying people off to make a quarterly number shows people you don't value them.
Create a culture without fear
It has always been an unspoken thing in the tech world that if you get paid well and the benefits are good, your company can treat you terribly. People don’t realize that free coffee and pizza days do not consitute positive workplace culture. Instead, a large part of that culture is creating an environment without fear.
There’s no rule that says getting a nice salary means having to live with the constant anxiety of a potential layoff. But that has been how companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Google, just to name a few, have operated.
In reality, if good talent knew that their employer would fight to retain them even if a project failed, workers would be more loyal. Creating an environment like that would actually be good for the bottom line because it would help retain strong workers.
Just because you'e a public company does not mean employees have to be treated like laptops. It’s difficult to hire and train new people, so it makes sense to keep as much of your existing workforce as possible.
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Of course, you can fire people who don’t perform. But, that’s not why most people get laid off at big technology companies.
As it currently stands, it’s a numbers game that doesn’t really need to be played. Yes, you can use staff reductions in a down period to trim the fat and get rid of the bottom tier of your workforce, but it’s not a good idea to enact broad layoffs just to look fiscally responsible.
