I was involved in creating the business cases for the massive hiring sprees we had when things were good and now that the economy is going to shit I am involved in slowing that down to make sure our OpEx growth does not outpace our top line growth. However, due to the nature of the company I work at (non-tech, non-shit), all we have done is slowed down hiring to adjust to the new economic environment, a far cry from the massive layoffs I see happening pretty much all over the place. However this makes me curious as to how things look for people with my job but within tech companies and other companies heavily trimming their fat right now. If anyone wants to share any details of how it goes on the finance side of things, feel free to share.
I would particularly be interested in knowing:
- How early did you have to start planning for layoffs? Is it that when a shitty quarter closes you rush to come up with a list of people to fire, or did the plans start way earlier than that?
- Before layoffs are publicly announced, at which level are you involved in the planning? For example, I imagine that if the layoffs will include Directors and VPs, you are probably not letting your junior analysts/interns handle those Excel files. But would a SA be involved? Managers? Only Directors? What about general layoffs. When Google has a list of 10,000+ employees to fire, who has access to it before they go public with it?
- How much influence do you have? In my case, for business cases we always have up-to-date data of which are the departments that actually make money so that we can continue to justify investing in them, but if things went south I imagine things would turn around. But how much of that would be my call vs the call of the VP of that department or SVP of cluster of departments?
- How grim is the atmopshere when you have meetings about these types of lists?. Are we talking tech execs sipping champagne laughing as they pick who to fire, or a more gloomy and almost impersonal vibe as people reluctantly go over the list and make tough decisions.
Hey Hölder, what a lonely thread. I'm here since nobody responded ...so maybe one of these discussions will help:
More suggestions...
Hope that helps.
Following bc this is one good set of questions
We were notified of a headcount reduction analysis in Q3 of last year and was executed Q1 of this year.
The decision of who to let go is decided by HR feedback, Direct/Skip/Department head feedback depending on their level. But most importantly it depends on the department and overall budget of the company. They first determine how many to cut at each level, then go to identify the lowest performers at those levels.
In my experience it was 75% juniors under 5 YOE, 20% 5-10 YOE, and the remaining goes to MD/ED/SVP level.
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