> But the ones being discussed in the article are the consistent ones. The ones you do while you’re ahead to make your balance sheet look better.

That has to be matched with a strategy of intentional overhiring though, and the damage is being done there. That is the insight that should be drawn from the research - intentionally doing something silly (in this case, overhiring) is a classic form of waste and economically destructive. Layoff or no layoff, the problem is the management team has set up a situation where they believe a big chunk of their workforce is unproductive.

This does raising the question of why boards and shareholders tolerate these clowns. To me the obvious answer being that the major central banks have a history of printing money and handing it out to asset owners, so hiring competent managers for said assets is a lot of trouble for limited gains - even weak managers are enough to drink from the money hose. But who knows, maybe the analysts think that a small amount of sillyness averts a greater problem.

> That has to be matched with a strategy of intentional overhiring though, and the damage is being done there

No, doesn't have to. Looking at the article, sometimes they had hired the right number of people, but (new?) management decided to let people go because that looked better short term (saved money, higher profits), but was bad long term.

> But the ones being discussed in the article are the consistent ones.

I worked at GE when Jack Welch was there. First of all we never had a systematic firing of the bottom 10%. That is a myth. We ranked everyone each year and clearly identified the bottom 10% but they were not always fired. The manager did have to have a development plan for these individuals.

More importantly, GE did have consistent layoffs. I assert this was a good thing. I vividly remember asking an EVP at GE Capital when I first joined GE why we did this. It seemed inhumane. Wasn’t it better to try and fix the so-called ‘C’ players? His response fundamentally changed my view on hiring, leadership, and firing. He told me two things. 1) Hiring people is always a gamble. The best interview/onboarding processes will not produce 100% success. There will people that do not have the skills that are needed. There will also be people for whom GE is simply not a good cultural fit. 2) In good times, when a GE business unit is doing well, they always over hire. People working 50 hours a week want to work 40, process problems that have built up need to be addressed (similar to tech debt), etc. Over time this leads to bloat and inefficiency.

For these reasons, consistent layoffs make sense for the company. They also make sense for the employee. By not waiting for an economic downturn and then making dramatic cuts, the exiting employees would have an easier time finding the next job as odds are the economy would doing well. Particularly in the case where the person was not a good fit for the GE culture, they learned this and could find a better fitting role elsewhere. And GE was great on the resume back in those days (sadly not so today). If we waited for the downturn, then the exiting employees would be looking for a new job in a bad economy with everyone else who had just been laid off. Not a good situation.

Finally, an additional point I learned later by observing when and where we made headcount reductions. GE made many bets on new markets, new products, etc. We had to if we were to grow by 10% each year (GE Capital’s rigorous requirement for business and strategic plans). The successful GE leaders understood is was easier to grow revenue to achieve 10% net income growth than to cut expenses. Unfortunately, not all new business ventures worked out. In those cases, we had to make a decision to shut them down (all new ventures had off-ramps). As a result, some people were repurposed, but others had to be let go. I posit that is consistent with the tech approach of “fail early, fail often.” In industries with significant people required to try a new approach, the consequence of failing will be layoffs.

> The manager did have to have a development plan for these individuals.

What percentage of people on PIPs didn't leave the company within a year or two?

My recollection is a very high percentage. Not clear what the alternative is. No action plans to help people improve their performance? Action plans also helped people understand their situation and allowed them to find other jobs while they were still employed at GE. For clarity, I never developed an action plan for someone who was then surprised to receive it.

>But the ones being discussed in the article are the consistent ones. The ones you do while you’re ahead to make your balance sheet look better. Those come with a temporary balance sheet boost and all of the negative effects of any layoffs.

This feels like a "no true scotsman" argument. The headline of the article is literally "Why layoffs don’t work", not "why consistent layoffs don't work". The only mention of "consistent" layoffs were when referencing Jack Welch's management style, but that was more of an attempt to argue that layoffs are bad by citing the worst possible example, than trying to introduce nuance between the types of layoffs. The studies cited also did not distinguish between the type of layoffs.

Clickbait headlines aren't anything new. While a better headline like: "How the Layoff Culture that Started in the 80s and Spread to the Rest of Wall Street is Actually Harming Business's Long Term Prospects" would be better, punchy headlines like this one spur clicks and conversation as seen by this thread.

I believe we took different things from the piece and I imagine you'd disagree with my better headline. I understood the piece to be telling a story starting with Welch and Dunlap of how layoffs as a way to improve numbers actually damage those same numbers in the long term.