Had been advocating slower hiring & targeted reductions in a mid-sized tech firm for years after COVID, but it happened much faster under a newly appointed CEO.
Under new leadership, we executed 1/3 layoffs framed as a "culture refresh" and to briefly lift the stock. It wasn't about survival, we had plenty of cash, okayish growth and fantastic ARR - more about a new corp-backed CEO adopting a "do-it-like-Elon" approach.
Being mostly Europe-based but US-led, it turned into a massive and costly process (Americans don't exactly dig EU/UK workers rights - Spain was the biggest shock), stalling most productive activity for half a year. Internal trust and brand perception tanked. Since it began with ousting old execs, it quickly devolved into a blunt-force exercise with no internal knowledge, led by scared managers with percentage targets - many good people were cut. Managers hesitated to shield talent, given the "culture reboot" framing. I ended up personally cutting entire offices.
When the CEO's broader strategy failed (for reasons beyond layoffs), high performers started eyeing the exit. Ironically, many first saw the layoffs positively - COVID overhires had left uneven team dynamics, and some dead weight was on high salaries. But when it became clear there was no coherent plan, people began leaving.
That triggered a chain reaction. Senior hiring pipelines dried up (reputation matters, esp. when your top-talent is on the way out and is loud about it), and panic set in. Eventually, it turned into survival mode. The CEO didn't last long after that.
There’s weirdly (to intuitive sense and business zeitgeist since the 80s or so) mixed data on layoffs in general. There’s a decent chance they cause more mid-term harm than good, most of the time.
They also didn’t used to be a regular feature of business.
It’s funny how such things become “ordinary” and “obviously good things to do sometimes” that haven’t always been the former, and may not really be the latter either.
Business management is vibes, trend-following, and fear of straying from the pack. And the best of that is vibes! That’s how bad it is.
You nailed it. In our case, EBITDA margins were "pencil on a napkin" at best — only because the CFO is usually the sanest person in the room. At the same time, Elon's moves and Meta's "year of efficiency" were super influential.
A lot of what happens in the boardroom or C-suite is "stick with the crowd" — e.g. template-based "tech modernization." (That's often a new CTO's hedge if the real problems are too hard. Just "go Cloud" or "go AI" for five years — four vests, one to jump off.) You broadcast confidence, you own the narrative. Which means never, ever saying "I don't know."
This is especially common in PE "turnarounds" or post-IPOs after founder exits. And it's especially harmful there because current staff is often seen as a liability, not an asset.
I thought a lot about this after the layoffs, and I think it boils down to how "professional C-levels" see execution as a commodity. They tend to overemphasize leadership (sometimes self-serving, but often genuine) and resource availability. The focus is on "what?" and "how to pay for it?" — with "how?" left to be figured out on the go.
I don't think that's completely wrong. Sometimes execution is a commodity. But not when you're short on time and planning for a rapid sprint.
> But when it became clear there was no coherent plan, people began leaving.
I see this more any more, to the point of wondering what % of execs and decision makers are actually meaningfully good at the job? When times are good, any exec action will turn out fine. But when times are tough, who is worth their salt?
And if all these decision makers are bad at decision making, what would a better organization look like?
There's definitely a "peacetime" / "wartime" divide. There's also an overreliance on pedigree. But above all, it's the pressure of being a public company (which often means losing the founder).
As a new CEO, you have to impress the board and investors without really knowing the company. You probably get two earnings calls - six months at most - to prove yourself. That's nothing, even for a senior dev, let alone an exec. And if you're being brought in, it means the company isn't in great shape - or is at least perceived that way.
You don't have time to really figure out how things work, and even if you did, it's political suicide. The board didn't hire a "looks fine to me" person. They hired a fixer. So, it turns into narrative games and rapid actions with massive tail risks.
I don't think it's a people problem. It's a system problem. Leadership replanting is hard, but it's one of the very few tools in the board's toolbox.
UK was horrible. No real protection for workers - just layers of mandatory legal mumbo-jumbo with zero actual chances for people to keep their jobs. It was like ripping off the band-aid 1mm at a time for four months.
Spain/France were an employer’s nightmare. Anyone without another job lined up secured a "special deal"—workers have massive leverage, they know it, and they’re actively litigious. People on parental leave had close to a year of guaranteed no-shows. The reaction was, of course, "never again" rippling across American corporate circles.
The rest of Europe was okay-ish.
US was predictably the easiest. We were generous with packages, but it's easy to see how the system can be used to screw people over.
Middle East was the roughest. Visas in UAE/Qatar expire instantly, and the local tech market is almost non-existent. We extended until the end of the school year to help with visa concerns, and some people managed to arrange golden visas. But for many, it was a massive shock — losing both jobs and residency overnight.
When I hear things like this, where one person has been given command of the plane and tanked it straight into the ground, with dire consequences particularly for the middle east employees you have mentioned, I am filled with concern about the stability of our systems in general. It often feels like in the history books when you read about the land the King built and then his son inherits it and burns it to the ground. This can't be a sustainable way to run a society.
Worth noting that Europe is the only place where someone could have actually been a Nazi, historically speaking. Plenty of other countries managed to avoid both Nazism and sweeping free speech bans.
And let’s not forget — the actual consequences for genocide were delivered by the Americans, Brits, and Russians, not by internal bans or laws.
Reminder for USAians that in USA free speech has limits and you can also get fined for your speech. USA decided that the public needs to be protected by boobs and Europeans decided that nazis cause much more damage then boobs.
Wouldn't you implicitly support Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, Dell/HP, Snowflake/Databricks, Datadog, etc. with almost every sale though? For many European businesses, infrastructure and platform costs likely exceed their own margins. In that sense, a lot of European businesses are really just "value-added resellers" of US hardware and platforms.
Agreed Europe has never had to care about that because we have always supported the US. Now there is always Loongson/Zhaoxin to base your infra on. Considering the way the US is heading you might see people considering a "neutral party" in the war.
You absolutely could go bare-metal with emerging local platforms and a Chinese stack — that’s the path Russia (and obviously China itself) is heading down. But...
Equinix? US. Digital Realty? US. NTT? Japan. Interxion? US. CyrusOne? US. That’s your top five DC/colo operators in Europe.
Same story with Tier-1 and Tier-1.5 ISPs.
It’s not just software. It’s not even just hardware. It’s the whole stack — down to power grids, land property rights, and regulatory frameworks.
Nationalization? Multidecade supply chain reconfiguration? Trillions in investment to rebuild local capacity — likely still with deep reliance on China for core infra components.
Europe isn’t just "a bit dependent" — it’s completely entangled.
I do not think completely entangled is a problem, it is just that there will be actual reasons to look for alternatives how ever bad they are. Considering that the EU is under fire from the current president of the US it is going to affect how people think in the EU.
And that is not an excuse to do nothing. Much to the opposite, it should be an acknowledgement of risk, and that steps should be taken to have an infrastructure less dependent on foreign nations. Especially when they are hostile, such as the US right now.
Would the investor even outlive the investment though? Imagine building data centers in the UK — only to get Brexit halfway through.
Any long-term, shared investment relies on continuous, guaranteed political and economic unity. Today it’s the US that’s hostile — but how confident can you be that tomorrow it won’t be a PiS-led Poland, or even an AfD-led Germany?
Except Putin doesn’t need to outrun America — he just needs to outrun Ukraine.
There’s a finite number of Ukrainians, and an even smaller number of Ukrainian men actually willing — or physically able — to fight.
20% of the population already left, and around 1.5 million of them went to Russia. Another 15% are stuck under occupation.
Ukraine’s demographics were already a disaster after the WW2 wipe-out, the Soviet collapse, and 30 years of economic decline and emigration. Now they’re drafting 18 to 60-year-olds just to keep units filled - at 40%.
So what happens in a year or two, when there’s no one left to draft?
The Poles aren’t volunteering to die en masse, and they’re the only EU country with anything resembling a real army — and even that is one-fifth the size of Russia’s.
So who’s holding the line then?
The US Army? The Marine Corps?
Is anyone actually ready to send Americans to die in the Donbas?
Russian economy doesn't have enough juice to "outrun Ukraine" under the sanctions regime and the war intensity they maintain to impress the Westerners. It's not a "year or two", it's a decade at least.
Keep Ukraine on life support for a decade, hoping Russia collapses under sanctions?
Cuba’s still standing after 60 years. Iran after 40. The USSR took decades to fall — and none of them had China bankrolling their survival.
Russia’s economy bleeds, but it’s not cut off. China sends tech and machines, India buys the oil, and Europe keeps quietly paying top dollar for gas through backdoors.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s population shrinks, its economy is wrecked, and its army can’t fight without Western money, Western weapons — and soon, Western bodies.
Because if you actually want to push Russia back — not even collapse it, just push it back — that means European and American troops on the front line. Conscription, mobilized economies, the whole package.
Without a sustained meat grinder to chew up Russian forces, Russia just consolidates and digs in — with China keeping the whole thing afloat.
And if the West isn’t ready for that, who exactly do you think will still be standing in 10 years?
The only guaranteed winner? China — with Russia as a client state, Europe as a deindustrialized theme park, and America too exhausted to stop them.
If this is a game of who bleeds out last, Ukraine’s already done, Europe bleeds out first, Russia bleeds to its usual stupid level — and China walks away without a scratch.
The Westerners have been tirelessly making excuses about how it's impossible to defeat Russia for a while now, so forgive me for not being impressed, but the proposition is quite simple really — if you don't want to support Ukrainians fighting for themselves against Russia today, Ukrainians will be sent to fight poles and others for Russia tomorrow. Of course as it's clear now, the US wouldn't defend Poland either, fighting Canada is the new geopolitical priority, so there's that.
Agree that China is a winner of it all simply by virtue of not being mad, but as they like to say in Russia — it's not the evening yet.
Funnily enough, this is exactly Putin’s own logic — just flipped.
“We had to support those rebel Ukrainian states so Ukrainians fight them, not us.”
“We had to preemptively disarm Ukraine, or we’d be fighting Ukrainians inside Russia within five years.”
As for China — surely they’d be nervous if Taiwan was one-third of their population and shared a land border.
Ukraine isn’t just a border state, it’s alt-Russia, as Taiwan is alt-China (and so was Hong-Kong). A competing civilizational project trying to jump off the imperial train and build a Polish-style normal nation-state — and that makes it an existential threat. Not because Ukraine is strong, but because it offers Russians a dangerous glimpse of an alternative path — a Russian identity without the empire.
> Funnily enough, this is exactly Putin’s own logic — just flipped
Except Ukrainians ask the West for support to fight for themselves, so the West is given a rarest opportunity to do a morally right thing while furthering its own interests.
French land army is 77k total, with maybe 30k actually combat-capable — the rest are admin, logistics, and training. Add 9k Foreign Legion, but only a fraction of that is high-intensity capable.
With rotations, France can probably field about 15k troops on an actual frontline — and after that, it’s draft time.
For comparison:
* Russian armed forces: 1.1 million.
* 500k deployed in Ukraine.
* ~300k on the active frontline right now.
In terms of real land warfare capacity, France is in the same weight class as Belarus or Romania — and about 20 times behind Russia.
Even if you argue technical edge (better equipment per soldier), France has zero industrial mobilization capacity and no modern large-scale combat experience.
You can’t fully defeat a nuclear power. You can, at best, drive it back — if you’re willing to pay the price.
And that price means Europe will have to absorb a dramatic, sustained drop in quality of life — plus forced mobilisation.
Even the Poles - the most serious player in Europe right now — only have about 200,000 troops.
The British and French combined have maybe 40,000 soldiers actually capable of high-intensity combat. That’s enough for, what - four weeks of real war?
After that, there will be no volunteers. That means a draft.
So the real question is: Are you ready to be drafted to “defeat Russia”?
And what exactly is "The West" these days? A glorified open-air Continental museum, a failed British Empire with an army the size of Belarus, and a bickering hegemon half-convinced it should retreat to regional power status, house divided and all.
Europeans are still high on their own supply, fantasizing they’re global players, when in reality they’ve got no money, no energy, no industry, no credible army, no unity, and no diplomatic weight — not even within their own borders.
Europe spent decades as an American piggy bank and a strategic liability. Now the bill’s come due — and Uncle Vlad is doing Uncle Donald a favor, playing the bogeyman just well enough to scare Europe’s capital and industry back into the safe harbor of the New World.
And if Russian pressure helps deliver "MAGA in four years" by triggering capital flight from Europe to the US — is Ukraine really too steep a price for such a valuable service?
Ukrainian nukes were about as Ukrainian as Texas-based US nukes are Texan — they were Soviet weapons targeting US cities, with launch authority and maintenance cycles controlled from Moscow.
After independence, Ukraine had physical possession of a huge nuclear arsenal but lacked the codes and infrastructure to operate or maintain it long-term. The only practical options were to dismantle them, bargain them away, or possibly sell off some nuclear material or technology to third parties — though they ultimately chose to denuclearize under the Budapest Memorandum in exchange for security assurances.
What could have truly deterred Russia was Ukraine’s enormous conventional military inherited from the USSR (actually, the size of Russia's), but it was steadily gutted over the decades through underfunding, corruption, and arms sales.
The only obligations it imposes, besides not attacking Ukraine, is to seek UN Security Council action should Ukraine be nuked. I don't know why people keep trotting it out like it's a comprehensive defense pact.
He hasn’t managed to lead much of anything so far. The British will happily switch sides the moment they can play those Continental fools against each other again — it’s practically a national sport, and it always works.
When the real trouble starts, it’ll come down to the Germans and the Poles, as it usually does.
On the bright side, all that capital fleeing France and Germany will go a long way toward reindustrializing the US and giving Britain’s economy a much-needed shot in the arm — so, it’s not all bad.
Under new leadership, we executed 1/3 layoffs framed as a "culture refresh" and to briefly lift the stock. It wasn't about survival, we had plenty of cash, okayish growth and fantastic ARR - more about a new corp-backed CEO adopting a "do-it-like-Elon" approach.
Being mostly Europe-based but US-led, it turned into a massive and costly process (Americans don't exactly dig EU/UK workers rights - Spain was the biggest shock), stalling most productive activity for half a year. Internal trust and brand perception tanked. Since it began with ousting old execs, it quickly devolved into a blunt-force exercise with no internal knowledge, led by scared managers with percentage targets - many good people were cut. Managers hesitated to shield talent, given the "culture reboot" framing. I ended up personally cutting entire offices.
When the CEO's broader strategy failed (for reasons beyond layoffs), high performers started eyeing the exit. Ironically, many first saw the layoffs positively - COVID overhires had left uneven team dynamics, and some dead weight was on high salaries. But when it became clear there was no coherent plan, people began leaving.
That triggered a chain reaction. Senior hiring pipelines dried up (reputation matters, esp. when your top-talent is on the way out and is loud about it), and panic set in. Eventually, it turned into survival mode. The CEO didn't last long after that.