In December of 2000, I went to a company all hands. This was a company in the networking industry, a high flyer, and a day or two before the meeting the CEO of the biggest player in the space, Cisco, announced that they were experiencing the biggest slowdown the company had ever seen, and the biggest slowdown that any of the members of the board of directors had ever seen. They were warning that they may miss, and they were even broaching the topic of having a massive inventory write-down (which, later, they would: $2B+ of written off inventory).

At the meeting, our CEO announced that he wasn't seeing any of this, that it was a Cisco problem, and that it was an indicator that we were even winning! Of course, a number of our customers were on the brink of declaring bankruptcy, including Cable and Wireless and a few others. Worldcom was about to happen.

Of course, our CEO said, not only weren't we laying off, we were going to accelerate hiring, and we did. No layoffs planned, more heads to take more of the market!

We did accelerate hiring. Our group almost doubled in the next three months with more reqs opened. One day in early April, I was the last interviewer for a candidate who had done really well and was walking the guy out. Normally at the time we'd make an offer on the spot if the interview was positive enough, we would do incremental round-tables in those days as we went, and this one was positive, so I was a little confused. We happened to walk by my manager's office as we I was seeing him out - were on our way to the elevator. He rushed to join us as and had positive things to day on the way down by gave me a look. We said goodbye and my manager says, "Yeah, there's a hiring freeze as of a few minutes ago, so all reqs closed."

A month later, the CEO denied any layoffs were pending or planned, but suggested that we do a prayer at the company all hands in April. To pray for... something? Worldcom not to go bankrupt? I don't quite remember, I was so shocked. Very explicitly, the CEO promised: "no layoffs are planned." And then, about a month later, the company did its first ever layoff.

And this brings me to the point. New companies - and there are a lot of them this round just like there were going into 2001 - suck at almost everything. They don't know what they're doing and they do a lot of idiotic stuff. I've worked at companies that peanut butter the layoff, that try and cut functions, that target non-human expenses first (such as HW prototypes or expected builds for labs or server farms), companies that target engineering first (or specific engineering disciplines, like ASICs or new boxes, where the project can, in theory if not reality, be put into hibernation for a bit), that target customer support or marketing first, and even one that targeted sales first (because there weren't any). New companies that have not done it before get stupid.

This layoff was the first ever for the company, and they had absolutely no fucking idea what they were doing. What actually happened for about half of the managers was they wanted around the cube area at 9am in the morning and did a sort of "duck duck go" in their heads, and when they approached someone they decided to lay them off or not based on whether they appeared instantaneously busy. To this day a friend who was at the same company swears that when his manager came to lay him off, "can you talk for a few minutes?" he survived entirely because he told the guy to go away because he was incredibly busy on something another team needed and could talk in an hour or two.

So yeah, don't judge people by layoffs from small or new (years) companies. Judge each candidate by what they do and can do and what they've done, not that they ended up on the wrong side of the layoff.