> Also, engineering managers absolutely have endless work to assign to new hires
Assuming there isn't a sharp dropoff of the ROI on the work juuuuust past the point where the current team can tackle it, that means that the work in the backlog is valuable and worth paying for. By chopping people they are saying actually, this work doesn't need to be done. Whether that work needs to be done or is valuable has not magically changed. That means the company was wrong all along about whether the work in the backlog was worth doing, and had all along had too many people on the team -- despite painfully fighting for headcount to get that work done, and despite careful calculus about which teams to spend budget on, all those managers were basically categorically wrong all along. How can we reconcile all that?
Assuming there isn't a sharp dropoff of the ROI on the work juuuuust past the point where the current team can tackle it, that means that the work in the backlog is valuable and worth paying for. By chopping people they are saying actually, this work doesn't need to be done. Whether that work needs to be done or is valuable has not magically changed. That means the company was wrong all along about whether the work in the backlog was worth doing, and had all along had too many people on the team -- despite painfully fighting for headcount to get that work done, and despite careful calculus about which teams to spend budget on, all those managers were basically categorically wrong all along. How can we reconcile all that?