Layoffs are hard, but we shouldn’t try to make it easier with stack ranking because ranking is inherently one-dimensional and forces you to compare pairs of people. For layoffs, you should want to compare different multi-dimensional teams.

In programming, we know that whatever algorithm you use to sort a list, you need a function to compare two items. But sorting this way only works if comparing is transitive. This means that if a<b AND b<c then a<c. This works for numbers, but you need to be careful when you make your own comparators.

There’s no natural way to order people, so when you make one up, it’s often not transitive. The second problem is that the comparator only has the two people to compare, not any other context. That means that when you are considering the “value” difference in a pair of people you are not using the context of the team that they will be on.

Instead of sorting, consider this visual aid:

I explained this graph in Raising The Bar is a One Dimensional Concept. Each spike represents an attribute of a team member that you value. For example: coding skill, team gelling skill, writing ability, domain knowledge, code-base knowledge, mentoring—you can have as many as you want. Your team members may each excel in some, but lack skill in others. For each member, put a dot somewhere on each spike of the graph and connect it to make a polygon. By overlaying the individual graphs, you can see if you have a balanced team with diverse abilities and interests.

Here’s how I suggest you use this. Let’s say you have 10 developers and you need to lay off 20% of total salary. To decide, try evaluating each member on all the dimensions you value and create a team using your budget to pick the ones that result in the team you want.

Let’s say you start with some obvious top-performer. They have the most seniority, have mentored well, write great documentation. They are all-around a person that you want to keep. The next person to add is probably not someone similar to that. You want to end up with a good mix of junior and senior people, so the next person might be someone relatively unskilled, but perhaps with other desirable attributes.

The key is that you are thinking of that junior person in combination with the senior one, not comparing them against each other. To the extent you are comparing team members to add, you are considering which one is a better multi-dimensional addition to a multi-dimensional team, not looking at them in isolation. As you build up the team, you may notice things the team needs, and pick the next person based on that. You should try this a few different ways, with different starting points, and see if they converge.

Instead of thinking of people that you need to cut, you focus on building the best team you can afford. You should already know how to do this because this is a good way to recruit as well.

One of the most surprising things I learned in math was that complex numbers had no natural ordering. Meaning, less-than and greater-than are not defined for complex numbers. It makes sense when you think of it for a minute. The same applies to other multi-dimensional things like matrices and vectors.

So, why do we think we can rank order people? I’m specifically talking about companies that do this for their employees, but it comes up in other contexts (e.g. class rank).

Even if you were to think of people as a number, it wouldn’t be expressed as a 1-dimensional one. When I wrote about the concept of lowering/raising the bar, I said that that a bar is a 1-dimensional concept. So is rank ordering.

Just like with complex numbers, you can make up an order if you want. But then you lose information. For example, if you choose to order based on magnitude, then direction would no longer matter. Similarly, when you rank team members by, say, seniority, you lose orthogonal characteristics, like the ability to catalyze others.

The reason companies do this anyway is when they are looking to downsize. If they do need to lay someone off, it might well be the lowest ranked person, but it’s a terrible way to do this. I do have a suggestion, but I’ll get to that Monday. [EDIT: Here it is – Comparing People is Not Transitive]

Every week I get a few messages that start “I was looking at your profile and I noticed …” or something to that extent, and then they just have some generic, irrelevant pitch. They absolutely did not look at my profile. If they had, they would not have bothered contacting me. So, their very first words were a lie.

I’m open to being contacted by strangers on LinkedIn. To some extent, I am interested in how people contact others to see if I can learn. So, I should be thankful that I learned how much I hate this kind of opening, so I will never use it.

I am building software to help onboard sales team new hires by helping them get to demo proficiency fast (if you are interested, here’s a 3 minute video of the DemoWizard).

One of the things we help our clients with is writing a compelling opening. My partner, Brian, calls this a “James Bond” opening. I’m not a salesperson, but I gave a ton of demos at Droplets and Atalasoft (both made developer tools)—I wish Brian had told me this back then, because I love this kind of opening.

Here’s how I try to explain it:

The beginning of a James Bond movie is actually the end of the previous (unmade) movie. We don’t know anything about the back-story of that movie, but now we get to watch the most exciting 10 minutes of it until it ends. Then, we start the next movie—the one we came to see. We know that at some point we’ll see an ending that topped the one we just saw, so we lean forward in anticipation.

For you, the opening is your best customer success story, but just the end. That customer already have a completely set up system, and they are already getting value from it. Start your demo by showing the part of the software that delivers that value and share their results (with permission of course).

Now that you have their attention, you can start your prospect’s story and help them understand how they will get from where they are now to an ending like the one they just saw.

When I worked at Atlassian, we had five company values. The one that is most applicable to me outside of Atlassian is “Be the change you seek”. Even at Atlassian, in our slack, I probably reacted with our custom “Be the change” emoji annoyingly often. But, it wasn’t ironically—I loved that we (as a company and team) embraced the changes that people went out of their way to try to make. Co-CEO Scott Farquhar often started company Town Halls by telling new hires that they were hired to change Atlassian.

Before we were acquired, at Trello, we had a similar value we called “Don’t do Nothing”. It’s not exactly the same. “Be the change you seek” says that you should work hard to fix broken things you care about. “Don’t Do Nothing” was asking you to take a proportionate action to the problem, but not “nothing”—this could just be reporting it.

They both functioned in the same way with regards to who was responsible for improving the company—you were.