LeadTime#22 - Laying Off a Good Developer

How do you support a good performer you must let go while maintaining team trust and delivery? What approaches help the departing employee, team morale and your leadership credibility?

Hi, this newsletter is a weekly challenge for engineers thinking about management. I'm Péter Szász, writing about Engineering Leadership and training aspiring and first-time managers on this path.

In this newsletter, I pose a weekly EM challenge and leave it as a puzzle for you to think about before the next issue, where I share my thoughts on it.

Last Week’s Challenge

Last week, we imagined a situation where a company-wide cost-cutting layoff impacted our team, and we would need to say goodbye to John, a junior developer who’s performing according to expectations. Read the details here if you missed it.

I'll approach this difficult situation with my usual Goals - Risks - Questions structure:

Goals to Achieve

Own the decision. While the fact that cost-cutting is necessary to save the company was not your choice, how you implement it is. This is not the time to negotiate, delay, or ask for alternatives. Your director expected one name, and you needed to step up with clear leadership. The decision is made: it's John. Now execute it with dignity and professionalism.

Support John through this transition. This is one of the most important goals. Do everything within your power to make this less painful for him. Be transparent about why this is happening, offer your network for references, provide strong recommendations, and be flexible about his departure timeline. Show him the same respect you'd want in his situation.

Maintain team trust through transparency. The team will be watching how you handle this situation. Your approach here can strengthen or destroy your leadership credibility. Be honest about the financial situation while staying forward-looking. Frame this as a sacrifice for company survival and stability, not arbitrary cost-cutting for investor benefits. The world around us is changing rapidly, and resilient companies have to be careful to ensure they are ready for whatever comes.

Restructure work without missing delivery commitments. Review current and upcoming tasks to ensure John's departure doesn't derail the team. This might mean reassigning Mara to different projects, postponing some work, or redistributing responsibilities. Use this as an opportunity to eliminate lower-priority work entirely.

Shift focus from the past to the future. After processing the immediate impact, help the team channel their energy into fighting for the company's success. Connect their work to business outcomes - show them how their efforts contribute to stable financials.

Risks to Avoid

Making this about you. Letting someone go is hard enough if they are underperforming — firing an innocent victim is brutal. Still, regardless of how difficult it feels for you, it is much harder on John. Don't let your discomfort or guilt become the focus. John might be angry, disappointed, or critical of leadership decisions. Your job is to acknowledge his feelings, provide support, and maintain professionalism — not to argue, defend, or justify beyond the basic facts.

Under-preparing for the conversation. Know all the details: severance package, notice period, remaining PTO, stock options, benefits continuation. Have this information ready or know exactly when you'll get it. This isn't a discussion you want to fumble through.

Promising what you can't deliver. Avoid making commitments you can't keep in the heat of the situation. Don't say you'll "look into options again" or promise specific severance improvements without knowing what's possible. Be honest about your constraints while maximizing support within them.

Letting the team’s narrative spiral out of control. There's a huge risk of "us versus them" thinking: complaints about incompetent leadership, sales failures, or other departments’ perceived mistakes. This builds cynicism and hurts collaboration. In team settings, you can address this directly by focusing on what your team can indeed control and how everyone is doing the best they can toward company recovery. However, in the safety of private one-on-ones, you can let people vent and release some steam; these are stressful times. Acknowledge how they feel without validating their statements.

Timeline mismanagement. John should absolutely hear this from you first, not through office gossip, a different manager, or HR. Once you tell him, you need to manage the team announcement carefully. Respect his privacy preferences, but avoid a prolonged uncertainty that hurts team planning and morale. The team should also hear this from you first, not in a company-wide announcement or colleagues’ rumors.

Ignoring existing insecurities and survivor's guilt. Mara, as the other junior developer, will be particularly affected by John’s departure. Be explicit about why she's staying, what her contributions are that you’re counting on, while acknowledging that nobody can guarantee indefinite stability. Focus on current work needs and how her skills align with these.

5 Questions

What are the facts that I need before the conversation with John? Fine-tune and practice your "elevator pitch" for why this had to happen, so you can remain clear, collected, and consistent. Work with HR and your director to understand every detail of his departure package. What's the notice period? Severance amount? Benefits continuation? Stock option treatment? Can he keep or purchase his work laptop? Anticipate his questions and have clear answers. This isn't the time to say "I'll find out and get back to you" about the most basic logistics, but make sure you don’t delay the talk too much waiting for the last details.

How can I maximize support for John within my constraints? What's in your power to offer? Can you extend his notice period? Reduce his final workload so he can focus on job search? Connect him with your network for job opportunities? Write a strong LinkedIn recommendation? Be specific about what you can commit to offering beyond the generic “let me know if I can help with something”.

What work needs to be redistributed — or eliminated entirely? Don't just shift John's tasks to others; use this as an opportunity to reassess priorities. With reduced capacity, what should you stop doing? Which projects can be postponed or cancelled? How do you ensure this doesn't just increase everyone else's workload unsustainably?

How do I frame this to maintain team motivation? The team needs to understand this is about company survival, not individual performance. Connect their work to business outcomes: how does what they're building help the company recover? Besides this purpose, can you increase their autonomy or mastery within their day-to-day? (These three areas are known to motivate creative workers.)

What's my retention strategy for key team members? This layoff and the bad financials might trigger others to start interviewing. Who are your most critical, top-performing team members, and what would you do if they gave notice? Are there retention conversations you should have proactively?

The Leadership Test

This is one of the hardest challenges in management.

How you handle it will define how your team sees you as a leader. The goal isn't to make everyone happy; that's impossible. The goal is to act with integrity, support those affected with dignity, and guide your team through the crisis toward a better future.

Your team is watching. Show them what leadership looks like when things get tough.

This Week’s Challenge

Thanks, Rodrigo, for suggesting the question that inspired the following challenge:

You're leading a platform team of 8 engineers supporting infrastructure and tooling for your organization's 80+ developers. Your director is evaluating a new observability platform that would replace your current monitoring stack - a mix of Prometheus, Grafana, and some old proprietary in-house tools.

The vendor demo went well. The platform promises unified metrics, logs, and traces with "minimal operational overhead." Annual cost is $240K, which is more or less what you're spending on your current setup when you factor in hosting and engineering time.

The vendor claims their platform is "self-service" and should reduce your operational burden significantly. But you know that any new tool comes with its own setup and operational requirements: user management, configuration, integration maintenance, and the inevitable support requests when teams can't find what they need.

Your director needs your input: How many engineers would you need to dedicate to this new platform?

Think about what your goals would be and what risks you'd like to avoid in this difficult situation. I'll share my thoughts next week. If you don't want to miss it, sign up here to receive those and similar weekly managerial challenges as soon as they are published:

Until then, here's a small piece of inspiration about communicating layoffs:

Did you enjoy this episode? Do you know someone who could benefit from thinking about similar challenges? I need a favor from you then: please, spread the word. Recommend LeadTime in Substack, post to your company Slack, send over to a friend or colleague, share with someone who’s leading engineering teams or is considering this path. Word of mouth is the best way to reach interested readers.

Thank you and see you next week,

Péter