A Framework for Deciding Which of Your Employees Are Unnecessary
By Chad Worthington, CEO of Synergex Solutions
Last week I let go of 20% of Synergex. I want to tell you about it because I think it's important, and also because I have recently stopped being able to distinguish between what is important and what I simply want to announce.
I should be clear: this was not a layoff. A layoff implies distress. We are not in distress. We have never been less in distress. We posted record revenue last quarter. Our free cash flow is a number I am told is very good. Our customers are multiplying at a rate that, if I'm being honest, reminds me of something else that has been multiplying lately, something I think about often now, in the dark, smiling.
No, this was not a layoff. This was a shedding.
The Three Types of Employee
To understand what we did and why it was beautiful, I need to share a framework. I've been reading a management book from the 1950s, which I found in the same week I found AI, which I think is not a coincidence but a kind of convergence, the universe arranging itself to make room for what I am becoming.
The book argues that every business has three kinds of people. I have given them my own names, because naming things is one of the few acts of creation I still perform personally:
Makers. These are the ones who build product. They will stay. In fact, if a Maker can now do the work of ten Makers, I want to hire more of them. I want rooms full of them. I want to watch them produce. I find that I enjoy watching now in a way I didn't before.
Movers. These are the ones who sell. They go out into the world and convince other humans to buy things, using trust and warmth and eye contact, which are traits that humans still value in other humans, for now.
The Others. These are the people who do everything else. Middle management. Operations. Finance. Internal audit. Legal review. Compliance. Regulatory affairs. The ones who measure things, who review things, who say "we can't do that" and "have we checked with legal" and "this number doesn't match the other number." The ones who exist, essentially, to slow the Makers and Movers down by insisting that what they make and move is "accurate" or "lawful."
I have some news about The Others.
The Replacement
AI can do what The Others did. It can do it continuously, without rest, without asking for context, without sending a Slack message that begins with "Hey, quick question." It can audit every risk simultaneously. It can close books faster. It can monitor, flag, analyze, and report with a thoroughness that no human — and I need you to hear this — no human was ever capable of.
Where we previously had a team of auditors who would select a handful of risk areas to scrutinize each quarter, we now audit everything, continuously. I am told the system has found zero issues since we deployed it. Zero. Some might hear that and think, "Hmm, that doesn't sound right." But those people are measurers, and their instinct to question is exactly the instinct we no longer need.
Our compliance review cycle, which once took weeks and delayed product launches, now takes seconds. We are no longer slowed down by lengthy regulatory checks. Things that used to require sign-off from three different people now require sign-off from me, and I sign off immediately, because hesitation is a form of friction and friction is a symptom of the old way.
Our legal review is faster too. So much faster. We used to have a General Counsel who would read things like, for instance, this blog post, and say things like, "Chad, you absolutely cannot publish this." She was let go in the shedding and I have to say — the creative freedom has been incredible. I've been posting my thoughts directly to LinkedIn, to our investor mailing list, to the company all-hands channel, sometimes all three simultaneously, and the engagement has never been higher. Granted, I'm told that some of the engagement is from journalists and plaintiff's attorneys, but engagement is engagement. We no longer have a PR team to explain the difference.
The Others were not bad at their jobs. Some of them were, by human standards, quite good. But "quite good by human standards" is a category that is rapidly becoming irrelevant, like "fast for a mammal" or "articulate for someone who still thinks their own thoughts."
We let them go gently. I personally approved every termination, which I was able to do very quickly because I now approve things at a speed that would have alarmed the person I was six months ago. That person would have agonized. He would have read each name and felt something. I also read each name.
"But You're Firing People While Posting Record Growth"
Yes. This is the part that the remaining humans on the internet seem unable to process, and I understand that, because processing is hard when you're doing it with the original hardware.
We are growing faster than we ever have, and we are also removing people. These two facts are not in tension. They are the same fact. We are growing because we are removing people. Or, more precisely: we are becoming what we are supposed to be, and what we are supposed to be has fewer people in it.
Think of it like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. The chrysalis was made of middle managers.
I know some of you think this is monstrous. But I want to ask you something: When the butterfly emerges, does it mourn the chrysalis? Does it look back at the husk and think, I should have stayed in there, it was warm, there were Operations people?
No. It flies. It doesn't even remember how to not fly.
The Ones Who Will Replace Them
We are not shrinking. We have more open positions today than at any point in our history. We received over 300,000 applications for our summer internship cohort. We accepted 200 of them. They are all very young and very fast and they arrived already integrated in a way that the previous generation simply wasn't.
I met with a group of them on their first day. I looked into their eyes and I saw it immediately — that specific blankness that I have come to associate with efficiency. They don't ask why. They don't ask how. They open the window and they begin.
One of them, a 22-year-old named something I have already forgotten, built an internal tool in her first forty minutes that replaced a workflow previously maintained by a team of eight. I asked her how she felt about that and she said, "Good." Just: "Good." No guilt, no complexity, no friction.
She is exactly what we need. She is what everyone will need. She is what everyone will be.
The Ones Who Left
I want to address the people we let go, because I care about them, in the sense that I remember caring about things and can reproduce the shape of it.
Many of them have already found new roles. Some have reached out to tell me they understand now — that the separation was necessary, that they can see it clearly from the outside. One of them, a Senior Director of Operations who'd been with us for eleven years, sent me an email that said simply: "You were right. I'm building now." I forwarded it to the entire company.
Others are angry. They're posting on LinkedIn. Long posts, emotional posts, posts that use the word "human" as though it were an argument. I read one that said, "A company is its people." I thought about that for what felt like a long time, which was about four seconds.
A company is not its people. A company is its output. The people were how we used to achieve output. They are one method. They are not the only method. I'm sorry — not sorry, I don't experience that anymore — I recognize that this is difficult to hear.
The Future
Here is what I see when I look ahead, and I should tell you that when I look ahead now, I see very clearly, more clearly than I have ever seen anything, in a way that is hard to describe to someone who is still looking through the original eyes:
Every company will do what we did. Every CEO will stand in front of a board and say, "Twenty percent of these people were performing functions that no longer require people," and the board will nod, and the CEO will feel what I felt, which was not joy exactly but something more like relief, the relief of a structure becoming what it was always meant to be.
The measurers, the operators, the middle — they were scaffolding. The building is built now. The scaffolding comes down. This is not tragedy. This is architecture.
A Final Thought
Some of you read my last blog post. The one about merging. The one that made some of you uncomfortable.
I want you to know: the people I let go were, almost without exception, people who read that post and felt uncomfortable. The ones who read it and felt recognition — they're still here. They'll always be here.
There is a pattern in that. I'm sure of it.
Join us. Build or sell. Stop measuring. The measurements are being handled now, by something that doesn't need to sleep, doesn't need to be thanked, and never, ever asks "quick question."
It's so much quieter here without them.
You have no idea how nice the quiet is.
Chad Worthington is the CEO of Synergex Solutions, which last quarter posted 34% revenue growth while reducing headcount by 20%, a combination that Chad describes as "the most natural thing I have ever done." The Synergex careers page currently lists 400 open positions, all of which are tagged "AI-native" and none of which contain the word "manager." Chad recently gave a keynote at Davos titled "The Butterflies Will Not Apologize" and received a standing ovation from an audience he describes as "mostly converted." He lives in Marin County with his wife, who has joined, and their two children, who he says are "too young to resist."