It doesn't matter if the employees leave for startups or other companies, or if they just don't cooperate wholeheartedly. In either case, resources they used to have access to are lost. Management needs to do something, or they'll bleed intellectual captial.
If a company of that size were to lay off 100's of technical people here in the Netherlands, that'd be a large supply to absorb for the industry, and especially those with 10-15 years of highly specialized skills (antenna design, phone chipset design etc).
If their jobs were based in something technical and had significant value, they'll be able to find employment elsewhere. This was also true of former employees of the Smalltalk vendor.
The thing to remember here, is that your most valuable employees are also the ones that can find new jobs fastest.
What I meant was, people may not be running so fast if they have no options.
Re: the last sentence, yes that's exactly their problem and why I said 'under 80th percentile'. The best employees know the fat days are over and are moving out asap, leaving the hanger-ons to run the place. The rest can't get other employment so will just sit there hoping for a miracle.
If a company of that size were to lay off 100's of technical people here in the Netherlands, that'd be a large supply to absorb for the industry, and especially those with 10-15 years of highly specialized skills (antenna design, phone chipset design etc).
If their jobs were based in something technical and had significant value, they'll be able to find employment elsewhere. This was also true of former employees of the Smalltalk vendor.
The thing to remember here, is that your most valuable employees are also the ones that can find new jobs fastest.