We Built a Financial Solver That Protects Jobs. Then We Tried to Break It 1.1 Billion Times.
The Problem Nobody Wants to Solve A company is running out of money. The runway is eight months. The board says cut costs or die. The default answer is layoffs. Pick 87 people. Walk them out. The m...

Source: DEV Community
The Problem Nobody Wants to Solve A company is running out of money. The runway is eight months. The board says cut costs or die. The default answer is layoffs. Pick 87 people. Walk them out. The math works: fewer salaries, longer runway. But the people who stay carry survivor's guilt, institutional knowledge walks out the door, and the company that was supposed to be "family" just proved it wasn't. We asked a different question: what if everyone took a small, temporary pay cut instead? Not forced. Not uniform. Each person declares the maximum percentage they're willing to give. An algorithm distributes the burden fairly, respects every individual's limit, and extends the runway. Nobody loses their job. This is Seuil. French for "threshold." The threshold where individual sacrifice becomes collective strength. The Constraint That Makes It Hard Here's the thing about this algorithm. It has one rule that cannot bend: βi : adjustment_i β€ declared_threshold_i Every person's adjustment must