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Startup valued at $7B gets flack as CEO lays off hundreds over Zoom
- aaron695 5y agoWelcome to remote work? This is what everyone wanted. It's not going to be like normal work exactly, it allows efficiencies like these. Other than trashy people who are getting told how to feel about it by this article, I think most normal people think this is a good way of doing it. How do you want it done, HR and tissue boxes and virtual hugs?
- BoorishBears 5y agoFor anyone who hasn't seen it, what made it brutal was that only people who were fired were in the call. Which seems incredibly stupid. Like why not have the call with everyone, then immediately follow up with who's fired (so people don't sit around questioning if they're gone)
- syspec 5y agoWell, he did say everyone on this call is part of the unlucky group and is fired effective immediately. I think it's better than having the call with everyone (even though the whole situation still sucks, and the timing is terrible) They really couldn't wait 1 month? It's pretty tough to find a job between now and Jan 1st
- mcraiha 5y agoI assume that guy cares more about Q4 than people.
- ipaddr 5y agoSign of a quick decline.
- questiondev 5y agothis is correct. it’s a sign a company is in trouble
- joshxyz 5y agoI sometimes wonder if part of the CEO job in high valued companies is being the pinpoint person to blame whenever there are hard decisions the shareholders has to agreed upon. Like, you're basically paid to suck it up.
- coolspot 5y agoLaid off got 4 weeks of severance and 3 months of paid health insurance coverage.
- BoorishBears 5y agoI would much rather get a company wide call, then a private message, than a patronizing group firing. Usually the issue is a long delay between saying people will be laid off, and laying them off, but in this case the delay could have been minimal. - The use of the word unlucky also made it extra insulting. They're not unlucky, his company made bad moves. Even if the market changed, it was on his company to build in resiliency.
- sokoloff 5y agoThis move can reasonably be viewed as creating resiliency for the remaining employees (which the article suggests is 91% of the company).
- BoorishBears 5y agoI'm guessing the morale hit from going viral for this is probably going to undo any hoped good... - And for the record, the way I saw this was a TikTok of an employee recording the call before he even said the word fired, so I assume most people already knew what was up. But based on the placement of (imo justified) profanity, it wasn't known that the call was exclusive to the fired. So in a way they probably felt like they had just been fired by receiving a poisoned zoom link, not even the call that it lead to, if that makes sense.
- rajacombinator 5y agoIf you’re gonna do this, hard to see many ways to make it less painful.
- willcipriano 5y agoThey have really different messaging for the people they are keeping I imagine, they have to convince them to do the work of all the people they laid off for no additional pay so they can't really talk about how they are failing as a business, as people will figure out too quickly that they won't get rewarded for that effort.
- silisili 5y agoI dunno, maybe I've been around the business too long and been jaded. Aside from the opening, this is how I'd prefer to be let go. I notice CEOs like to talk about themselves as if anyone cares, in this case about his crying and having to do it twice. That part can go. But otherwise, just be forward and direct, which I think he was. And I'm not sure the whiny 'oh fuck you dude' is warranted. The market is blazing right now, and you have 3 months of benefits. Anyone who sees this as a problem probably quite frankly was on the chopping block already.
- Aurelius3 5y agoI dislike the crying part as well, but I think I can see the reason Ceo's talk about themselves like that, they are paid to act a certain way and attract as much flack as possible to themselves rather then the company.
- kumarvvr 5y agoIf you want to work from home on Zoom, be prepared to be fired from home on zoom. After 2 years of COVID and the movement and fight for work from home, I guess its time people accept that remote work means, remote firing.
- freewilly1040 5y agoEvery time a story like this comes up, the method of bad news delivery gets critiqued. Being laid off is bad news. It’s going to sting no matter what. Every method has its drawbacks and advantages. Personally, hearing the news “over zoom” sounds much less bad than having to go into an office for the day just to get fired.
- throwuxiytayq 5y agoThese past few years have been great for the autism community. I'm glad all of these CEOs are coming forward and letting everyone know that it's OK to struggle with self-awareness and emotional processing. Sometimes you fire up a zoom call with 700 people and do something perplexing and embarrassing, but it could happen to anyone.
- Dracophoenix 5y agoThe Onion just can't catch a break, can it? Reading this article is like reading a transcript from a lost episode of Silicon Valley.
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- jollybean 5y ago[flagged]
- globalise83 5y ago"The company also hired 7,000 people during the pandemic" Does anyone know why a digital mortgage lender would need to hire 7000 people?
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- browningstreet 5y agoFormer CTO of a mortgage LOS here. The mortgage industry is an offshoot of the real estate industry, and has a similar attitude … everything can scale with more bodies. The digital and loan part isn’t the bottleneck, the “dealing with applicants” and “shuffling documentation” gets more workers since automating the back end does little to relieve the manual and exception processes anchored between the humans on the front end.
- gxespino 5y agoEven with solutions like Handl.ai, the "shuffling documentation" portion is still a bottleneck? No affiliation to Handl, btw.
- ViViDboarder 5y agoSales, compliance, risk and underwriting, appraisal? Not sure, but I imagine these roles would be internal and some may need to be in local markets.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y agoDuring the Zoom call, he should have shown the "Better" logo and broken the ice with, "It could be worse!"