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What you wrote doesn't make rational sense to me: 1. Why would Shopify willingly hire and train lots of people during the pandemic if they knew they'd let them
by jupp0r 4y ago
What you wrote doesn't make rational sense to me:
1. Why would Shopify willingly hire and train lots of people during the pandemic if they knew they'd let them go afterwards anyways? This makes no economic sense at all, they'd be better off to silently burn that money and not take the reputation hit.
2. You assume that layoff decisions take your individual job and situation into account. This is not the case in practice, especially so in quota driven mass layoffs.
- vgel 4y agoThe argument isn't that they did evil stuff for no reason. The argument is they "bet" that growth would continue at pandemic levels, and hired to support that growth, with the plan that if the growth didn't continue and the new people weren't needed, they'd just lay them off. The opinion is that, if that was the plan (which Tobi's layoff post seems to confirm), that it's a crass way to operate. People uprooted their lives to work there. They quit old jobs, maybe moved cities or countries. Of course layoffs happen and companies make mistakes, but deliberately setting up a strategy with a high possibility of failure ("a bet") and then hiring people knowing that they'll be laid off if things outside their control don't go right in the near future--that's sort of crass. Obviously no exec was twirling their mustache and saying "find me Jim, we'll fire him first because I hate him". It was just a plan set up, seemingly, without regard for the outsized risk it placed on new employees relative to the possibility of the business itself failing. New employees that would disproportionately be affected by a layoff, by nature of being new employees.