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> So why does their management - which should be able to read the writing on the wall, since that's part of their job - not issue a strict hiring freeze [...] W
by Closi 4y ago
> So why does their management - which should be able to read the writing on the wall, since that's part of their job - not issue a strict hiring freeze [...] Why do they go from hiring to firing in the blink of an eye?
They did have a hiring freeze, and didn't really go from hiring to firing in the blink of an eye:
* In May they froze hiring for engineers and low-level data scientists.
* In July they announced that there would be restructures, and asked managers to start identifying weak performers.
* In September they extended the freeze to all areas and announced that they would be reducing labour budgets for teams, and restructuring.
In all probability, this engineer was probably considered 'on-shoring' rather than a hire so slipped through the hiring freeze (headcount figure stays the same, we are just moving someone on-shore) but then didn't escape the corporate redundancy. Although this individual story is awful, at the scale of 12,000 layoffs unfortunately there will inevitably be instances where the circumstances are poor.
- bluepizza 4y agoDoesn't have to inevitable, though. They literally have all the data.
- largepeepee 4y agoThat's the problem with just reading data reports at scale. Hiring 30k people so recently then firing almost half of them the next year, even filtering a tiny quarter of a percent is going to create outliers who get affected with serious life changing events.
- kitsune_ 4y agoIt's really more about whether the decision makers at that level care about this kind of stuff or not.
- raspberry1337 4y agoLiterally, if we lived in a literally perfect world none would have to be literally fired either. Yet, here we literally are.
- Closi 4y ago> Doesn't have to inevitable, though. They literally have all the data. Even if you have all the data, lets say there is a 4 person team being reduced to 3 during this redundancy - What do you do? Fire Anne instead of Peter purely because Peter joined the team more recently? Sure that sounds more fair for Peter, but it's less fair for Anne.
- hooby 4y agoIt probably would have been cheaper and less effort to make sure the hiring freeze actually properly works as intended - rather than interviewing, hiring, relocating and firing someone (including relocation and severance packages) for just two days of work.
- Closi 4y agoEh, large redundancies are usually planned semi-confidentially and executed immediately for obvious reasons, which makes these sort of things pretty inevitable. The obvious reasons aren't just from a corporate perspective, it's also for an employee welfare perspective - Sometimes it's better that 13% of people immediately know rather than 100% of employees worrying about their job before 13% are eventually sacked.
- Tao3300 4y ago> Although this individual story is awful, at the scale of 12,000 layoffs unfortunately there will inevitably be instances where the circumstances are poor. Basically 1 layoff is a tragedy, 12K is a statistic.