9 ms·
Maybe it's just the segment I'm in, but I feel like Salesforce was hiring pretty hard up until recently. They wouldn't be the only company to go from a hiring s
by dan-0 4y ago
Maybe it's just the segment I'm in, but I feel like Salesforce was hiring pretty hard up until recently. They wouldn't be the only company to go from a hiring spree to layoffs that quickly over the last quarter.
We really need to lock this absurdity down and increase severance requirements for large companies heavily. It's one thing to gamble risk for the company, it's something completely different to gamble employee livelihood when you're signaling job security by hiring.
- coredog64 4y agoWARN Act already exists and has state level analogs that strengthen it to some extent. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retrai...
- alistairSH 4y agoWARN doesn't apply if... - layoff results in fewer than 50 workers losing their jobs at a single employment site - If 50 to 499 workers lose their jobs and that number is less than 33% of the employer's total, active workforce at a single employment site These seem to let some* tech companies off the hook. * Those that are highly remote or distributed.
- symlinkk 4y agoIf you do that companies will be more reluctant to hire, since they’ll have to factor in the risk of paying a hefty severance.
- urfullofsht 4y ago[dead]
- shafyy 4y agoThat's the whole point
- dinkumthinkum 4y agoDoes that really make sense if layoffs only happen a minority of the time after hiring sprees?
- chucksmash 4y agoIf the answer to "am I likely to have to lay this person off soon?" isn't "probably not" then it's good that the company becomes more circumspect in hiring. The other side of the token is that such a guarantee would help convince more people to accept an offer. I'd personally be hesitant to switch to a less stable job right now, and getting an offer yanked or immediately laid off with minimal severance would be brutal for many. A company providing "we changed our mind" insurance would retire a lot of risk for job seekers - and, if things are going well, it costs them essentially nothing to do.
- dantheman 4y agoWhy do you want to make it harder for people to get hired?
- chucksmash 4y agoI've laid out my thinking above, which part was unclear? Many people taking a job are leaving some other job or passing up on other offers to do so. Imposing a cost on employers when they pull a "whoopsie daisy" and rescind offers or immediately lay off a new employee seems like a reasonable trade off to me.
- water-your-self 4y agoThats the point
- neon_electro 4y agoDo you like the current status quo where employers are not reluctant to hire, and they're just as likely to lay folks off? Where's the efficiency for employee or employer?
- sokoloff 4y agoI like it more than the (admittedly extreme) situation in France. There could be a happy medium, but going far enough down the road to making it hard to fire makes it hard to get hired.
- mattkrause 4y agoI feel like there's a fairly big difference in effects between: - "If we hire this specific person, we might be stuck with them for a while" and - "If we build out this entire department, we can't close it down on a whim"
- sokoloff 4y agoI think where a lot of companies find themselves is "[last year] we think we're going to grow 20% next year and need to hire 15% to cover that business growth; [this year] oops, we only grew 5%, meaning we should have only grown headcount by 2% and now need to layoff around 10% of our staff to keep our financials sound and protect the jobs of the other 90%" I think that's a lot of repeated applications of the former case.
- scarface74 4y agoNo matter where you work in any major city in the US, whether you are working for a major tech company or your run of the mill enterprise shop, you should be making at least twice the median household income of your local area if you have at least three years of experience. If people making half of what you make can manage to survive and it be homeless or go hungry, you should be able to save enough “to live in a position of f%%l you” (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI). You may not be able to put little Timmy in private school and he may have to gasp go to a public college.
- willcipriano 4y agoThe people downvoting you are suffering from a sort of survivorship bias. Sure, now you'd like the comfort of knowing your employer would have to pay you a ton of money if they laid you off, but what if you were somebody who was recently laid off looking for a job and people were reluctant to hire beacuse of this requirement? It's not clear to me that it's a net win, from my perspective I'd rather be able to easily replace my employer as opposed to them paying me for a few months. A strong labor market has been effective in rasing the real incomes of the bottom 25% or so over the past few years, it's entirely possible that a weaker labor market with stronger workers protections would've been less effective at doing so leaving the very poor worse off.
- rybosworld 4y ago> A strong labor market has been effective in rasing the real incomes of the bottom 25% or so over the past few years Source?
- mym1990 4y agoNot really the source and not specific to the bottom 25(but the bottom 50), based on this graph(https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107) we can see net worth going up quite dramatically. If you look at pretty much any metric of capital(https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=453&eid=813668#snid=813803 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=453&eid=81366...), it has been rising for the bottom 50. How much of that is attributed to income vs government stimulus is unclear.
- bcrosby95 4y agoThat chart basically mirrors real estate prices.
- jfghi 4y agoGaslight handwavy talking point
- andrekandre 4y ago
- dmitryminkovsky 4y agoThat's the point...
- majormajor 4y agoWould the overall economy be worse off if companies hadn't gone nuts with hiring in 2020/2021? Does "more reluctant" here = "more thoughtful"? I'm sure you could take it too far, but I'm highly skeptical that we're in any sort of optimal situation today.
- wintogreen74 4y ago>> since they’ll have to factor in the risk of paying a hefty severance Typically there is not a hefty severance paid by most companies though. There's some restructuring costs and lots of disruption though.
- llampx 4y agoThere was a slide deck by Sequioa going around recently, wherein one of the points was that the companies that cut costs hard and fast at the beginning of the recession were more likely to survive to the end of it. Either that or they see something the rest of us don't when looking at economic data (a long recession).
- bink 4y agoThat's the general consensus, especially around YC companies. Didn't they send out warnings early last year suggesting people cut early and deep? I really don't think Salesforce falls into that category though. They aren't going out of business any time soon and their revenue may not even drop if there were a recession.
- berkes 4y agoWhy would their revenue not drop? Typically, revenue suffers if either clients downgrade or stop their contracts. Or go out of business. Is Salesforce in a position or niche where that doesn't apply?
- __coaxialcabal 4y agohttps://content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Adapting_to_Endure_May_2022.pdf https://content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Adapt...
- Eumenes 4y agoSeverance requirements are not an entitlement. It'll make hiring harder than it already is.
- mr_00ff00 4y agoIt’s all about trade-offs and I think it’s worth it. I’d rather it be harder to get a job, but have higher job security when you get it.
- Eumenes 4y agoIf I'm fired/laid off, I want free money too, but come on - companies already fund unemployment programs. The government should keep their dirty hands off severance and stop regulating employment within tech/software biz. Alot of these companies have given out very generous packages. These aren't low wage factory workers. These are highly paid/well compensated white collar workers, probably making 2x the median US income. They'll be okay. Look into how hard it is to fire someone in Germany post trial period (Probezeit).
- AbrahamParangi 4y agoThat seems like a deal that adversely affects the people at the bottom of the stack, so to speak, in favor of people in the bottom-middle.
- ejb999 4y ago>>I’d rather it be harder to get a job, but have higher job security when you get it. If you were out of work, 3 months behind on your mortgage, and wondering if you have enough money saved to keep your kids fed until you get another paycheck - I doubt you would make the same statement.
- dantheman 4y agoThen choose companies that offer that, you can sign a long contract. Or avoid companies that are rapidly growing. Why should you force your preference on everyone else?
- fatnoah 4y agoSalesforce is giving a minimum of 5 months severance to affected people. That's not too shabby.
- peanuty1 4y agoIncluding accelerated RSU vesting?
- fatnoah 4y agoThe letter doesn't explicitly say (I'll way to hear from friends at CRM to get actual details) but their SEC filing mentions stock-based compensation as an associated cost of the layoffs, so it sounds like accelerated vesting might be happening.
- kerbs 4y agoI read that they will technically be on payroll until late March. If that's the case, it's not so much accelerated vesting as it is vesting while not being "employed". So same result, to some extent.
- fatnoah 4y agoFWIW, I was laid off earlier in the year, and was put on garden leave for 60 days. My vesting stopped immediately, even though I was still employed for 2 months.
- time_to_smile 4y agoI really hope that I get laid off in the first round of these layoffs where everyone gets good severance. My current worry is that the first round of layoff at my first company will get 4 months severance, I'll miss that round, and 2 months later get laid off with only 2 months severance. This would of course mean that my severance ends at the same times as the first group but I had to work an additional 2 months.
- 4y ago
- Spivak 4y agoAt minimum if you're gonna lay someone off then any employee benefit that required they worked there for x months/years should be immediately paid out.