29 ms·

Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

888 points by rkachowski 4y ago

maerF0x0 4y ago
Pretty much a text form of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ > Silicon Valley - Gavin firing Nucleus
pontifier 4y ago
[flagged]
ebiester 4y ago
The part I thought was the best was this: "This was not an easy decision to make. It’s weighed heavily on me for the past month, keeping me up at night and nearly causing me to cancel the exec team’s offsite, even though Bad Bunny’s appearance fee was only 50 percent refundable. Let’s not mince words, though; the accountability for this decision rests with me. The consequences, on the other hand, rest with you, but so does a pretty generous COBRA package." Accountability comes with consequences. What are the consequences?
- thewildginger 4y ago
  Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
  - yvdriess 4y ago
    Glad I'm not the only one who read that blog in Zap Brannigan's voice.
    - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
      The quote was Lord Farquhard (not pronounced Fuckwad) in Shrek I, IIRC.
      - selimthegrim 4y ago
        Who was patterned after Disney’s Michael Eisner IIRC.
        oblio 4y ago
        I did a quick check of his education. I think the US is at 12 years + 4 for university, that's 16 in total. Actually, I think kindergarten is another 2 years. So that's 18 years. All of them in private institutions. At current tuition rates, all of the places he went to cost about $60k per year. So that's about $1m just in his education...
  - reducesuffering 4y ago
    "Make no mistake, though they are the ones leaving, it is I who must remain, and bear the heavy burden of their failure." https://youtu.be/u48vYSLvKNQ?t=44 https://youtu.be/u48vYSLvKNQ?t=44
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  I think he meant accountability as in accounts, as in bank.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > so does a pretty generous COBRA package I had to look that up, it appears to be a USA thing that "gives workers and their families who lose their health benefits the right to choose to continue group health benefits provided by their group health plan for limited periods of time" (1) Nothing to do with "Cabinet Office Briefing Room A". Ugh. Health care that is contingent upon employment, is a social ill. 1) https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/health-plans/cobra https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/health-plans/cobra
- rurp 4y ago
  Same here. I can't believe the cringy, "I take full responsibility (but no consequences)" line has become a standard part of the CEO layoff announcement. Saying you take responsibility, without actually sacrificing anything or really facing any consequences at all is so obviously slimy and patronizing, I don't know why anyone thinks it's a good thing to say. Actually it's even worse than no consequences; often times these layoffs give the CEO more money. Their compensation is typically heavily in stock and these layoffs often raise the stock price, directly increasing the CEO's net worth. Taking "full responsibility" indeed.
DieBruderBauer 4y ago
>And suddenly all your salaries and dental work hang like millstones chafing the supple neck of my stock compensation package. Oof. This guy knows how to write. And he's funny to boot! May consider adding my name to his Patreon list...
- Semaphor 4y ago
  Here’s his site for more to read: https://www.mikelacher.com/ https://www.mikelacher.com/ And his articles on the linked site: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/authors/mike-lacher https://www.mcsweeneys.net/authors/mike-lacher
sgu999 4y ago
Really love the tone! I can imagine that the ones calling for layoffs have always been the stingy kind. They just have a better case now... Execs are just obeying whomever has the strongest voice to ensure their outrageous pays remain unchanged.
hcks 4y ago
[flagged]
gorgoiler 4y ago
I grind away at our codebase day in day out causing me immense personal anxiety and burnout risk and all for what? Well! The honest answer is because software engineering is an incredibly satisfying intellectual pursuit. So satisfying that outside of work in my spare time I literally do it for free, giving away my work to strangers as free / open source software. Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I have to feed my family. But also I have to then see that I’m getting a big share of the pie too, because otherwise someone else will be eating some pie that was rightfully mine, and that feels wrong. Would my C-level pals get their $15m exit without my work? Maybe, but it’s less likely. Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? No. So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary? Waterfall edge marble kitchen island indeed.
- kewpiedoll99 4y ago
  > why is ... mine [only] around about a year’s worth of salary? this complaint is almost as tone deaf as the satire. poor you. i was laid off, and only got a month's severance.
- sagaro 4y ago
  >Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? They tried this at twitter. But twitter survived. Turned out for KTLO not many people are actually required. Also, when you are over staffed, employees have enough free time to get political, run slack channels, do activism and in general reduce the entire org's productivity. Most companies were stuck in this phase the last few years, with Coinbase and a couple of other companies being brave enough to say they don't want their employees engaging in workplace activism. This whole macro-economic change and the twitter success after getting rid of 30% of its employees, has now given these companies an opportunity to follow without getting singled out. If they don't do it now, and do it 6 months later they will get called out as demons. Now since everyone is doing it, it is not that bad a PR hit.
- mshake2 4y ago
  >So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary? Honestly? Because 1) you are very replaceable and 2) you have a very low chance in succeeding at organizing any kind of group/union action. If either of those two facts were different, you would have more leverage. But they aren't so you don't.
arcturus17 4y ago
Great satire, very poignant and entertaining.
mshake2 4y ago
What ever will those TikTok tech workers do now that they can't stream their comped meals and coffee breaks and afternoon relaxation massages?[0] If only it was illegal for The Man to fire these valuable employees! 0. https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1617534649508716544 https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1617534649508716544
- Crusoe123 4y ago
  It's not a TikTok tech worker. It's a recruiter depicting an unrealistic - missing all the stress etc - view of the workplace to attract inexperienced employees.As ones with experience mostly don't give a crap about these types amenities. That video was done for The Man, not for the employees well being. And apparently The Man was able to sell you this depiction of the work place so you can now feel smug about all those layoffs. Good for you I guess, you independent thinker!
  - mshake2 4y ago
    She wasn't a recruiter, she was a Partner Services Program Manager[0]. And there's dozens of videos just like these of employees flexing their perks daily while appearing to do very little work. It's been going on for awhile. If you're asserting that it's all propaganda, you're going to need to give some sources and not half-baked conspiracy theories. 0. https://news.yahoo.com/former-google-employee-documents-day-131158676.html https://news.yahoo.com/former-google-employee-documents-day-...
    - Crusoe123 4y ago
      OK I mixed with a different video that people mocked on twitter. First one was bragging about amenities like in your post and second one is layoff - https://urlebird.com/video/def-not-an-ideal-start-to-2023-but-staying-optimistic-that-the-i-7191193142157151534/ https://urlebird.com/video/def-not-an-ideal-start-to-2023-bu... . Here it is indeed a recruiter. Do you honestly believe those TikToks were made spontaneously and they depict a realistic view of the workplace? It's not a half baked conspiracy theory - it's called a PR strategy and companies have been doing them on social media for as long as they existed. Let me give you the benefit of the doubt. Even if the videos are spontaneous, how can you with a straight face use them to judge a workplace and use them as a metric on the amount of work done? Do you really think social media is a realistic depiction of life? Maybe if you saw a TikTok of how big investors and execs live and how much they would lose (nothing material) by retaining these employees, you would understand the situation better.
zmxz 4y ago
[flagged]
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Hmm, if your employer waits until they have 12000 of you to fire for not doing any work, that is its own kind of incompetence.
  - friend_and_foe 4y ago
    Well, it seems to be less of a PR problem doing the "no hard feelings, business is business and we have to" than firing a handful of people every few months to maintain optimal operation. Probably costs less overall. Laying off a ton of people is less likely to get severe bad will as laying off a few dozen every few weeks for years.
  - zmxz 4y ago
    Why would you apply for a job with employer who is known to overhire and the entry level is low? Does that not speak of incompetence of the employee too? I'm not advocating that boss is good, worker evil. Both are incompetent AF. It's just easy to jump at the boss because boss rich, worker poor.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  A business that can't think of what they should have a massive percentage of their staff do, is a business that has fucking useless bosses.
  - zmxz 4y ago
    And what is your solution? Keep paying people until company goes under? I'm not saying boss is competent, but these posts where worker whines at boss and offers no solution is just stupid. Keep paying dead weight employees, make other useful employees work to make up for the incompetent ones' incompetence and create more problems? There's never a solution in these whiny posts except "omg i found the bad guy and it's this evil boss" - well find the solution too then, how do we move from keeping everyone employed and company afloat. But no, that part we won't read about. We'll close our eyes to Hanlon's razor and attribute to malice what should be attributed to stupidity and incompetence.
kqr 4y ago
> The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face. And so we must make hard choices. Maybe I've hung around in the wrong circles too much recently, but this hit me hard. This is basically how the reasoning behind all top management decisions have been communicated to me in the past year: "There is indeed a clearly better alternative course of action that we should take. You're right in that it would be trivial to adopt and we would all be happier from it, with more satisfied customers. The fact is that's not what we have chosen in reality, so we must shoulder the heavy burden of choosing the inferior alternative and give it our best shot." Way to motivate a decision!
- username_my1 4y ago
  wrong view / comparios ... in a 5% interest rate environment, companies fight for investors money .. if you don't do the cuts and find a way to be efficient investors will put their money somewhere else that's more profitable. this reasoning is pure and simple and correct, you start from the top, not from the fact "they can afford it" because their job is not to spend the money they have their job is to increase value for investors.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    > their job is to increase value for investors Is their job to increase it in the short or the long term? These “I know we’ve been doing great for 3 years, but the past 3 months haven’t been so hot, so we’re going to cut jobs.” Messages seem incredibly shortsighted.
    - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
      Do investors sell if they company income falls for a quarter? I'm guessing yes, and that answers the question of whether the company looks to the short term when seeking only to satisfy investors. The whole system is wrong.
      - Aeolun 4y ago
vintermann 4y ago
Am I paranoid in thinking that recent firings, and the attitude this article satirizes, may be a factor in the current Azure outages that keep me from working right now?
ath3nd 4y ago
What a funny write! Despite it being funny, if it wasn't for the outright satire, it would be virtually indistinguishable from the recent tech layoff messages: Gitpod - https://www.gitpod.io/blog/building-for-the-long-run https://www.gitpod.io/blog/building-for-the-long-run Microsoft (this is maybe the classiest) - https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-focusing-on-our-short-and-long-term-opportunity/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-focusing... Zuck/Meta - https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-message-to-employees/ https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-mes... Stripe - https://stripe.com/en-nl/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email-to-stripe-employees https://stripe.com/en-nl/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons... Spotify - https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-01-23/an-update-on-january-2023-organizational-changes/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-01-23/an-update-on-january... The industry had been, for quite some time, growing both in terms of headcount and compensation, without regards to boundaries, sanity or practicality. With that in mind, it looked like it was only a matter of time for this to happen. However, one cannot help wondering how much influence did profitability and future outlook had to do with it, versus how much it was about regaining control over workers and salaries and about "fixing" the stock price. For me, the biggest crime is the fanatic enthusiasm and we-are-all-a-family narrative these companies were pushing while growing well beyond needed in 2020 through 2021 contrasted with the generic messages they are peddling now when laying off.
- safety1st 4y ago
  Maybe I've lost my heart but it's hard for me to find fault with the way Nadella communicated MSFT's layoffs. They're a business, they need to reallocate capital and headcount, he doesn't shed any crocodile tears, but they are providing above market severance benefits, end of transmission. If I have to be laid off I want it to go something like this.
  - okokwhatever 4y ago
    It's called subjectivism for a reason.
  - pas 4y ago
    The word layoff does not appear in that post. It's word salad for 2 paragraphs. It's bad writing, it's an even worse communique from a CEO. Start with the point. The point is that X percent of the workforce is to be let go. And that it has been already in the works for some time because some people have been let go that day. "some notifications happening today" = we already have a list and we'll go through it as fast as labor laws allow.
roenxi 4y ago
Management needs to be made up of the sort of people who make economically optimum decisions. Without diminishing the horrible experience of being fired; if we have people who purposefully keep tens of thousands of people working on jobs that don't make sense to them, on aggregate society will be much worse for everyone. We have a system that allows people to do unpopular things, like this, because it works better than the alternatives. Dons flak jacket
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  The weirder thing is the overhiring in the first place. So only now the folly detectors are working?
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  >because it works better than the alternatives. Does it?
- mrsuprawsm 4y ago
  it would be nicer if they made economically optimal decisions in the first place, instead of making a bad decision in 2022, firing a shitload of people in 2023, and going "ah whoops our bad". competent operators wouldn't get into this problem in the first place (or, alternatively, these layoffs are also an incompetent decision and the C-levels are simply following the herd)
  - Shish2k 4y ago
    I have a feeling the current actions are economically optimal, and so, they’ll keep happening - if they optimisitcally hire a ton of people, then fire most of them, that’s expensive in the bad years - if they only hire as many people as they need, then they’ll be eaten by the bigger-risk-taking competition in the good years
    - acdha 4y ago
      You also have to look at productivity: if you lay people off you will have disruption and lower productivity with the remaining workers unless it’s something like a fairly isolated subsidiary being cut loose. It can also make people hesitate to take a job with you in the future. In general, it’s better to keep people if you’re profitable even if you want the margin to be higher. Google’s problem is more their management – in a less rudderless environment you could come up with things for people to work on but when you’re mostly sitting around hoping the ad words money fountain keeps running it probably is true that you can’t figure out what to have them do.
meindnoch 4y ago
See, this is why you stay overemployed. If you're laid off from one of your jobs, you still get to keep the others. Companies are like sociopaths, so employees must act like sociopaths too when interacting with them.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Not even sociopathic: you basically a consult business with many customers.
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  first rule of fight club.
  - latency-guy2 4y ago
    Talk about it at all times because that's what they do in both the comics and film. How else would they get members? Anyway, it's not even close to a secret, it even has numerous articles across NYT, Yahoo, Forbes, etc.
    - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
      My point is the more this is talked about the more likely that companies will increase big brother tooling for remote staff be it contractors or employees.
icu 4y ago
I think one of the hard truths is that corporate managers and executives are often disconnected from the decisions they are making and the negative impacts of those decisions are pushed on to employees. There aren't many solutions to this problem besides better voluntary ethical treatment of employees or compulsory enforcement via a set of professional standards set by a 'management body', a 'management regulator' or well written employment laws. However, having said this, I don't think many US based management or executives would want to be constrained in this way due to cultural perspectives around capitalism. I've spent a lot of time thinking why socialist policies are part of the zeitgeist in the UK but not the US. I think it's due to a historical hangover of industrialization and having a society where there was the rapid exploitation of workers and especially children. I think socialism in the form of worker rights and healthcare was an upper-society response to squalor and destitution being in the face of the political elite in London. My somewhat jaded view is that socialist policies in the UK are setup so that instead of the wealthy paying for a greater proportion of the negative externalities caused by industrialization and capitalism, everyone, would pay in an "equal" way. However equal isn't quite equitable because National Insurance employee deductions are capped out at 2% above a salary threshold of £4,189 a month. No I'm not saying capitalism is bad or that socialism doesn't have problems. I think free market capitalism is good in many cases, it just needs to be constrained by high ethical standards. However, I don't think free market capitalism can solve all the challenges we face in society and Western democracies need a Government mechanism to address wealth inequality otherwise the foundations of society start to break down. In comparison the US, with it's vast land mass and varied dispersed resources, industrialized in a more distributed way, the exploitive effect of industrialization was far away from Washington DC. Even now I think US politicians still don't viscerally understand the human suffering caused by the hollowing out of blue collar jobs due to globalization. For a time I thought 'triple bottom line' might work, but it seems like ESG has taken over with an emphasis on the environment and not people. While I care deeply about Mother Earth, realistically I think people who are struggling to survive have no mental space to consider their environmental impact.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > I think socialism in the form of worker rights and healthcare was an upper-society response to squalor and destitution being in the face of the political elite in London They weren't. The upper classes did everything in their power to prevent the plebs from getting ANY right whatsoever. Churchill even sicced the military at the striking workers at the turn of the century. All of those gains were made by the people fighting tooth and nail. Especially after Ww II, when the USSR did not 'just collapse because socialism is not sustainable' like the British press was screaming about during the interwar years, it made a great case for the people pushing their agenda and the Labour party was able to do all the reforms that the neoliberals have been bit by bit dismantling over the last 40 years.
drdrek 4y ago
Not to rain on the common man parade, most of these layoffs are after even bigger hiring rounds. Microsoft hired 40K employees in 22 to layoff 10k in 23, that is still 30K more employees. In 22: Meta hired 12K+ Netflix 2k+ Google 20K+ Amazon 300K+ (!) But oh me oh my the free market that lets the companies hire lets them fire. Evil money man used to give me money to get compensation, that is good greed. Now evil money man wants to take away money to get compensation that is bad greed angry face emoji
- tkfu 4y ago
  Your numbers are massively wrong at a glance, when I went to check them. Microsoft's total number of employees increased by roughly 40k between June 30 2021 and June 30 2022, but a large portion of that increase was from M&A, not from hiring, and they started large layoffs in July 2022. Net hires are not public info, but it's probably more like 15k in the period specified. Amazon has 300k employees total, and they obviously didn't hire all 300k in 2022. Those were the first two I checked and they're massively off, so I'm inclined to think the rest of your argument is also in bad faith or misinformed.
  - drdrek 4y ago
    What? Amazon has more than 1.5M employees... its like the first thing you can see by googling amazon number of employees. We can disagree on the interpretations but let's at least agree on the numbers. I will not accuse you of being neither misinformed nor in bad faith if you rectify your comment as to not spread misinformation :) https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)
    - freeone3000 4y ago
      You're counting warehouse workers as employees, instead of as disposable meat robots. The layoffs are of people that matter -- software developers and only software developers
Tade0 4y ago
> Even as we speak, they’re streamlining, optimizing, and booking the best contractors in the Bay Area for the next eighteen months. I suppose the author didn't want to sound racist or the equivalent that concerns people of the same skin tone but, somehow, different economic situations and options in life, but over here in Eastern Europe Google and Amazon have been hiring all this time.
- ponector 4y ago
  They are hiring all this time simply because they can pay 1/5 salary there for the same role
- arcturus17 4y ago
  As I understood it, the point was that they are laying off people but hiring more expensive contractors instead.
  - rossitter 4y ago
    The contractors in that joke are for the CEO's kitchen reno: > ...complicated global factors like [one], [two], and my desire for a marble kitchen island with a waterfall edge. As we all know, our competitors are relentless. Even as we speak, they’re [one], [two], and booking the best contractors in the Bay Area for the next eighteen months.
    - arcturus17 4y ago
      Ah that makes sense! The author is a really clever writer. It's a short text but it's packed with little details like that, and shows a great understanding of the tech enterprise domain.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
severine 4y ago
The Cinque Terre (Italian pronunciation: [ˈtʃiŋkwe ˈtɛrre]; Ligurian: Çinque Tære, meaning "Five Lands") is a coastal area within Liguria, in the northwest of Italy. It lies in the west of La Spezia Province, and comprises five villages: Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore. The coastline, the five villages, and the surrounding hillsides are all part of the Cinque Terre National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinque_Terre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinque_Terre TIL!
- theandrewbailey 4y ago
  Yeah, I had to look up that place, too.
  - wmeredith 4y ago
    I wonder if my company's CEO did.
    - dboreham 4y ago
      Likely. Anyone familiar with Rick Steves work would know, and probably has visited.
danw1979 4y ago
> Given every available forecast, it was the perfect time to hire 1,200 blockchain developers, spin up original streaming content, and lead three rounds of funding for my nephew’s AI-powered B2B sourdough recipe app. * chef kiss *
ReptileMan 4y ago
I kinda like the layoffs of late. We are incredibly spoiled - anyone in IT born past 1985 barely knows what making less money than the previous year is. It will trim the fat, push away people that are in the industry because of the money. I think it will be ok.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  > It will trim the fat More like cutting of fingers. Layoffs at mass scale are not "low performers" or individuals that are (as individuals) redundant. It is just people picked in some Excel sheet.
throwaway6734 4y ago
Engineers at the big tech companies were getting paid 200-500k+, more than enough money to build enormous safety buffers. Surely if they're worth that premium they'll have no trouble finding jobs elsewhere.
winstonprivacy 4y ago
Pretty ironic seeing as just a few months ago, everyone was ghosting employers, taking counteroffers after accepting, and "quiet quitting". So let's quit pretending employees are holier than employers.
- Xorlev 4y ago
  "Everyone". A vocal minority, perhaps.
- guntherhermann 4y ago
  Seeing a few posts on HN or blogs about "quiet quitting" (which appears to be doing exactly what is required of you, no more, no less... a misnomer then.), and "ghosting" employers... is not even comparable to the 50,000+ layoffs that have happened across tech companies in the past few weeks. > So let's quit pretending employees are holier than employers. I haven't seen anyone stating this, or even implying it. I do see employees (people) as more worthy of sympathy than corporations.
- activitypea 4y ago
  "People and multi billion dollar-generating corporations are the same to me"
- acdha 4y ago
  “Quiet quitting” was corporate spin shopped around to gullible journalists. The behavior described was employees doing what they were paid to do but not giving the company freebies. This is important to understand because it relates to why there are layoffs now: the managerial class hates when normal workers have negotiating clout. Layoffs remove that clout by cooling the job market and making existing employees afraid to leave or ask for market rate pay. This is important for most HN readers to understand: there’s been a long tech boom where we’ve had above average pay & benefits due to demand. This has lead a lot of us to think we’re part of the upper crust at companies because we’re paid and treated better, and that this is the natural order of things. Few C-level managers agree but they’re definitely hoping we continue to believe it and don’t unionize.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Throughout modern human history, power centers have belonged to finance, business, and law. Uppity technology specialists are attempting to upend the system and take a seat at the table. They have to be shown their place occasionally to remind them who is in charge.
- coldpie 4y ago
  > Uppity technology specialists are attempting to upend the system and take a seat at the table. We are? Seems to me like the folks down at the Starbucks are the ones doing the hard work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks_unions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks_unions
LBJsPNS 4y ago
But you don't understand! These people who were laid off are important! So much so they didn't need a union, because the company couldn't possibly let them go. Unions are for all those other people who aren't important! Perhaps some of you are beginning to understand the term Solidarity Forever.
- NhanH 4y ago
  Union does not protect you from layoff. They will be able to negotiate for severance package, but seeing the way big techs are handling it, I highly doubt unions can negotiate a better one.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    I have some criticism, mainly in that I want visa-holders to fit the legal definition of employed for longer so that they can find a new job without the 30 day deadline over their heads.
  - creativenolo 4y ago
    A union’s function is to protect you from layoffs. They stand to protect you from layoffs through collective bargaining. The difference in how layoffs are handled between the US & parts of Europe is astounding, where big tech could be bothered to face the fight against union influenced legislation and works rights.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    What? Unions absolutely can protect against layoffs, by threatening to strike over them. Union: Oh, you are making 16 billion profit and want to lay off 12,000 people on a whim? How about we strike and your profit is cut in half next quarter and you all miss your stock options? Huh, no layoffs, funny. Granted we haven't SEEN an effective labor union in the US (aside from the police unions) in about 100 years, that doesn't mean they can't work in principle.
- carapace 4y ago
  I used to think programmers didn't need unions. Then that massive no-poaching collusion amongst dozens of the top tech companies in the US surfaced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... It wasn't just "Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay", the practice spread to "dozens" of other companies: > Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles of court dockets and reviewed by PandoDaily, clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees. https://web.archive.org/web/20210912195239/https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing-cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210912195239/https://pando.com... It's actually pretty insane what's revealed in the documents, they knew exactly what they were doing, they were completely ruthless. Anyway, now I think that we do need unions, or something, because these folks are clearly willing to do anything they think they can get away with.
6510 4y ago
I'm not sure if I'm stating the obvious here but if enough big tech companies combined flood the market with unemployed talent it could lower salaries as opposed to hiring everyone at any price to make them unavailable to the competitors. They have captured the market now, hoarding employees is no longer necessary.
chewz 4y ago
You might be a proud and valuable person in your personal life. But for a company, you are just an asset - low yielding asset with high depreciation. So it is rational decision for an enterprise to let you go and free some liquidity that could be deployed elsewhere. Even buying Treasury bill yields more then an employee and is more liquid option. Liquidity is important when times get tough and recession is coming.. Just face it. And for an enterprise if competitors are letting go employees it means that they are building their war chest of liquid assets. So you have too because you have to be prepared when time comes for mergers, takeover and acquisitions....
- wmeredith 4y ago
  Google's average salary is $124k/ year and its revenue per employee is $1.365 million. Show me a t-bill with that 1100% annual return.
  - chewz 4y ago
    But Google is irreparable and sinking fast. The goal is to return as much as possible to shareholders during 5 years window Google still has so shareholders can better allocate capital themselves. Every 124k/year is appreciated.
    - malfist 4y ago
      > But Google is irreparable and sinking fast So you've invested all your money on shorting GOOG?
  - overrun11 4y ago
    Google's average total compensation per employee is much higher than that, around $300k IIRC. You also need to back out cost of revenue to get a more accurate picture of return.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    The average is meaningless. What matters from the company perspective is the additional revenue for the last employee.
afian 4y ago
[flagged]
- breakpointalpha 4y ago
  Somehow, more human than human CEOs.
aczerepinski 4y ago
Why can’t the extremely profitable companies manage their headcount through attrition? Losing 6% of your staff via a hiring freeze would work too wouldn’t it?
- wepple 4y ago
  I believe the claim that execs would make is that natural attrition isn’t fast enough, especially during economic slowdowns where opportunities to jump ship are at an all time low. Further, there’s a good chance that the execs have taken it into consideration already, IE they need an 8% reduction so they layoff 6% and assume 2% through attrition. The skeptic in me also suspects that this isn’t just about cutting expenses - they’re wanting to send a message to those who remain that it’s time to get to work and achieve some results. IMO it actually ends up demotivating and turns people away from trusting the org, but rather prepping to jump ship.
- vikingerik 4y ago
  Attrition loses your more talented and motivated workers, as those are the ones that can and do find better deals elsewhere. Layoffs are the way to lose your least talented and motivated workers.
gavinmckenzie 4y ago
Amazing. There was a time, nearly 20 years ago, that I was let go from Adobe. My colleagues assumed that because of my position/tenure/knowledge that I was layoff-proof. I told them that I was just a number in a large organization, and that orgs of a certain scale don’t do layoffs in a way that looks at each individual. Sure enough I was let go and after 16 years at the same company, that was acquired by Adobe where I spent 5 years, my overall feeling was “meh, I knew the end was nigh”. Since then I’ve been a contractor, and I couldn’t be happier. The relationship between me and my client is simple: I work, and they pay me. Sure there’s no stock option perks, but on the other hand I never have to deal with HR processes, submit quarterly objectives, etc. I work, I get paid. I know when the contract will end, and either the client renews the contract or I go somewhere else. It’s all fine. For me, reducing my work life down to such a simple transactional level has been incredibly freeing and stress reducing, and allowed me to focus even more clearly on the work.
- l1silver 4y ago
  But isn't the inbetween contract jobs a tenuous time?
  - berniedurfee 4y ago
    I’ve considered independent contracting many times in my career. But I just could never get past the possibility of the stress of being in between gigs.
    - andai 4y ago
      Did you read the article? What about the stress of being in between jobs? You have a single point of failure that's outside your control. With contracting, you can take as many clients as you can handle, and you'd have to lose all your clients simultaneously to end up in an equivalent position.
      - berniedurfee 4y ago
        That’s still a greater risk though. If you end up in the position where you do lose all your clients simultaneously, it can be catastrophic. I suppose it’s also the hustle of finding new clients that never interested me much.
entropyneur 4y ago
> bankrolling your children’s insulin What an utter lack of self-awareness. You guys are some of the best compensated workers in the entire world. At least have some decency not to bring the "little girl who has cancer" into it.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  It's actually a real problem here, considering the cost of medical care here in the USA, and how insurance is generally via employer.
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  Pretty sure insulin is for diabetes not cancer
- ketchupdebugger 4y ago
  insulin can cost thousands of dollars per month and it is an indispensable drug. Big Pharma actually raised the prices of insulin in recent years by 50%. so all that extra compensation literally just goes to drug costs.
- lezojeda 4y ago
  You sound pretty envious.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Well, employee-owned corporations that aren't controlled by profit-hungry shareholders and the executives who service them are the only realistic way to avoid this problem. Investment capitalism inevitably pushes towards a world divided into wealthy rent-takers and impoverished rent-payers. It's also not a good system of capital distribution for optimal real-world results, aka progress, due to the tendency towards the creation of stagnant monopolies, but state-run systems are not much better (or different). It doesn't matter much whether the Central Committee in charge of capital distribution is a Wall Street investor conglomerate or a Soviet cabinent of ministers, both systems have same structural flaws.
bell-cot 4y ago
Wonderful to imagine: Similar dismissive missives from boards and shareholders to the executives who massively over-hired earlier, basically because "all the cool kids are hiring".
trynewideas 4y ago
Only thing missing from this is a fake demonym. Like "Farglers" or "Chairistans" or "Doughfolx."
2devnull 4y ago
No sympathy for the average American worker, who is impacted even more so by inflation, which robs them of their life savings and job security at their min wage job. Over-entitled and over payed young tech workers who have displaced poorer people and haven’t been astute enough to save their extravagant salaries, spending it instead on $30 door dashed organic salads now want to bleat about how “boo hoo life isn’t fair.” They are correct but too stupid to blame the real culprit. It’s the fed dummies! The fed givith and then taketh away. A tale as old as time. If you don’t understand how economics 101 works, you probably didn’t deserve your high paying tech job, to say nothing of being an actual participant in society and voting in elections, where guess what, you can have a say in fiscal and monetary policy decisions once removed.
- automatom 4y ago
  It’s the fed dummies! Why is it that the C-suite folks, who are supposed to understand macroeconomic trends or "Economics 101" as you're calling it, didn't see this coming and didn't make better decisions to not over-hire and mitigate reactionary cost-cutting. These companies have billions of cash on hand, but they choose the easy short term route of slashing labor costs to appease shareholders. I would argue this is a terrible long term solution on growth and profits (despite the shareholders impatience. Besides even the big tech employees are closer to the average American worker than C-suite folks if you look at median salaries. You're talking down to a large group of people as if you somehow saw it coming before everyone else? spending it instead on $30 door dashed organic salads This is effectively the same argument as the one made by the Avocado Toast guy, and it's out of touch. You can empathize with folks that make less than you and still criticize the action of management that could have had the foresight to prioritize people over profit, but chose not to out of greed.
  - IX-103 4y ago
    Why didn't the C-suite folks do better? Because their contracts hold stock prices above all else. That means that making any group of stockholders unhappy risks reducing their earnings. Many stockholders don't understand macroeconomics. Many see the news and start calling for action, however misguided. When enough demand action, the C-suite is forced to act, even when they know the actions are symbolic at best or counterproductive at worst. That's assuming they know best. The C-suite command their salaries not because of what they know, but because of who they know. So making economic predictions may not be their strength.
EGreg 4y ago
Is it better to have a job and lost, than to have never worked at all?
sequoia 4y ago
The one thing this is missing is referring to employees with a cutesy company nickname while laying them off. "We'll be parting ways with some talented Floofmates* which is very difficult." It always strikes me that a layoff email is not the right time/place to lean on cutesy "we're a family here! We have fun" company culture schtick. *or googleers, metamates, plaids, whatever Incidentally is there a name for these company-nickname-for-employees words?
- jetrink 4y ago
  Here's a fun list of these from Mike Pope from 2012: https://mikepope.com/blog/AddComment.aspx?blogid=2354 https://mikepope.com/blog/AddComment.aspx?blogid=2354 He adds, > Then there is the question of what we might call a nickname like this. A name based on a place is a toponym. A name for people from a city or region is a demonym. I solicited some ideas for this, too. We threw around corporanym and employeeonym. Someone suggested "idionym, which should mean roughly 'your own name'." > The most interesting suggestion was from Colleague Clay, who knows his way around a number of languages. He suggested ergazomenonym ("from modern Greek εργαζόμενου= employee"). I like it tons, although I'd need some coaching, perhaps, in how to pronounce it properly.
janalsncm 4y ago
Sam Harris talks about how when we get superintelligent AI, our relationship to it will be like ants relationship to humans. Well, we already have a kind of “slow AI” in corporations. Profit-seeking paperclip maximizers. They don’t hate us, they don’t love us. They keep us around as long as we’re useful and then dispose of us after that point. The fact that corporations are made of meat doesn’t change the ultimate reward function that they all must follow: maximize profit, laws and negative externalities be damned.
- OOPMan 4y ago
  When is a big If. Much like the simulation hypothesis, "super intelligent AI" is more religion than reality at this point.
  - janalsncm 4y ago
    Yeah, I’ve been reading Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence and it is frustratingly oblivious to the basic fact that since intelligence is so ill-defined it will never be clear when human intelligence has been exceeded. However every single concern of “AI existentialists” has already manifested in multinational corporations.
luxuryballs 4y ago
It has to partially be related to Twitter files, everyone knows they were all doing it and they must anticipate some eventual consequences.
engineer_22 4y ago
Sometimes you've got to trim the branches for the tree to stay healthy. Layoffs suck, been there done that, but they're a good chance for everyone to reconfigure in a better configuration.
Dwedit 4y ago
> Blockchain Stopped reading there...
steve76 4y ago
[dead]
MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
Very funny! I don't think the issue is that simple though, of course. The very quirks that cause these massive layoffs are the same quirks that caused the massive hiring in the first place. Namely, executives playing a macro-level game with their company. You can have stability where companies don't have the crazy layoffs and insane pay discrepancies, but it might come at the cost of less hiring in the first place, more modest salaries all around, and probably less risk taking and therefore less productivity in general. If you don't think productivity matters ask yourself what products or technologies really do make the world a better place right now, and if you'd be okay with never having those developed in the first place. Maybe there's a way to make things better without sacrificing productivity. But let's not kid ourselves and pretend that simply expecting executives to "stop being greedy" is a realistic expectation.

888 points by rkachowski 4y ago

Pretty much a text form of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ > Silicon Valley - Gavin firing Nucleus

pontifier 4y ago

[flagged]

ebiester 4y ago

The part I thought was the best was this: "This was not an easy decision to make. It’s weighed heavily on me for the past month, keeping me up at night and nearly causing me to cancel the exec team’s offsite, even though Bad Bunny’s appearance fee was only 50 percent refundable. Let’s not mince words, though; the accountability for this decision rests with me. The consequences, on the other hand, rest with you, but so does a pretty generous COBRA package." Accountability comes with consequences. What are the consequences?

thewildginger 4y ago
Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
- yvdriess 4y ago
  Glad I'm not the only one who read that blog in Zap Brannigan's voice.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    The quote was Lord Farquhard (not pronounced Fuckwad) in Shrek I, IIRC.
    - selimthegrim 4y ago
      Who was patterned after Disney’s Michael Eisner IIRC.
      - oblio 4y ago
        I did a quick check of his education. I think the US is at 12 years + 4 for university, that's 16 in total. Actually, I think kindergarten is another 2 years. So that's 18 years. All of them in private institutions. At current tuition rates, all of the places he went to cost about $60k per year. So that's about $1m just in his education...
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  "Make no mistake, though they are the ones leaving, it is I who must remain, and bear the heavy burden of their failure." https://youtu.be/u48vYSLvKNQ?t=44 https://youtu.be/u48vYSLvKNQ?t=44
anothernewdude 4y ago
I think he meant accountability as in accounts, as in bank.
SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
> so does a pretty generous COBRA package I had to look that up, it appears to be a USA thing that "gives workers and their families who lose their health benefits the right to choose to continue group health benefits provided by their group health plan for limited periods of time" (1) Nothing to do with "Cabinet Office Briefing Room A". Ugh. Health care that is contingent upon employment, is a social ill. 1) https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/health-plans/cobra https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/health-plans/cobra
rurp 4y ago
Same here. I can't believe the cringy, "I take full responsibility (but no consequences)" line has become a standard part of the CEO layoff announcement. Saying you take responsibility, without actually sacrificing anything or really facing any consequences at all is so obviously slimy and patronizing, I don't know why anyone thinks it's a good thing to say. Actually it's even worse than no consequences; often times these layoffs give the CEO more money. Their compensation is typically heavily in stock and these layoffs often raise the stock price, directly increasing the CEO's net worth. Taking "full responsibility" indeed.

DieBruderBauer 4y ago

>And suddenly all your salaries and dental work hang like millstones chafing the supple neck of my stock compensation package. Oof. This guy knows how to write. And he's funny to boot! May consider adding my name to his Patreon list...

Semaphor 4y ago
Here’s his site for more to read: https://www.mikelacher.com/ https://www.mikelacher.com/ And his articles on the linked site: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/authors/mike-lacher https://www.mcsweeneys.net/authors/mike-lacher

sgu999 4y ago

Really love the tone! I can imagine that the ones calling for layoffs have always been the stingy kind. They just have a better case now... Execs are just obeying whomever has the strongest voice to ensure their outrageous pays remain unchanged.

hcks 4y ago

[flagged]

gorgoiler 4y ago

I grind away at our codebase day in day out causing me immense personal anxiety and burnout risk and all for what? Well! The honest answer is because software engineering is an incredibly satisfying intellectual pursuit. So satisfying that outside of work in my spare time I literally do it for free, giving away my work to strangers as free / open source software. Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I have to feed my family. But also I have to then see that I’m getting a big share of the pie too, because otherwise someone else will be eating some pie that was rightfully mine, and that feels wrong. Would my C-level pals get their $15m exit without my work? Maybe, but it’s less likely. Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? No. So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary? Waterfall edge marble kitchen island indeed.

kewpiedoll99 4y ago
> why is ... mine [only] around about a year’s worth of salary? this complaint is almost as tone deaf as the satire. poor you. i was laid off, and only got a month's severance.
sagaro 4y ago
>Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? They tried this at twitter. But twitter survived. Turned out for KTLO not many people are actually required. Also, when you are over staffed, employees have enough free time to get political, run slack channels, do activism and in general reduce the entire org's productivity. Most companies were stuck in this phase the last few years, with Coinbase and a couple of other companies being brave enough to say they don't want their employees engaging in workplace activism. This whole macro-economic change and the twitter success after getting rid of 30% of its employees, has now given these companies an opportunity to follow without getting singled out. If they don't do it now, and do it 6 months later they will get called out as demons. Now since everyone is doing it, it is not that bad a PR hit.
mshake2 4y ago
>So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary? Honestly? Because 1) you are very replaceable and 2) you have a very low chance in succeeding at organizing any kind of group/union action. If either of those two facts were different, you would have more leverage. But they aren't so you don't.

arcturus17 4y ago

Great satire, very poignant and entertaining.

mshake2 4y ago

What ever will those TikTok tech workers do now that they can't stream their comped meals and coffee breaks and afternoon relaxation massages?[0] If only it was illegal for The Man to fire these valuable employees! 0. https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1617534649508716544 https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1617534649508716544

Crusoe123 4y ago
It's not a TikTok tech worker. It's a recruiter depicting an unrealistic - missing all the stress etc - view of the workplace to attract inexperienced employees.As ones with experience mostly don't give a crap about these types amenities. That video was done for The Man, not for the employees well being. And apparently The Man was able to sell you this depiction of the work place so you can now feel smug about all those layoffs. Good for you I guess, you independent thinker!
- mshake2 4y ago
  She wasn't a recruiter, she was a Partner Services Program Manager[0]. And there's dozens of videos just like these of employees flexing their perks daily while appearing to do very little work. It's been going on for awhile. If you're asserting that it's all propaganda, you're going to need to give some sources and not half-baked conspiracy theories. 0. https://news.yahoo.com/former-google-employee-documents-day-131158676.html https://news.yahoo.com/former-google-employee-documents-day-...
  - Crusoe123 4y ago
    OK I mixed with a different video that people mocked on twitter. First one was bragging about amenities like in your post and second one is layoff - https://urlebird.com/video/def-not-an-ideal-start-to-2023-but-staying-optimistic-that-the-i-7191193142157151534/ https://urlebird.com/video/def-not-an-ideal-start-to-2023-bu... . Here it is indeed a recruiter. Do you honestly believe those TikToks were made spontaneously and they depict a realistic view of the workplace? It's not a half baked conspiracy theory - it's called a PR strategy and companies have been doing them on social media for as long as they existed. Let me give you the benefit of the doubt. Even if the videos are spontaneous, how can you with a straight face use them to judge a workplace and use them as a metric on the amount of work done? Do you really think social media is a realistic depiction of life? Maybe if you saw a TikTok of how big investors and execs live and how much they would lose (nothing material) by retaining these employees, you would understand the situation better.

zmxz 4y ago

[flagged]

Aeolun 4y ago
Hmm, if your employer waits until they have 12000 of you to fire for not doing any work, that is its own kind of incompetence.
- friend_and_foe 4y ago
  Well, it seems to be less of a PR problem doing the "no hard feelings, business is business and we have to" than firing a handful of people every few months to maintain optimal operation. Probably costs less overall. Laying off a ton of people is less likely to get severe bad will as laying off a few dozen every few weeks for years.
- zmxz 4y ago
  Why would you apply for a job with employer who is known to overhire and the entry level is low? Does that not speak of incompetence of the employee too? I'm not advocating that boss is good, worker evil. Both are incompetent AF. It's just easy to jump at the boss because boss rich, worker poor.
anothernewdude 4y ago
A business that can't think of what they should have a massive percentage of their staff do, is a business that has fucking useless bosses.
- zmxz 4y ago
  And what is your solution? Keep paying people until company goes under? I'm not saying boss is competent, but these posts where worker whines at boss and offers no solution is just stupid. Keep paying dead weight employees, make other useful employees work to make up for the incompetent ones' incompetence and create more problems? There's never a solution in these whiny posts except "omg i found the bad guy and it's this evil boss" - well find the solution too then, how do we move from keeping everyone employed and company afloat. But no, that part we won't read about. We'll close our eyes to Hanlon's razor and attribute to malice what should be attributed to stupidity and incompetence.

kqr 4y ago

> The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face. And so we must make hard choices. Maybe I've hung around in the wrong circles too much recently, but this hit me hard. This is basically how the reasoning behind all top management decisions have been communicated to me in the past year: "There is indeed a clearly better alternative course of action that we should take. You're right in that it would be trivial to adopt and we would all be happier from it, with more satisfied customers. The fact is that's not what we have chosen in reality, so we must shoulder the heavy burden of choosing the inferior alternative and give it our best shot." Way to motivate a decision!

username_my1 4y ago
wrong view / comparios ... in a 5% interest rate environment, companies fight for investors money .. if you don't do the cuts and find a way to be efficient investors will put their money somewhere else that's more profitable. this reasoning is pure and simple and correct, you start from the top, not from the fact "they can afford it" because their job is not to spend the money they have their job is to increase value for investors.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > their job is to increase value for investors Is their job to increase it in the short or the long term? These “I know we’ve been doing great for 3 years, but the past 3 months haven’t been so hot, so we’re going to cut jobs.” Messages seem incredibly shortsighted.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    Do investors sell if they company income falls for a quarter? I'm guessing yes, and that answers the question of whether the company looks to the short term when seeking only to satisfy investors. The whole system is wrong.
    - Aeolun 4y ago

vintermann 4y ago

Am I paranoid in thinking that recent firings, and the attitude this article satirizes, may be a factor in the current Azure outages that keep me from working right now?

ath3nd 4y ago

What a funny write! Despite it being funny, if it wasn't for the outright satire, it would be virtually indistinguishable from the recent tech layoff messages: Gitpod - https://www.gitpod.io/blog/building-for-the-long-run https://www.gitpod.io/blog/building-for-the-long-run Microsoft (this is maybe the classiest) - https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-focusing-on-our-short-and-long-term-opportunity/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-focusing... Zuck/Meta - https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-message-to-employees/ https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-mes... Stripe - https://stripe.com/en-nl/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email-to-stripe-employees https://stripe.com/en-nl/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons... Spotify - https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-01-23/an-update-on-january-2023-organizational-changes/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-01-23/an-update-on-january... The industry had been, for quite some time, growing both in terms of headcount and compensation, without regards to boundaries, sanity or practicality. With that in mind, it looked like it was only a matter of time for this to happen. However, one cannot help wondering how much influence did profitability and future outlook had to do with it, versus how much it was about regaining control over workers and salaries and about "fixing" the stock price. For me, the biggest crime is the fanatic enthusiasm and we-are-all-a-family narrative these companies were pushing while growing well beyond needed in 2020 through 2021 contrasted with the generic messages they are peddling now when laying off.

safety1st 4y ago
Maybe I've lost my heart but it's hard for me to find fault with the way Nadella communicated MSFT's layoffs. They're a business, they need to reallocate capital and headcount, he doesn't shed any crocodile tears, but they are providing above market severance benefits, end of transmission. If I have to be laid off I want it to go something like this.
- okokwhatever 4y ago
  It's called subjectivism for a reason.
- pas 4y ago
  The word layoff does not appear in that post. It's word salad for 2 paragraphs. It's bad writing, it's an even worse communique from a CEO. Start with the point. The point is that X percent of the workforce is to be let go. And that it has been already in the works for some time because some people have been let go that day. "some notifications happening today" = we already have a list and we'll go through it as fast as labor laws allow.

roenxi 4y ago

Management needs to be made up of the sort of people who make economically optimum decisions. Without diminishing the horrible experience of being fired; if we have people who purposefully keep tens of thousands of people working on jobs that don't make sense to them, on aggregate society will be much worse for everyone. We have a system that allows people to do unpopular things, like this, because it works better than the alternatives. Dons flak jacket

quickthrower2 4y ago
The weirder thing is the overhiring in the first place. So only now the folly detectors are working?
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
>because it works better than the alternatives. Does it?
mrsuprawsm 4y ago
it would be nicer if they made economically optimal decisions in the first place, instead of making a bad decision in 2022, firing a shitload of people in 2023, and going "ah whoops our bad". competent operators wouldn't get into this problem in the first place (or, alternatively, these layoffs are also an incompetent decision and the C-levels are simply following the herd)
- Shish2k 4y ago
  I have a feeling the current actions are economically optimal, and so, they’ll keep happening - if they optimisitcally hire a ton of people, then fire most of them, that’s expensive in the bad years - if they only hire as many people as they need, then they’ll be eaten by the bigger-risk-taking competition in the good years
  - acdha 4y ago
    You also have to look at productivity: if you lay people off you will have disruption and lower productivity with the remaining workers unless it’s something like a fairly isolated subsidiary being cut loose. It can also make people hesitate to take a job with you in the future. In general, it’s better to keep people if you’re profitable even if you want the margin to be higher. Google’s problem is more their management – in a less rudderless environment you could come up with things for people to work on but when you’re mostly sitting around hoping the ad words money fountain keeps running it probably is true that you can’t figure out what to have them do.

meindnoch 4y ago

See, this is why you stay overemployed. If you're laid off from one of your jobs, you still get to keep the others. Companies are like sociopaths, so employees must act like sociopaths too when interacting with them.

quickthrower2 4y ago
Not even sociopathic: you basically a consult business with many customers.
DoingIsLearning 4y ago
first rule of fight club.
- latency-guy2 4y ago
  Talk about it at all times because that's what they do in both the comics and film. How else would they get members? Anyway, it's not even close to a secret, it even has numerous articles across NYT, Yahoo, Forbes, etc.
  - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    My point is the more this is talked about the more likely that companies will increase big brother tooling for remote staff be it contractors or employees.

icu 4y ago

I think one of the hard truths is that corporate managers and executives are often disconnected from the decisions they are making and the negative impacts of those decisions are pushed on to employees. There aren't many solutions to this problem besides better voluntary ethical treatment of employees or compulsory enforcement via a set of professional standards set by a 'management body', a 'management regulator' or well written employment laws. However, having said this, I don't think many US based management or executives would want to be constrained in this way due to cultural perspectives around capitalism. I've spent a lot of time thinking why socialist policies are part of the zeitgeist in the UK but not the US. I think it's due to a historical hangover of industrialization and having a society where there was the rapid exploitation of workers and especially children. I think socialism in the form of worker rights and healthcare was an upper-society response to squalor and destitution being in the face of the political elite in London. My somewhat jaded view is that socialist policies in the UK are setup so that instead of the wealthy paying for a greater proportion of the negative externalities caused by industrialization and capitalism, everyone, would pay in an "equal" way. However equal isn't quite equitable because National Insurance employee deductions are capped out at 2% above a salary threshold of £4,189 a month. No I'm not saying capitalism is bad or that socialism doesn't have problems. I think free market capitalism is good in many cases, it just needs to be constrained by high ethical standards. However, I don't think free market capitalism can solve all the challenges we face in society and Western democracies need a Government mechanism to address wealth inequality otherwise the foundations of society start to break down. In comparison the US, with it's vast land mass and varied dispersed resources, industrialized in a more distributed way, the exploitive effect of industrialization was far away from Washington DC. Even now I think US politicians still don't viscerally understand the human suffering caused by the hollowing out of blue collar jobs due to globalization. For a time I thought 'triple bottom line' might work, but it seems like ESG has taken over with an emphasis on the environment and not people. While I care deeply about Mother Earth, realistically I think people who are struggling to survive have no mental space to consider their environmental impact.

unity1001 4y ago
> I think socialism in the form of worker rights and healthcare was an upper-society response to squalor and destitution being in the face of the political elite in London They weren't. The upper classes did everything in their power to prevent the plebs from getting ANY right whatsoever. Churchill even sicced the military at the striking workers at the turn of the century. All of those gains were made by the people fighting tooth and nail. Especially after Ww II, when the USSR did not 'just collapse because socialism is not sustainable' like the British press was screaming about during the interwar years, it made a great case for the people pushing their agenda and the Labour party was able to do all the reforms that the neoliberals have been bit by bit dismantling over the last 40 years.

drdrek 4y ago

Not to rain on the common man parade, most of these layoffs are after even bigger hiring rounds. Microsoft hired 40K employees in 22 to layoff 10k in 23, that is still 30K more employees. In 22: Meta hired 12K+ Netflix 2k+ Google 20K+ Amazon 300K+ (!) But oh me oh my the free market that lets the companies hire lets them fire. Evil money man used to give me money to get compensation, that is good greed. Now evil money man wants to take away money to get compensation that is bad greed angry face emoji

tkfu 4y ago
Your numbers are massively wrong at a glance, when I went to check them. Microsoft's total number of employees increased by roughly 40k between June 30 2021 and June 30 2022, but a large portion of that increase was from M&A, not from hiring, and they started large layoffs in July 2022. Net hires are not public info, but it's probably more like 15k in the period specified. Amazon has 300k employees total, and they obviously didn't hire all 300k in 2022. Those were the first two I checked and they're massively off, so I'm inclined to think the rest of your argument is also in bad faith or misinformed.
- drdrek 4y ago
  What? Amazon has more than 1.5M employees... its like the first thing you can see by googling amazon number of employees. We can disagree on the interpretations but let's at least agree on the numbers. I will not accuse you of being neither misinformed nor in bad faith if you rectify your comment as to not spread misinformation :) https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)
  - freeone3000 4y ago
    You're counting warehouse workers as employees, instead of as disposable meat robots. The layoffs are of people that matter -- software developers and only software developers

Tade0 4y ago

> Even as we speak, they’re streamlining, optimizing, and booking the best contractors in the Bay Area for the next eighteen months. I suppose the author didn't want to sound racist or the equivalent that concerns people of the same skin tone but, somehow, different economic situations and options in life, but over here in Eastern Europe Google and Amazon have been hiring all this time.

ponector 4y ago
They are hiring all this time simply because they can pay 1/5 salary there for the same role
arcturus17 4y ago
As I understood it, the point was that they are laying off people but hiring more expensive contractors instead.
- rossitter 4y ago
  The contractors in that joke are for the CEO's kitchen reno: > ...complicated global factors like [one], [two], and my desire for a marble kitchen island with a waterfall edge. As we all know, our competitors are relentless. Even as we speak, they’re [one], [two], and booking the best contractors in the Bay Area for the next eighteen months.
  - arcturus17 4y ago
    Ah that makes sense! The author is a really clever writer. It's a short text but it's packed with little details like that, and shows a great understanding of the tech enterprise domain.
deleted 4y ago
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severine 4y ago

The Cinque Terre (Italian pronunciation: [ˈtʃiŋkwe ˈtɛrre]; Ligurian: Çinque Tære, meaning "Five Lands") is a coastal area within Liguria, in the northwest of Italy. It lies in the west of La Spezia Province, and comprises five villages: Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore. The coastline, the five villages, and the surrounding hillsides are all part of the Cinque Terre National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinque_Terre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinque_Terre TIL!

theandrewbailey 4y ago
Yeah, I had to look up that place, too.
- wmeredith 4y ago
  I wonder if my company's CEO did.
  - dboreham 4y ago
    Likely. Anyone familiar with Rick Steves work would know, and probably has visited.

danw1979 4y ago

> Given every available forecast, it was the perfect time to hire 1,200 blockchain developers, spin up original streaming content, and lead three rounds of funding for my nephew’s AI-powered B2B sourdough recipe app. * chef kiss *

ReptileMan 4y ago

I kinda like the layoffs of late. We are incredibly spoiled - anyone in IT born past 1985 barely knows what making less money than the previous year is. It will trim the fat, push away people that are in the industry because of the money. I think it will be ok.

rightbyte 4y ago
> It will trim the fat More like cutting of fingers. Layoffs at mass scale are not "low performers" or individuals that are (as individuals) redundant. It is just people picked in some Excel sheet.

throwaway6734 4y ago

Engineers at the big tech companies were getting paid 200-500k+, more than enough money to build enormous safety buffers. Surely if they're worth that premium they'll have no trouble finding jobs elsewhere.

winstonprivacy 4y ago

Pretty ironic seeing as just a few months ago, everyone was ghosting employers, taking counteroffers after accepting, and "quiet quitting". So let's quit pretending employees are holier than employers.

Xorlev 4y ago
"Everyone". A vocal minority, perhaps.
guntherhermann 4y ago
Seeing a few posts on HN or blogs about "quiet quitting" (which appears to be doing exactly what is required of you, no more, no less... a misnomer then.), and "ghosting" employers... is not even comparable to the 50,000+ layoffs that have happened across tech companies in the past few weeks. > So let's quit pretending employees are holier than employers. I haven't seen anyone stating this, or even implying it. I do see employees (people) as more worthy of sympathy than corporations.
activitypea 4y ago
"People and multi billion dollar-generating corporations are the same to me"
acdha 4y ago
“Quiet quitting” was corporate spin shopped around to gullible journalists. The behavior described was employees doing what they were paid to do but not giving the company freebies. This is important to understand because it relates to why there are layoffs now: the managerial class hates when normal workers have negotiating clout. Layoffs remove that clout by cooling the job market and making existing employees afraid to leave or ask for market rate pay. This is important for most HN readers to understand: there’s been a long tech boom where we’ve had above average pay & benefits due to demand. This has lead a lot of us to think we’re part of the upper crust at companies because we’re paid and treated better, and that this is the natural order of things. Few C-level managers agree but they’re definitely hoping we continue to believe it and don’t unionize.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Throughout modern human history, power centers have belonged to finance, business, and law. Uppity technology specialists are attempting to upend the system and take a seat at the table. They have to be shown their place occasionally to remind them who is in charge.

coldpie 4y ago
> Uppity technology specialists are attempting to upend the system and take a seat at the table. We are? Seems to me like the folks down at the Starbucks are the ones doing the hard work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks_unions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks_unions

LBJsPNS 4y ago

But you don't understand! These people who were laid off are important! So much so they didn't need a union, because the company couldn't possibly let them go. Unions are for all those other people who aren't important! Perhaps some of you are beginning to understand the term Solidarity Forever.

NhanH 4y ago
Union does not protect you from layoff. They will be able to negotiate for severance package, but seeing the way big techs are handling it, I highly doubt unions can negotiate a better one.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I have some criticism, mainly in that I want visa-holders to fit the legal definition of employed for longer so that they can find a new job without the 30 day deadline over their heads.
- creativenolo 4y ago
  A union’s function is to protect you from layoffs. They stand to protect you from layoffs through collective bargaining. The difference in how layoffs are handled between the US & parts of Europe is astounding, where big tech could be bothered to face the fight against union influenced legislation and works rights.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  What? Unions absolutely can protect against layoffs, by threatening to strike over them. Union: Oh, you are making 16 billion profit and want to lay off 12,000 people on a whim? How about we strike and your profit is cut in half next quarter and you all miss your stock options? Huh, no layoffs, funny. Granted we haven't SEEN an effective labor union in the US (aside from the police unions) in about 100 years, that doesn't mean they can't work in principle.
carapace 4y ago
I used to think programmers didn't need unions. Then that massive no-poaching collusion amongst dozens of the top tech companies in the US surfaced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... It wasn't just "Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay", the practice spread to "dozens" of other companies: > Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles of court dockets and reviewed by PandoDaily, clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees. https://web.archive.org/web/20210912195239/https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing-cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210912195239/https://pando.com... It's actually pretty insane what's revealed in the documents, they knew exactly what they were doing, they were completely ruthless. Anyway, now I think that we do need unions, or something, because these folks are clearly willing to do anything they think they can get away with.

6510 4y ago

I'm not sure if I'm stating the obvious here but if enough big tech companies combined flood the market with unemployed talent it could lower salaries as opposed to hiring everyone at any price to make them unavailable to the competitors. They have captured the market now, hoarding employees is no longer necessary.

chewz 4y ago

You might be a proud and valuable person in your personal life. But for a company, you are just an asset - low yielding asset with high depreciation. So it is rational decision for an enterprise to let you go and free some liquidity that could be deployed elsewhere. Even buying Treasury bill yields more then an employee and is more liquid option. Liquidity is important when times get tough and recession is coming.. Just face it. And for an enterprise if competitors are letting go employees it means that they are building their war chest of liquid assets. So you have too because you have to be prepared when time comes for mergers, takeover and acquisitions....

wmeredith 4y ago
Google's average salary is $124k/ year and its revenue per employee is $1.365 million. Show me a t-bill with that 1100% annual return.
- chewz 4y ago
  But Google is irreparable and sinking fast. The goal is to return as much as possible to shareholders during 5 years window Google still has so shareholders can better allocate capital themselves. Every 124k/year is appreciated.
  - malfist 4y ago
    > But Google is irreparable and sinking fast So you've invested all your money on shorting GOOG?
- overrun11 4y ago
  Google's average total compensation per employee is much higher than that, around $300k IIRC. You also need to back out cost of revenue to get a more accurate picture of return.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  The average is meaningless. What matters from the company perspective is the additional revenue for the last employee.

afian 4y ago

[flagged]

breakpointalpha 4y ago
Somehow, more human than human CEOs.

aczerepinski 4y ago

Why can’t the extremely profitable companies manage their headcount through attrition? Losing 6% of your staff via a hiring freeze would work too wouldn’t it?

wepple 4y ago
I believe the claim that execs would make is that natural attrition isn’t fast enough, especially during economic slowdowns where opportunities to jump ship are at an all time low. Further, there’s a good chance that the execs have taken it into consideration already, IE they need an 8% reduction so they layoff 6% and assume 2% through attrition. The skeptic in me also suspects that this isn’t just about cutting expenses - they’re wanting to send a message to those who remain that it’s time to get to work and achieve some results. IMO it actually ends up demotivating and turns people away from trusting the org, but rather prepping to jump ship.
vikingerik 4y ago
Attrition loses your more talented and motivated workers, as those are the ones that can and do find better deals elsewhere. Layoffs are the way to lose your least talented and motivated workers.

gavinmckenzie 4y ago

Amazing. There was a time, nearly 20 years ago, that I was let go from Adobe. My colleagues assumed that because of my position/tenure/knowledge that I was layoff-proof. I told them that I was just a number in a large organization, and that orgs of a certain scale don’t do layoffs in a way that looks at each individual. Sure enough I was let go and after 16 years at the same company, that was acquired by Adobe where I spent 5 years, my overall feeling was “meh, I knew the end was nigh”. Since then I’ve been a contractor, and I couldn’t be happier. The relationship between me and my client is simple: I work, and they pay me. Sure there’s no stock option perks, but on the other hand I never have to deal with HR processes, submit quarterly objectives, etc. I work, I get paid. I know when the contract will end, and either the client renews the contract or I go somewhere else. It’s all fine. For me, reducing my work life down to such a simple transactional level has been incredibly freeing and stress reducing, and allowed me to focus even more clearly on the work.

l1silver 4y ago
But isn't the inbetween contract jobs a tenuous time?
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  I’ve considered independent contracting many times in my career. But I just could never get past the possibility of the stress of being in between gigs.
  - andai 4y ago
    Did you read the article? What about the stress of being in between jobs? You have a single point of failure that's outside your control. With contracting, you can take as many clients as you can handle, and you'd have to lose all your clients simultaneously to end up in an equivalent position.
    - berniedurfee 4y ago
      That’s still a greater risk though. If you end up in the position where you do lose all your clients simultaneously, it can be catastrophic. I suppose it’s also the hustle of finding new clients that never interested me much.

entropyneur 4y ago

> bankrolling your children’s insulin What an utter lack of self-awareness. You guys are some of the best compensated workers in the entire world. At least have some decency not to bring the "little girl who has cancer" into it.

p0pcult 4y ago
It's actually a real problem here, considering the cost of medical care here in the USA, and how insurance is generally via employer.
Ancalagon 4y ago
Pretty sure insulin is for diabetes not cancer
ketchupdebugger 4y ago
insulin can cost thousands of dollars per month and it is an indispensable drug. Big Pharma actually raised the prices of insulin in recent years by 50%. so all that extra compensation literally just goes to drug costs.
lezojeda 4y ago
You sound pretty envious.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Well, employee-owned corporations that aren't controlled by profit-hungry shareholders and the executives who service them are the only realistic way to avoid this problem. Investment capitalism inevitably pushes towards a world divided into wealthy rent-takers and impoverished rent-payers. It's also not a good system of capital distribution for optimal real-world results, aka progress, due to the tendency towards the creation of stagnant monopolies, but state-run systems are not much better (or different). It doesn't matter much whether the Central Committee in charge of capital distribution is a Wall Street investor conglomerate or a Soviet cabinent of ministers, both systems have same structural flaws.

bell-cot 4y ago

Wonderful to imagine: Similar dismissive missives from boards and shareholders to the executives who massively over-hired earlier, basically because "all the cool kids are hiring".

trynewideas 4y ago

Only thing missing from this is a fake demonym. Like "Farglers" or "Chairistans" or "Doughfolx."

2devnull 4y ago

No sympathy for the average American worker, who is impacted even more so by inflation, which robs them of their life savings and job security at their min wage job. Over-entitled and over payed young tech workers who have displaced poorer people and haven’t been astute enough to save their extravagant salaries, spending it instead on $30 door dashed organic salads now want to bleat about how “boo hoo life isn’t fair.” They are correct but too stupid to blame the real culprit. It’s the fed dummies! The fed givith and then taketh away. A tale as old as time. If you don’t understand how economics 101 works, you probably didn’t deserve your high paying tech job, to say nothing of being an actual participant in society and voting in elections, where guess what, you can have a say in fiscal and monetary policy decisions once removed.

automatom 4y ago
It’s the fed dummies! Why is it that the C-suite folks, who are supposed to understand macroeconomic trends or "Economics 101" as you're calling it, didn't see this coming and didn't make better decisions to not over-hire and mitigate reactionary cost-cutting. These companies have billions of cash on hand, but they choose the easy short term route of slashing labor costs to appease shareholders. I would argue this is a terrible long term solution on growth and profits (despite the shareholders impatience. Besides even the big tech employees are closer to the average American worker than C-suite folks if you look at median salaries. You're talking down to a large group of people as if you somehow saw it coming before everyone else? spending it instead on $30 door dashed organic salads This is effectively the same argument as the one made by the Avocado Toast guy, and it's out of touch. You can empathize with folks that make less than you and still criticize the action of management that could have had the foresight to prioritize people over profit, but chose not to out of greed.
- IX-103 4y ago
  Why didn't the C-suite folks do better? Because their contracts hold stock prices above all else. That means that making any group of stockholders unhappy risks reducing their earnings. Many stockholders don't understand macroeconomics. Many see the news and start calling for action, however misguided. When enough demand action, the C-suite is forced to act, even when they know the actions are symbolic at best or counterproductive at worst. That's assuming they know best. The C-suite command their salaries not because of what they know, but because of who they know. So making economic predictions may not be their strength.

EGreg 4y ago

Is it better to have a job and lost, than to have never worked at all?

sequoia 4y ago

The one thing this is missing is referring to employees with a cutesy company nickname while laying them off. "We'll be parting ways with some talented Floofmates* which is very difficult." It always strikes me that a layoff email is not the right time/place to lean on cutesy "we're a family here! We have fun" company culture schtick. *or googleers, metamates, plaids, whatever Incidentally is there a name for these company-nickname-for-employees words?

jetrink 4y ago
Here's a fun list of these from Mike Pope from 2012: https://mikepope.com/blog/AddComment.aspx?blogid=2354 https://mikepope.com/blog/AddComment.aspx?blogid=2354 He adds, > Then there is the question of what we might call a nickname like this. A name based on a place is a toponym. A name for people from a city or region is a demonym. I solicited some ideas for this, too. We threw around corporanym and employeeonym. Someone suggested "idionym, which should mean roughly 'your own name'." > The most interesting suggestion was from Colleague Clay, who knows his way around a number of languages. He suggested ergazomenonym ("from modern Greek εργαζόμενου= employee"). I like it tons, although I'd need some coaching, perhaps, in how to pronounce it properly.

janalsncm 4y ago

Sam Harris talks about how when we get superintelligent AI, our relationship to it will be like ants relationship to humans. Well, we already have a kind of “slow AI” in corporations. Profit-seeking paperclip maximizers. They don’t hate us, they don’t love us. They keep us around as long as we’re useful and then dispose of us after that point. The fact that corporations are made of meat doesn’t change the ultimate reward function that they all must follow: maximize profit, laws and negative externalities be damned.

OOPMan 4y ago
When is a big If. Much like the simulation hypothesis, "super intelligent AI" is more religion than reality at this point.
- janalsncm 4y ago
  Yeah, I’ve been reading Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence and it is frustratingly oblivious to the basic fact that since intelligence is so ill-defined it will never be clear when human intelligence has been exceeded. However every single concern of “AI existentialists” has already manifested in multinational corporations.

luxuryballs 4y ago

It has to partially be related to Twitter files, everyone knows they were all doing it and they must anticipate some eventual consequences.

engineer_22 4y ago

Sometimes you've got to trim the branches for the tree to stay healthy. Layoffs suck, been there done that, but they're a good chance for everyone to reconfigure in a better configuration.

Dwedit 4y ago

> Blockchain Stopped reading there...

steve76 4y ago

[dead]

MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago

Very funny! I don't think the issue is that simple though, of course. The very quirks that cause these massive layoffs are the same quirks that caused the massive hiring in the first place. Namely, executives playing a macro-level game with their company. You can have stability where companies don't have the crazy layoffs and insane pay discrepancies, but it might come at the cost of less hiring in the first place, more modest salaries all around, and probably less risk taking and therefore less productivity in general. If you don't think productivity matters ask yourself what products or technologies really do make the world a better place right now, and if you'd be okay with never having those developed in the first place. Maybe there's a way to make things better without sacrificing productivity. But let's not kid ourselves and pretend that simply expecting executives to "stop being greedy" is a realistic expectation.