4 ms·

How would being human scale to those thousands of people? Seems impossible to do. Why spend money and time on people that aren't employees.

csomar 4y ago
By that logic it's also impossible to provide 12.000 with computer, desks and lunch. But it happened because as you scale numbers of engineers you also scale the para-military to sustain them. So they could have had a one-on-one face-to-face time with each one of them. But they decided to treat them like Cloud resources.
- khazhoux 4y ago
  They needed to get it over basically in one day (per site). This is actually standard, and gets into issues of computer security, personal security, and lots of CYA. They've scaled up to setting up whatever hundreds of new employees every monday. There's no way they're ready for 12,000 HR 1:1s in one day.
whitemary 4y ago
If you can hire 12000 employees, then this is not impossible. Not even difficult. And not only was this person literally an employee, but they were an employee for 16 years. I really can't tell if I'm responding to an AI bot.
- khazhoux 4y ago
  The employees are hired a few hundred every week. Layoffs like this happen within a day (per site).
  - whitemary 4y ago
    Then don't do them within a day? Regardless of how you try to valorize it, it happened and it's extremely distasteful.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      For half or one percent of outliers, you could give them an earlier heads-up. But for 99+% of the people in a massive layoff, I do think you need to do it in a single day for the practical reason that you want everyone to get certainty as quickly as possible. Can you imagine the chaos in a company if layoff certainty takes a week or two weeks to achieve? This is not a time for eventual consistency.
      - whitemary 4y ago
        If the boss is inconvenienced by treating workers with respect, then so be it. Workers' interests are often at odds with their boss's interests. If you're just figuring this out then I sympathize with you on that point, but I side with the workers here.
        sokoloff 4y ago
        I believe that reducing the uncertainty window from 1-2 weeks to a single day is entirely for the purposes of treating workers with respect. I think it's fundamentally disrespectful to send people to sleep multiple nights and perhaps over a weekend while in a state of grave uncertainty for their near-term economic future. The greater respect is respecting their psychological needs rather than the performative respect of whether the notice was delivered by email or in person. I'd much rather get fired by email [or "all clear" by email] on the first day layoffs begin than to get fired in person 10 calendar days after layoffs begin. I don't think I'm an outlier here.
        khazhoux 4y ago
        The layoffs at these companies have been 12,000 people, 18,000... no, 1:1s just aren't going to happen. Massive layoffs like this require swift execution, not dragged out over the weeks or months it would take to give everyone a personalized sendoff. In fact, the basic premise of these mass layoffs is that they're not personalized. Entire departments and teams are cut, etc. You may disagree with the very idea of laying off tens of thousands of people at once, but this is still the only reasonable way to execute them.

csomar 4y ago

By that logic it's also impossible to provide 12.000 with computer, desks and lunch. But it happened because as you scale numbers of engineers you also scale the para-military to sustain them. So they could have had a one-on-one face-to-face time with each one of them. But they decided to treat them like Cloud resources.

khazhoux 4y ago
They needed to get it over basically in one day (per site). This is actually standard, and gets into issues of computer security, personal security, and lots of CYA. They've scaled up to setting up whatever hundreds of new employees every monday. There's no way they're ready for 12,000 HR 1:1s in one day.

whitemary 4y ago

If you can hire 12000 employees, then this is not impossible. Not even difficult. And not only was this person literally an employee, but they were an employee for 16 years. I really can't tell if I'm responding to an AI bot.

khazhoux 4y ago
The employees are hired a few hundred every week. Layoffs like this happen within a day (per site).
- whitemary 4y ago
  Then don't do them within a day? Regardless of how you try to valorize it, it happened and it's extremely distasteful.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    For half or one percent of outliers, you could give them an earlier heads-up. But for 99+% of the people in a massive layoff, I do think you need to do it in a single day for the practical reason that you want everyone to get certainty as quickly as possible. Can you imagine the chaos in a company if layoff certainty takes a week or two weeks to achieve? This is not a time for eventual consistency.
    - whitemary 4y ago
      If the boss is inconvenienced by treating workers with respect, then so be it. Workers' interests are often at odds with their boss's interests. If you're just figuring this out then I sympathize with you on that point, but I side with the workers here.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        I believe that reducing the uncertainty window from 1-2 weeks to a single day is entirely for the purposes of treating workers with respect. I think it's fundamentally disrespectful to send people to sleep multiple nights and perhaps over a weekend while in a state of grave uncertainty for their near-term economic future. The greater respect is respecting their psychological needs rather than the performative respect of whether the notice was delivered by email or in person. I'd much rather get fired by email [or "all clear" by email] on the first day layoffs begin than to get fired in person 10 calendar days after layoffs begin. I don't think I'm an outlier here.
      - khazhoux 4y ago
        The layoffs at these companies have been 12,000 people, 18,000... no, 1:1s just aren't going to happen. Massive layoffs like this require swift execution, not dragged out over the weeks or months it would take to give everyone a personalized sendoff. In fact, the basic premise of these mass layoffs is that they're not personalized. Entire departments and teams are cut, etc. You may disagree with the very idea of laying off tens of thousands of people at once, but this is still the only reasonable way to execute them.