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Salesforce is hiring over 3k people, despite axing 10% of staff
- outside1234 3y agoMicrosoft is doing the same thing. Layoff the older white men. Hire the younger women of color. It is not even concealed anymore.
- datadrivenangel 3y agoMost of the big companies are doing this. Really makes you wonder about the quality of their leadership when they follow trends like this.
- IKantRead 3y agoThe problem is that as the market increasingly becomes removed from reality the only thing left for "leadership" to do is follow the trends that their biggest investors are following. What benefit would sound, thoughtful leadership provide in a world where the fundamentals have no connection with real world success? For years if you had made a profitable, viable and sustainable company investors would have scoffed at you. You would have been crushed by some investor hype fueled, unprofitable, impossible to sustain company chasing trends. Reality keeps threatening to rear it's ugly head, but then we find a way to keep it at bay for another round of delusion. We all know something is not quite right but as long as there's money on the table we all keep playing the game. I mean we all know by now that crypto is a scam and COIN has more than doubled it's opening price at the start of the year.
- iwant2endmyself 3y ago[dead]
- paleotrope 3y agoWatch Margin Call. Jeremy Irons character explains exactly what is happening.
- throwawaysleep 3y agoThey have bosses/people with power over them like everyone else. CEO is day to day in charge, but they have a board to report to, investors who will gripe, banks that will want more collateral of the share price falls, etc. I’ve done all sorts of damaging things to keep people above me satisfied. And I will do it thousands of times more over my career.
- jacobr1 3y agoRight, even if they disagree with a particular trend, they probably have tremendous pressure to to conform. Going an independent path is very difficult and requires strong leadership skills and political capital.
- pixelatedindex 3y ago> I’ve done all sorts of damaging things to keep people above me satisfied. And I will do it thousands of times more over my career. Interesting. I understand why - your career matters more than another person’s career. But I can’t help but think nobody wants to work for someone who won’t have their team’s back. How do you strike a balance? Asking because I imagine I might face similar situations in the future if/when I go up the totem pole. Do you just say “it’s not personal, just business” and go on your way?
- throwawaysleep 3y agoI will. I will work equally for someone who has my back as someone who does not. I’m too cynical to believe you do have my back, so having it does not matter. I am an IC, so most of my decisions have been about screwing customers. I’ve never had to directly deal with them as that is customer support’s problem. I’ve also hurt salespeople, but again, only had to hear about it through channels.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago> I’ve done all sorts of damaging things to keep people above me satisfied. I love the buck passing. you could just say no.
- frob 3y agoElon Musk starred a fad. The other tech leaders had to get in on the fad or seem out-of-date. The thing about fads is you don't do them because they're useful or because you thought it out; you do it because everyone else is and you don't want to look stupid for being left behind. Owners of tech companies aren't immune to the same foibles that drive all of us; they just have more money.
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoBlaming Elon for everything has reached a new level. I don't think you can be confident in this hypothesis, you would have to show that all these firms weren't reacting similarly because they had the same data and outlook. Twitter just went first.
- rchaud 3y agoIt has nothing to do with Musk. Cisco, Verizon, HP etc have been slashing tens of thousands of jobs to please shareholders since before Musk knew what a 10-Q was. Mass layoffs have been a fact of bigco life for ages. Tech layoffs seem novel in comparison, possibly because in the old days companies didn't have thousands of developers on the payroll.
- tamimio 3y agoNo they do have a use or benefits, not for the employees though but for the corps, it is all supply and demand, once those employees who are mostly living paycheck to paycheck are let go, on a scale, you will have a lot of supply to further reduce the compensations or at least have the leverage when it comes to negotiations, so no WFH and the likes. Corps are never your friends or in your interests, unions are.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- browningstreet 3y agoI was part of a layoff this year. I was the highest performing member of the team — and awarded as such — but my skip level VP didn’t like me. So I’m gone. It was similar across the board.. lots of my coworkers, many of whom were good at their jobs, were selected-out not based on performance either. So yeah, sometimes you can cut the chaff this way, and sometimes it’s just a way for those in power to consolidate their crews. And sure… this is technically a management right, but some who were retained were kept because they were abusable more than they were useful.
- officialjunk 3y agoDo you know why that VP didn't like you?
- pixelatedindex 3y agoNot OP, but I know my manager was let go because he didn’t agree with his manager (VP) in the new re-org structure. I’m glad he didn’t agree because we are customer facing engineers and under the new re-org, we would be under a person who had no desire to think about issues from an external client perspective. It would have made the entire team miserable and less efficient but the VP had an attitude of “why don’t you just do as you’re told”. Sometimes it’s just poor leadership, but leaders have power.
- browningstreet 3y agoI could say that my project was orthogonal to his interests, but also not optional (from higher ups). I made it painless but I expect that as much as anything, he didn’t like my face. And, what was rough was that he oversaw our division for about 60 days. I know for a fact I wasn’t on the cut list from my manager or his manager. Is this capitalist-rational? It is what it is. Is it about optimal organizational outcomes? I don’t see how it could be. Layoffs are about something, but righting ships? I don’t accept that.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoGotta push those salaries down somehow. Publicly traded means everyone lookin at that OpEx, and labor is a big part.
- tamimio 3y agoI had a discussion with one of the CEOs who did that around a year ago, it turns out, it is just the usual influence and bandwagon ride, he said that the hiring is easier these days and unlike during the pandemic, “so we will let go those and hire others later, it won’t be a challenge”, and why he did it? Apparently from reading all the news that big companies are doing it. Now that was a small company following the big boys in tech, but why big companies would do that in the first place? Well, personally, I think it revolves around what said by Tim Gurner, the CEO of Gurner Group (1) > We need to see pain in the economy, We need to remind people they work for the employer, not the other way around. Yes, obviously he was attacked and apologized later, but he was honest, he said out loud what most CEOs say behind closed doors. (1) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tim-gurner-property-developer-australia-b2411998.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tim-gurner...
- ianceicys 3y agoRinse and Repeat. Rinse and Repeat during next year's 2024 recession.
- justinzollars 3y agofeels like we've been in a tech recession for almost a year already!
- iwant2endmyself 3y ago[dead]
- nine_zeros 3y ago2021: Others are hiring, we must hire. 2022: Others are laying off/firing, we must lay off/fire. 2023: Others are RTO, we must RTO too. 2023 and beyond: Others are hiring, we must hire too. So inspired to work hard for them /s
- darkwater 3y agoThere is one "small" twist: they were probably firing/letting go all the people that didn't want return to the office and now are starting again to hire people that will go to the office. It sucks big time, and it's what more or less happening at my company as well (I'm fully remote, hoping to get fired and get a juicy compensation for that)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ashleyn 3y ago"It's OK, come back [at a significantly reduced salary]"
- krembanan 3y agoIf anything you'd probably drastically increase your salary if boomeranging. Inflation has been no joke these last years, and getting a new job usually outperforms a promotion by a large margin.
- m00x 3y agoWages don't need to track inflation. It's been going the opposite way.
- ozzydave 3y agoThe data say wages have been outpacing inflation: https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/1702134443203289513?s=20 https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/1702134443203289513?s=20
- wenebego 3y agoFor the past 6 months, convinient to ignore the 2 years before that, and the 30 years before that.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoBut also, importantly, not driving a wage/price spiral. https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2023/may/how-much-do-labor-costs-drive-inflation/ https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...
- wredue 3y ago“For 6 months” That’s some pretty important context you left out.
- IKantRead 3y ago
- gustavus 3y agoSo I think before we can get outraged we need to know what areas got laid off and what areas they are hiring for, rebalancing your workforce isn't necessarily a bad thing, although the way they handled it might've been done poorly. I mean you can't exactly take Linda whose been in HR for 10 years or Frank whose a team lead in accounting and suddenly turn them into Sr. ML engineers.
- jvanderbot 3y agoYeah and also visa versa, just to be fair. My experience with HR folks and accounting folks makes me so glad I'm not doing their job.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jalapenos 3y agoNot if we're on the internet to get outraged. Then these details would be sabotage.
- _ea1k 3y agoTrue, but my impression is that large scale layoffs don't tend to be well targeted. It is almost impossible for them to be well targeted, just because of the needs for secrecy driving decisions into places far removed from day to day operations. Inevitably the new hires won't be the same roles, but plenty of them would fit the same resumes. :facepalm
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- runarberg 3y agoIn class warfare it is a poor choice to give the wealth class this benefit of a doubt. If their seemingly poor decisions—and to a laid off worker these were indeed poor decisions—were not made of incompetence, to a worker it is better to assume they were made out of class interest. Or as Marx’s razor goes: > Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by class interest. In this case you have no evidence to even hint that the people being rehired won’t fill up positions lost during the mass layoffs. If you are a worker, it serves you better to assume the mass layoffs were done with the sole purpose to enrich the shareholders at the cost of the business, and assume that the rehiring is evidence to the fact that this poor decisions collaterally affected the health of the business, and by extension, the value for their shareholder.
- manishsharan 3y agoThe formula is to lay off senior people who are at the higher end of the paygrade salary range and hire similarly experienced people at the lower end of the salary range. They can shave off ~50k for every such position. It sucks and it happens a lot when you are older.
- m00x 3y agoIt doesn't always happen, but if the company can operate like this successfully, why wouldn't they? If you can pay less someone for the same result, it's an obvious win.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoI don’t think many companies do this or could be successful doing this. Unless the senior person is just performing like a junior one, they should have got laid off long ago. Most companies have the opposite problem (difficult to hire/retain a senior SWE, easy to hire junior ones, but you need experience to balance the teams out).
- coldpie 3y ago> If you can pay less someone for the same result, it's an obvious win. I guess if the only thing in the world that matters to you is money, sure. I think people who think like that should be shunned from society.
- paulcole 3y agoWhat are you saying matters then?
- coldpie 3y agoPeople. Treating the people who work for you as the people they are. People who depend on stable employment for their lives & family, and who intrinsically deserve to be respected, rather than be tossed on the street to save a couple bucks.
- xeromal 3y agoIt's always annoying when article headlines mix figures. Why use 3k people on one hand and 10% on the other. Make them consistent. lol
- beanjuiceII 3y agook?
- LargeTomato 3y agoWe were so convinced of an upcoming recession. The pandemic, domestic politics, a trade war, inflation, all of these things were signaling a downturn. We got articles like [1] "100% probability of U.S. recession in coming year, according to Bloomberg Economics forecast model". Except the underlying foundation for the economy was strong. All the people who said it was strong were shouted down but here we are now, with a roaring economy. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/100-probability-of-u-s-recession-in-next-12-months-according-to-new-forecast-11666051473 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/100-probability-of-u-s-rec...
- dataflow 3y agoYou might be right but I'm gonna hold judgment until the interest rates are back down to something more normal for a while. Recession or not, the situation doesn't feel normal, and the current situation doesn't feel sustainable. Edit: In reply to those who feel "normal" isn't a thing: replace it with "sustainable".
- seansmccullough 3y agoBy historical standards, we just got back to normal interest rates, the last 15 years was not normal - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds
- nsxwolf 3y agoI'm thinking this might be healthier. When I was a kid it seemed normal that money in the bank would accrue real interest. Now that mine's doing that, something just feels right about it, like things are back in balance. Take my money, loan it out, pay me a little something back.
- notyourwork 3y agoWhat do you consider normal? Normal may be different depending on your age.
- fullshark 3y ago
- finnh 3y agoIsn't this generally because they didn't fire low performers one by one, but instead those people just build up and get laid off all together? It's a terrible pattern (firing known-bad staff is good for morale, layoffs are bad for morale) but extremely common. As much as people hate stack ranking and enforced "unregretted attrition" at places like AWS, it seems like the only way to ensure managers actually fire deadweight.
- jacobr1 3y agoThe bigger problem was deadwood employees, but deadwood projects and middle-managers who built out their fiefdoms. The smarter approach would have been to do a better job moving around the best employees in more comprehensive reorg. But that is very difficult to execute well.
- jvanderbot 3y agoThis always seems to be a worse problem than IC performance. Managers have power to remove ICs. But nobody really has a lot of power against politically strong dead weight projects.
- milesvp 3y agoFun story. I worked with a guy who had a habit of killing any project he was on. Guy was fantastic at certain feel good maneuvers that had a tendency to suck all forward momentum and enthusiasm. He was a nice guy, and it was clear he had positive intent. I would unequivocally hire this guy if I was a C-suite and place him on any project I couldn’t kill but wanted to stall out.
- game_the0ry 3y agoCorporate america is strategy is incoherent. They probably needed to make quarterly profit benchmarks, so cut opex via layoffs. Now they are good, start hiring aggressively (again). Silly management, can't make up their minds. Personally, I have adapted to expect the chaos and prep mentally. I encourage others to do the same, especially if you are at a risky tech company. Its best t never assume stability, especially nowadays.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deltree7 3y ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoMore discussion yesterday over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37516544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37516544
- jacobr1 3y agoOne thing to consider for SFDC, the layoffs took a while to percolate. It was many months before the international employee base was impacted, especially in the EU, do to local labor laws.
- archo 3y agohttps://archive.is/ifYV5 https://archive.is/ifYV5