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I mentioned it in another thread but this is employers resetting employee expectations. Lay off a percentage and work the rest harder, make people RTO, etc.
by HumblyTossed 3y ago
I mentioned it in another thread but this is employers resetting employee expectations. Lay off a percentage and work the rest harder, make people RTO, etc.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI think this makes sense from the perspective of a worker and what their fears are. I think it’s probably much simpler: money isn’t cheap anymore and everyone overhired for a long time.
- aaomidi 3y agoDon’t let a “crisis” go to waste.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoThe point is that isn’t what’s happening. From the workers’ perspective it’s a convenient narrative. The truth is, as usual, messier: constrained executives are confronted with targets they don’t know how to meet, and so start shoving round pegs into square holes.
- jachee 3y agoAnd very seldom suffer themselves for their choices.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoSure. Yes. Wealth insulates. Firing the CEO before a lay-off is stupid; it means every hire is a job risk. If we want that, Europe has it better figured; socialise the risk of unemployment.
- evantbyrne 3y agoDo layoffs actually motivate workers though? I feel like from the people I've spoken to that have experienced losing coworkers to layoffs, they just kind of disconnect.
- HumblyTossed 3y agoI don’t think it’s about motivation. I thinks it is about saying employees have been making too much noise past couple years with their union talk, WFH, pay inequality, etc so this is going to be the year of fear for your job.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago> money isn’t cheap anymore I know nothing about economics but I wonder if it’s time to ease up on the interest rates. Inflation might not be due to too much money in the system but rather supply simply drying up as China economy circles the drain. Maybe it’s a good idea to let money be cheap again so people could quickly set up alternative non-China suppliers to relieve the supply pressure. But then again I know anything about economics so add salt as required.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoThe economy is hot. Money is being allocated away from the jobs that powered that last decade’s tech boom; we’re feeling that in Silicon Valley. (It doesn’t help how expensive commodity talent is in the Bay Area. Unless you’re doing AI or something tremendously collaborative, you’ve probably already built the systems that enable your team to phone in from anywhere.)
- verve_rat 3y agoIf money is being allocated away from tech, where is it going to?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kasey_junk 3y agoGovernment, healthcare & construction from the last report: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
- jimbob45 3y agoPeople aren't cattle for you to get rid of. I'm tired of layoffs being a first resort rather than a last resort for companies. I'd like to see something where C-suite executives are required to resign if undergoing layoffs.
- throwaway5959 3y agoUltimately it’s bad management that usually leads to layoffs (barring extreme cases like the product your company makes being banned, for instance), it makes sense that leadership should be some of the first heads to roll.
- novagameco 3y agoAt the very least, layoffs should be seen as an indication of failure. Sundar Pichai should not be making as much money as he is with the amount of layoffs they did
- paulddraper 3y agoLayoffs are an indication of failure, as much as hires are an indication of success. That is to say: not at all.
- tlivolsi 3y agoNeither should every other Google employee.
- paulddraper 3y agoHN in 2018: "Why do you need X employees to do that? That's like a weekend project." HN in 2024: "Companies should not reduce their headcount."
- jimbob45 3y agoLayoffs ruin human lives. Suicides happen. Breakups happen, with and without kids. Homes are defaulted on. Depression is almost a certainty. If the choice is between layoffs and total company ruin, okay, they’re necessary. If the layoffs are because you don’t want to try fixing anything else with the company first, you ought to be the first one fired.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Lay off a percentage and work the rest harder, make people RTO, etc. There is little to no evidence of this. There is a lot of evidence of layoffs, particularly across-the-board ones, costing shareholders [1]. Companies that manage little to no laying off outperform their competitors and are rewarded in the capital markets. [1] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-layoffs-cost-companies/ https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-layoffs-cost...
- WheatMillington 3y agoHow do you control for biases here? Of course companies who haven't needed to do layoffs are stronger than businesses who did need to.
- dv_dt 3y agoLook at comparable profit margins before and after. A lot of these layoffs are coming to companies that are still maintaining a healthy margin. The layoffs might prop up the margin in the short term, but I think there becomes long term lasting damage that would show as underperformance.
- Aurornis 3y ago> this is employers resetting employee expectations. Many of these companies transitioned to remote work at the same time they did massive hiring sprees. Many of these new hires were getting their first taste of remote work in companies that were doing their first trial of remote work, all while a massive influx of new employees and initiatives introduced more chaos. Predictably, a lot of this chaos happening all at once wasn’t a good environment for those new employees, especially those learning how to work remote for the first time. There’s definitely a resetting going on. Many companies are reversing everything all at once in an attempt to get back to some of the stability they had before COVID. I think we’ll see more remote work opportunities, but companies learned their lesson that throwing everyone into remote all at once doesn’t work. Remote isn’t for everyone.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]