4 ms·

> today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: > i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays ou

by neya 8mo ago

> today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: > i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. > i’m sorry to put you through this. POV: Dude who has effortlessly fired people before deflects blame for over-hiring in the first place. I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist. This is just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision and no accountability.

y1n0 8mo ago
How dare someone accept your application for employment and pay you money for services rendered. It's absurd!
- no_wizard 8mo ago
  That’s not even a good argument for whatever it is you’re trying to say. While you may not like the energy behind OPs statements he’s pretty clear: CEOs and executives in general face almost zero consequences for their decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of people I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions
  - snihalani 8mo ago
    >I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions I don't think the investor cares. The investor wants 1 in X shot at beating the majority and is agnostic to failure.
    - no_wizard 8mo ago
      I know investors largely don’t care but that’s the point, they do t care because they don’t have to face any real consequences of bad decisions in aggregate
  - csallen 8mo ago
    If you make bad enough decisions, your customers leave, your company dies, and/or you are fired by the board. CEOs get fired all the time, and companies die all the time. It's part of life, and so are layoffs. There's no need for some sort of additional punitive actions to be taken. If you control a company, you have the right to do layoffs, and if you're an employee, you take that risk of being laid off because you prefer it to going out and trying to grow your own company from scratch.
    - ytoawwhra92 8mo ago
      > If you make bad enough decisions, your customers leave, your company dies, and/or you are fired by the board. Not true. Buffet's written a lot of great stuff on this subject.
      - csallen 8mo ago
        The number of famous CEOs who've hopped around from company to company despite being terrible at their job is probably in the dozens. The number of founders/CEOs whose companies have died is demonstrably in the millions. Also, there are plenty of regular employees who suck at their jobs and yet manage to hold onto them, get promoted, get new and lucrative job offers, etc.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - no_wizard 8mo ago
      It’s fine if someone doesn’t believe that executives should not be held to additional high consequence standard, but you’re boiling down this argument without addressing the central element at play which is viability and wealth gap. Now, you can absolutely hold a different position here, that’s okay, I’m fine with that, but at least address it head on. Consider the fact that those getting laid off have disproportionate negative affects compared to what executives face for making terrible decisions in the first place. Jack still keeps his aspen home and whatever wealth he’s extracted out of the company. So he faces no real downside here. He could run block into the ground and still have more money than he would know what to do with. You’re arguing about shares of paper entitling people to do things to other people’s lives without facing much actual consequence in their personal lives. Not to mention professional, I’ve watched executives jump from company to company doing terrible things and they still keep getting hired. Where as the average person is often advised to reduce or obfuscate the fact they were laid off less there be discrimination. Now you can argue that executives shouldn’t face higher consequences in exchange for wielding such immense power over the lives of those which they employ, I ask that you say it plain, don’t hide behind feigned guise of people who live in a world where they don’t have a choice but to work for corporations or not have a roof over their head and basic needs met. It’s fine if you want to defend that, but don’t act like people are just making a deliberate choice. This is a choice society has made for them and the wealthiest perpetuate
- neya 8mo ago
  When you accept my application, there is an implicit understanding that I will have a job for a foreseeable future. I am making life decisions based on YOU, the CEO - I have to think about commute, renting, school for kids and a lot more. All you need to think about is my pay-check. And once you fuck up, you still get your nice fat cheque and bonus, but I'm very realistically looking at relocating and/or unemployment for a very long time and possibly homelessness. You will be hailed as a hero by the board for saving them money, I will be painted a villain by everyone in my family...just for believing in you and your empty words. I'm not even mentioning the side effects of health I get as a result (possible anxiety, depression, blood pressure, etc.) Services rendered is an acceptable excuse for a contractor relationship, not employees. If that's how you view employees, then good luck with your business.
princevegeta89 8mo ago
>>I had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I chose the latter. Jesus.. why do CEOs and other executive members end up writing such useless language in their posts....! Essentially, both these points are the same if you look at the employees. However, the writing has to be bloated in such a way that there is something else involved here, which there is not. This is just drama. Also, these decisions are not hard, regardless of whatever the hell has been claimed. They are actually easy decisions and choosing not to do layoffs is actually the hard decision. There is no need to sugarcoat so much.
- operatingthetan 8mo ago
  It's for the people who still work there.
  - princevegeta89 8mo ago
    It surely still does look stupid for the same people though..
    - tempest_ 8mo ago
      Do they make sure new employees all remove the shift key from their company laptop or is that limited by band?
      - chanux 8mo ago
        At that level, pressing shift probably affects efficiency. /s
    - vkou 8mo ago
      A lot of employees are really stupid, and will believe (or close their eyes to) all sorts of bullshit.
- SanjayMehta 8mo ago
  > such useless language in their posts "Your call is very important to us." "We take security very seriously." PR speak + copy/paste and now LLMs.
keeda 8mo ago
> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist. Look at the job market. They know they can get away with it and so they don't care. My current theory is that this is partly why executives are desperate to get AI to work, and why investors are ploughing billions into AI. They know they've burnt too many bridges, and they need AI to work so they never have to turn to us again. Otherwise the pendulum will swing even farther in the opposite direction, putting even more bargaining power in the hands of employees than the post-COVID job market. Unfortunately, AI does seem to be working very well, and I don't see great outcomes for us on the current trajectory. I expect turmoil before a new social contract is established.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- rezonant 8mo ago
  It seems AI code is producing technical debt at an alarming speed. What many people think of as "AIs don't need code to be pretty" is misunderstanding the purpose of refactoring, code reuse, and architectural patterns that AIs appear to skip or misunderstand with regularity. A reckoning will come when the tech debt needs to be paid and the AIs are going to be unable to pay it, the same way it happens when humans produce technical debt at a high rate and do not address it in a timely manner.
  - Ancalagon 8mo ago
    I agree with this take. The AI is producing tons of debt still, we will see if that pattern holds or if people automate that part into the agents as well.
  - keeda 8mo ago
    Actually, AI's do need code to be pretty. It's becoming widely accepted that whatever is good for humans -- modular code, tests, docs, linters, fast feedback loops -- is good for agents. I keep repeating this, but the latest data from large-scale dev reports like DORA 2025 and DX find that AI is simply an amplifier of your engineering culture: Teams with strong software engineering discipline enjoy increased velocity with fewer outages, whereas teams with weak discipline suffer more outages. About the only thing they need (for now) is architectural guidance and spot-checking of results. But then how many architects does any given company need?
Skidaddle 8mo ago
I remember when Zuck said cut once, cut deep
- tsunamifury 8mo ago
  … then keep cutting.
- ojbyrne 8mo ago
  It’s not clear to me whether you’re characterizing that as trenchant business advice or cynical bullshit. Meta has had several rounds of layoffs now so it surely can’t be the former. Also Guy Kawasaki probably isn’t the first to say this, but I’d guess he predates Zuckerberg: https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_the_/ https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_the_/
mil22 8mo ago
Yep, he hasn't changed. F*ck that guy.
- neya 8mo ago
  I mean, sky is blue, water is wet, etc.
khazhoux 8mo ago
> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. i love that he casts it as: a) a drawn-out downsizing that might stretch for years, which is clearly "bad" because no one likes uncertainty. b) ripping the band-aid decisively, with the nobility of being an "honest" decision. and who doesn't appreciate honesty? ...because of course employees who get laid off, prefer to lose their jobs as soon as possible and know they served an honest ceo.
_heimdall 8mo ago
> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs Do most people not already do this? I know there's a list of CEOs I would never go near.
- rubyfan 8mo ago
  Share
pembrook 8mo ago
The whole thing reads to me like he's not deflecting blame at all, he's explicitly saying he's putting the employees through this. > just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision I mean, the guy has built multiple publicly traded companies and scaled them to thousands of employees from the ground up (an exceedingly rare feat), and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did. I'm sure you would have done a much better job, though. As an HN commenter, you definitely wouldn't have overhired, because you're endlessly pessimistic and deathly afraid of risk. But you also would have never gotten the company off the ground in the first place because this. What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?
- akutlay 8mo ago
  > and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming You miss the point that this is not about AI in the first place
  - pembrook 8mo ago
    If we're being generous we could say mayyybe 20% of the layoffs are accountable to overhiring during ZIRP. Block was doing $4B in revenue with 4K employees in 2019 before the pandemic. They're now doing $24B in revenue with 10K employees and are going to cut near to those previous employee levels. That's a 5X jump in revenue per employee from the pre-covid, pre-AI levels. If you don't think code becoming 1,000X cheaper to produce doesn't radically change the number of employees needed inside a technology org, then it's time to put down the copium pipe.
    - Kina 8mo ago
      The problem is that there is no hard evidence anywhere to actually prove this. I’m going to avoid whether or not AI productivity gains are real, but all the “data” I have seen affirming this is black box observations or vibes. Even your evidence is just conjecture. You’re proposing that they’re going to be successful cutting their workforce like this because AI is such a boon. The Financial Times ran an article [1] the other week with a title saying that AI is a productivity boost and then the article basically spends a bunch of words talking about how the signs are looking good that AI is useful! Then mentions that all of this is inherently optimistic and is not necessarily indicative of an actual trend yet. > While the trends are suggestive, a degree of caution is warranted. Productivity metrics are famously volatile, and it will take several more periods of sustained growth to confirm a new long-term trend. IMHO, at the moment it is not possible to separate trends from AI being an actual game changer vs. AI being used as a smoke screen to launder layoffs for other reasons. We are in a bubble for sure and the problem is that it’s great until it’s not. Bar Kokhba was considered the messiah…until everyone was slaughtered and the Romans depopulated Judaea. Oops. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419dc5 https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419...
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
anitil 8mo ago
To be honest I prefer this type of communication over the I-can't-believe-it's-not-layoffs that my previous employer was doing. At least it's honest that it is a decision they've made.

by neya 8mo ago

y1n0 8mo ago

How dare someone accept your application for employment and pay you money for services rendered. It's absurd!

no_wizard 8mo ago
That’s not even a good argument for whatever it is you’re trying to say. While you may not like the energy behind OPs statements he’s pretty clear: CEOs and executives in general face almost zero consequences for their decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of people I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions
- snihalani 8mo ago
  >I’m with OP, thy should face real consequences for stupid decisions I don't think the investor cares. The investor wants 1 in X shot at beating the majority and is agnostic to failure.
  - no_wizard 8mo ago
    I know investors largely don’t care but that’s the point, they do t care because they don’t have to face any real consequences of bad decisions in aggregate
- csallen 8mo ago
  If you make bad enough decisions, your customers leave, your company dies, and/or you are fired by the board. CEOs get fired all the time, and companies die all the time. It's part of life, and so are layoffs. There's no need for some sort of additional punitive actions to be taken. If you control a company, you have the right to do layoffs, and if you're an employee, you take that risk of being laid off because you prefer it to going out and trying to grow your own company from scratch.
  - ytoawwhra92 8mo ago
    > If you make bad enough decisions, your customers leave, your company dies, and/or you are fired by the board. Not true. Buffet's written a lot of great stuff on this subject.
    - csallen 8mo ago
      The number of famous CEOs who've hopped around from company to company despite being terrible at their job is probably in the dozens. The number of founders/CEOs whose companies have died is demonstrably in the millions. Also, there are plenty of regular employees who suck at their jobs and yet manage to hold onto them, get promoted, get new and lucrative job offers, etc.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - no_wizard 8mo ago
    It’s fine if someone doesn’t believe that executives should not be held to additional high consequence standard, but you’re boiling down this argument without addressing the central element at play which is viability and wealth gap. Now, you can absolutely hold a different position here, that’s okay, I’m fine with that, but at least address it head on. Consider the fact that those getting laid off have disproportionate negative affects compared to what executives face for making terrible decisions in the first place. Jack still keeps his aspen home and whatever wealth he’s extracted out of the company. So he faces no real downside here. He could run block into the ground and still have more money than he would know what to do with. You’re arguing about shares of paper entitling people to do things to other people’s lives without facing much actual consequence in their personal lives. Not to mention professional, I’ve watched executives jump from company to company doing terrible things and they still keep getting hired. Where as the average person is often advised to reduce or obfuscate the fact they were laid off less there be discrimination. Now you can argue that executives shouldn’t face higher consequences in exchange for wielding such immense power over the lives of those which they employ, I ask that you say it plain, don’t hide behind feigned guise of people who live in a world where they don’t have a choice but to work for corporations or not have a roof over their head and basic needs met. It’s fine if you want to defend that, but don’t act like people are just making a deliberate choice. This is a choice society has made for them and the wealthiest perpetuate
neya 8mo ago
When you accept my application, there is an implicit understanding that I will have a job for a foreseeable future. I am making life decisions based on YOU, the CEO - I have to think about commute, renting, school for kids and a lot more. All you need to think about is my pay-check. And once you fuck up, you still get your nice fat cheque and bonus, but I'm very realistically looking at relocating and/or unemployment for a very long time and possibly homelessness. You will be hailed as a hero by the board for saving them money, I will be painted a villain by everyone in my family...just for believing in you and your empty words. I'm not even mentioning the side effects of health I get as a result (possible anxiety, depression, blood pressure, etc.) Services rendered is an acceptable excuse for a contractor relationship, not employees. If that's how you view employees, then good luck with your business.

princevegeta89 8mo ago

>>I had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I chose the latter. Jesus.. why do CEOs and other executive members end up writing such useless language in their posts....! Essentially, both these points are the same if you look at the employees. However, the writing has to be bloated in such a way that there is something else involved here, which there is not. This is just drama. Also, these decisions are not hard, regardless of whatever the hell has been claimed. They are actually easy decisions and choosing not to do layoffs is actually the hard decision. There is no need to sugarcoat so much.

operatingthetan 8mo ago
It's for the people who still work there.
- princevegeta89 8mo ago
  It surely still does look stupid for the same people though..
  - tempest_ 8mo ago
    Do they make sure new employees all remove the shift key from their company laptop or is that limited by band?
    - chanux 8mo ago
      At that level, pressing shift probably affects efficiency. /s
  - vkou 8mo ago
    A lot of employees are really stupid, and will believe (or close their eyes to) all sorts of bullshit.
SanjayMehta 8mo ago
> such useless language in their posts "Your call is very important to us." "We take security very seriously." PR speak + copy/paste and now LLMs.

keeda 8mo ago

> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist. Look at the job market. They know they can get away with it and so they don't care. My current theory is that this is partly why executives are desperate to get AI to work, and why investors are ploughing billions into AI. They know they've burnt too many bridges, and they need AI to work so they never have to turn to us again. Otherwise the pendulum will swing even farther in the opposite direction, putting even more bargaining power in the hands of employees than the post-COVID job market. Unfortunately, AI does seem to be working very well, and I don't see great outcomes for us on the current trajectory. I expect turmoil before a new social contract is established.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
rezonant 8mo ago
It seems AI code is producing technical debt at an alarming speed. What many people think of as "AIs don't need code to be pretty" is misunderstanding the purpose of refactoring, code reuse, and architectural patterns that AIs appear to skip or misunderstand with regularity. A reckoning will come when the tech debt needs to be paid and the AIs are going to be unable to pay it, the same way it happens when humans produce technical debt at a high rate and do not address it in a timely manner.
- Ancalagon 8mo ago
  I agree with this take. The AI is producing tons of debt still, we will see if that pattern holds or if people automate that part into the agents as well.
- keeda 8mo ago
  Actually, AI's do need code to be pretty. It's becoming widely accepted that whatever is good for humans -- modular code, tests, docs, linters, fast feedback loops -- is good for agents. I keep repeating this, but the latest data from large-scale dev reports like DORA 2025 and DX find that AI is simply an amplifier of your engineering culture: Teams with strong software engineering discipline enjoy increased velocity with fewer outages, whereas teams with weak discipline suffer more outages. About the only thing they need (for now) is architectural guidance and spot-checking of results. But then how many architects does any given company need?

Skidaddle 8mo ago

I remember when Zuck said cut once, cut deep

tsunamifury 8mo ago
… then keep cutting.
ojbyrne 8mo ago
It’s not clear to me whether you’re characterizing that as trenchant business advice or cynical bullshit. Meta has had several rounds of layoffs now so it surely can’t be the former. Also Guy Kawasaki probably isn’t the first to say this, but I’d guess he predates Zuckerberg: https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_the_/ https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_the_/

mil22 8mo ago

Yep, he hasn't changed. F*ck that guy.

neya 8mo ago
I mean, sky is blue, water is wet, etc.

khazhoux 8mo ago

> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. i love that he casts it as: a) a drawn-out downsizing that might stretch for years, which is clearly "bad" because no one likes uncertainty. b) ripping the band-aid decisively, with the nobility of being an "honest" decision. and who doesn't appreciate honesty? ...because of course employees who get laid off, prefer to lose their jobs as soon as possible and know they served an honest ceo.

_heimdall 8mo ago

> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs Do most people not already do this? I know there's a list of CEOs I would never go near.

rubyfan 8mo ago
Share

pembrook 8mo ago

The whole thing reads to me like he's not deflecting blame at all, he's explicitly saying he's putting the employees through this. > just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision I mean, the guy has built multiple publicly traded companies and scaled them to thousands of employees from the ground up (an exceedingly rare feat), and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did. I'm sure you would have done a much better job, though. As an HN commenter, you definitely wouldn't have overhired, because you're endlessly pessimistic and deathly afraid of risk. But you also would have never gotten the company off the ground in the first place because this. What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?

akutlay 8mo ago
> and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming You miss the point that this is not about AI in the first place
- pembrook 8mo ago
  If we're being generous we could say mayyybe 20% of the layoffs are accountable to overhiring during ZIRP. Block was doing $4B in revenue with 4K employees in 2019 before the pandemic. They're now doing $24B in revenue with 10K employees and are going to cut near to those previous employee levels. That's a 5X jump in revenue per employee from the pre-covid, pre-AI levels. If you don't think code becoming 1,000X cheaper to produce doesn't radically change the number of employees needed inside a technology org, then it's time to put down the copium pipe.
  - Kina 8mo ago
    The problem is that there is no hard evidence anywhere to actually prove this. I’m going to avoid whether or not AI productivity gains are real, but all the “data” I have seen affirming this is black box observations or vibes. Even your evidence is just conjecture. You’re proposing that they’re going to be successful cutting their workforce like this because AI is such a boon. The Financial Times ran an article [1] the other week with a title saying that AI is a productivity boost and then the article basically spends a bunch of words talking about how the signs are looking good that AI is useful! Then mentions that all of this is inherently optimistic and is not necessarily indicative of an actual trend yet. > While the trends are suggestive, a degree of caution is warranted. Productivity metrics are famously volatile, and it will take several more periods of sustained growth to confirm a new long-term trend. IMHO, at the moment it is not possible to separate trends from AI being an actual game changer vs. AI being used as a smoke screen to launder layoffs for other reasons. We are in a bubble for sure and the problem is that it’s great until it’s not. Bar Kokhba was considered the messiah…until everyone was slaughtered and the Romans depopulated Judaea. Oops. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419dc5 https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419...

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

anitil 8mo ago

To be honest I prefer this type of communication over the I-can't-believe-it's-not-layoffs that my previous employer was doing. At least it's honest that it is a decision they've made.