4 ms·

Former employee (though not part of that famous round of layoff) The noise around Zoom firing was ridiculous. We were a largely remote company with most people

Former employee (though not part of that famous round of layoff) The noise around Zoom firing was ridiculous. We were a largely remote company with most people having never been to the office (I don't think I had, at that moment) so how exactly do you lay off people except remotely? VG didn't do a great job there but the idea of doing it remotely being evil or whatever was ridiculous - should the people be flown in to NY just to get fired? Overall I find VG a flawed but reasonable dude. He definitely put his ass on the line for the business, was generous with equity - and was a pretty engaged leader. I don't think much about my time at Better but it was fine.

throwaway27448 2mo ago
> He definitely put his ass on the line for the business Oh did he risk being homeless? Let's not be hyperbolic here—all he risked was minor embarrassment
- xyzelement 2mo ago
  There was some dynamic with Softbank which required VG to put a lot of personal money on the line to keep going. I forget the dynamic exactly.
- nickff 2mo ago
  "Minor embarrassment" is what politicians who 'take full responsibility' while not facing any consequences 'suffer'.[1] Getting canned for it is a bit more than that. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-19958739 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-19958739
  - happytoexplain 2mo ago
    >Getting canned for it is a bit more than that. No, in the C-suite, it is not. Yes, in other positions, it is.
    - SaltyBackendGuy 2mo ago
      What more can he do, other than get canned, to be accountable?
      - xboxnolifes 2mo ago
        Take a pay cut, push back on investors/board, wait until after Christmas...
      - simoncion 2mo ago
        One option is to pay back enough of his compensation from that period (and money made off of investments funded by that compensation) to make his total comp over his tenure equal to that of a low-to-mid-level line worker. Some say that money is the unit of caring. If that's true, then nothing expresses an executive's commitment to accountability more than him forfeiting enough of his total compensation to put himself nearly at the bottom of the totem pole.
      - sgt101 2mo ago
        Apologise and donate his fortune to homeless charities?
      - happytoexplain 2mo ago
        Nothing, of course - that's why he is not accountable. Because of the way things currently work, he was not in a situation to be able to be accountable. Maybe we can change that eventually.
  - throwaway27448 2mo ago
    Well he is almost certainly wealthier than the people he fired so it's quite hard to take this seriously
happytoexplain 2mo ago
>put his ass on the line Please don't do this. There are many people who put their ass on the line. He is not one of them. He risked almost nothing from a human perspective.
- xyzelement 2mo ago
  I find it off-putting that you and another poster think you are in position to evaluate someone else's sacrifice. I pressume that if you had put years and lots of money towards something - you would consider that significant "on a human level".
  - happytoexplain 2mo ago
    This is an oversimplification. I didn't make the implication you are accusing me of. Tangentially, please do not presume my feelings based on invented scenarios - it's hostile. Regardless - yes, my response should be off-putting. The situation we are in is "off-putting", to understate it.
  - bluefirebrand 2mo ago
    > I pressume that if you had put years and lots of money towards something - you would consider that significant "on a human level". If you are wealthy enough to gamble a bunch of money and a couple of years and still have more money than most people left over if it fails, then no. I don't view that as making any kind of significant sacrifice at all Seriously. If your "worst case scenario" is still "I could retire comfortably tomorrow without any hardship" then I genuinely feel no sympathy for you if your ventures fail.
    - simoncion 2mo ago
      > Seriously. If your "worst case scenario" is still "I could retire comfortably tomorrow without any hardship"... Yeah. A long while back, I was talking to the guy who ran a Subway-branded sandwich shop that I frequented, and had been running it for quite a long while. He was complaining to me how absolutely terribly the business was doing... how he'd lost something like 150K last year and this year was shaping up to be at least as bad. And, like, on the one hand that's a quite a lot of money for an individual to lose. On the other hand I -at the time- would have been immediately tossed out on the street if I lost even a quarter of that amount in a year. Him? He kept the business open, bleeding money for a couple more years before he shut it down to go do something else. He was unhappy about the change in plans, but very clearly not financially threatened by the losses over the previous years. A monetary loss that would ruin one person might not even be worth bothering to account for to another. The surrounding context always matters.
healsdata 2mo ago
There's a huge range of options between a terse Zoom call with 900 people on it and flying everyone to NY. And if you're someone who previously said "You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS… SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME" to your employees, you may want to lean towards the more humane options if you don't want to get dragged.
- Petersipoi 2mo ago
  There is nothing inhumane about announcing layoffs over Zoom though. Hell I'd prefer to be laid off in the least personal way possible because I'm a grown-ass adult who doesn't need my company to treat my like a child. Tell me and get it over with.
  - garciasn 2mo ago
    Just like a mass wedding is fucking stupid, so is a mass layoff. You can have the fucking common decency to do a 1:1 Zoom call with each person. Or at least each fucking team. Firing 900 people simultaneously is not only stupid and callous, but lazy. There’s absolutely no excuse for that level of inhumanity.
    - Pedro_Ribeiro 2mo ago
      What does it matter if it's an HR person or the CEO telling me? The job is not coming back either way.
      - happytoexplain 2mo ago
        Not who, how.
      - swat535 2mo ago
        I don't understand this either. It's a professional environment and all you're doing is a business transaction: you offer them services, they pay you. My phone provider doesn't have an emotional breakdown when I fire them, why should I? People should never take anything corporations do personally. This is why all the messaging about "we're a family" is BS.. The biggest issue is the lack of safety net and healthcare for people when they are let go.. severance kind of take care of this but it varies greatly. But hey.. perhaps working in this industry for decades has made me too cynical.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
lbrito 2mo ago
Oh, will some one think of the poor CEOs for a change! He puts his ass on the line! Pathetic
jroseattle 2mo ago
> VG didn't do a great job there but the idea of doing it remotely being evil or whatever was ridiculous I don't think the issue was the communications medium (Zoom.) > I don't think much about my time at Better but it was fine. That's the biggest tell about leadership at any company.
e40 2mo ago
> so how exactly do you lay off people except remotely? You have their managers do it. Privately. 500 people at once is just lazy and hateful.
- xyzelement 2mo ago
  How long does that take (900 people) - how does your entire 10k people company feel for hours and days knowing the layoffs are happening but not their fate? And how many of those said 10k mortgage originators and engineers do something stupid to customer financial data they have access to while under duress of this uncertainty?
duxup 2mo ago
I’ve been laid off via remote meeting. The folks doing it were unhelpful (couldn’t answer typical questions) / they were some third party company hired to fire people. I didn’t like it… but not much would have made it “better”. The CEO actually doing it himself is surprising. Lots of executives wouldn’t put themselves out there like that.

throwaway27448 2mo ago

> He definitely put his ass on the line for the business Oh did he risk being homeless? Let's not be hyperbolic here—all he risked was minor embarrassment

xyzelement 2mo ago
There was some dynamic with Softbank which required VG to put a lot of personal money on the line to keep going. I forget the dynamic exactly.
nickff 2mo ago
"Minor embarrassment" is what politicians who 'take full responsibility' while not facing any consequences 'suffer'.[1] Getting canned for it is a bit more than that. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-19958739 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-19958739
- happytoexplain 2mo ago
  >Getting canned for it is a bit more than that. No, in the C-suite, it is not. Yes, in other positions, it is.
  - SaltyBackendGuy 2mo ago
    What more can he do, other than get canned, to be accountable?
    - xboxnolifes 2mo ago
      Take a pay cut, push back on investors/board, wait until after Christmas...
    - simoncion 2mo ago
      One option is to pay back enough of his compensation from that period (and money made off of investments funded by that compensation) to make his total comp over his tenure equal to that of a low-to-mid-level line worker. Some say that money is the unit of caring. If that's true, then nothing expresses an executive's commitment to accountability more than him forfeiting enough of his total compensation to put himself nearly at the bottom of the totem pole.
    - sgt101 2mo ago
      Apologise and donate his fortune to homeless charities?
    - happytoexplain 2mo ago
      Nothing, of course - that's why he is not accountable. Because of the way things currently work, he was not in a situation to be able to be accountable. Maybe we can change that eventually.
- throwaway27448 2mo ago
  Well he is almost certainly wealthier than the people he fired so it's quite hard to take this seriously

happytoexplain 2mo ago

>put his ass on the line Please don't do this. There are many people who put their ass on the line. He is not one of them. He risked almost nothing from a human perspective.

xyzelement 2mo ago
I find it off-putting that you and another poster think you are in position to evaluate someone else's sacrifice. I pressume that if you had put years and lots of money towards something - you would consider that significant "on a human level".
- happytoexplain 2mo ago
  This is an oversimplification. I didn't make the implication you are accusing me of. Tangentially, please do not presume my feelings based on invented scenarios - it's hostile. Regardless - yes, my response should be off-putting. The situation we are in is "off-putting", to understate it.
- bluefirebrand 2mo ago
  > I pressume that if you had put years and lots of money towards something - you would consider that significant "on a human level". If you are wealthy enough to gamble a bunch of money and a couple of years and still have more money than most people left over if it fails, then no. I don't view that as making any kind of significant sacrifice at all Seriously. If your "worst case scenario" is still "I could retire comfortably tomorrow without any hardship" then I genuinely feel no sympathy for you if your ventures fail.
  - simoncion 2mo ago
    > Seriously. If your "worst case scenario" is still "I could retire comfortably tomorrow without any hardship"... Yeah. A long while back, I was talking to the guy who ran a Subway-branded sandwich shop that I frequented, and had been running it for quite a long while. He was complaining to me how absolutely terribly the business was doing... how he'd lost something like 150K last year and this year was shaping up to be at least as bad. And, like, on the one hand that's a quite a lot of money for an individual to lose. On the other hand I -at the time- would have been immediately tossed out on the street if I lost even a quarter of that amount in a year. Him? He kept the business open, bleeding money for a couple more years before he shut it down to go do something else. He was unhappy about the change in plans, but very clearly not financially threatened by the losses over the previous years. A monetary loss that would ruin one person might not even be worth bothering to account for to another. The surrounding context always matters.

healsdata 2mo ago

There's a huge range of options between a terse Zoom call with 900 people on it and flying everyone to NY. And if you're someone who previously said "You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS… SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME" to your employees, you may want to lean towards the more humane options if you don't want to get dragged.

Petersipoi 2mo ago
There is nothing inhumane about announcing layoffs over Zoom though. Hell I'd prefer to be laid off in the least personal way possible because I'm a grown-ass adult who doesn't need my company to treat my like a child. Tell me and get it over with.
- garciasn 2mo ago
  Just like a mass wedding is fucking stupid, so is a mass layoff. You can have the fucking common decency to do a 1:1 Zoom call with each person. Or at least each fucking team. Firing 900 people simultaneously is not only stupid and callous, but lazy. There’s absolutely no excuse for that level of inhumanity.
  - Pedro_Ribeiro 2mo ago
    What does it matter if it's an HR person or the CEO telling me? The job is not coming back either way.
    - happytoexplain 2mo ago
      Not who, how.
    - swat535 2mo ago
      I don't understand this either. It's a professional environment and all you're doing is a business transaction: you offer them services, they pay you. My phone provider doesn't have an emotional breakdown when I fire them, why should I? People should never take anything corporations do personally. This is why all the messaging about "we're a family" is BS.. The biggest issue is the lack of safety net and healthcare for people when they are let go.. severance kind of take care of this but it varies greatly. But hey.. perhaps working in this industry for decades has made me too cynical.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

lbrito 2mo ago

Oh, will some one think of the poor CEOs for a change! He puts his ass on the line! Pathetic

jroseattle 2mo ago

> VG didn't do a great job there but the idea of doing it remotely being evil or whatever was ridiculous I don't think the issue was the communications medium (Zoom.) > I don't think much about my time at Better but it was fine. That's the biggest tell about leadership at any company.

e40 2mo ago

> so how exactly do you lay off people except remotely? You have their managers do it. Privately. 500 people at once is just lazy and hateful.

xyzelement 2mo ago
How long does that take (900 people) - how does your entire 10k people company feel for hours and days knowing the layoffs are happening but not their fate? And how many of those said 10k mortgage originators and engineers do something stupid to customer financial data they have access to while under duress of this uncertainty?

duxup 2mo ago

I’ve been laid off via remote meeting. The folks doing it were unhelpful (couldn’t answer typical questions) / they were some third party company hired to fire people. I didn’t like it… but not much would have made it “better”. The CEO actually doing it himself is surprising. Lots of executives wouldn’t put themselves out there like that.