Hey this has been happening at my work! It definitely isn’t a complete dumpster fire over here now, that knowledge and experience from those hundreds of people wasn’t critical or anything, the people who are left are totally working well and not just scraping by under constant fear of being fired next, it’s fine
They always underestimate the morale killer. They think HR sending out a few notes will smooth things over. Nope, that job security just hit the floor, people are scared. Productivity drops while everyone processes, people start wondering if they should look elsewhere, it takes years to rebuild from a big layoff like that
My (soon to be ex) company gets around the rebuild step by doing annual layoffs.
they are so clueless. half of my team got laid off on friday, and we got an email from our manager inviting us to attend a different team’s standup in addition to our own so we could feel more “connected”.
the only thing another standup is going to make me feel is fucking pissed off
maybe you just need a pizza party. There they can explain how laying off half your team was a good thing so they can buy another Audi
My employer had a slightly better reason to do layoffs, because our financial situation then was pretty bad and still is pretty bad. I don’t mean “we got 30% profit instead of 31%!”, but “we aren’t making money and we have no money”. Layoffs were more understandable than usual given the situation and circumstances.
And even in these conditions, I still think it was a terrible decision. Morale was ultra low after the layoffs, and the situation led to quite a few people who did survive to leave of their own volition for better opportunities. We lost talent in the layoffs, and then we lost talent in everyone who felt like they were on a sinking ship. Which, in turn, has led to even more people feeling like it’s a sinking ship with the writing on the wall.
My management chain is completely gone. I directly report to an executive now, where previously there was my supervisor, his supervisor, his supervisor, and then the executive. Where there were perhaps 10-15 system engineers both in and outside my team, there are now like 3-4 of us thanks to layoffs and departures. And if one of these guys leave, I’m going to find a new job and put in my two weeks once I land one.
The silver lining is that my job security has never been better, because they’ve created a situation where they literally can’t afford to lose me or my colleagues. We’re all on critical projects, and at the point where a new person just wouldn’t be helpful, because they don’t have the proper time to learn and get caught up before we need these projects finished.
In short? Layoffs are a terrible decision, even when you’re in terrible financial straits. You risk a death spiral that makes things even worse and worse.
Dude, just start looking. Don’t wait for somebody else to leave, be that person.
If somebody else leaves, your workload will increase even more while you try to find a new job. Just take the initiative. And next time, be quicker about it too. Protect yourself.
It’s a renewable energy company, so I do believe in its mission and I’m hoping it’ll be successful in the long term. I want to jump ship only as a last resort.
That said, I should probably stop being lazy and actually update my resume and start putting out some applications.
I symphatize with that, but it would seem they are definitely not going to last until they are successful. I respect that you work towards renewable energy, but they won’t lose one night of sleep if they have to fire you down the road.
Take care of yourself, good luck.
Edit: I just remembered from another thread. Somebody shared a gem about hoping: Hope in one hand, shit in the other and see which one gets filled first.
Not to say hope is bad, but I also believe in being realistic about things.
No you’ve brought up a lot of good points, and I appreciate it. I also just tend to be resistant to changes as a person. At the very least I do need to brush up my resume.
I always jump ship after a layoff. They invariably ask you to do more work for the same price. Half the time at places I’ve worked the company goes under soon anyways.
You get a bigger raise with a new job than staying at the old job, and I assume it’s even worse after layoffs. When I tell job interviewers “because layoffs”, they can easily verify it and confirm I didn’t just get fired for being an asshole.
What happened at my work was they did like 2 mini layoffs, then a medium one, then a big one that was split into 3 parts, all this over the course of about two years. Morale here is more or less in free fall, we’ve alienated our user base, and I don’t expect it to recover for many years.
wow, it sounds like they did the exact perfectly wrong approach to layoffs. (When I was laid off I researched how companies do them).
The goal should be to do one big layoff - once. This sounds horrible, but it actually helps morale in the longrun because you can tell your people you did it once so it doesn’t have to happen again. (Assuming the company is in fact in dire straits). Morale will go to zero, some employees will leave, but it will rebuild, and trust will (eventually) be restored.
What you don’t want to do is several layoffs, because each succeeding layoff morale drops even lower and more and more people leave voluntarily, and you never rebuild that trust, because there is no reason to. Anxiety that you’ll lose your job keeps growing, fearing that you’ll be next, and you have no idea when. So, you might as well just let everyone go and start over.
Yeah only reason I’m still there is I can’t let my insurance get disrupted right now. Couple more months though then I’m going to start looking around. I don’t trust them at all anymore and I’ve pretty well checked out of that job
My company built a big lab with expensive equipment and then laid off the person who was an expert in using all of it.
I’m sure that won’t have any negative consequence. Please do not question the decisions of our enlightened leaders or you won’t have pizza.
I work in an industry where it’s kind of normal to have large fluctuations. Layoffs at least go by seniority, so only new people are terrified.
I honestly feel you shouldn’t be able to declare money saved from layoffs as a good thing, shouldn’t profit be a sign of growth but if you really could keep growing you’d still need that staff
It’s not a good thing if you know what you’re looking at. Of course, the average investor doesn’t have a clue. Half the problem is that there’s a lot that can’t be conveyed in financial statements. I’ve worked for companies that I would never buy any stock in because it’s like you get there and realize that they completely destroyed any chance at long term viability for some small short term gains. Even if they’re profitable. Corporations that focus on building a high quality, sustainable business that aims to earn a modest profit are an exceptionally rare breed.
You certainly won’t have to rehire many of them in a week or two as your operations turn to shit.
Wait till they demand contractor rates!
As long as you don’t go full Elon, company can get away with it. You are just coping hard.
My company 😢
This shit sucks. Some Silicon Valley shit company bought ours and they’re closing us down after only half a year. Feels so unfair. Our company was doing well while theirs is going down the shitter with huge loans and promising the moon but delivering fuck all. Silicon Valley culture is toxic shit
Typical Private Equity deal… The buyers take a massive loan in the name of the company they are buying then they use the sudden massive interest payments to explain the declining profits and the need to downsize. Then they find a way to squirrel out of the loans claiming the company sucked and let banks take remaining assets (or losses) and maybe resell the intellectual property to someone else right before that.
So you mean that banks are dumb and give away money for free and then just take the losses and repeat thr process?
Actually banks take collateral that is normally not what the private equity firms target and that actually seems to work, but the consequence is that hard assets of the firm (offices, buildings, hardware, cash, etc) are essentially given up
so think of your company as a horse
you sell it to someone for a nice price thinking the other one wants to ride the horse just like you did. but they are actually a butcher and make horse sausage out of it.
Yes and it hurts.
They’re not dumb; this is the “moral hazard” we were warned of during the 2008 GFC.
True, but we never expected that to happen with our company which was built on entirely different values. I am now committed never to let those vultures anywhere near a company I care about if I can help it, no matter their offer
Well, this is because it’s access to Money that determines power, not actual merit.
That’s the purest Capitalism you can think of and you see it at such an extreme level in present day Tech Startup Culture because nowadays it’s basically the Even Wilder Wild West Of Finance so it operates by the same principles of Finance - (I actually went from Investment Banking to Startups back in the UK a few years ago and for me it looked a lot like the Founder and Investor level culture of the latter was very similar to that in the wildest bits of the former). Back in the 90s Startups weren’t quite like that, but nowadays it’s different.
That kind of thing also operates at the people level: I’ve seen Startups with so-so ideas get jump-started with a couple of millions because mommy and daddy of a main founder are rich whilst ideas with a lot better legs to go places keep limping along unable to generate sufficient cash flow to takeoff or to get enough investment to do what’s needed to generate more cash flow, until running out of founds.
What survives is either those with access to lots of no questions asked money upfront (which actually works because a well funded half-arsed idea can still triumph in the market over barelly funded good ideas) or those who manage to portray their stuff as paradygm-changing (“The next Google!!!”) which why one sees incredible levels of bullshit in the Startup space and endless jumping on hype-trains (like, for example, anybody looking for funding now will be pitching “something-something-AI !!!”)
Imagine how many brilliant innovations have been lost to the world because of this…
I don’t even know if that list would be a fair one because those are things we know were killed. We don’t know how many unannounced or secret projects were killed that were basically completed.
Well “brilliant” may be a stretch for a lot of those…
My understanding is that these projects are a side-effect of how Google judges promotions. If you’ve “created a new product”, that puts you higher on the list to get promoted.
There are no incentives nor resources for maintaining those products. So you see a long list of “ideas” from Google that are abandoned immediately after someone got their promotion.
Oh yes. The CEO said to my boss that they need to cut down on staff because it costs too much, meanwhile he takes a huge bonus every year. Makes sense…
Then on the other end, you have bosses who willingly took pay cut to save employees from lay offs such as Nintendo bosses Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto. They’re far and wide among the bloody sea of cut throat and greedy executives.
That kind of insightful advice doesn’t come cheap.
Add in re-hiring those same employees at a lower rate or off-shoring to India to get 3x the head count for the same wage and that’s basically what’s going on.
3x times the headcount 9x times the lead times. Spend more for less!
Good God Almighty. If I worked on a construction job, you’d see a bunch of people trying to pound screws in with the head of a screwdriver. Meanwhile, I’m over here like, “No! What? What the hell are you doing?!Wait, did you just try to solder too boards together with a blow torch? Oh fuck. Now the building is on fire.”
And of course, management is like, “Why is the building on fire?? Isn’t this like the twelfth time the building has been on fire?”
Yes. Yes it is, because you geniuses fired all the guys who knew anything about construction and hired a bunch of people who were able to identify screwdrivers without asking them if they knew how to use one.
Now, if we were actually in construction, this would be completely ludicrous. But if you work in technology, it’s considered a “good business decision” because it has a “positive impact on the bottom line”. …for about 5 minutes anyway.
Also 9x the terrible flaws that scare away customers.
Spent about the same for more people to do less work and lower quality work.
Note that 99% of the time the offshore labor geography does have talent, but they aren’t going to work for an offshoring shop, they will work for real companies in that geography. The offshoring companies thrive on essentially fraud, no matter what country they are in.
You forgot to add ai to everything.
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There are consequences, but those consequences are a big fat bonus and a golden parachute.
I immediately distrust anyone wearing a suit, I’ve just realised.
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
— Maya Angelou
Pick the victims randomly
Even better, pick the highest-paid rank-and-file workers (which usually have the highest pay for a reason), so your entire workforce is made up of inexperienced juniors unfamiliar with the things they’re working on, who have little to no reason to stay at the company for long. That always works out in the company’s favor long-term.
Experiencing this now. They fired my manager/boss, who was the only engineer that had the license to sign off on a bunch of shit related to a bunch of our projects. Now i’m left picking up the pieces and working remotely with some guy hundreds of miles away that doesnt have direct access to our file systems. So fun!
They know that, at least for a little while, the customers are buying the brand name and not evaluating the nuanced ccompetency. When that falls, their stocks have vested and they are long gone.
If shareholders and executives are demanding so much money, shouldn’t they be the optimal target for cuts to maximize profitability of the business? 🤔
IMHO that’s why co-ops tend to last longer.
All employees are replaceable by a series of sales pitches on what AI is about to do right around the corner. That will keep pumping the stock price right up until the impending massive crash.
“The economy is doing fine.”
I saw this a few years ago and it has stuck with me.
“The economy isn’t talking about me and you, it’s referring to corporations and executives and shareholders and such.”
The economy could be doing amazing and we have 50% unemployment.
The economy could also be doing terrible and we have 0% unemployment.
The economy could also be doing amazing and the workers don’t make enough to survive.
It isn’t measuring what many people seem to think it is. It isn’t a measure of “how well the average person is doing” at all.
Exactly. I feel like Andrew Yang gets a bad rep, but it’s not like he didn’t say stuff that everyone should know. I liked his idea of expanding the “American Scorecard” as he called it. Basically we currently use GDP, and stock prices to determine how well we’re doing as a country. That’s insane. Sure, the economy is up, but you know what else is up? Homelessness, unemployment, suicide, divorce, drug addiction, and many others. But we don’t include those metrics to grade our performance. Just once I’d like the President to do a PowerPoint at the State of the Union Address. With a bunch of slides and graphs and charts.
Some of this is a bit soft. Like, the 50% / 0% employment split says something about business’s ability to command labor. If we had an amazing economy with 50% unemployment, this would imply a large population that businesses either didn’t want or couldn’t access. And the former says something very different than the latter.
In that same vein, the ability to grow the economy is heavily predicated on how individual workers within the economy operate. A bunch of precarious workers with tentative access to capital, poor education, and dismal living conditions don’t generate the kind of surplus value found in countries with ready access to new capital, high end education, and comfortable low-stress environments.
From a raw numbers perspective, you can try and transition your economy to an entirely financialized scorecard. But then you just end up with two engineers optimizing the rate at which a dollar can be traded back and forth.
Although, this might already technically describe the London economy.
Either way, you’re divorcing the means by which we measure new value in the economy from the actual measures of economic utility through layer after layer of abstraction. Yes, this can fool people while economic utility is increasing (or even while its increasing for a subset of the right kind of people). But eventually - at the 50% unemployment and large migrant caravans of jobless vagrants trawling across the country - you run into some very basic domestic policy problems that outshine the focus on GDP Go Up.
Some of this is a bit soft. Like, the 50% / 0% employment split says something about business’s ability to command labor. If we had an amazing economy with 50% unemployment, this would imply a large population that businesses either didn’t want or couldn’t access. And the former says something very different than the latter.
The worry for me is the “didn’t want” part. Automation is increasing throughput. The ultra wealthy are netting most of the value instead of humanity as a whole. Workers are getting laid off to keep profits increasing. Greed blocks mass access to surplus while the available job pool shrinks. Culture warfare is used as a distraction to vilify those who aren’t staying afloat as immoral leaches.
I doubt we could get to 50% without something like UBI. The unemployed would either die off due to lack of resources or a revolution happens to extract the horded wealth by force for another cycle of history. Doesn’t mean employers won’t try to min/max how much they can take.
Automation is increasing throughput.
We’ve been in a state of diminishing returns for nearly a century. But all this new technology has created a rising demand for specialized high-education labor. The pivot to China during the 90s and then India over the last decade has been an effort by capital to defer the cost of a professional workforce. But this has given birth to rivalrous superpowers who western elites don’t have a firm administrative dominance over.
Culture warfare is used as a distraction to vilify those who aren’t staying afloat as immoral leaches.
Absolutely, but there are limits. Decades of cultural warfare without a cathartic conflict builds tensions and degrades institutional trust. We saw the end stage of that game in 1860 and then again in the 1930s. One function of imperialism is to outsource the irate surplus male population abroad, but we’re appearing to give up on that as the cost of foreign occupation outstrips any material benefits.
So now we’ve got a problem of social control that’s only really being kept in check by low national employment rates. If businesses start failing en mass and you end up with a large wave of unemployed, disaffected youth… well… look to 2008, 2014, and 2021 to see what happens next.
I doubt we could get to 50% without something like UBI.
I agree. But even at 8-10%, you’re talking about tens of millions of unemployed people. And we can hit that number very quickly. The COVID crisis took us from 3.5% unemployment in February of 2020 to 14.3% in April. The automation of our economy is increasingly financial, and that means giving businesses the ability to rapid reduce staff at a moment’s notice. When we’re in a downturn, that can mean hemorrhaging jobs very quickly.
But the consequences of mass layoffs aren’t invisible. Shortly after these mass firings, we experienced a wave of “supply chain failures”, which prompted a big inflationary wave.
And remember that when they say shareholders, it’s not a large number of people. There are a few people who want to make money pushing for the layoffs, and they know what the consequences are going to be.
“It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.” — George Carlin
Shareholders aren’t the big issue. CEOs paying themselves hundreds of millions of dollars is.
Emphasis added since some seemed to not be reading all the words.
spoiler
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Yup the CEO, shareholders, and middle management goals are diametrically opposed to the workers.
The hell. Shareholders are vampires that suck the profits from a business that should go to employee compensation. All while demanding more.
I wish there were more coops that I could shop at.
Fiduciary duty to shareholders is a gun to civilizations head.
Good thing my entire retirement is dependent of stock price!
The existence of shareholders definitely is the big issue
