411–420 of 557 posts
10% is a big fraction. How often do large, stable companies execute a layoff like that? Sometimes layoffs can be not so bad, for example when that's the company's way of clearing off the managers' firing wishlist without incurring legal trouble. However at 10% of the workforce, this may be a change of direction away from R&D and towards sitting on the falcon 9 and launching to LEO.
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In my experience, the larger the company the less painful it is to fire 10%. In large engineering organisations, laying off 10% makes no difference at all on anything apart from the ego of managers whose teams shrink. On the topic, wasn't Jack Welsh/GE that popularised the idea of firing the bottom 10% every single year? Not saying that this is necessarily a good idea but that shows the amount of slack in large organ…
Must be great for morale.
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That 4% number is complete crap, and you know it. Even if it was accurate, which it isn't, 48% of the U.S. earn less than $30k a year [1] with few benefits. Corporations need to be flexible, but they also need to provide stable long-term employment so our society can grow and prosper. When Henry Ford launched the Model T, he made sure to pay his workers $5 a day so they could actually afford to buy the cars. It was a…
> That 4% number is complete crap, and you know it. Could you explain it please? Even U6 is below 8 percent. https://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate the part time part is big of course ( https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2015/05/the-many-flavors-of-... ) but that's how it was for decades since BLS started tracking it. With regards to ethical wages, SpaceX should pay well, so people don't depend on them (t…
There’s basically two Americas. In the other one, 40-60% of adults aren’t working.
1) Maybe brought on themselves: 'hey, design/build the thing, then fire those who designed it' type thing, which definitely happens. It happens to companies in a crunch, or those who just put the outcome ahead of everything else.
2) A decimation: let's use this as an opportunity to drop anyone we feel is not cutting it - and teams that we created/hired we realize we don't want/need.
3) General organizational shakeup.
4) A true and real opex cutback ahead of anticipated future needs.
The thing is - outside of human terms - it's a big cut but it might be highly rational.
'Pruning' I think is a essential aspect of any healthy organization, forcing entities to rethink, to shake them out of their settled positions, getting rid of organizational cruft.
Of course, there are humans behind every decision which makes it quite fundamentally something else.
But if you could imagine they were 'robots', as if to remove any issues of compassion and concern for externalized outcomes, and this were simply a simple dispassionate re-org ... then you can see where the economics might be pointing.
We also don't know the terms of the layoff: maybe some of them are voluntary. Maybe the payouts are huge. Sometimes these things work out well for a lot of those involved, obviously it doesn't for others.
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Two points in rebuttal. First, companies can expand more confidently if they know they can reduce more easily if they need to. It is more efficient for companies to be able to right-size themselves. Bolstering this point of view is that the USA has a 4% unemployment rate, which is about as low as you can get without things starting to break down. The US economy has been outperforming almost everyone too, creating mor…
That 4% number is complete crap, and you know it. Even if it was accurate, which it isn't, 48% of the U.S. earn less than $30k a year [1] with few benefits. Corporations need to be flexible, but they also need to provide stable long-term employment so our society can grow and prosper. When Henry Ford launched the Model T, he made sure to pay his workers $5 a day so they could actually afford to buy the cars. It was a…
10% is a big fraction. How often do large, stable companies execute a layoff like that? Sometimes layoffs can be not so bad, for example when that's the company's way of clearing off the managers' firing wishlist without incurring legal trouble. However at 10% of the workforce, this may be a change of direction away from R&D and towards sitting on the falcon 9 and launching to LEO.
WA. +855978543082
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> Bolstering this point of view is that the USA has a 4% unemployment rate As a counterpoint, Germany has much stronger employee protection laws and unions and has a comparable unemployment rate. That said, resizing is still possible there, it just has some lag.
Kinda off topic but job protection in Germany is such a joke it's almost fake news. Got terminated recently after 12 months for no reason, filed for unfair dismissal, won the case. 3000 eur is what I got (lawyer fees 1500). You can be fired for very little cost, it's dangerous to think you're protected.
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Take Mars, I am heading to Mercury.
What would you do when you got there? Thought it was sort of inhabitable for humans with such temperature swings.