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Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call

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Re: Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call

#461

Post by darkandbrooding »

contravariant wrote: post #248
darkandbrooding wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious and did some math. A five minute zoom call is not realistic; you probably need 15 minutes per person. If my math is correct, and if no one was even a minute late, it would take 225 hours to lay those people off sequentially, assuming 24/7 meetings. If you had 15 managers making those calls, it would still take 15 hours to complete all calls. Let's call that three business days, during which no other wor…

Is it realistic to have just 15 managers for a 6000 employee company? That would mean 400 employees per manager.

I freely admit that I pulled numbers out of a hat, just to help me visualize the problem.

Re: Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call

#462

Post by randomswede »

wheels wrote: post #359
jerf wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasons why may not be obvious if you're not a manager or haven't run a large organization before, but the simple truth is, "employees" are not a magically ethical bunch of people simply by virtue of being the underdog and poor and downtrodden and being all fired and stuff. You do not want a significant number of employees running around who are either uncertain they are going to be fired for a significant period…

This is one of those things that seems to be an institutional part of Americans quitting or being fired from jobs, but it's far from universal. In Germany (and I believe most of Europe) several months notice is usual (three months minimum), and typically people keep working until the end of that time (aside from taking unused vacation). Sure, motivation suffers in that time, but don't think the cases of employees tak…

In some cases, you will be escorted off the premises immediately, then paid to stay at home until the end of your notice period. This is mostly for people with somewhat sensitive jobs, though (research, sales, some management positions) and probably more common in finance than elsewhere. And usually imposed no matter what side initiates the departure.

Re: Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call

#463

Post by tekknik »

nradov wrote: post #148
post-it wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Zoom call part isn't really the issue, although individual Zoom meetings would have been better. > In another email obtained by Forbes last year, Garg wrote: > > ‘You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and…DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”

The funny thing is that sharks are more likely to be eaten by dolphins (especially orcas) than vice versa. And sharks also get caught in nets. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/killer-wh... I guess Garg is just as weak on marine biology as he is on leadership and business ethics.

Not to fixate but this is kinda interesting to me. I very much believe orcas will kill and eat sharks, but dolphins do too? I didn’t see a mention of it on the article.

Re: Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call

#464

Post by tekknik »

jerf wrote: post #329
tshaddox wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After the first 10 minutes everyone will know what their meeting is about and it makes the problem worse. Huh? It’s not a surprise birthday party. I’m not sure why a key goal would be that each fired person is taken completely by surprise.

The reasons why may not be obvious if you're not a manager or haven't run a large organization before, but the simple truth is, "employees" are not a magically ethical bunch of people simply by virtue of being the underdog and poor and downtrodden and being all fired and stuff. You do not want a significant number of employees running around who are either uncertain they are going to be fired for a significant period…

> because some fraction of them are going to take advantage of their access to wreck things up for the company.

These stories always float around, but this is quite rare and depending on what “wrecking” means, could end in jail time for the ex-employee. Most are capable of making that connection therefore most don’t. Yet the fear and treatment from upper management for this mostly fictitious hypothetical still runs rampant. There’s even a high profile case of an ex-Ubiquiti employee having a real good time because they wanted to extort their employer.

Re: Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call

#465

Post by golemotron »

namdnay wrote: post #433
golemotron wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that's wise.

I know that the zeitgeist is to say “your employer doesn’t care about you, don’t care about them etc”, but honestly in my experience the employer-employee relationship is much more stable and human than a contractor-client one

It's a buffer against the market. Nice when it works, but you can't count on it fully. Sometimes the outside world leaks through. I don't think anyone wanted to fire 900 people at once in this situation.

Re: Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call

#466

Post by beerandt »

SkittyDog wrote: post #76
beerandt wrote: post #16

>>Garg told Fortune that a month earlier, the company began to review employee productivity data, including missed telephone call rates, number of inbound and outbound calls, employees showing up late to meetings with a customer, and other metrics. >>“You guys know that at least 250 of the people terminated were working an average of 2 hours a day while clocking 8 hours+ a day in the payroll system? They were stealin…

Wait, they only started reviewong employee data ONE MONTH ago?? Thats some serious management incompetence. What's with this weaselly language, too... "At least 250 employees" also means "No more than 250 employees". If it was more, they would have just said the bigger number to prove their point. Which means the other 650 employees they fired did not have productivity problems, and they're just trying to blame their…

>Which means the other 650 employees they fired did not have productivity problems

No- it just suggests/implies the remainder had an average productivity of greater than (2hrs-value/8hrs-pay).

That doesn't mean they were or weren't still performing below expectations. The fact that they were selected for layoffs over the retained employees suggests they were the lowest performing segment, regardless of whether that relatively low performance was satisfactory in an absolute sense or not.

>What's with this weaselly language, too... "At least 250 employees" also means "No more than 250 employees". If it was more, they would have just said the bigger number to prove their point.

And using this logic, if those 650 employees were collectively productive enough to generate a net-positive value, they wouldn't have been fired.

Re: Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call

#467

Post by siva7 »

jiriknesl wrote: post #459
thraway_bparrot wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no right way to layoff 900 people simultaneously, in the same way there is no right way to break up with someone who doesn't want to break up with you. There are just bad ways and worse ways. If you try to give everyone a 1:1 zoom call with their manager, the inevitable outcome is that the rumor mill starts turning and everyone spends the day terrified for their job, because the layoffs happen in a drip feed…

Yes but what if the CEO is right and people were really tracking 8 hours of work a day and working 2? Isn't this a reason to be upset?

Not really because this isn’t your biggest problem then. Leadership must be exceptionally poor at this company if you hired almost thousand employees who don’t care.

Re: Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call

#468

Post by beerandt »

2fast4you wrote: post #250
s1artibartfast wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

250 were 2 hours per day. This leaves a lot of room for workers <8 hours.

Can you find one employee that truly works 8 hours a day?

It's performance based (not entirely timeclock based), so it's more useful as a relative metric.

(Although, missed calls, etc, suggests actual availability problems separate from productivity.)

Which doesn't necessarily mean anybody was truly working 8 hours per day, but it does suggest that the top/satisfactory tier of employees averaged 4x the productivity for the same number of hours on the timesheet.

A 4x multiplier like that isn't explained by a normal distribution curve.

Re: Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call

#469

Post by siva7 »

missedthecue wrote: post #406
manuelabeledo wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Wage theft" in these terms is a thing only in the US. In legal terms, and in most of the developed world, "wage theft" is the unlawful denial of wages from employers to employees.

It's usually called time theft when employees are on the clock but doing things they shouldn't be doing.

There is no such thing as time theft, please don’t make legal terms up

Re: Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call

#470

Post by VRay »

missedthecue wrote: post #403
VRay wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the cost of doing business, you keep the profits and in exchange you don't treat your employees like fucking garbage. He didn't even need to lay them off, according to the article. He just wanted "a fortress balance sheet going into the holidays"

From the employees' perspective, who wants to sit around in angst for a month while your friends and colleagues are dropping like flies, wondering if you're next? One and done is the way to do it in my opinion. Dragging out bad news seldom works out well.

You can pass out layoffs across the whole company in a couple of hours through the same infrastructure you use to pass out work items, KPIs, and paychecks
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