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Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

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Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#441

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

A. [Don’t worry, we only fired whites!] is the an absolutely awful thing to do, and a worse pat yuorself on the back for. Racists. The term “anti racist” is a dog whistle that means racists for everyone, but justified for some.

B. I appreciate they made their idiocy public. I will make sure to 100 percent shut down any possibility of my company using their services. We’re still using Expensify which does upset me, cut from the same cloth as Twillio but they were more sneaky about it, will cut them asap.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#442

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

automatic6131 wrote: post #44
_fat_santa wrote: post #3

> The cloud communications software builder has been striving for profitability in 2023, and the restructuring plan aims to improve operating margins, create a better selling capacity and reduce operating costs. If you look at all the layoffs we had this year, the vast majority are by companies that are VC funded and unprofitable. It would be a scary time to work for a VC backed company, because you're one missed fun…

Oh no, imagine having to provide value to the world instead of being in the business of selling a dollar for 95c. So hard ;*(

Next you are going to tell me that a company is going to need to make a product going forward and can’t just expect to be supplied with literally endless free money forever.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#443

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

tonymet wrote: post #347
BonoboIO wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be anything you want, look at Elizabeth Warren. She pretended to be a Native American for more than 30 years. Trump called her Pocahontas and she challenged trump with a dna test. This test is kind of bogus but it proved that she is like 1/1024 Native American. How can that fly.

Of course she should have stopped that as a tenured professional / politician, but it's perfectly understandable she did that as a young applicant based on her family lore. It goes to show these policies are clumsy and absurd. They will only make matters so much worse. Is it reasonable to ask someone to make an election that will result in them not getting or getting fired prematurely ? We're talking about food on th…

> but it's perfectly understandable she did that as a young applicant based on her family lore.

To be clear, she contributed as a Cherokee Indian on a cookbook called Pow Wow Chow, and sumbitted at least one completely plagiarized recipe… as an adult.

https://elizabethwarrenwiki.org/pow-wow-chow-cookbook/

As to why Cherokee matters, the Cherokee have a well maintained registry. You do not claim to be Cherokee if you are not. She doesn’t care and never had anything in her youth to bring her up Cherokee. She’s a liar through and through.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#444

Post by Natsu »

NeverFade wrote: post #286
gitfan86 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal probably approved the word "lens". And if this ends up in court they will say that "lens" means that we are aware of the impact layoffs have on our society, but does not change who we fire during a layoff, meaning even if we didn't do this through a lens the person suing would have still been let go.

If the layoff was done through the lens of racist consideration, and minority races were given preference, then the odds of a white or Asian person getting fired were higher. That's already illegal. Even if you can somehow prove in court that "white worker X" would still be fired had he been black (already a dicey and likely impossible feat), just the fact that the employer already admitted that this worker was under…

As an aside, the Latin words you wanted are a priori, but you're right that race is a protected category and putting out a statement saying "we made firing decisions based on a protected category" is a bad idea for that reason.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#446

Post by Natsu »

enumjorge wrote: post #113
John23832 wrote: post #34

(I am a black man) I feel like the statement that the layoffs "were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" puts a target on the backs of the people who you claim to be helping. If you're affected by layoffs described this way, you then question whether that was because of who you are. That then makes it harder for the minorities you claim to be "helping" to stay in the room anywhere else because of…

As a Latino, I too am growing tired of the way some leadership and HR departments in tech callously, carelessly push and promote these diversity initiatives in a way that creates resentment. Combating racial bias is a sensitive topic. You'd have to be living under a rock to not know that. And yet companies continue to make statements like this without the tact it deserves. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt, an…

> they just throw out the term anti-racist, and let the audience draw their own conclusions.

It's pretty clear what antiracist means:

> The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

- Ibram X. Kendi, "How to Be an Antiracist"

https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/06/ibram-x-kendi-def...

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#447

Post by jiveturkey »

xeromal wrote: post #424
guywithabike wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TWLO is down 80% from its 52 week high, even after today's 10% rise. Do you really believe that this is the "slightest sign of trouble"?

So I'm a big dummy, but I STILL don't understand how current stock price affects companies. They've already raised their money. How does the stock going down make them lose money other than lowering their chance at another seed round?

the stock price is a trailing indicator of the company’s health. in the case of headcount, you hire based on growth rate, to sustain and even further that growth. it works until it doesn’t. then you fire.

it’s no skin off the company’s back, so it is the correct strategy. when CEOs (the world over) say they overhired AND that it was a mistake, it’s a pitiful political lie. also a mandatory strategy. you can’t say, “employees are cogs. we planned this shit. this was plan A.”. you wouldn’t be able to hire again when you find your stride.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#448

Post by Kye »

prottog wrote: post #420
Kye wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is erasing lesbians or women.

There's a whole ideological movement in vogue that has a really hard time defining what a woman even is.

I always enjoyed that attempt at a definition that led to people pointing out it made women out of chairs and horses. Some of them do manage to be ideologically consistent and exclude vast swathes of cis women from womanhood just to get at trans women, but most just fall back on "but science!" even as actual scientists point out science doesn't support anti-trans ideology.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#449

Post by xanaxagoras »

crackercrews wrote: post #55
John23832 wrote: post #34

(I am a black man) I feel like the statement that the layoffs "were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" puts a target on the backs of the people who you claim to be helping. If you're affected by layoffs described this way, you then question whether that was because of who you are. That then makes it harder for the minorities you claim to be "helping" to stay in the room anywhere else because of…

This creates three problems. The first is that some white people who were affected will believe it was because of their race. The second is that minorities who were not affected may be assumed to have been kept because of their minority status. But the most harmful is for minorities who were laid off. That signals that they were really subpar, even more than the average laid off person. It seems like this policy has…

> The first is that some white people who were affected will believe it was because of their race.

It literally was because of their race.

> But the most harmful is for minorities who were laid off

srs?

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#450

Post by Natsu »

yibg wrote: post #366
peter422 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thus we perpetuate the injustice indefinitely! Your essential argument seems to be that once an injustice is over one generation old, it is as if it never happened, no matter if the after effects continue to cascade into modern day. You cannot just magically pretend an individual is not part of a society.

What's the proposed solution? Put a finger on the scale against the privileged group? By how much? for how long? Lumping any race together and treating it as the same is a problem in my view.

> What's the proposed solution?

There actually is an equitable solution there: help all of the poor equally. To the extent any identifiable group has been historically disadvantaged, this solution will balance things out by disproportionately helping those groups.

I really don't know why it's not more popular as a way to make society more fair, or why group-based interventions are seen as necessary despite the existence of a simple and stable way of leveling the playing field and keeping it closer to level over time, instead of constantly debating how much we have to tip it in which direction(s) and for how long.

Of course, there's still the problem that things will probably never be perfectly fair no matter what we do and that grievance can always be used as a reason for people to push for rules that favor their groups over others.

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