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Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

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Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salesforce is giving a minimum of 5 months severance to affected people. That's not too shabby.

I really hope that I get laid off in the first round of these layoffs where everyone gets good severance. My current worry is that the first round of layoff at my first company will get 4 months severance, I'll miss that round, and 2 months later get laid off with only 2 months severance. This would of course mean that my severance ends at the same times as the first group but I had to work an additional 2 months.

It could always be worse. I got laid off last month with 2 1/2 weeks of severance. And of course there are plenty of industries outside of tech where severance itself is an alien concept.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#272

There are over two jobs open for every layoff. People haven’t realized how crazy the labor market is about to get with a collapsing workforce population over the next many decades.

Nothing that immigration won't solve. You have hoardes of young people from South Asia, Africa that will come up and fill any money making opportunity in the states.

Not when US immigration policy is so restrictive and hostile. We are actively preventing our own prosperity in the pursuit of protectionism.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do that companies will be more reluctant to hire, since they’ll have to factor in the risk of paying a hefty severance.

The people downvoting you are suffering from a sort of survivorship bias. Sure, now you'd like the comfort of knowing your employer would have to pay you a ton of money if they laid you off, but what if you were somebody who was recently laid off looking for a job and people were reluctant to hire beacuse of this requirement? It's not clear to me that it's a net win, from my perspective I'd rather be able to easily r…

  > A strong labor market has been effective in rasing the real incomes of the bottom 25% or so over the past few years
do you mean the increase in demand/jobs we had after the initial covid lockdowns + wfh?

is it possible that strong labor market was due to increased demand from the stimulus checks?

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#274
post #147
post #103

Maybe it's just the segment I'm in, but I feel like Salesforce was hiring pretty hard up until recently. They wouldn't be the only company to go from a hiring spree to layoffs that quickly over the last quarter. We really need to lock this absurdity down and increase severance requirements for large companies heavily. It's one thing to gamble risk for the company, it's something completely different to gamble employe…

There was a slide deck by Sequioa going around recently, wherein one of the points was that the companies that cut costs hard and fast at the beginning of the recession were more likely to survive to the end of it. Either that or they see something the rest of us don't when looking at economic data (a long recession).

That's the general consensus, especially around YC companies. Didn't they send out warnings early last year suggesting people cut early and deep? I really don't think Salesforce falls into that category though. They aren't going out of business any time soon and their revenue may not even drop if there were a recession.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#275
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then the company can't operate? Is it really that hard to understand?

Well I understand it, but the analogy I was trying to illustrate is that in theory, 10% of a workforce produces something, and while it costs something to employ them, it also costs something to lose their employment. In theory. Otherwise, why were they hired to begin with?

There are inefficiencies in every organization. It's not like 100% of the workforce is 100% productive and critical to operations. You can cut a lot more than 10% before it starts to affect the business in a meaningful way.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#276
post #201

Why do CEOs claim to "take responsibility" for the hard times, but their salary is never cut because of it? If they were actually taking responsibility then they would face real consequences instead of dooming people to no longer having healthcare. Fucking rich people.

Salesforce stock is down 45% in the last 12 months. There’s the pay cut.

That would be true whether they "took responsibility" or not.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#277

This corporate bulimia, these binge-and-purge cycles, are a remarkably unpleasant feature of 21st century employee life. I hope those affected are able to find work before their severance runs out. One positive aspect is that the Salesforce ecosystem is gigantic, and there'll be work for some in the partner firms and consultancies with expertise in the platform.

>> binge-and-purge cycles

I think of it as a career thing. Someone gets promoted they need to hire 5-10 new people to manage. They lay off 5-10 people their career is facing a setback.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "we over hired" line is mostly made up. Many of these companies did not substantially increase their head count. This has more to do with improving P&L numbers to get their stock up, since most companies' revenue is tanking currently.

Didn’t Salesforce nearly double headcount since 2019 though?

Some sizable percentage of that is acquisitions as well though

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope that I get laid off in the first round of these layoffs where everyone gets good severance. My current worry is that the first round of layoff at my first company will get 4 months severance, I'll miss that round, and 2 months later get laid off with only 2 months severance. This would of course mean that my severance ends at the same times as the first group but I had to work an additional 2 months.

It could always be worse. I got laid off last month with 2 1/2 weeks of severance. And of course there are plenty of industries outside of tech where severance itself is an alien concept.

And of course there are plenty of industries outside of tech where severance itself is an alien concept.

Absolutely. People in tech don't realize how good they have it.

The first time I lost a job I found out when my company phone started showing alerts on a Saturday night that it couldn't connect to the e-mail server. It turned out that my entire department was canned.

The second time, I came to work on a Thursday only to discover the door locked, and a couple of coworkers lingering around. Eventually, we decided we had the day off. Same story Friday. In the Sunday newspaper there a small note that the company has been bought. So Monday morning, it was off to the Unemployment office.

For 99% of American companies, you're lucky to get notice before you get laid off, let alone severance pay.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#280
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then choose companies that offer that, you can sign a long contract. Or avoid companies that are rapidly growing. Why should you force your preference on everyone else?

"My preference is the current state of things so I pretend that it wasn't forced on people in just the same way I accuse others with different preferences of doing." Welcome to "government is the means by which a group of people make collective decisions about the way we want our city/state/country to work." When striving for liberty, the thing we actually want, anarchy is just as much a preference as order.

Yeah, liberty is totally defined by draconian policies on employers/companies to give hand-outs for lay offs. If that's the case, we need to mandate employees give 3 months notice, for the employer to backfill the position properly. Its only fair.
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