[flagged]
This is an opinion piece.
That's all we really ever get these days.
Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
11–20 of 386 posts
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#12I remember reading in a book called "everything is obvious" that this is a standard thing to attribute (or at least self attribute) success to personal competencie and failures to bad context. In this case I think that they are in fact being held somewhat accountable by their remuneration based mainly on stocks, which values are currently plummeting. With the consideration that we are talking about comp going from $200M to $50M... Your comp might have been divided by 4, but you still earn orders of magnitude more than all of the people you laid off, so I don't think there is much accountability in that.
Re: overhiring, it's been discussed on every layoff thread. The arguments go: they overhired and should be accountable and fix the process OR they overhired consciously but didn't care because capitalism OR they didn't overhire because there wasn't a way they could have known that the situation would turn out as it did OR they may or may not have overhired but that's irrelevant, they're now laying off to lower the salaries
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#13This is based upon the assumption that layoffs are a failure rather than a feature which, while I find it distasteful using people's livelihoods in such a way, doesn't actually seem to be the reckoning for a lot of people. When times are good why wouldn't you hire to maximize profits and then cut people loose when times are getting bad? If you can ignore the human factor it makes sense.
[dead]
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#14[flagged]
Mostly all publications these days are supported/funded by outside “open societies or foundations” that want to further their own agenda. Unless it’s independent journalism, don’t expect these entities to objectively report anything.
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#15My company did a big round of layoffs and it was pretty revealing that not a single director or above were laid off. Despite reduced headcount, the org chart got DEEPER in some cases. For all the talk of bloat in the tech world, nobody wants to point fingers at directors who have little to do but schedule very expensive meetings with the directors under them.
Reminds me of a company I worked for where we up staffed to sixty people plus five managers in my department. Then a recession hit and after two rounds of layoffs, there were fifteen workers left and still five managers. Not only did those of us left have an increased workload, but now had to deal with endless bike shedding by the managers, all of whom wanted to be able to put their name on whatever we were working on, probably because they were scared of what would happen if there was a round three of layoffs. Round three never came and eventually hiring freezes were lifted, but it was really annoying dealing with all the useless petty changes that were pushed on our work during that time so the management layer could look like they were doing something.
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#16[flagged]
And who is going to be the judge of that?
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#17Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#18This is based upon the assumption that layoffs are a failure rather than a feature which, while I find it distasteful using people's livelihoods in such a way, doesn't actually seem to be the reckoning for a lot of people. When times are good why wouldn't you hire to maximize profits and then cut people loose when times are getting bad? If you can ignore the human factor it makes sense.
A consulting company I worked for was really strict on how they managed resources on the bench. As a new employee, I was surprised by how many of my co-workers had at one time or another been laid off by our company and came back. The key seemed to be that the company had always been quite open and transparent about how it manages bench resources and that they rarely carry anyone for more than a month. Everyone knew what to expect and if they were on the bench and didn't have any likely projects coming up, they knew to adjust their finances accordingly for the coming layoff.
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#19Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#20The goal of the CEO of a publicly traded company is to make the shareholders money. As much money as possible. If laying people off is the best way to do that, they'll do it.
Blaming the CEO for doing the job they were hired to do seems short-sighted. Blame the broken system that incentivizes this, that makes doing it profitable.
And then, let's change the system.