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Zoom lays off 15% of employees

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Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#361

Post by buggy6257 » 

  - Comments about how this is a good thing and bravo to the CEO for actually taking accountability  
  - Replies saying how it's never enough and the CEO should be fired for doing something as stupid as hiring people during an economic boom  
  - Comments off ^^^ talking about how much net worth the CEO has based on stock that he hasn't liquidated, and how much he made off this temporary stock bump from cutting "cruft"  
  - Comments questioning why  needs # employees to do   
  - Comments pointing out that they still have more employees than pre-covid  
  - Comments assuming that every person laid off was an engineer because why would a tech company hire anything else.  
  - Comments off of ^^^ talking about how it's a rough time to be job hunting despite the massive labor shortages in many sectors including tech  
  - Comments about how stupid the demonym for the employees was/is
I filled out my bingo card. Anyone else?

EDIT: I always get HN list formatting wrong.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#362

Post by s1artibartfast »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #324
s1artibartfast wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is one definition, but not the only. I think it is interesting how people chose which definition to go with. It all comes down to social expectations of if the nature of the transaction. "I used Bob the contractor to build my house" has no implication of injustice. "My ex-wife used me for money" has significant implications. Used has no negative implication if used to describe a honest and mutually beneficial tr…

"90+ percent of all internet arguments are over semantics." I honestly wish HN would adopt a "no semantics arguments" rule. These debates over what one person thinks a word means vs what another person thinks they mean are just uninteresting and really never lead anywhere, especially when all sides pretty much agree on the underlying issue. A couple days ago I made a comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465…

Words and language are how humans communicate information so I think it is worthwhile to talk about. That said, I think everyone would benefit from being more Curious and less dogmatic. It is ultimately subjective. I can choose to use the word up to refer to down. It would certainly cause some confusion, but at the end of the day nobody can force me to change. The best that they can do is point out that they use a different definition and why that makes sense to them.

That's all I was trying to do here, and in this other more interesting thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34697045

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#363

Post by lamontcg »

brk wrote: post #329
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just fucking stop with this already. Quit pretending like your employees are so aligned with the company that some kind of special terminology is needed, or even logical. I cannot judge how Zoom works internally but a lot of companies (ours included) has a term to refer to employees. They are usually not born out of some leader making up a ridiculous term, but out of some sort of chaotic process where the origin of…

> a lot of companies (ours included) has a term to refer to employees Why? Employee is a perfectly suitable and applicable term. You're not "associates" or anything else that implies there is some kind relationship that is anything other than work for hire. Granted, if you have some kind of internal way to refer to yourselves or your teams, that's great. But like politics or religion, it should probably be a thing th…

Because Millennials eat up cheesy tribalistic terms to wrap their sense of identity around and corporations exploit that.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#364

Post by nunez »

> To that end, I am reducing my salary for the coming fiscal year by 98% and foregoing my FY23 corporate bonus. Members of my executive leadership team will reduce their base salaries by 20% for the coming fiscal year while also forfeiting their FY23 corporate bonuses.

Eric is probably already wealthy and can withstand a 98% cut to his base, but I definitely respect him more for doing that than the nothing other execs have done (at least publicly).

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#366

Post by AlbertCory »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #338
AlbertCory wrote: post #67

If you're hired for the Christmas rush, you know it's temporary. These poor people probably didn't realize they were just a temporary hire. Would they have joined if Zoom had disclosed on hiring them, "We're experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime growth spurt because of COVID. If and when that ends, we may have to lay you off." ??

“If ___ we may have to lay you off” is always true, I wouldn’t believe anyone who promised that can’t happen. Unlike Christmas, Zoom couldn’t know when or if demand might subside, and their goal was that it wouldn’t. We shouldn’t punish employers for leaning into strong markets, because unemployment is much worse when they’re reluctant to ever hire even at the best of times.

Well, no. Black Swan events are fundamentally different than "strong markets."

It would be like a "survival supplies" store hiring 10,000 "permanent" employees when there's threat of a nuclear apocalypse.

You could argue that the Zoom employees knew, or should have known, that they were really temp hires.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#367

Post by MollyRealized »

deathanatos wrote: post #351
password11 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are a US-based employee who is impacted, you will receive an email to your Zoom and personal inboxes in the next 30 minutes that reads [IMPACTED] Departing Zoom: What You Need to Know. This is the way to notify people of a layoff. Immediate binary yes/no. Although there is no great way to do it, this layoff seems pretty respectful and well done.

Hopefully they're also sending a NACK email too. Having been through it, let me tell you that's a gut wrenching n minutes to wait, though.

Okay, gotta ask for learning purposes: what's a NACK email?

*EDIT: Ah. "Negative acknowledgement." In other words, someone hears from them regardless of whether they're impacted or not, i.e. [NOT IMPACTED].

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#368

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

lamontcg wrote: post #363
brk wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of companies (ours included) has a term to refer to employees Why? Employee is a perfectly suitable and applicable term. You're not "associates" or anything else that implies there is some kind relationship that is anything other than work for hire. Granted, if you have some kind of internal way to refer to yourselves or your teams, that's great. But like politics or religion, it should probably be a thing th…

Because Millennials eat up cheesy tribalistic terms to wrap their sense of identity around and corporations exploit that.

FWIW, we all do that to an extent. Pick a label and make it good or bad, but something you can use as a yard stick. You are on the money, but oddly fall into the same trap by using label 'millenials' in a tribalistic manner ( the term has been largely made up to describe a giant cohort, and as most giant population terms, it shares the same flaws ).

I do not think you are wrong in general. I am not sure, however, if it applies to that particular group only or even in general.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#369

Post by ghaff »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #339
ghaff wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. And, if I had stood up in June 2020 and made the prediction that 50% of business travel would be replaced by video conferencing because companies would realize that their T&E spend was bloated and unnecessary to a significant degree--you might have disagreed but you probably wouldn't have laughed me out of the room. Instead, air travel is pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels in spite of economic headwinds.

Yet Video conferencing is still an 10 billion dollar market and growing, and Zoom is a, if not the leading player. It is projected to hit 19 billion by 2027. https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2023/01/12/258...

Fair enough. What we've seen since pre-pandemic but accelerated by it is that companies have mostly decided that video conferencing vs. voice-only is basically free in the grand scheme of things and it's useful for a great many circumstances. It hasn't mostly replaced in-person though and, for events, it feels like there's a great deal of virtual fatigue at this point. In fact, the main event observation I'd make is that people going to events in-person seem more inclined to socialize/network rather than parachuting in to give a talk relative to pre-pandemic.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#370

Post by s1artibartfast »

ethbr0 wrote: post #145
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> short of giving shares away to laid off employees there isn't much a founder can do is it realistic to ask a company not to hire if they think they're just going to lay people off 12-18 months later or is that too perfect of a science? obviously you don't want to ask companies not to try to grow/be conservative because then we'll have too much unemployment... i think? it's just so "convenient" the timing of all of…

The most ethical way to do it would have been to tell your candidates "We're hiring for excess capacity, so this would be a contract to hire position." Then candidates might have made different decisions, like "Maybe this job isn't worth relocating my family internationally for." It's pretty Machiavellian to present the role as otherwise, when HR had strong suspicions it'd be first on the chopping block. Does a compa…

This assumes that things are all known and planned out in advance.

It also ignores that contract positions are a huge liability in California.

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