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Zoom lays off 15% of employees

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Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#551

Post by EdwardDiego »

speby wrote: post #390
vsareto wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably the best you can hope for in terms of fairness right now. You'll never see executives put themselves financially in the same situation as the lowest level people they are letting go. This is actually a pretty big step, but the move will need some benefit to the company for it to become more common-place. They might roll these bonuses into subsequent bonuses, but that may actually end up being a motiv…

Seriously? What 'fairness' exactly is it people want when companies do layoffs? "Hey, we are laying off 3,000 people. Because of that, I am firing myself and the company will no longer have a CEO and will have to find someone else, starting immediately. In addition, I plan to donate all of my life's savings and file for unemployment like everyone else and, if needed, live in my van down by the river. I hope this make…

If you reduced the comp of the C-suite by 50%, you could probably lay off only 2500 people to achieve the same cost savings.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#552

Post by EdwardDiego »

colinmorelli wrote: post #423
lkrubner wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Because of that, I am firing myself" A team does terrible for awhile -- should the coach be removed? A company does terrible -- should the CEO be removed? This is what accountability means. Just this year I was hired by a Board Of Directors, of a startup with 150 people, to do an evaluation of the technology and code, and I found epic levels of tech debt and irresponsible decision making. When I gave my report to th…

I don't know who needs to hear this, but laying people off _does not mean the company is doing terrible_ and this narrative is the reason why you get vastly different opinions about handling this scenario. All laying people off means is that there are items that the company will not be executing against in the future. It may or may not mean that they're in a bad spot, but very often - and the case with many of the cu…

It doesn't mean that they're doing terrible as a going concern, but it does mean that they're a terrible company to work for.

If you're hiring in bulk to tie up talent your competitors might want during a boom, and then promptly firing thousands in the bust, you're bad people and should feel bad.

But then, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get an executive to understand the impacts of their decision when their compensation package depends upon them not understanding it.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#553

Post by [deleted] »

lazide wrote: post #210
HollywoodZro wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big thing would be for Mr. Yuan to forgo his equity grant for FY23 and also take his equity grant from FY22 and distribute that as severance for the employees who lives are impacted negatively due to the decisions of executives in the organization. That truly means "taking ownership" of what happened. The individuals leaving were not the ones who hired or authorized the hires without the evaluation of long-term v…

That isn’t taking ownership, that’s falling on your sword. There is a difference.

[deleted]

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#554

Post by nicbou »

fencepost wrote: post #331
OrvalWintermute wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams & Meet are improving rapidly; I can't help but ask why when it comes to Zoom these days.

Never really used Meet, but for Teams I'll say "which one?" Microsoft provided a free Teams business license during the pandemic, but that ends in April - at which point you need either a $4/month license managed through the M365 admin portal or you switch to a Personal account through live.com and use that for Teams. Haven't tried in a while, but that always seemed troublesome when I tried it early on. Zoom may not…

> Zoom may not be perfect, but it's a lot more accessible for a lot of non technical people

It uses dark patterns to get people to install Zoom when the web client works fine. I recall the software itself also doing a lot of shady stuff, but that was some time ago.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#555

Post by johnvanommen »

madamelic wrote: post #86

This sucks but something like COVID should normalize the idea in the minds of workers that all workers are disposable regardless of education or skill. If you don't own 51% of the company, you are disposable. Zoom had a use for you during COVID, now they don't: bye-bye. You were used, they got what they needed and now it is time to go. That's how workers are treated and people should understand that. You are not Geor…

> You are not George from Engineering, you are employee #3223 and you cost $x per year.

I used to work for a company with nearly 300,000 employees. Our user names in Active Directory were randomly generated. So our user names were just gibberish, like "ughwyrt"

I always thought that was a bad PR move on their part, but whatever

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#556

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

fijiaarone wrote: post #508
stainforth wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The learjet flights were "unrealized flights"

Because of his Gulfstream?

I know it was a Gulfstream, but I referred to it as a “Learjet,” because that’s a more well-known term, and it really doesn’t matter to most of us mensch. It’s like calling a Fuji copy machine a “Xerox” machine.

Fairly standard type of literary trick.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#557

Post by [deleted] »

haswell wrote: post #8

> As the CEO and founder of Zoom, I am accountable for these mistakes and the actions we take today– and I want to show accountability not just in words but in my own actions. 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…

[deleted]

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#558

Post by listenallyall »

jimbokun wrote: post #517
actually_a_dog wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? What's the functional difference between $6 billion and $1 billion (which is roughly what Google says his current net worth is). Unless your net worth is $500M or more, you're closer to being homeless than ever seeing that kind of wealth.

5 billion dollars.

His point, which you failed to address with your smug response, is the well-understood fact that the utility value of money falls greatly, the more money one has. The utility of 5 billion dollars is essentially zero to someone who already has a billion.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#559

Post by nivenkos »

zdragnar wrote: post #516
linkjuice4all wrote: post #487

There are several points that I don’t see being made in these discussions. 1. Layoffs would be less painful is major aspects of your life (read: health insurance or your visa) wasn’t tied to employment. Yes the layoffs would still hurt but it wouldn’t be such a catastrophe for the actual workers. This is a discussion for another thread but it’s at least worth mentioning here. 2. Unions could certainly provide some pr…

I'm on board with #1. #3 is tough because you'd have to offer lower salaries to make up for the expense of essentially pre-paying a severance package. #2, however, is way off base. The AMA played a significant role in our current health system's mess. It recently backed off of some of its previous bad decisions (i.e. in 2019 it lobbied to remove the caps on medicare-funded residency slots that it had originally gotte…

It's similar with the BMA in the UK, but they've been less successful.

It's worked out well for the doctors in the USA though so you can't blame them.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#560

Post by hnbad »

speby wrote: post #390
vsareto wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably the best you can hope for in terms of fairness right now. You'll never see executives put themselves financially in the same situation as the lowest level people they are letting go. This is actually a pretty big step, but the move will need some benefit to the company for it to become more common-place. They might roll these bonuses into subsequent bonuses, but that may actually end up being a motiv…

Seriously? What 'fairness' exactly is it people want when companies do layoffs? "Hey, we are laying off 3,000 people. Because of that, I am firing myself and the company will no longer have a CEO and will have to find someone else, starting immediately. In addition, I plan to donate all of my life's savings and file for unemployment like everyone else and, if needed, live in my van down by the river. I hope this make…

"Clearly this failure demonstrates that a centralized system can not work and I have initiated a transition to turn this corporation into a worker-owned cooperative."

I'm kidding, of course. Layoffs rarely represent failure, they're usually just a cost cutting measure to increase profitability and make shareholders happy. They're just framed as failure every time because people take more kindly to "we had to lay 15% of employees off because of the economy" than "we had to lay 15% of employees off to meet our quarterly growth goals".

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