CEO Announcement to the Netlify Team

Are you referring to chattel slaves and victims of racial segregation as working people? If so that seems like a very simplistic way to reframe it when their status hinged entirely on the color of their skin. I ask because I may be misreading your comment entirely and I don’t want to be uncharitable in my interpretation.

Respectfully disagree. It's important to explain why, and he does that in a standard 3-point structure without getting too carried away on the hype train. It could be worse.

Also, this part is worth emphasizing:

> For those amazing Netlifolk that are leaving us today, our team is... waving [sic] the first year stock option cliff for newer employees, and extending the exercise period to 7 years.

This is a classy move. They didn't have to do this, but they did. Layoffs suck, and no amount of wordsmithing on the email is really going to make a huge difference. It's worth noting and encouraging when companies at least take the time to do something for the people they're letting go.

I fully agree with you on one thing, though: the word "sorry" is conspicuously missing. A little more ownership would go a long way.

> From 2020 to 2023 we grew our team substantially and added layers of management. We now need to simplify Netlify to be more nimble

While management layers certainly do add overhead to varying degrees, simply getting rid of it and trying to be move faster and be more nimble, in my experience, leads to one of two things:

1. The existing management layer work gets offloaded to multiple people who have no interest in those topics, usually without any extra pay for them as well.

2. The management layers get removed without any replacement, which usually leads to long-term overhead across all departments that's often hard to quantify.

Combined with the wish to expand and evolve, especially within the enterprise sector, neither of the above options is a good choice. The only thing such change is good for is cutting expenses in the short term to inflate company value on paper.

> They didn't say everybody's personal liberty

Legally enforced racial segregation denied everybody's personal liberty – although of course, African-Americans bore the brunt of that denial.

Berea College, founded by abolitionists in 1855, was the only desegregated and coeducational college in Kentucky – it admitted all students irrespective of their race or sex. Even though the state of Kentucky enforced racial segregation on all public educational institutions, Berea College was exempt from that as a private institution. Until 1904, when the Kentucky state legislature passed the "Day Law" (named for its sponsor, Democratic politician Carl Day), banning racially integrated private educational institutions. Since Berea was the only such institution in the entire state, it was a direct attack on Berea College's existence. Berea College refused to comply with the new law, and was convicted of the crime of being a racially integrated school; the College appealed the conviction all the way to the US Supreme Court, who in the 1908 case of Berea College v Kentucky, upheld Kentucky's law, on the rather specious grounds that the law did not infringe personal liberty, since Berea College is a corporation, and corporations don't have constitutional rights (such as personal liberty). Berea College was forced to expel all its African-American students; Andrew Carnegie gave them a large grant to open a new college for African-American students (the Lincoln Institute), although it was never very successful. Berea resumed admitting African-American students in 1950, when the Kentucky legislature revoked the ban on racial integration in private education.

So legally enforced racial segregation didn't just infringe on the personal liberty of African-Americans, it also infringed on the personal liberty of European-Americans, by denying them the freedom to associate with African-Americans when they freely desired to do so

Fortunately they stopped short of "Today, some of our beloved Netlifolk will be Netlifired."