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Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

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Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#51

Post by glitchcrab »

silverquiet wrote: post #38
Fin_Code wrote: post #21

I'm pretty sure a lot of this is connected to the bond market. Companies are running out of operating capitol. When they try and get an operating loan the terms are onerous. Rather than refinance they are electing to perform layoffs to maintain solvency. It does not matter how good you are doing in contrast to previous years. If your loan comes due and you can't afford another one to keep that revolving credit going…

I work for a company that does something that I guess is a bit unusual - they use the revenue from our customers to pay employee salaries. If you would have asked me, this would seem like the obvious way to do things, but I'm told that debt is very important for some reason or other. As Homer Simpson has been known to say, "I don't know how the economy works".

How very dare you suggest that organic growth is the way forward? Everyone here knows that unless you've hit your series c and are soaring for unicorn status then you might as well just not exist at all.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#52

Post by wubrr »

matusp wrote: post #10

If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.

In many cases the company can run fine for a while... the systems that engineers already built will continue to function until a certain point. Once they start breaking/failing the company needs to hire additional people for maintenance/improvements. Often these are people who hadn't worked on the original systems and don't have a full understanding of the stack/systems involved this leads to many other issues... knowledge fragmentation, tech debt, maintenance difficulties, increased bugs, etc.

I've seen this happen many times in large orgs, and the people making the decisions to cut engineers in certain areas often aren't responsible for what happens down the line and don't need to deal with the fallout. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#53

Post by trey-jones »

yinser wrote: post #7

I can't decide if I'd prefer to hear a bunch of nonsense from an executive at the moment of being let go, or no explanation and just an email saying I'm part of a layoff.

The nonsense (thank you for your valuable contributions) makes me nauseous. I'm so sick of that shit. We as a society need to stop sugarcoating (denial, rationalization) and be more candid. Otherwise the words just become more and more meaningless and nobody can trust anything anybody says.

So I know which I would choose, is what I'm trying to say. Like a band-aid.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#54

Post by pdonis »

haswell wrote: post #20
matusp wrote: post #10

If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.

> and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? A few issues to consider: 1. Many companies can continue to operate for a time purely based on momentum and existing pipelines. That does not mean that this is sustainable. 2. The lack of a visible dip does not mean the internals are healthy. Often layoffs are accompanied with an expectation to "do more with less", which generally means the…

> If every company could automate every function and there were no employees anywhere, this would obviously not be sustainable in the long run

Perhaps not, but I'm not sure it would be for the reason you are implying.

What is this hypothetical company that automates every function and has no employess anywhere producing? And what price can that thing fetch in the market? If the marginal cost of producing additional units is basically zero, which is what the hypothetical implies, then the products should be basically free, since standard microeconomics says that price = marginal cost. Which means nobody would need jobs to afford these products. Which means this condition would be sustainable in the hypothetical as you state it: sure, there would be no employees, but there would also be no need for the jobs that no longer exist.

Of course in the real world there are plenty of ways this could go sideways, but they all basically boil down to: in the real world, governments mess with markets in ways that prevent price from being driven down to marginal cost. That means many things (food, for example) cost more than they should, which means people need more income than they should need if the market were truly free. So what is really not sustainable is governments trying to mess with markets. If that stopped, we could make the necessities of life basically free. That would be a good use of technology.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#55

Post by H8crilA »

tnel77 wrote: post #43
silverquiet wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a company that does something that I guess is a bit unusual - they use the revenue from our customers to pay employee salaries. If you would have asked me, this would seem like the obvious way to do things, but I'm told that debt is very important for some reason or other. As Homer Simpson has been known to say, "I don't know how the economy works".

You would think that this would be an acceptable approach, but MBAs have decided that this is not the case so I don’t know.

Except all tech giants do just that, yet they fire people. Google has an amount of cash in the bank comparable to all the help that has been sent to Ukraine (though there are also many things that Ukraine gets that are not really measurable in money). Sent, not "promised" or whatever else some states do to make themselves look better.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#56

Post by crazygringo »

no_wizard wrote: post #35
matusp wrote: post #10

If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.

Why is anyone so quick to take the company side? For starters, productivity is a broad term, so without defining what it means in context it isn’t doing anyone any favors. You won’t feel the dip or record it until after the event happens, and often not right away. When productivity drops a year from now for example, that could be due to layoffs. It’s not always immediate in its impact. I also question this from the o…

> why are executives who set the company priorities not also axed? They are the ones that ultimately messed up as they had poor strategic vision.

Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not.

And managing staff size is like 1% of their job. They're also busy running their divisions, managing roadmaps and objectives and all sorts of non-staff resource planning, etc.

It's entirely reasonable to think economic and competitive conditions will probably be such that we should hire more, and then your competitive situation changes and you have to have some layoffs.

That doesn't mean anybody made mistakes or the executives should be fired as well. It just means that nobody has a crystal ball. Very little future estimation that is done in the business world turns out to be perfectly correct.

Sometimes executives do mess up in big ways and get fired just like anybody at any level. But that has nothing to do with layoffs in any special way.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#57

Post by troupe »

matusp wrote: post #10

If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.

Just laying off 10% of your employees is easy. If a company can identify the 10% of their workforce that isn't contributing anything, that would speak very highly of their management processes. And in any sufficiently large company, there are always 10% that are either adding nothing or are creating negative value.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#58

Post by smallmancontrov »

davesque wrote: post #42
pdonis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the company is rudderless and unable to allocate effective work to employees, it won't be doing well. This is about companies that are doing well. At least, that's the premise of the article.

Not necessarily. Companies can be rudderless and have some kind of industry capture or brand recognition and still be doing great. In other words, at one point they had good leadership or built up during times of low regulation or economic prosperity and now are just living off those early successes. A lot of large tech companies are like this.

Yeah. The Google Graveyard really shows how far this can go.

https://killedbygoogle.com

The punchline is that in addition to hundreds of failed hobby projects, their stock is doing great. Monopoly rents are a helluva drug.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#59

Post by datadeft »

matusp wrote: post #10

If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.

Delayed impact is rarely taken into account. You fire people who's impact is going to show up 2-3-6 months from now. Same goes to maintenance. Stop doing maintenance you can save money in the short term. Should you stop doing maintenance? Should you fire this many people?

Probably not.

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