71–80 of 333 posts
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.
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.
For the sake of argument, does that mean all those employees were useless or does it mean the management isn't doing a good job of allocating them to effective work? I've been at a few companies that were rudderless and yeah, letting go of people wouldn't have made much difference because the leadership didn't know what to do with them anyway.
Having extra people on staff who aren't needed can be good as long as you expect to need them in the near future. That obviously creates the risk of needing to terminate the positions if the need for the person never materializes.
It takes 2-3 months to hire someone after opening a role, and 6-9 months to onboard them. So 8-12 months to fill a role with someone fully up and running. That's a really long time which is why so many high growth companies fill roles they don't actually need right now.
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.
If you have a project/company that's already running well and you fire almost everybody except a skeleton crew, you'd be amused but things don't crumble down instantly. Technical debt piles up and everything goes to maintenance mode, when you need the insight of the good people who left is when you realise that going to the previous state will cost you a lot more time and money than you might possibly predict.
Should private for-profit companies employ people just because they can?
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.
-like maybe all salaried people need to work an extra hour every day to cover the laid off people's work-
Productivity per employee would go up, and it would be impossible to really attribute any negative impact to the product to the layoff!
But would that have been a wise decision for the company? If it was wise, the company should keep laying off more people, but how can you tell when it has gone too far?
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.
A company I used to work for set up a team to develop a new product for a new market. After 3 years they were still unprofitable, the product was shut down and the entire team was fired. This obviously had no direct effect on the companies overall productivity. Was that team doing a "bullshit job"?
If you fire the team doing R&D on the next generation of one of your products or the team working on launching your company into an entirely new market or the team the works on internal tooling or some of the people managing key account relationships with certain customers or suppliers or many other similar jobs then the company can absolutely keep going without a hitch, for a while.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was not apparent in the mid 1980s when the robot panic was definitely in full swing. You're looking back with almost 40 years of hindsight. The view in the 80s was that the entire assembly line was going away to be replaced with nothing but robots. We were taught to expect that our jobs would be to maintain and service the robots. Heck in the 90s I remember going to a museum somewhere where McDonald's was demons…
McDonalds has automated the ordering process away, though.
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.
That’s one interpretation. Another is that that 10% of work is distributed to the remaining 90%, who now work harder and are more stressed, but well aware that they were lucky to keep their jobs and therefore willing to absorb an extra hour a day. Which, free market and all that, may just be smart business. But I don’t think it’s necessarily good management in the long term.