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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

#171

Post by srveale »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #100

If the company ultimately has no need for workers, then it's competitors won't either. And as they compete on price there will be no reason for the goods not to sink to the raw ingredient price + cost of capital. With the hypothetically perfect AI this will sink to near 0 + raw material cost (which itself will be plummeting due to AI). I have long thought that automation will result in goods being so cheap that it be…

That sounds great, but I think it's more likely that they'll start charging for water and air before they start producing food and clothing with the intention of giving it away.

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

#172

Post by nebula8804 »

throwawayq3423 wrote: post #73
lp4vn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is why I think X is worth maybe 1b, not more.

It depends. Musk has a great ability of burning his employees out to make up for mistakes he has made: (Early automation efforts at Tesla in 2017/2018 where they repeated the mistakes GM made in the 70s/80s, dumb mistakes in the early days of SpaceX when they tried to replicate what NASA had in the 50s/60s).

In the end he succeeds powering through all the dumb decisions he makes and manages to pull ahead:(Tesla production and engineering is now seen as a innovation leader in the industry and not just dismissed as some dumb flash in the pan, SpaceX has no real competitors, maybe the Chinese will eventually catch them but no one else is even in the conversation).

I have often wondered why so many people sign up to put themselves though this and I guess the clearest answer I got was when I interviewed some Starlink employees at DEFCON. They just want to be part of a team of excellent players and will overlook Musk's faults to be a part of that team.

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

#173

Post by gumby »

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.

What's your timescale? If you take medicine for a chronic condition you can often skip a dose without problem, maybe even two, but eventually you presumably revert back to where you were before treatment.

I saw a lot of this back in the "reengineering the corporation" craze in the 90s (and then the "lean organization" and so on). They cut all the slack out of the system so in steady state everything seemed to work. But the world is not consistently in a steady state.

So fire that guy doing backups, and save money by not paying for the redundant network connection you've never used. Stock goes up, prepare three envelopes, and retire!

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

#174

Post by tick_tock_tick »

no_wizard wrote: post #143
crazygringo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thi…

>Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not Yeah I think when a layoff is enacted, you made more than a mistake, you fundamentally missed something. Its outside the bounds of needing to be perfect or what have you, something went sideways in a big way, and unless you can actually simply trace it down to market forces beyond your control and you are telling me those people can't be productively…

I think you just have a fundamentally different view of what a layoff means then the executives, board of directors, and general shareholders.

> I and several others made this case, and yet again, not headed, layoffs hit 6 months later, because all those customers either went belly up or had to downsize themselves, because they were too credit dependent.

But what if the customers survived? What if interest rates didn't hike as fast? You're suggestion would have been horrible. The risks of over-hiring is a layoff which no one else views as really that bad vs failing behind competitors.

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

#175

Post by ike2792 »

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.

As companies get bigger they tend to get more bloated and disorganized. A lot of initiatives end up not being worth continuing on, so they lay off the people working on those initiatives. Better companies will reallocate talent to new, better initiatives so they don't lose the knowledge in their workforce, but that seems rare.

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

#176

Post by derefr »

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.

Large companies reinvest most of their profits as bets on the future — building new arms of the company, that initially do nothing but quiet R&D for months/years — but which might bring the company entirely new revenue-lines years down the line.

Much of a large company's headcount at any point in time, is people hired to work on these bets on the future. You can fire all of these people, and nothing will happen to the company's day-to-day operations.

But the company's stock will take a nosedive nevertheless — because the promise of future increased returns had already been factored into the share price, and that factor now has to be removed.

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

#177

Post by nytesky »

kansface wrote: post #126
nytesky wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually feels like a semi-coordinated effort to push down wages. With high inflation, workers would have demanded raises, but with the specter of layoffs, they keep their heads down. Musk bought Twitter in April 2022, had huge layoffs and then rest of tech followed in Nov 2022 onwards. Prior to current trends was it common to announce great earnings and then announce layoffs?

We went from 0% interest rate to a whole lot real quick. It used to be there was literally no overhead for over hiring if it moved the bar at all. Thats not true anymore.

If it was really over hiring, and the end of ZIRP, why have their financial results been so strong? It’s not like profits dipped to losses from these “headwinds” — companies have been strong and AI is increasing demand for cloud services, chips, etc.

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

#178

Post by NM-Super »

salad-tycoon wrote: post #128
Aurornis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies reduce initiatives and headcount at the same time. It's usually approached as a budget reduction exercise: Company is reducing budgets by X%. Select which projects get cancelled. Now work with managers to identify enough employees to lay off to reduce headcount spend by X%. Now reorganize remaining employees across remaining projects, with the understanding that a few extra people will leave due to future l…

Twitter shed 80% and still works, is still the go to outside of fringe empty echo chambers of the left and right divide. Not only that but they added a significant amount of features like Grok, which I know nothing about really, and Substack like payments. 80% is a lot and it works just fine. 7,500 to 1,300 in Jan 2023. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...

Twitter's still working, but it's in a state that I think is worse than before. The spam bots alone seem to be orders of magnitude more prominent. I don't think I'd ever seen a spammer pre-headcount-change, and now "MY PUSSY IN BIO" is a running gag on the website because spambots are so prominent.

They also changed their content rules to allow drastically more content, which reduces the total amount of work to be done. You could argue that this is a good thing because the moderation was useless and censoring before, but the moderation also made it a friendlier place for major advertisers who have since pulled out—so changing the moderation resulted in a business model change. That's naturally going to reduce headcount.

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

#179

Post by p1esk »

crazygringo wrote: post #56
no_wizard wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

Has anyone tried laying off most of the executive team - instead of the workers?

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

#180

Post by transitionnel »

transitionnel wrote: post #147

Haven't you seen how discussion lately has improved in quality? For whatever mixture of reasons, the world is finally waking up. We should start lobbing some good thoughts and respect on folks around us, and start to bring them around. The government is us, and needs us. The time is here.

...but really though.

Y'all are the smartest people I know, and with a little banter we could figure things out. A win for all parties.

"Yes, Mom, I took my pills today" Lol

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