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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

#181

Post by no_wizard »

Jensson wrote: post #163
no_wizard wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For example, not hiring extra is also a gamble, it means you gamble on the market not growing and you would lose a ton of money if the market didn't stall This assumes hiring is the only way to grow the company. More specifically, it assumes ramped up hiring is the only way. There are balances that can be struck, for example, instead of hiring 100 people, maybe hire 20 and see how onboarding and growth pans out? Per…

You assume they were fired due to inefficiencies, but they were fired since the market went down and the US government made software engineers more expensive short term by changing how those investments were taxed. That means they can no longer maintain as many software engineers. > but what executives did was irresponsible and I knew it even at the time. Lots of people said this during the entire hiring spree from 2…

>Lots of people said this during the entire hiring spree from 2010 to 2020, but most of those people are still there paid and working. If they listened to people like you most of us here would be out of a job since the job market wouldn't have grown that fast.

That assumes I'm taking an absolutist position like you shouldn't hire or hire rarely, and I'm not. There needs to be successive indicators and re-evaluation of conditions that need to be balanced. In many (most?) cases, they simply weren't. I would say the accurate time to call this out would have been 2021, not 2009, and that is the timeframe in which I looked at everything and thought to myself "this won't last more than 5 years at best". By late 2020 to early 2021 I created a thesis that we crossed into artificial growth rate and too much "free" money being pumped into everything around us, to be clear about this.

The steady growth from 2009-2019 in tech was relatively organic by comparison, and far more moderate for most of the industry if you compute only non FAANG companies (FAANG companies, and those near that acronym, simply had outsized growth by comparison, by many multiples)

All this is to say, that I think if people listened to me, it would have nothing to do with 2010 to the start of 2020.

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

#182

Post by baq »

hadlock wrote: post #145
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/X hasn't seen notable user growth since ~2015/16 and has been absolutely flat since then, coming up on a decade now. It was 325 million active users in 2015 and it's still about 300 million active users today (spring 2024). A decade of no growth. I don't know if twitter is functioning exactly the same as it was before, but if you have to pay the bills, cutting 80% of the workforce and holding the line seems t…

It absolutely isn’t functioning the same.

Technically maybe everything works more or less as well as before, after a year.

…but the experience is quite bad now: every other thread is full of crypto and/or onlyfans promoting bots. The algorithm displays a lot of obvious attention grabbing posts which have 300 replies, 10 of which are from humans. There’s a constant stream of bots trying to connect with you via follows or likes.

It’s a mess and a fantastic example of why anonymous and free communication platforms absolutely need professional moderation.

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

#183

Post by jprete »

tuckerconnelly wrote: post #168
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…

While X's main use case works, I just tried to run some ads there. When trying to upgrade to verified org: "An unexpected error occurred" When trying to change my display name: "An unexpected error occurred" When trying to run an ad: "Awaiting verification" for a week Contacting support through messages: No response Finally finding a way to submit a ticket: 3 day response time with a standard response that didn't res…

It's sad that you cannot even get through the workflow that gives them money. They must be in absolutely terrible shape.

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

#184

Post by LargeWu »

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...

It "works".

The main app is generally functional, but it's easy to see the deterioration of the smaller subsystems that large platforms like that need for a good user experience. For instance, I have an account that I am unable to log into because their password recovery/change feature doesn't seem send me anything when I click it. I'm sure frequent users have a litany of little things they've noticed that are flaky or outright broken, even if they can still send and read tweets.

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

#185

Post by yinser »

trey-jones wrote: post #53
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.

Executives and bloviating. Peanut butter and jelly unfortunately.

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

#186

Post by paulddraper »

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.

HN: "Why do you need 1000 people for that? It's a weekend project."

Also HN: "You can't have less than 1000 people for that!!"

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

#187

Post by no_wizard »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #174
no_wizard wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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

Most likely, and I personally believe that is part of the problem, not the problem.

I recognize how damaging layoffs are to people. Its unfair to act like they aren't. Its people's livelihood and we as humans often make decisions around these things, and when its yanked out from underneath them without notice, its very damaging.

Its not numbers on a spreadsheet, it is human lives.

>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.

We would have hired more modestly, and could focus on making the business more generally efficient, cut down on process, and focus on keeping the business nimble and responsive.

If I'm wrong, we end up primed to take on more customers while continuing to hire modestly. Ironically, our smaller more nimble competitors ate a bunch of market share from us with much smaller overall staff, because they could move faster, and I can directly trace that to the hiring spree.

Now, I will admit, if we had stronger safety nets in the US that made layoffs relatively painless for the unemployed, I'd feel differently about this.

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

#188

Post by taurath »

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.

It’s a bad thing for everyone who depends on the company for their livelihood. The company that decided to hire them, the management that used their headcount to justify a higher valuation.

People are burning out, working the jobs of 3 people and are told they’re lucky to have a job. It’s not bullshit if it’s unsustainable.

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

#189

Post by baq »

matwood wrote: post #48
davesque wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Big tech clearly overhired during the pandemic. The layoffs over the last 12-24 months are a return to the mean.

In the states it’s a new tax thing going live.

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

#190

Post by stcroixx »

baq wrote: post #182
hadlock wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter/X hasn't seen notable user growth since ~2015/16 and has been absolutely flat since then, coming up on a decade now. It was 325 million active users in 2015 and it's still about 300 million active users today (spring 2024). A decade of no growth. I don't know if twitter is functioning exactly the same as it was before, but if you have to pay the bills, cutting 80% of the workforce and holding the line seems t…

It absolutely isn’t functioning the same. Technically maybe everything works more or less as well as before, after a year. …but the experience is quite bad now: every other thread is full of crypto and/or onlyfans promoting bots. The algorithm displays a lot of obvious attention grabbing posts which have 300 replies, 10 of which are from humans. There’s a constant stream of bots trying to connect with you via follows…

On the other hand, I love it now and hated it before. Guess it depends on what you're looking for. Me - I like little to no moderation and government interference and don't find much offensive and have no problem just ignoring anything I do find objectionable. All worth it to be able to speak honestly.
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