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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

#241

Post by scruple »

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.

My productivity has been severely impacted, actually, without even going into the mental health / stress / morale effects. I've seen two rounds of layoffs at my current employer and today I am utterly and completely fucking swamped in work. New initiatives showing up in January, directly from corporate sponsors at the SVP and executive level, despite the Great Big Fucking Deal they made about us getting our 2024 "roadmap" to them in November of 2023. Bullshit jobs or not, I'm not sure why I'm expected to have to pick up the slack and do more work at the same time.

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

#242

Post by itsoktocry »

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…

>every other thread is full of crypto and/or onlyfans promoting bots.

Remember when we were told Elon was going to unleash AI on the bot/spam problem and solve it in a month?

It's worse than it ever was. I hardly ever saw bots or spam. Now I have 100+ spam followers, and on the very rare occasion where I reply to something, it gets 90% spam likes. Ads are also crypto, soft porn games and drop shipping companies.

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

#243

Post by itsoktocry »

stcroixx wrote: post #190
baq wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I like little to no moderation and government interference

My personal politics better align with based Elon than the previous regime, but let's not pretend there's no moderation happening. It's just different.

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

#244

Post by aksss »

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…

Honestly, I think taking the company's side is the contrarian opinion. The knee-jerk reaction is to judge them as the evil man oppressing working families.

Why? The vast majority of people have not worked in managerial positions with high levels of responsibility to understand the decision-making and interest balancing processes required for a large organization to operate.

But everyone's been a victim of managers at least once, and certainly seen bad ones. And many people think they can imagine what's entailed in the job. Your questions about ownership and responsibility are not invalid, but they are also the most accessible (easiest) questions. You don't get to see the sausage unless you're on the inside and most people can only imagine what that looks like, and then tend to imagine the worst or most malicious alternatives. Thinking beyond those questions isn't always warranted, but doing so does require a perspective that most people don't have direct experience with.

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

#245

Post by itsoktocry »

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...

>Not only that but they added a significant amount of features like Grok, which I know nothing about really, and Substack like payments.

A premium (as in requires money), also-ran AI with a juvenile "sense of humor" and payments? These are significant?

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

#246

Post by nebula8804 »

jimbokun wrote: post #240
nebula8804 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 produ…

In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, one of his employees completely burnt out and quit. Then came back years later because he was bored and wanted to be part of something cutting edge again.

Yeah I remember that. Honestly I wish there was some other organization that could rival the Musk companies. We need to spread out the power that he has right now but man I just don't know what the other guys are doing. Just today I saw the Rivian and Lucid financial results and they are not looking good. On the space side I'll take Bezo's Blue Origin but I hear almost nothing good.

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

#247

Post by no_wizard »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #232
no_wizard wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 f…

> 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. Or more realistically doomed the company to fade from grace as you competitors surge past you eventually ending with a massive layoff.

>Or more realistically doomed the company to fade from grace as you competitors surge past you eventually ending with a massive layoff.

This is a black and white take that doesn't jive, additionally, we have the hindsight of history, both recent history and the history of other boom / bust cycles, that serve to validate. Our competitors wouldn't have zoomed past us. We have strong market presence and we bleed more users due to our own ineffectiveness than strictly from competitive pressure, and I can trace much of that ineffectiveness back to hiring practices from late 2020 to mid 2022. As I noted previously, we have a clear line of how this happened.

Generally speaking, a moderate growth strategy would have left us in a better place, and it was easy to see by the end of 2021 that things were going to change sooner rather than later. I'm not that smart, by my own admission, I'm a pretty dumb guy, but I put the pieces together by then by simply looking at where the money was coming from. There was no way the conditions of 2021 were going to continue at most past 2025 if you wanted to be an optimist, but realistically, it was coming down a lot sooner to anyone paying attention to how the money was flooding in, and I felt we would start to see some downturns in 2022 and 2023. As soon as the COVID relief stuff was announced to be ending, it should have been even more so, yet there wasn't a prevalent skepticism in the status quo until much later.

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

#248

Post by silverquiet »

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.

I'll be forever proud that when I got the call from my senior manager, I started with, "so you got some bad news for me"? No matter how bad the situation, it seems like my snark will never fail me.

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

#249

Post by aksss »

tsunamifury wrote: post #115
leftcenterright wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but this is not true of the giants like Microsoft and Google right? They chose to fire thousands and yet have sufficient to invest further into markets all over the world. Burn and churn is just much easier and lax labor laws do not prohibit such tendencies!

They elected to do that because the 1 billion dollar write down yield 300 billion in market value -- firing people literally raised their market cap more than what those people could earn doing a real job earning real revenue. To be clear, this is not people being fired for bullshit jobs. This is people being fired because their 1 billion in revenue is a fraction of the 300 billion in stock price opportunity. Ask me…

I think both scenarios can be true. Let us not deny that there are worthless employees and worthless jobs, which tend to accumulate in large organizations organically, and warrant periodic correction.

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

#250

Post by saagarjha »

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…

Twitter almost doubled their mDAU between 2016 and 2022. They definitely weren't doing anything. (I have no idea what the recent acquisition has done to the numbers, though.)
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