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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

#251

Post by cynicalsecurity »

briantakita wrote: post #149
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #116

The young lad who blames capitalism has obviously never lived under socialism.

What's interesting is that capitalist systems often make socialist systems poor through sanctions, military intervention, & other underhanded tactics. It's a geopolitical game of control & socialism stands of defiance over the banking establishment. Times seem to be changing though as the commodity producing nations are gaining leverage & winning wars against colonial nations. The problem for the colonialists is if t…

Mate, you want to tell me that a country that had 1/6 of all the resources of the planet collapsed into oblivious because of the Western sanctions and mean Western banks? I'm sorry, I'm not buying it.

Authoritarian/Totalitarian structures always flop. Unfortunately, they also tend to screw millions of lives in between. They also like put the blame on others and gaslight. Like a crazy doomsday cult.

Oh mate... The so-called socialism is a much worse mafia which wouldn't even allow you to call them mafia. The way they disregard human life and any human morals would damage your mental sanity if you ever had to face it. I hope you wouldn't. I wish you all the best and a great life, and hopefully you would never have to face the evil that the socialism is.

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

#252

Post by saagarjha »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #234
jader201 wrote: post #28

You know it's satire from the title (and the first paragraph) because it uses terms like "fired" and "let go". Nobody uses those anymore. You're "impacted".

If companies started saying "We have taken the decision to fire you", people would complain about it being too harsh. If they say impacted, people complain that it's euphemistic. In the end, people just want to complain, and they're going to do it either way.

Yes, because they are getting fired!

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

#253

Post by no_wizard »

aksss wrote: post #244
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…

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…

>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.

There are some of us who have and still see the facades and illogical reasoning for many decisions, decisions that if made in the lower wrung of the company would definitely lead to someone getting fired. People ignore good evidence even at the highest levels all the time because their incentives are not aligned, for example. I witnessed this before. I've been in director+ levels multiple times, at small and medium organizations. I'm not convinced that my peers were any smarter than lower level employees when it comes to making decisions given all the available inputs.

I will say, that in mid sized organizations I've been apart of, you do see sometimes that lower level employees have no concept outside the department, and that leads to tunnel vision. They don't see the complete story all the time, but I always viewed those as communication failures most of the time.

I "made the sausage" at my previous job reporting directly to the CTO[0] at a 1000+ person company. It was alot more volume of information, and I talked to alot of different people all the time, but I think you could take any whip smart employee, elevate them to that position, and they could do a reasonable job.

That experience has left me really jaded to be honest. Whatever humanity I had left to endure corporate life had sunk by the end, as it were.

[0]: This is why I was raising alarm bells in the first place, because I knew it'd be heard. Fact is, it was ignored.

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

#254

Post by nine_zeros »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #197

This reminds me of Reed Hastings (Netflix Co-Founder) talking about how after he had done layoffs (I think 30%) he found that they actually moved faster because all the dead weight was gone and the talent density had gone up. This could also just be marketing spin however.

This is actually true. Cutting people automatically causes a cut in scope of work. Teams become more picky and focused about the work they would do in the next few quarters.

BUT - the cut has to be management. Management is overhead. They are the reason why red tape exists. Every manager in the company adds more reporting, more paperwork, and more bureaucracy for people doing the actual work.

By cutting layers and layers, companies can become very efficient.

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

#255

Post by no_wizard »

p1esk wrote: post #179
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…

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

I always wanted to see an experiment where you take a really knowledgeable about the business front line employee, and hoist them to the C suite with all the same support systems executives have (and there's more than you might expect) and see if they do the same or better in that chair.

There's only be limited studies done in this vain, and the results, while limited, seem to suggest that any reasonably smart person with knowledge of the industry could do a good job but the studies are pretty limited, and don't construct the circumstances as I described, so its hard to say its true or not true.

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

#256

Post by skeledrew »

This actually makes sense, no /s. After all, the core reason for a business to hire is to access talent to fulfill various business requirements. And the better a given employee does, particularly one doing software development things, the less they should be needed over time. So with AI being increasingly available in limited forms, and at costs more business-friendly than hiring humans, it only makes sense that human talent is gradually deprecated.

And this is why I'd like to get to the point where I'm running my own business eventually, because one will always be "expendable" as an employee/contractor. I actually look forward to a day when there's 100% automation of all value-giving labour. Raises some interesting questions about what society and economy will become, but that's another topic...

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

#257

Post by crazygringo »

no_wizard wrote: post #255
p1esk wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I always wanted to see an experiment where you take a really knowledgeable about the business front line employee, and hoist them to the C suite with all the same support systems executives have (and there's more than you might expect) and see if they do the same or better in that chair. There's only be limited studies done in this vain, and the results, while limited, seem to suggest that any reasonably smart person…

They would do terribly. They're completely and utterly different skill sets.

It makes as much sense as taking an oboe player and asking them to conduct an orchestra, without any conducting experience.

Do you know how to handle investor relations and different factions on the board? Managing sales and marketing strategies? Assessing the regulatory environment in Europe and the legal risks of expansion in China? Can you speak confidently and charmingly at conferences with billionaires? Do you understand how to manage different interest rate environments? Is it obvious to you which law firms to hire for different needs?

This isn't just stuff you can learn on the fly. It takes many years of experience, and often a business degree in the middle, to become even moderately competent in this stuff.

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

#258

Post by darth_avocado »

importantbrian wrote: post #222
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…

I don't think it even technically works as well as before. The iOS app seems mostly fine, but on web the feed or tweet fails to load and shows the blue retry button probably 1/3rd of the time for me now. Combined with all the bot issues you mentioned, that has dramatically reduced my Twitter usage. It's become incredibly frustrating to use. I only use it now when I click on a tweet link that's been shared with me.

If you're logged out, you can't see any Tweets unless you're directly viewing a specific Tweet, and even then you cannot see any other Tweet apart from the one you're directly viewing.

This was one thing we had tried on Twitter before Elon, and had found that it is detrimental to the platform and engagement. So, had to roll it back. But now it is a thing again. This drives down the popularity and overall usage of the platform, but some people will still claim it works the same (or even better).

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

#259

Post by scruple »

tareqak wrote: post #99

What about when companies are doing layoffs but still continue hire at exactly the same time ? Sometimes, they even hire for the same positions that were just laid off. Are there ever conversations where employees are asked to take a pay cut instead of being laid off?

And what about companies who do layoffs and then have to scramble to try to re-hire some of the very key, crucial people that were "accidentally" let go?
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