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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
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-…
> 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. Are you talking about Russia? They seem to be on the upswing by all standards. Food is plentiful & inexpensive compared to the inflation that we see in America with rampant homelessness...while billions are sent to bu…
> Are you talking about Russia?
No, USSR. Russia is a capitalist country that is quickly becoming a totalitarian fascist country though. Which hugely brings it back to the socialist times.
Oh mate, you need to get out of the far right bubble.
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#283Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? A few issues to consider: 1. Many companies can continue to operate for a time purely based on momentum and existing pipelines. That does not mean that this is sustainable. 2. The lack of a visible dip does not mean the internals are healthy. Often layoffs are accompanied with an expectation to "do more with less", which generally means the…
> 2. The lack of a visible dip does not mean the internals are healthy. Often layoffs are accompanied with an expectation to "do more with less", which generally means the conditions going south for remaining workers. I've always wondered: If the layoff is happening because the company over-hired and the roles are no longer needed, then why do existing employees need to step up and do those roles that the company jus…
Highly depends on the company and how they select the people to be laid off, but the issue can be that the layoff targets some % of over-hiring, and some teams are effected more than others depending on the makeup of those teams, project load, etc. Some teams are disproportionately impacted.
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-…
> 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. Are you talking about Russia? They seem to be on the upswing by all standards. Food is plentiful & inexpensive compared to the inflation that we see in America with rampant homelessness...while billions are sent to bu…
> Food is plentiful & inexpensive compared to the inflation that we see in America
Is that why Russian TV channels are showing Putin heroically promising to "personally" "solve the issue" of egg prices? [1] Is that why Russian authorities are telling people to grow their own bananas? [2] This strongly resembles the USSR in its final days. Even the old jokes from that era are relevant once again:
A man goes to a doctor and complains: "Doctor, there appears to be an issue either with my vision or my hearing." - "What makes you say that?" - "What I see doesn't match what I hear."
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-rare-apology-over...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/putin-banana-ban-shortage-ecuador-u...
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 yo…
I have yet to see evidence that what gets done in the C-suite of many (not all, possibly not most—but many) companies is making use of any skill set at all, besides self-aggrandizement and bullshitting.
To be charitable, for some of these, what's happening is that rather than leveraging their skills, they're leveraging their relationships. And that can be valuable, sometimes, but it's not a substitute for actually knowing what the hell you're doing.
The real problem is that far too many of these people—skills or no skills—primarily bring their egos to the table, and operate mostly based on that.
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? How can you be so callous? This is why people don't like startup people. Yes, obviously it's a bad thing, because those people are now without a source of income and often without health insurance. I say " obviously " because it's pretty reasonable to expect people aren't sociopaths, and c…
Would it also be preferable for companies to act as de-facto charities and hire an extra 10% (or an extra hundreds to thousands) of people in order to provide some of the people who are currently out of work a source of income and health insurance? If 100 fewer employees is bad; is 100 more good?
> Would it also be preferable for companies to act as de-facto charities and hire an extra 10% (or an extra hundreds to thousands) of people in order to provide some of the people who are currently out of work a source of income and health insurance?
No, that's a low-effort straw man argument.
It would be preferable for us to stop trusting companies to provide for people's needs, and build effective systems for providing people's needs.
A good start might be to stop pretending corporate actions are always morally good as long as they're profitable, and recognize that firing people causes harm to those people. That's not a difficult concept for normal people--again, its obvious--and corporations have spilled a great deal of ink to override basic human empathy on this subject.
I'll agree that companies can't be made to work if they're required to act as charities, but I'll also say that if corporations can't exist without causing harm then I'm not sure why we'd want them to exist. The entire purpose of allowing corporations to exist is that they are supposed to benefit society.
At the very least, if we're going to allow companies to fire at will, we need a much more effective social safety net to help workers pick up the pieces when they get fired. But of course these corporations will fight against that, because exploiting their workers' dependence is profitable, and besides, they don't want to be asked to pay to fix the harms they cause.
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 yo…
All these tasks you listed - what makes you think an average CEO knows how to do any of them? How do you know if the company is doing well because of the CEO or despite them?
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you have ChatGPT generate this?
Ha no. If you read the essay you’d understand.
Thank you for the reply! Yes, Venkat's essays tend towards logorrhea, so I don't quite like them (though the kernels within are insightful). I went back and skimmed this one again, and your verse makes more sense now :)
Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired
#290I know it's comedy, but the essense relies on faulty reasoning of why you were employed. You are employed because the company expects the profit/savings you generate to exceed the cost of employment. If that stops being true, then naturally it's no longer profitable to employ you. You'll notice there is no mention of the overall profitability of the organization in that equation. It holds equally true for both profit…
This is a very simplistic understanding of how much more complicated the world has become. Google was able to take 20 years worth of salary of its laid off employees and execute stock buybacks that increased stock price more than those workers POSITIVE revenues. Its a more brutal reality than you think.
Thank you for articulating this!
I'm not accusing everyone of this cluelessness, but many appear to think that Google was looking at financially-trying times, and fired some employees to save some money -- no, they fired people, and then spent enough money to have kept those folks employed for decades on stock buybacks.
Google's layoffs weren't about saving money, but about juicing the stock.