Perhaps some work is just bursty and companies need to be able to scale up and down to handle these cases, not unlike servers. Of course we are dealing with people not servers, so at the very minimum they need to provide generous severance packages. Even better, if this can be predicted, these employees should be brought in as temporary or contract employees so that there is no misunderstanding.
Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
101–110 of 386 posts
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#102Regardless of individual opinions on whether CEOs should be terminated for layoffs or not - there's a surprising amount of comments here that seem to not understand that growing companies don't hire for today, but for where they want to be tomorrow. Where you want to be tomorrow is based on where you and your investors believe the world is going. If the world materially changes enough to shift your expectations about…
>when COVID hit and tech companies saw large surges because investors and CEOs saw industries leaping 5-10 years into the future overnight, they hired to support that growth
Yes, they all egregiously failed. A massive, widespread, collective failure for which they should lose their jobs, as many other people do. On the face of it, it was obvious, that's not even hindsight bias - it was the topsy turvy world that bad news meant good news for stocks and S&P 500 CEOs that persisted for nigh on 15 years that was weird and had to end sooner rather than later.
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The function of the CEO of a publicly traded company is to execute on major objectives of the firm. Amongst the major objectives of a firm there is honoring debts and shareholders are mostly creditors.
> shareholders are mostly creditors You need to understand the fundamental difference between debt and equity. A creditor gets his money back with interest, and that's all. The firm could prosper or flail and it makes no difference as long as they pay him back. If the firm goes bankrupt, he's first in line for what's left of it. A stockholder might get nothing back, but if the firm prospers, he shares in it. He's las…
"Mostly" is there exactly because they trade risk for power (and a virtually endless profit, in the best case scenario).
Edit: With that power they may notice a gap in capital during a financial crisis, and they may force the firm to fill it with layoffs.
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#104My company did a big round of layoffs and it was pretty revealing that not a single director or above were laid off. Despite reduced headcount, the org chart got DEEPER in some cases. For all the talk of bloat in the tech world, nobody wants to point fingers at directors who have little to do but schedule very expensive meetings with the directors under them.
The managerial class looting public companies for outsized compensation while taking near-zero risk, is a huge problem in the modern economy.
Being a steward of an already-giant company...one that has product-market fit, reliable sales/distribution channels, household brand awareness, and a position of gravity in the markets...is infinitely easier than building something from scratch.
Nobody who was employee #1567 should ever be granted $10M+ of equity in a business they didn't build.
It's quite literally stealing from public investors, and boards only enable this because they're incestuously composed of fellow managerial-club members.
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not even clear to me that tech employees (as a whole) would be better off if such an overall system were in place for the last decade. Instead of (highly-visible) layoffs now, you'd have seen substantially less hiring across the last decade (invisibly) and probably much lower market-clearing compensation levels as a result. You can't have the benefits of go-go-gang-busters hiring sprees without sometimes having…
Two things 1) you mostly need your money now , to pay rent or mortgage, food, activities. In that cyclic markets like this are bad for devs. In choosing between a higher salary that comes with a non negligible chance that you won't have a salary at all for a sustained period, or lesser compensation but higher stability, I choose the latter. 2) The crazy increase of salaries was the result of the raise of demand, and…
Cyclic markets are bad for some devs who have tech jobs. Cyclic markets are probably better than staid markets for those many people who would have never landed a tech job in an environment where over-hiring was a career-ending threat to CEOs.
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#106Regardless of individual opinions on whether CEOs should be terminated for layoffs or not - there's a surprising amount of comments here that seem to not understand that growing companies don't hire for today, but for where they want to be tomorrow. Where you want to be tomorrow is based on where you and your investors believe the world is going. If the world materially changes enough to shift your expectations about…
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Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#107[dead]
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#108Since boards of directors and CEOs belong to the same class, there is no accountability; they collude with each other or 'help' each other.
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to see a few recent examples of CEOs making decisions for the future health of the company that knowingly lower the stock price for more than 2Q.
Zuckerberg did this. He correctly or incorrectly believes, Metaverse to be the future and so he invested in it knowing that short term profit may fall because of this.
He also has most of the voting shares. That means that as CEO he is not in conflict when maximizing value for the owner(s). He is the owner.
Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs
#110The only solution is to form a guild for software engineers. Control access to the guild through credentials and other means. Provide mentorship and apprenticeship opportunities through the guild. Allow the guild to negotiate rates and working conditions with the industry. If actors can do it, why can't we? If you want to level the playing field with tech CEOs, that's the way to do it.
Why call it something weird? You're talking about a union.
Because a "guild" sounds more appealing to nerds?
I wish I was joking but a union sounds like blue-collar work while a guild sounds like something cool from D&D and medieval fantasy.