131–140 of 333 posts
"Our Company is Doing So Well That You're All Fired" The title seems to presume that "you all" are contributing to the company doing so well. If you're not, then firing you will have no effect on the company doing well or not, except it will reduce costs. Arguably the company may do better without you as by firing you they have reduced costs.
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.
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.
“I stopped changing the oil and my car runs fine.” Sometimes problems take time to present themselves.
Even an understaffed team can crawl along with a skeleton crew for a while, but you will burn people out. A burned out team ceases to make forward progress and is going to act like things are in maintenance mode. You're liable to spend more money and SWE-hours looking for backfills vs if you'd just kept your team intact.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not about running a deficit (most are free cash flow positive), it’s about improving returns on capital with leverage.
I'm financially illiterate, but what does this mean? Companies have the revenue to pay their employees, but they choose to terminate them instead, because... why?
In an environment where the "risk-free rate of return" is secularly-higher, the floor of minimal necessary productivity goes up.
Let's say the ROIC of investing $300k "into" an employee is $310k (3.33% rate of return).
If the risk free rate of return is 1%, you take that employee. If it's 5%, you fire that employee.
I think the reality is that the typical ROIC was above the typical salary, but that there was an inflection point that they crossed in the hiring spree of 2019-2021.
If you're a capital allocator (CEO), your responsibility is to maximize ROIC for shareholders over the long run. In environments where you're not absolutely confident that your eventual, steady-state employee ROIC will trounce (i.e. 2-5x's) the risk free rate of return, you should generally favor returning capital to shareholders (with dividends or buybacks) instead of putting good money after bad.
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 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.
Accumulate capital, make it grow
If you fail, your life is encumbered in ways that prevent you from doing that, there are limited programs in the US for you, but burdening corporations is a symptom
financial engineering has become a disaster.
I'm pretty sure a lot of this is connected to the bond market. Companies are running out of operating capitol. When they try and get an operating loan the terms are onerous. Rather than refinance they are electing to perform layoffs to maintain solvency. It does not matter how good you are doing in contrast to previous years. If your loan comes due and you can't afford another one to keep that revolving credit going…
I work for a company that does something that I guess is a bit unusual - they use the revenue from our customers to pay employee salaries. If you would have asked me, this would seem like the obvious way to do things, but I'm told that debt is very important for some reason or other. As Homer Simpson has been known to say, "I don't know how the economy works".
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...
Your definition of "working" needs work. Nothing you said contradicts the parent.
I 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…
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.