181–190 of 279 posts
This was too dumb. First, the intro with the dog analogy. If you remotely see your relationship with your employer as you being the beloved family dog, you're the problem. Second, the author quotes a paper on downsizing in a journal and afterwards says, "[i]n all my searching I wasn't able to find any hard data which suggests layoffs either enable a company to better compete or improve earnings in the long term." How…
Nice find (and makes sense).
This was too dumb. First, the intro with the dog analogy. If you remotely see your relationship with your employer as you being the beloved family dog, you're the problem. Second, the author quotes a paper on downsizing in a journal and afterwards says, "[i]n all my searching I wasn't able to find any hard data which suggests layoffs either enable a company to better compete or improve earnings in the long term." How…
The higher educated white collar class is coming to terms with the fact they are just as disposable as the rest of us.
I think it's a huge mistake. The great labor shortage is just beginning. You can thank the retiring boomers for that. (And I hope they enjoy their retirement!)
There is no such thing as a labor shortage. There are just insufficient wages.
If the demand for brain surgeons doubled overnight, no amount of wage hike is going to magically double the supply of brain surgeons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So the layoffs... worked? How does that follow? The conclusion would be that both the companies and workers suffered unnecessarily for 2 years, with no long-term benefit afterward to the layoffs. In other words, you should just ride out the downtimes instead of panicking.
Group 1: companies in a good enough financial situation to not need layoffs Group 2: companies in a dire financial situation requiring layoffs After 3 years, what group would you expect to perform better financially? And if we told you it was a tie, you might ask: what did group 2 to improve their situation? Layoffs? Ok, sounds like they worked.
In any case they’d still have lost two years of growth when their competitors were.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Group 1: companies in a good enough financial situation to not need layoffs Group 2: companies in a dire financial situation requiring layoffs None of the big tech companies are in a "dire" financial situation. Indeed, some of them have just announced modest revenue increases this week. Yet they still conducted big layoffs. Did they "need" to do it? (Note in contrast that Apple announced a significant revenue decre…
Depends on your definition of "dire." Perhaps some companies have Finance departments that believe they're in a dire situation when they have less than six months runway if all revenue stopped. I don't know what they factor in to the decision other than they believe their costs are too high given the current economic conditions. It's kind of like me having plenty of money, right now, to afford Netflix but cancelling…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one is saying you should have 100% job security, or never be let go / fired. People are saying that these mass layoffs and the way they are conducted are harmful to society and not as beneficial to the business as CEOs and investors want to believe. Layoffs are not always a result of declining performance. We have seen several now where quarterly results point to increased performance but layoffs still occur as an…
> People are saying that these mass layoffs and the way they are conducted are harmful to society and not as beneficial to the business as CEOs and investors want to believe. Exactly this, though I also propose as the end of your sentence, "...as CEOs and investors claim." We get told a lot of false or true-but-in-the-abstract motives. The McSweeney's article[0] nails it perfectly for me. I am in the gap in the middl…
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If you think work and your coworkers are friends or family, you’re in for a world of hurt.
I've worked at two companies where people pooled vacation time for sick co-workers who had already been granted extended leave time by the company way past the company norm when they got cancer. If that is not an act of friendship what is it? I've worked on a team where we scheduled our production schedule and the company their release schedule for a year around making sure a co-worker could go back to their country…
It is a sad attempt at compensating for a missing social safety net.
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There are two different contexts around layoffs. 1) The company is struggling, losing money, etc and needs to tackle corrective action before everyone loses their jobs. 2) The company is generating record revenues, profits are high, but growth will be 4% instead of 5% so we need layoffs. There seem to be a staggering number of layoffs from camp two. > But it's weird to see all of these think pieces implying that once…
> " Is anyone really going to miss that $4 billion? " Yes, the people who own the company will, i.e. shareholders. The majority are not some cartoonish greedy fatcats either; they're ordinary people like you and I who have retirement investments in stocks and mutual funds. Moreover, if you think employees at FAANGs and big tech companies aren't on-board with this laser focus on share price, remember that a big, big c…
If they improve their stock price by only 1% this year so they’re in a position to improve it by 6% next year, then that’s a good thing.
Conversely, companies that immediately fire people because their stock gain was less than the 3% they expected, are too flaky to invest in.