Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just want to say, investors getting returns should be a goal of every for profit company (whos taken investor $$). Thats why investors risk their capital. That capital is responsible for the growth of most major tech companies. Its responsible for most jobs at tech companies. Not saying this is an excuse to treat employees poorly. They're just as vital as the capital (employee hours is often quite literally whats b…
Having money should not be worth more than doing the work. Same goes for landlords.
Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees
231–240 of 240 posts
Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does this have to do with WFH? The point is that teams are tasked with meaningless projects, which they deliver on, but because the project was meaningless, they get axed for not producing value. They were doomed from the start, due to the strategic initiatives management mistakenly decided they should work on. This is occurs for both WFH and in person work.
My theory is it's harder to be critical of meaningless projects and align on what's meaningful when remote.
It's not necessarily failed management, it's just the nature of big tech. You have the OG money maker. Then you have all the other stuff to try and continue to grow or expand revenue streams.
It's fine in a good economy and hopefully you get a few big wins in amongst all the failures (think of it like vc / angel funding).
But in a downturn those excess experiments are weighing you down when you just need to stay afloat to the next upturn.
Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we’ve decided to give every manager a blank check to fire a few of you This hasn't been common in a lot of recent layoffs. Low level managers aren't getting input, the decision comes from the top and it's random.
> the decision comes from the top and it's random As someone laid off from a FAANG, it's not random. They don't lay-off the top performer. They don't lay off the woman who keeps winning peer bonuses, or the one who plays golf with the VP, or the one doing cross-team knowledge sharing sessions. They're not laying off the guy that got an out-of-band pay increase because they're so valuable to the company. They may not…
Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, and the fact I'm not the CEO is why I can give a more accurate version of the statement. However, if I were the CEO of Twitch I'd like to think I could produce a statement more direct and less impersonal than the one they did release.
Fair. What would you say?
Probably I'd say something about increasing efficiency and focusing on our core product. I'd still use some buzzwords but would avoid using the passive voice as a crutch to imply it's not our fault, even though we've increased revenue and it was our choice to fire people.
Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees
#235It's not selling anything to any consumer or business. If anything, people are watching more Twitch.
Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maximising profits might come at the expense of the worker, but it benefits the economy as a whole. The reason maximising profits is such an excellent goal is because it indirectly leads to maximising profit per worker (especially in lean times, when there's less cash to go around and you focus more on efficiency as opposed to revenue). The highest net benefit to society comes from having the highest possible product…
If the metric is important (and it might well be! -- I bet it is) it needs not translate into more profit for amazon. Say you want to maximize efficiency, and you think revenue per worker is a good proxy. Then you can use the extra resources for: * charitable donations * keeping the employees and putting them in an open-source charitable division I agree that market forces are powerful and can be used to do good thin…
I suspect the biggest difference in how I see this compared to the feeling I get from you is that most things are positive-sum games in capitalism. One man's profits is another company's capital is another employee's wages. The profits of the company don't disappear, locked up in a bank never to be seen again. They get invested by the shareholder somewhere else, or spent on something, and so on. There's nothing inherently "greedy or evil" in this process.
This process can be very indirect (how does an investment in Apple today help? By providing the incentive for many of these companies to be built and made public in the first place, sharing their profits across many people), but it is there. Some explicit redistribution may be necessary, as in many countries with public healthcare or strong welfare systems, but having a stable core of a private market helps generate the overall resources to run everything.
Maybe there's a better system that can distribute the wealth more evenly - but the best examples we've seen thus far come from welfare-state western democracies, which all grew up on the same basis (and are all poorer on an average basis than America, who has a much weaker welfare base). These aren't necessarily related of course, America is stupendously rich in a lot of other ways, but it's food for thought.
Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
You want to make it even harder to get a job? The better the benefits you mandate for firing/leaving employees, the more onerous companies become about bringing on more manpower (and eventually, lower wages as a whole since they have to fund an additional 10% or whatever whenever someone leaves). You're arguing that companies should implement these measures at the cost of just hiring people? "Companies would actually…
Re: shorter benefits Every corporate downsizing is an example of a "private decision" with clearly visible public costs, unemployment insurance payouts among them. Social and emotional distress have a cost, not just to the employee, but their social group and family. But, did I catch your opinion correctly? You believe we(society) are(is) providing unemployment benefits for too many months? In your mind, who benefits…
My presumption is that companies will generally be more reluctant to hire when severances are higher, and vice-versa. You're probably not really winning anything on average, with the inexperienced losing out the most in terms of just trying to get any job at all given the possible expense to most companies. Small companies even more so, given they'd be less able to absorb the cost of those benefits.
Anyway, can speculate all I want, I'm just saying there's no free lunch.
Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
You want to make it even harder to get a job? The better the benefits you mandate for firing/leaving employees, the more onerous companies become about bringing on more manpower (and eventually, lower wages as a whole since they have to fund an additional 10% or whatever whenever someone leaves). You're arguing that companies should implement these measures at the cost of just hiring people? "Companies would actually…
This idea you bring up that the jobs will evaporate when businesses are regulated sounds logical, but it’s a trap. McDonald’s didn’t wait for the minimum wage to go up to be motivated to install automated drink dispensing machines and self-service kiosks. In fact, the minimum wage adjusted for inflation was decreasing during the entire time period in which those innovations were deployed. On the other end of the labo…
In Australia we have superannuation. The government is raising the mandatory super contribution soon from 9% to, idk, 12%. Some people act like that change is free, but that's obviously not the case if you think about it. All that'll happen is regular wages are reduced a little such that a person's total compensation is basically the same in the end.
I contend the same will be true of generous severance policies, especially those imposed on a global scale. Some of these things are worth fighting for, I'm not sure huge severance periods are one of those things, personally. At best something that scales with experience/time at a company (eg. half a month of severance per year of experience, or whatever value fits your conception of the idea), so those more attached to a particular position have more time to adjust if they are let go.
Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having money should not be worth more than doing the work. Same goes for landlords.
They are the same thing! Money is just a store of work. All money was earned via work. Investors give that stored work to companies. They’re essentially energy credits
So, when you print more of it, whose work is being encapsulated into it?
And how do you explain profit margins? You are aware that things aren’t priced at just the cost of work, right?
Re: Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair. What would you say?
Dunno, is the position open? :) (I'm taken) Probably I'd say something about increasing efficiency and focusing on our core product. I'd still use some buzzwords but would avoid using the passive voice as a crutch to imply it's not our fault, even though we've increased revenue and it was our choice to fire people.