Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired • Hacker News Board

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#231

Post by paulddraper » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 9:53 PM UTC

silverquiet wrote: post #38

Fin_Code wrote: post #21

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".

> I'm told that debt is very important for some reason or other

I can help you out here :)

In addition to revenue, debt is a source of funding for investment into growth.

For example, if you can get a return of 8% on an investment, it make sense to borrow capital at a 5% rate. But not at a 10% rate.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#232

Post by tick_tock_tick » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 9:54 PM UTC

no_wizard wrote: post #187

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just have a fundamentally different view of what a layoff means then the executives, board of directors, and general shareholders. > I and several others made this case, and yet again, not headed, layoffs hit 6 months later, because all those customers either went belly up or had to downsize themselves, because they were too credit dependent. But what if the customers survived? What if interest rates didn…

>I think you just have a fundamentally different view of what a layoff means then the executives, board of directors, and general shareholders. Most likely, and I personally believe that is part of the problem, not the problem. I recognize how damaging layoffs are to people. Its unfair to act like they aren't. Its people's livelihood and we as humans often make decisions around these things, and when its yanked out f…

> We would have hired more modestly, and could focus on making the business more generally efficient, cut down on process, and focus on keeping the business nimble and responsive.

Or more realistically doomed the company to fade from grace as you competitors surge past you eventually ending with a massive layoff.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#233

Post by danaris » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 9:55 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #29

davesque wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the sake of argument, does that mean all those employees were useless or does it mean the management isn't doing a good job of allocating them to effective work? I've been at a few companies that were rudderless and yeah, letting go of people wouldn't have made much difference because the leadership didn't know what to do with them anyway.

If the company is rudderless and unable to allocate effective work to employees, it won't be doing well. This is about companies that are doing well. At least, that's the premise of the article.

This is essentially assuming that competence translates directly into high monetary value.

That is not true either at the individual level, or at the level of companies. It is particularly untrue with tech behemoths who enjoy near-monopoly status, massive network effects, and/or huge mindshare.

At the very simplest level, it is not at all uncommon for good decisions made previously to allow an organization to "coast" for a significant amount of time after it starts making bad decisions. This is part of why bad CEOs are so frequently not held accountable for their incompetence: they take over, and for 3 years, everything's going great! It's only after the accumulated "soft" resources (customer goodwill, employee loyalty, lack of technical debt, etc) are burned away that the bad decisions actually start being reflected in the balance sheets.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#234

Post by diego_sandoval » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 9:56 PM UTC

jader201 wrote: post #28

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 companies started saying "We have taken the decision to fire you", people would complain about it being too harsh.

If they say impacted, people complain that it's euphemistic.

In the end, people just want to complain, and they're going to do it either way.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#235

Post by pjmorris » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 9:56 PM UTC

frankjr wrote: post #65

Should private for-profit companies employ people just because they can?

Employed people are much more likely to be customers.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#236

Post by floren » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 9:57 PM UTC

toss1 wrote: post #212

Fin_Code wrote: post #21

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…

Yup. And this is why smart companies avoid that game. I know one regional company who sells nationally/internationally which has done that for decades. Decades ago, the owner asked the local bank for a growth loan for some equipment and was turned down. The next week, he found out that one of his employees, who depends 100% on his company for income, went to the same bank for a motorcycle loan and was approved. the b…

They're not your friend, because they're in the business of making money.

Unless that business was the only employer in the area, the owner was basically just having a tantrum over the idea that different kinds of loans for different amounts of money might have different decision-making processes behind them. When my credit union decided to give me a car loan, they didn't look into the solvency of my employer, they just saw that I have good credit and a steady income and took a safe 5-digit gamble. It may have hurt the owner's feelings to essentially be told "we're pretty sure we can make our money back on this $1000 motorcycle loan which has a very easy-to-deal-with collateral, but we don't want to give you a $100000 for specialized equipment"

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#237

Post by eclipticplane » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 9:57 PM UTC

trey-jones wrote: post #53

yinser wrote: post #7

I can't decide if I'd prefer to hear a bunch of nonsense from an executive at the moment of being let go, or no explanation and just an email saying I'm part of a layoff.

The nonsense (thank you for your valuable contributions) makes me nauseous. I'm so sick of that shit. We as a society need to stop sugarcoating (denial, rationalization) and be more candid. Otherwise the words just become more and more meaningless and nobody can trust anything anybody says. So I know which I would choose, is what I'm trying to say. Like a band-aid.

You may find value in bullshit.js: https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/

> You’ve helped us bullshit so much that the only possible way for you to continue to help us bullshit is by no longer working here, effective immediately.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#238

Post by raydev » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 9:58 PM UTC

salad-tycoon wrote: post #128

Aurornis wrote: post #95

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...

An implicit assumption I see often is that all 8000 Twitter employees were software engineers too, but at it's peak engineering only made up 40-ish%.

Without question though, despite the appearance of velocity in shipping features post-layoffs, the features were either small changes or if they were big, already partially deployed as experiments to small groups of users.

Aside from Grok, Musk's Twitter hasn't shipped anything new except and expanded monetization system (again, partially implemented when he took over anyway).

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#239

Post by jjav » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 10:03 PM UTC

matusp wrote: post #10

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.

> can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch

They don't, they just stop doing some things and pile on extra unpaid work on those left.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#240

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 10:04 PM UTC

nebula8804 wrote: post #172

throwawayq3423 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I think X is worth maybe 1b, not more.

It depends. Musk has a great ability of burning his employees out to make up for mistakes he has made: (Early automation efforts at Tesla in 2017/2018 where they repeated the mistakes GM made in the 70s/80s, dumb mistakes in the early days of SpaceX when they tried to replicate what NASA had in the 50s/60s). In the end he succeeds powering through all the dumb decisions he makes and manages to pull ahead:(Tesla produ…

In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, one of his employees completely burnt out and quit. Then came back years later because he was bored and wanted to be part of something cutting edge again.