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GM offers buyouts to ‘majority’ of U.S. salaried workers

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51–54 of 54 posts

Re: GM offers buyouts to ‘majority’ of U.S. salaried workers

#51
post #25

I think if you were a valuable employee and didn't get a buyout offer but were hoping to leave this would be a major downer.

> but were hoping to leave this would be a major downer. it would suck. But it also means that you are needed, and thus, would be in a position to demand a pay rise (or leave, which you were already hoping to do right?).

"we can't automate or offshore you, and you're not a middle manager who we can squish into someone else"

Re: GM offers buyouts to ‘majority’ of U.S. salaried workers

#52

I don't think people realize what a shock wave is coming for the auto industry. 1. High interest rates make cars a lot more expensive, suppressing demand. 2. The inventories on dealership lots have been rebuilt over the last 6 months, hiding a drop in consumer demand. 3. EV's take much less labor to manufacture than combustion engines. Take a look at the regularity of an EV compared to a combustion vehicle. That regu…

> 10. HN is highly skeptical about autonomous driving, but if it does happen it will have a significant unpredictable change on the market. I'm deeply skeptical about autonomous railroads, let alone cars. And those are much simpler problems to fix -- that haven't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driver-less_train_syst...

Re: GM offers buyouts to ‘majority’ of U.S. salaried workers

#53
post #2

> General Motors will offer voluntary buyouts to a “majority” of its 58,000 U.S. white-collar employees, > The buyout offer comes after the Detroit automaker said last week it would terminate about 500 salaried positions globally. How does that work? The only sensible explanations I currently see is that either there's some new technology that replaces _hundreds_ of people or that... they had _hundreds_ of people tha…

It’s not necessary for someone to be “[not] doing anything useful”, but a much lower standard of “not doing enough to useful to be worth paying them what we pay them”. If you have hundreds of people creating $50K/yr of value and you’re paying them $80K/yr, you’re losing money even though they’re all doing something useful.

Good point. And it opens up the broader topic of measuring impact/value.

My personal experience from the startup world is that I fill in "auxiliary" but crucial roles which at the same time are not roles that can have an economic surplus (nah, not even break-even!) if we were to go "a dedicated person for each role".

Paraphrasing one of the up-thread commenters: _Yes, it's hard_.

Re: GM offers buyouts to ‘majority’ of U.S. salaried workers

#54
post #48
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, in the UK and EU you also can't discriminate based on age, but that means that you can't do anything based on length of service . For example, it is illegal to place a job advert requiring "x years of experience in z" because that requires you to be a certain age.

Perhaps not with a specific number of years, but you are certainly not obliged to consider every recent graduate who applies for your senior position

No, but you have to look for (and talk in terms of) actual level of capability rather than just "you've done it for a while".
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