61–70 of 279 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no way to make a mistake here because there are essentially no consequences -- entities of this scale can rehire as easily as they fire. At a lower average compensation rate too, most likely. These companies are basically refinancing their labor force using cruelty and fear. It is working because they're all doing it, because we let them. System working as intended.
> At a lower average compensation rate too, most likely. highly doubt it. The labor force is shrinking. There's already a dearth of talented software devs. And then there will be huge upward pressure on wages from lower level jobs that now have to pay 20$ an hour to get workers.
This place isn't your home, these people aren't your friends and your executive leadership would run you over with their cars if you stood between them and revenue growth. Your relationship to work changes forever. You will never again believe that you are "critical" to the company or that the company is interested in you as a person. This has always always been the case. Grow up.
Agreed. This is a naive point of view. The company and worker agree on some terms and if the terms stop working for either one, that's the end of the line. It sucks when that comes to be but we have to realize that we as workers in any capacity are only useful when our input aligns with the goals of the company. There is leeway, but that diminishes when time gets tough. Blue collar workers, union or no union, always…
An alternative metaphor is this: imagine you got a dog, raised him, lost your sources of income and couldn’t afford to feed him. You kept him anyway out of pride or loyalty or whatever, and watched as he withered away without adequate resources to make him thrive. At the same time, others were looking for dogs and were fully willing to feed them and support them.
When companies don’t do thoughtful adjustments like layoffs, they end up instead in a cycle of slow withering, where the best resources leave and aren’t replaced, and the quality of the workforce slowly decays.
Layoffs may not be “fun” but they’re a necessary part of operating a successful company… and much better than the alternative.
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.
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 decrease yet didn't panic and do layoffs.)
Nobody likes getting laid off. But it's weird to see all of these think pieces implying that once someone is hired into a job, that job should exist forever. Things change. Company growth isn't monotonically increasing. Not all positions will exist forever. Joining a company was never a guarantee that you'd have a paycheck and work to do until you decided to leave. Also, pointing out that companies that did layoffs h…
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 opportunity to dump workers without much criticism.
This place isn't your home, these people aren't your friends and your executive leadership would run you over with their cars if you stood between them and revenue growth. Your relationship to work changes forever. You will never again believe that you are "critical" to the company or that the company is interested in you as a person. This has always always been the case. Grow up.
Nobody likes getting laid off. But it's weird to see all of these think pieces implying that once someone is hired into a job, that job should exist forever. Things change. Company growth isn't monotonically increasing. Not all positions will exist forever. Joining a company was never a guarantee that you'd have a paycheck and work to do until you decided to leave. Also, pointing out that companies that did layoffs h…
There's a big difference between "things change" and "mass top-down layoffs are an effective way to adapt to change"!
I worked at a company that tried to avoid mass layoffs at all costs. Whenever it became obvious that change was necessary, they'd do little cuts here and there, or they'd force people into roles they weren't familiar with (think front-end devs moved to cloud backend dev) to try to salvage people at all costs. They only cut people in small numbers here and there, and always spread out over long periods of time.
It was terrible. People were angry because they were hired for one job, but forced to do completely different work because the original needs had disappeared. People were constantly living in fear because there were micro-layoffs multiple times a month. They weren't called layoffs, though, so they weren't announced. You'd just open Slack to message someone and they'd be deactivated. You always wondered if you were next.
It's not pleasant to do mass layoffs, but if a company has to change it's much better to just rip the band-aid off and restructure all at once.
The higher educated white collar class is coming to terms with the fact they are just as disposable as the rest of us.
We are all workers, we are the working class whether we are educated or not. The capital owners want the working class to fight amongst themselves because it allows them to continue enriching themselves off the backs of the working class. Even if you own some stocks or have a 401k, if you depend on a salary to pay your bills then you are a worker