621–630 of 1001 posts
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Claims to take full responsibility but since he has not resigned he has not taken any responsibility he has just said the words.
That's not what it means. As CEO, it's his responsibility to make/approve the decision to do the layoffs, or not. The buck stops with him. That's all that it means. It doesn't mean he's liable for any hardships.
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> People often have long term financial commitments they cannot back out of, and not knowing how you'll make rent, if you can afford your child's school fees, or even maybe having to cut back on how much you eat, _is stressful_ and emotionally taxing. I'm sure people making >200k/year and getting a 4 month severance package will be cutting back on how much they eat. What you say is true about low or even medium incom…
You'd be surprised what lifestyle creep does to people. Often people don't pay off their debts and instead scale their debts to their new income - it's stupid I know. I agree they should be in a better position because of their income, and I'd say more than an average amount are. But there are still a lot of people in that bracket who absolutely would have the floor pulled out from under them. People are often caught…
The uncomfortable truth is that pretty much any business can cut staff by 20% without impacting overall performance. Provided that you manage to weed out the tail end of the performance bell curve that is. Most of the time, reducing staff is a healthy move for the business and the impacted employees. The company will not only save cost, but strengthen its culture of high performance. And under-achieving employees are…
They don't know which 20% needs to be cut. That's why they wait until something unrelated to their business internals (market downturn, other companies are cutting) happens to try.
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The linked article is specific to executives and kind of confirms what most are complaining about here. > a 10-year study of over 2,600 leaders showed almost half (45%) suffered at least one major career blow-up — like getting fired, messing up a major deal, or blowing an acquisition. Despite that, 78% of these executives eventually made it to the CEO role. An executive can make a series of awful decisions and still…
Most employees can as well - IFF you move to different companies.
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how would you like the next CEO to handle it, for reference?
Stop saying "take responsibility" if they aren't actually. If you knock a girl up and you "take responsibility" it means you getting married. If you are in a car wreck and you "take responsibility" it means you are paying for repairs. If you commit a crime and "take responsibility" you are going to jail. So if a CEO is "taking responsibility" it should be something like that second case, dollars from their own pocket…
I'm sad to see so much venom in these comments. HN of old would have tried to delve into the details and find something to learn from this.
The uncomfortable truth is that pretty much any business can cut staff by 20% without impacting overall performance. Provided that you manage to weed out the tail end of the performance bell curve that is. Most of the time, reducing staff is a healthy move for the business and the impacted employees. The company will not only save cost, but strengthen its culture of high performance. And under-achieving employees are…
So, reduce people to numbers and accept the suicides?
I realize that's difficult in today's performative world, where an quick perusal of LinkedIn shows loads of people that are "passionate" about banking compliance or insurance claims or whatever. Many companies have also have fostered this false idea that companies are a "family". That is always false. The best companies are more like a team, and when things start to go south, sometimes people on that team are cut.
Ironically, I think the professions where people really are passionate and see it as a "dream job" (think professional sports teams, actors, musicians, artists, etc.) generally have a much healthier view of their employment in the first place because they realize how tenuous it is to begin with. Point being, if you're considering suicide if you lose your job, you should be in therapy long, long before it gets to that point.
One final note: before I get the pushback of "that's all nice to say until you have no income and are living on the streets!", let's get real for a moment. First, I have a ton of sympathy for people who are laid off - it sucks and can be very destabilizing. But lets also get real - people were laid off from Dropbox with a very generous severance package and they are in a highly paid industry to begin with. None of these people are going to starve, and nearly all of them will be able to eventually find employment (if perhaps not at the same exact high salary as Dropbox). Any mental health issues folks have after getting laid off is nearly always the result of tying one's self-worth to one's job, and that's the link that should be broken.
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They don't know which 20% needs to be cut. That's why they wait until something unrelated to their business internals (market downturn, other companies are cutting) happens to try.
I remember seeing somewhere an analysis that layoffs do not improve medium or long-term stock performance for companies performing layoffs. But if layoffs are coordinated sector-wide they can have a big impact on employee compensation in the sector by creating a reserve army of unemployed.
Per Google, Dropbox had a net profit margin of 17% last quarter. Are they really hurting that badly that they have to lay off 20% of the company?
Google rule of 40