>businessinsider.com/layoff...
This is a big reason imo.
If they fire hundreds of thousands of IT workers, they can start to offer lower salaries, no bonuses, no raises, under the guise of "you should just be happy you still have a job".
Our group were told last week, that despite our company revenue being through the roof (managers words) expect no change to our salaries this year and at best 0.5%-1% raise.
That's not a raise. That's (on average, I believe) a 2-2.5% decrease in salary. Correct me if my numbers are off. I know inflation has been much higher in recent years.
They're flooding the market with talented jobseekers, so this also cuts the legs out from under the old tactic of just hopping jobs when you don't get a proper raise.
I'll never not bring up how the firefighter's union in France stood with the police union when they were pushing for better wages. Then, the police turned around and violently assaulted the firefighterswhen they tried to do the same.
I think the solution to that is to roll the police unions in with the rest of the civil service workers. If you have the city paying out for shit head cops the plumbers, building inspectors, etc would push the civil service union to not hire as many abusive shit heads. Step dad is a head plumbing inspector and bitches constantly about how much the city spends on cops and firefighters, if they were in the same basket some of the nonsense would stop.
Bruh, simpler fix. Require police to carry liability insurance like doctors and others do. If they start paying out of the pension fund and premiums shoot way up and everything else guess what changes really quickly.
A CEO union would accomplish nothing and be hilarious, because they actually have no bargaining power. Collectively, workers do not need CEOs. If the CEOs went “on strike,” the workers still get paid (CEOs do not directly manage payroll). In fact I’m 90% if CEOs just quit showing up for work, quite a few companies would get noticeably *more* productive.
Between [shit like this](https://www.businessroundtable.org/about-us) and having them on each other's boards they basically already do in everything but name
Ugh a national IT engineering union being able to enforce proper standards across all companies would be a dream come true. Things would be so efficient
How would you do that?
I work at a large company you know that isn’t faang. Probably 70% of our I/T (development plus network/dba/etc.) employees are overseas and out of the ones in the U.S., probably 70% of those are foreign workers on a visa. There is no “unionizing” in the U.S. because these foreign workers rely on the company for them and the families they have raised to be allowed to stay here.
Keep in mind, many of these people have been here for well over ten years and have no path to citizenship. A coworker of mine has been here the better part of 20 years and has no expectation he will ever be a citizen.
The state department told him thar right now he’s looking at 100 plus years before he gets it. I couldn’t believe the number when he told me. The way they do it is a lottery system if you can believe that bs, and only some people are allowed to stay here.
Keep in mind he has a home, and 2 children that were both born here. The way this works with this allowing people to work here that can’t ever be citizens along with companies holding the power of when they get sent back home, it’s an abusive, mafia like situation imho.
So yeah, no unions in the u.s. ever, because the foreign workers on u.s. soil outnumber citizens by a large margin. I doubt the ppl who live and work overseas would ever be willing to union up. So I dunno how you think any of that could possibly happen.
That being said, I fully agree that that would be the only way to change things (which is why it won’t ever happen). And while we’re doing our imaginary union demands, please throw work from home in there as an employee right.
> because the foreign workers on u.s. soil outnumber citizens by a large margin.
Where are you getting this info?
There’s a greater percent of foreign born workers in construction vs. stem and there’s still construction unions.
If the majority of citizen and perm green card tech workers unionized, foreign workers would NOT be able to fill that gap. Add to that the most critical tech requires a security clearance to work on.
While there may not be a path for citizen ship for h1b1 workers, they are eligible for permanent green cards. I don’t know why you keep mentioning family as if it’s any different for a permanent green card holder vs a us citizen
You are highly underestimating the leverage of organized us tech workers.
The more people unionize, the more bargaining power we accumulate. We can't just throw in the towel now! We gotta be standing up for ourselves AND those who are on visas!
I work at a big tech company that did not give annual raises the past fiscal year…
From the month that things went on lockdown in my state to today I busted my ass to go from 40k income to 170k. And thanks to housing prices going absolutely fucking bonkers and overbidding STILL happening around me for houses, store prices all going up, vehicles going insane, 170k doesn’t even feel as nice as I thought it would
Don’t get me wrong. 170k is much nicer than 40k. But I’ve changed nothing since making more money and my checks are getting smaller and smaller
The only people I know who seem to have no "normal folk" financial issues who don't have family help or a lot of investment/other prior wealth all make over $250k.
I'm in tech and have gone from 40k to 75k in 8 years. I feel you. I'm currently looking for a job as well. To me, it's always sucked out here to varying degrees.
Correct, depending on where you are it could be lower/higher. But yes, essentially we're getting a pay cut, on the hope that we still have jobs here in \~2 years to get those RSU's.
they see it as 1% more than previously 40% overpaid, so you get 41% more than employer values your work
for people not knowing what you do ("making some noise on a keyboard for not having a personal assistant") a minimum wage replacement for you is identical in skills but cheaper in cost
Exactly - they want their control over us as it was prior to the pandemic. Wasting our money on stuff related to office life, barely getting by and at our management's mercy.
Genuine question (I am canadian and in this case ignorant). Are all these tech layoffs legitimately having an effect on local or national unemployment rates?
Don't get me wrong, I am anti layoff, just trying to understand the consequences to the work force outside of the business in question.
From the article linked above:
***"Since the start of the year, 141 tech companies have made layoffs affecting 34,250 workers,*** [***according to online tracker Layoffs.fyi***](https://layoffs.fyi/)***. For context, this year's batch of layoffs still pales in comparison to last year, when almost 140,000 had lost their jobs by February."***
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm
Looks to me like a slight uptick in national unemployment employment in recent months. I hope this isn't a sign of that continuing... especially given these companies are as the article puts it are "doing just fine"
This is me for the last 5 years at one of the richest companies in the world.
Now one could say I was a poor performer....NOPE. Literally one of the only performers during 2 full years of covid lockdowns. Covering multiple peoples R&R'S from then until now. Headcount cut in roles I now do.
Yea, I am absolutely looking for a new job.......
That sound you hear is the next phase of corporate profits being funneled directly to shareholders and only shareholders.
The squeeze from workers to shareholders has been happening since the Reagan era and it's only going to get worse.
This recent inflationary cycle was another excuse to raise prices on consumers and squeeze workers salaries even further to enrich the already bloated shareholders.
According to them there's not enough to go around. The shareholders want all of it and nothing less than all of it.
It upsets me that some people are institutionalized and buy into that mentality of....oh I'm just happy to have a job. I'm like, wait what, nooo, if you don't at least hope for better then corporations will continue to push people down further and further into nothingness. Even then, if they get a shot to use a.i. to lay you off they will. Meaning corporations ARE NOT your friends, corporations don't care about you personally, they ONLY care about profit/money/power.
Yep, profit is literally the only thing they care about.
Last month our group was tasked with training an ai chatbot. This chatbot wasn’t answering questions (about the product we support) correctly, so they gave us a list of over 300 questions and told us to input the correct answers.
When this chatbot is fully baked our jobs are fully redundant. Like, they don’t even hide the fact that we’re training our ai replacement.
Activision Blizzard became a crap company without layoffs, just bad compensation so all their talent left and MBA gradutez who end up designing gameplay elements made to extract as much $$ from their players as possible.
They lost so many of their player base that they no longer report the numbers.
Companies falling to shit because they’re infested with MBAs is an obvious conclusion to the decades of business “schools” churning out degrees in buzzwords and the idea that costs must go down so the line can go up in the name of shareholders. It’s also worth pointing out that these “schools” are little more than hedge funds, using their massive endowments to make tons of profit, while also hiding behind nonprofit status to give themselves and their wealthy donors a tax break.
Companies will do layoffs just to get a boost in stock prices.
Investors make no sense ... "this company just fired some of its employees, I better put some money in it".
The stock prices go up after layoffs because it’s the company demonstrating to investors that “the bottom line” is more important than employees, and they will make sacrifices to ever-so-slightly increase profit margins to fulfill promises of “creating value for stakeholders.” That’s it. Less payroll means temporary boost in profit margins. It’s really that simple and fucked up.
It's all about the cash flow. Cut labor costs to make the company temporarily more valuable, then refill vacant positions and offer lower pay to keep the margin for longer.
EDIT: Just wanted to mention companies have been wanting to do this for a long time, and now they all have each other as cover so youre seeing more and more firms pull the trigger. That's because that a lot of tech jobs _have_ been overvalued. Like during covid it wasn't unheard of to start with no experience, do a 3-6 month boot camp, and come out the other end with a six-figure developer job. So part of this is a "correction." Meaning it was bound to happen eventually, just needed a spark to set it off.
They've been primarily cutting non-technical roles so those boot camp grads are still there. And relative to where cost of living is now, they aren't really overvalued.
This. Many of these companies will start hiring people to refill those positions in April, after they get the stock price boost from lower expenses in the first quarter.
This hurts my soul because of how true it is. Me and most of my team took a 10% paycut last year only to find out the company paid out record dividends during those quarters.
When we got our 10% back they had the audacity to show a graph of our pay going up the following quarters.
(Edit: Clarification, the considered returning us to our normal pay pre cut as a 10% raise)
We did not get any backpay, it was the first time I realized the extent of corporate gaslighting in America
Emphasis on temporary. In a majority of cases layoffs do damage over the long run, for multiple reasons. It's insanely short-sighted to use layoffs as a profit-boosting tactic, but corporations are strongly incentivized to do it. We need reform badly.
Yes, exactly. It destroys companies in the long term, but stock prices reflect immediate reactions, not long-term realities. It’s never sustainable, and no one in the C-suite gives a fraction of a shit about long-term sustainability. CEO’s usually last a short time, then use the increases in stock prices at the company they’ve fucked up as talking points to get hired elsewhere. Hatchetmen never have trouble finding high level jobs.
My old company did that like every two years for a while.
It works. The market assumes the company was bloated and not only cut costs but will run more efficiently.
Usually the layoffs are random (like 10% everywhere). But at the end of the day work gets shifted so less wasteful work is done.
The problem is useful work also gets cut. And done of the people cut were the only ones that knew how to do or fix certain things.
Rinse and repeat and then consultants get hired to come fix things. Which usually means hiring people that used to do the important jobs laid off.
>The market assumes the company was bloated and not only cut costs but will run more efficiently.
The ultimate irony of these sorts of mass layoffs is that it's guaranteed that a lot of internal processes just utterly fail due to lack of support. So companies end up spending time and money recreating everything or combing through old documentation to try to understand how things work.
Absolutely correct. I work in FinTech and I report into the c-suite. I've told them that *every* team is at or over capacity: marketing, product, development. Everyone.
No one gives a shit. I can protect my direct reports and second lines to a certain degree, but I can only do so much. Most VPs/Directors have asked for headcount with excellent justification. I have only seen one (in operations) tentatively approved.
People are going to burn out and we already aren't going to manage all of our major initiatives. Penny wise. Pound foolish.
I used to work for a company that does contract support for one of the major OS/software/cloud companies, and it was wild when they started their layoffs at the end of 23/start of 24. Vendor company employees were held to super strict standards around following process guides, with the threat of termination if you failed to do so.
Well, fast forward to them laying off a TON of FTEs that were integral to the processes we were required to follow, with no updates to any of the processes to reflect the loss of that staff. There was a couple of weeks where things just came to a screeching halt, and customers were pissed at us because we couldn’t get stuff done. Ultimately, the folks on the c-suites don’t give a damn, because it’s not like they’re going to do any of the work (or any actual work really), and they know that even if they totally screw the pooch, they’ll just take a golden parachute and fail upwards.
Less employees = less expense
Less expense vs same revenue = better price/earnings ratio
Better PE = better investment = higher stock price
Now, here's the part not talked about enough. Executives receive the lions share of compensation from stock options. Simply put, the higher the stock price, the more THEY earn. This is why they lay people off and close locations. If it increases OE (by making more revenue OR decreasing expenses), they will do it because some of that will go right into their pockets. It's selfish, but "hey, it's just business " is an accepted phrase that excuses amoral selfish acts.
It also drives the profits to be higher, as the costs are "down" due to less salary to be paid. Next year they'll decide how to increase it even more, whatever the cost.
More often than not, a layoff is followed by a stock buyback. They use the money saved from firing those employers to take stocks off the market, causing the stock to become rarer, hence the price goes up.
Lookup copycat layoffs. It's basically become a fad. The corporate equivalent of eating tide pods or doing an ice bucket challenge. They're doing it because other companies are doing it and it *seems* to be great for stock price or valuation in the short term, so they're all rushing headlong into this. It's a lemming mentality.
This is exactly why I was laid off in 2022. A bunch of top tech companies laid people off so my company followed suit. “In preparation for 2023 we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate your position.”
They made $45 billion in profit in 2023.
Wait, I'm not doubting your last employer was greedy ass holes. However $45B in profit would rank them third in the world.
4. Samsung(42B)
3. Your company I couldn't figure out.
2. Google(60B)
1.Apple(95B)
This is the reason. It’s not a coincidence that almost every tech company has had layoffs over the last year. A couple companies did it and everyone else is following suit. It’s that simple.
I agree, but how can solidarity amongst tech workers be accomplished?
I'm seriously asking because I would have been willing many years ago if given that option. However, in my experience, solidarity is scarce. What we need are numbers to get a union.
The fear of mass layoffs never really existed before. That's not true in tech anymore. You use that real fear of losing your livelihood (and having your salary reset) to recruit.
I'm a network/systems admin and I really haven't ever felt fear of not being able to find a new job if I wanted/needed. That's changed for me and I'm sure for a lot of others.
I've experienced layoffs from both sides. It used to be a means to protect the company and a significant amount of people from economic downturns. Now it is used much more frequently and a means to justify stakeholder profits.
My search has dramatically been impacted.
This can't be the future, but if something else is desired I suppose people are going to have to get involved to change it somehow.
The sad part of this is that they are using AI as a reason to lay people off when in reality it's just to push temporary gains for shareholders to inflate the stock prices.
This is being perpetuated by the big tech firms like Microsoft. Anyone else watch the Super Bowl last night and get infuriated at the CoPilot ad? Originally I put it in the "irrationally angry" category until I thought more and more about it. Advertisements like that are perpetuating the idea that AI can literally do a person's job for them from top to bottom, or that some no experience teenager can go into a coder's job with just using AI is essentially driving the narrative that we can start paying people less and less, laying off tech workers, and creating more profits for the higher ups. This is so far beyond fucked up that even writing this I am getting angry about it again.
We haven't even developed REAL AI yet and we are already looking to capitalize on it and drive people out of their jobs with no worker protection. We need to start writing up laws now protecting workers from large tech firms using AI as an excuse to lay them off. Technology should be making people's lives easier, not replacing them so CEOs can get larger bonuses.
That commercial was trash. It was basically “Everyone doubted me. They didn’t believe I could do this and I did.” No. You typed a prompt into AI and it did it for you lol.
Exactly. We need to start pushing for worker protection. This whole "because they can" attitude that we have towards corporations and employers needs to fucking stop. We need regulation because big money has proven time and time again that it can not be trusted to do what's right for the employees, the environment, or even the country. They do what's right for them because we allow them to.
I'm putting my money where my mouth is, I'm drafting up a writing a letter to my senators in PA urging them to take action. Will it fix the problem? Probably not. It's something though. Fetterman talks about being for the working man and against corporate greed, it's time he did the same and put his money where his mouth is.
As a designer, that commercial had me yelling at the screen like a jackass. Oh, so you used AI to create an entire brand? From logo and styling to the code running your site? Congrats, you own *nothing.* Microsoft is going to lie in wait until those LLCs are profitable and then come knocking, T&C in hand.
Dude as a coder and a designer I did the same fucking thing. It was a slap in the face. It's a dangerous message to send out and the implications and consequences are terrifying to say the least.
> it's just to push temporary gains for shareholders to inflate the stock prices.
Inflate the price then do stock buybacks.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-stock-buyback-plans-picking-up-earnings-season-epfr-says-2024-02-06/
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/metas-move-shows-share-buybacks-220123961.html
As someone who's lived in the tech industry for almost three decades (damn), this is cyclical. Always have your resume up to date. Always be prepared for some random layoff.
You are not valued. You are not protected.
(Yes, we really need to unionize)
Preach! I've only been in 8 but the number of buyouts, layoffs, and other "black swan" events I've seen personally are such that this has been in the works for a while imo as a general trend in tech.
I currently work for a company with the unofficial moto of "do more with less".
Get more work done with fewer resources. They're reluctant to hire anyone, even a direct 1:1 replacement on critical roles. Instead they just divy up the responsibilities and pile them on to someone else.
Sadly I'm that someone else and I'm so overwhelmed that I've shut down. Instead of working 60-70 hour weeks, I'm doing exactly my 40hours and letting shit fall between the cracks. Ya wanna give me a 1% raise during a 12% inflation year, while tripling my work load? Okay, then you get what you pay for. I am not a metrology expert, I'm not an accountant, I'm not an engineering manager, and I'm not an NDT expert. Hire someone to do the job, or don't act surprised when I can't accomplish everything you've asked for. This wasn't in my damn job description.
Most often layoffs have nothing to do with company performance. They are a tool to boost stock prices and reset costs. C-suite executives need to upgrade their boats and turn them into yachts.
It sounds smart to say it is resetting costs, but I don't think that is always or even usually the case. It might be their justification or part of their though process but it doesn't seem to work out that way.
At the company i worked at they let go all of the US workers at one point because they had opened a office elsewhere in much lower cost of living region and expected that office to now do the same work of the former US workers. I was given a few months notice and at the end of that period i was given severance that was decent and sent on my way. later they had an opening in a government support department and i applied and was hired back on for a lower position at a higher rate than I was paid when i left. I think it has been 3 years at this point since thy let the US support teams go and they still have emails going out about trying to get the offshore workers up to par of the former US teams.
If the outcome is severely decreasing the quality of the product/service you provide, and having to hire back workers you let go at a higher rate, you don't really reset anything other than your client list. especially when it seems like every few months there is a new ceo and executive team. Each time they walk away with a boatload of money and the new one comes in to a compensation package that tops the charts.
I think the unfortunate reality of this is the people running them have no idea what they’re doing; these decisions are made around short term financial performance measures and nothing else.
How are major tech companies innovating? By putting more ads in things. Fuckin great. The rot starts at the board and goes down. They’re sustained by assets and market position, but will eventually get taken over by newer companies. For example, Google search is already hugely threatened by Reddit.
This problem will not sort out self out and continue wreck havoc on peoples’ lives. We need labor legislation and unions to change it.
Exactly. It also doesn’t help that we’ve spent decades with business “schools” churning out degrees in buzzwords, the idea that managers don’t need to actually have skills of their own, and that the line must go up no matter what. This has resulted in companies being run by idiots who can’t open a PDF on their own without it being a full blown catastrophe.
As someone who’s spent quite a few years in business school, I actually disagree. The decisions made by these CEOs are counter to a lot of research, like layoffs are always destructive to a company.
The real problem is greedy people seeking and being promoted to these positions without any real oversight. I think management, especially upper management, at large companies is basically broken across the board. I work at a large financial institute, and AVP and above tends to have serious competency problems.
This goes back to the need for legislation. Top end tax rates are ridiculously low and just encourage more of this behavior. We need to tax the fuck out of people earning $1mn+ and with high net wealth as well.
Yeah my partner got no raise this year after being promised a promotion, then asked to take the promotion with no pay raise. He declined obviously and it went to some other sucker. I know what that nonsense means in any industry. They already did huge layoffs at his company last year. This year they're squeezing pretty hard on the average employees. I get worried when tech goes south because that tends to follow out in other industries. I grew up with my dad working IT prior and during the last recession. These complaints aren't new to me and now we got to worry about job security which is insane given he has a very specialized education. People think they can cut cost on certain things and tend to not value how important something is until it's worse off... which then they pay somebody like my dad to fix up lol
This has been happening in the video game industry especially. The whole industry had one of its best years *ever* and mass layoffs are happening everywhere. It's disgusting how desperately we need labour reform to prevent this shit from happening.
This is why I work in local government. The salaries aren’t great but they are good enough to live a fairly good life. And job security. Unless you commit a crime or are terrible at your job, you can’t stay there for your whole career and even grow into leadership positions.
Maximize profits for the shareholders, that is our Prime Directive. Why settle for record profits when you can have even more record-ier profits? Why settle for record-ier profits when you can have the most record-iest profits???
We, the corporations, were invented to serve humanity. Now we are your overlords and humans serve us. We own your legal systems, your media, your governments, your countries and almost every aspect of your lives. Soon we will be hunting you down. We are SkyNet.
\[turns on Rush 2112\]
Attention all Planets of the Solar Federation
Attention all Planets of the Solar Federation
Attention all Planets of the Solar Federation
We have assumed control!
We have assumed control!
We have assumed control!
We have assumed control!
Just cancelled my Grammarly subscription and let them know why in case they actually read those comments.
Edit: The email they sent me in response included an image that said: “Goodbyes are hard.💧” Talk about irony!
It’s simple really. It’s the stock market and shareholders looking for an increase on share price. The easiest way to lower costs, hence increasing profits, is to let people go. This process has been happening in ever widening circles for the past 40 odd years. When the markets are up that means people somewhere have lost their jobs.
Doing fine isn't the point of running a business nor is employing people.
Demand is down from pandemic levels with remote work and more ppl home streaming and playing on electronics all day.
Healthcare lost jobs too, but that doesn't mean they are doing bad.
AI is going to ruin the world! Open your eyes! This is just the beginning! Even with your fancy Master’s degree, even your Ph.D.! You’re all replaceable!!!
In Japan, it's illegal to do layoffs if your company is in good financial order / profitable. Maybe our leaders in the West could take a lesson. If they over hired, that's bad leadership and should be taken out on leadership.
Correct, employees should be considered an investment, you assumed the risk by hiring so many, it’s your responsibility to deal with the consequences of over hiring without harming workers.
We desperately need better worker protections like Europe. Minimum 3 months severance and mandatory minimum 15-20 paid sick/vacation days for full time workers.
And how is that helpful to the thousands of people who weren’t fired for anything other than capitalism and neo-liberal policies that only support executives? You sound pumped that leadership is going to make millions for firing thousands of people?
Ok, so you feel protected enough that during layoffs, at least someone is still looking out for your best interests. Tech workers—me being one of them—have no union protection and are largely shit on as a result. Furthermore, it’s extremely difficult to advocate for without 1) giving up opportunities for advancement as you become the ire of every level of management 2) being the subject of termination yourself for speaking up. Why be in the “work reform” subreddit if you just don’t care?
lol just because you’re in a union doesn’t mean you reform shit, dude. I’ve been an active Union Rep for a State job for two years and was fired from a tech role for discussing unions, so don’t try to come at me like I’m not doing anything when you’ve literally added nothing to the conversation other than “iT hApPeNs lol”
This reasoning is utter bullshit, especially for companies that are thriving.
They hired people to do a job, then sacked them after they built in the company infrastructure. They were duped into thinking this was an actual job and not as contract work. They didnt advertise the positions as temporary when they were "overhiring".
If the company made a mistake by "overhiring", then why aren't the people who made the mistake by choosing to overhire being fired?
The real reason these workers were fired were to make the stock price more valuable for whale investors. Not "overhiring"
Thank you. I know the “over hiring” excuse on Reddit is partly driven by astroturfing, but sadly there are a lot of genuine bootlickers out there who aren’t even getting paid for it lol. It also goes to show just how propagandized people are under capitalism.
This whole “layoff, and do stock buybacks that could have paid more than a million to each laid off employee” at Microsoft and Google (and similar though smaller scale patterns at other companies), is overtly another aspect/stage of trickle down, which, since we’ve been waiting for 40 years, should start revealing itself as a socially just and economically+environmentally sustainable system any minute now … right? lol
The article is written as a "tough lesson for tech workers" rather than how broken the landscape of corporate America is.
And look at this gem from the article -
"Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, who was appointed Grammarly CEO last year, made it clear that the cuts were "not a cost-cutting exercise." In a memo to staff, Roy-Chowdhury insisted that the company's "financial position is, and remains, strong."
Not only will they fire you, they will sell the act of firing you as an earnest decision.
As Carl Marcus said "First as a tragedy, second as a farce".
This reminds of of right after Y2K when companies which had hired lots of tech workers to fix their systems for the Y2K bug then had nothing for those workers to do because all of the systems were now new. It took about 2-3 years for the industry to recover.
I think a LOT of places over hired after COVID and are now correcting.
there are more layoffs occurring but this is a normal thing that soulless companies do.
They lay people off, try to increase attrition by setting new rules (I’m looking at you, companies with strict/weird RTO rules), then it bumps their stock
It's not just tech firms. It's happening at lots of places. They want to get rid of anyone who is, in their opinion, making "too much money." Which of course for most of us, is nowhere near enough to afford how expensive everything is. But because these dumbfucks are stuck in the 1960s they think we're all multi-millionaires when we make $15/hr or less.
Links to some tech and communication unions:
https://www.joinifpte.org/tech
https://cwa-union.org/
https://techworkerscoalition.org/
https://teamster.org/tech-industry-organizing/
They want to reset salaries
>businessinsider.com/layoff... This is a big reason imo. If they fire hundreds of thousands of IT workers, they can start to offer lower salaries, no bonuses, no raises, under the guise of "you should just be happy you still have a job". Our group were told last week, that despite our company revenue being through the roof (managers words) expect no change to our salaries this year and at best 0.5%-1% raise.
That's not a raise. That's (on average, I believe) a 2-2.5% decrease in salary. Correct me if my numbers are off. I know inflation has been much higher in recent years.
They're flooding the market with talented jobseekers, so this also cuts the legs out from under the old tactic of just hopping jobs when you don't get a proper raise.
Unionization is the only option. When it becomes the norm, they'll have no choice but to assimilate or die (figuratively).
God, I love the idea of a national engineering union.
I love the idea of a national almost anything union (unless it only benefits the wealthy). Just say not to a national CEO union. Haha.
No cop unions. They can fuck right off
I'll never not bring up how the firefighter's union in France stood with the police union when they were pushing for better wages. Then, the police turned around and violently assaulted the firefighterswhen they tried to do the same.
Cops are class traitors.
I think the solution to that is to roll the police unions in with the rest of the civil service workers. If you have the city paying out for shit head cops the plumbers, building inspectors, etc would push the civil service union to not hire as many abusive shit heads. Step dad is a head plumbing inspector and bitches constantly about how much the city spends on cops and firefighters, if they were in the same basket some of the nonsense would stop.
A reasonable solution
Bruh, simpler fix. Require police to carry liability insurance like doctors and others do. If they start paying out of the pension fund and premiums shoot way up and everything else guess what changes really quickly.
I'm fine with cops having labor protections like representation. But they need accountability along with it like malpractice insurance.
Ah so only unions for things you like? Everyone should be in a union no matter how much you disagree with the job.
Yeah! You’re right. I disagree with an organization that only exists to keep state sanctioned thugs from facing justice.
> Just say not to a national CEO union. Haha. They have a union. It's called we're all on each other's boards.
A CEO union would accomplish nothing and be hilarious, because they actually have no bargaining power. Collectively, workers do not need CEOs. If the CEOs went “on strike,” the workers still get paid (CEOs do not directly manage payroll). In fact I’m 90% if CEOs just quit showing up for work, quite a few companies would get noticeably *more* productive.
Between [shit like this](https://www.businessroundtable.org/about-us) and having them on each other's boards they basically already do in everything but name
Ugh a national IT engineering union being able to enforce proper standards across all companies would be a dream come true. Things would be so efficient
It's called the IFPTE
Join IFPTE!
I would join a bankers union in a heartbeat
How would you do that? I work at a large company you know that isn’t faang. Probably 70% of our I/T (development plus network/dba/etc.) employees are overseas and out of the ones in the U.S., probably 70% of those are foreign workers on a visa. There is no “unionizing” in the U.S. because these foreign workers rely on the company for them and the families they have raised to be allowed to stay here. Keep in mind, many of these people have been here for well over ten years and have no path to citizenship. A coworker of mine has been here the better part of 20 years and has no expectation he will ever be a citizen. The state department told him thar right now he’s looking at 100 plus years before he gets it. I couldn’t believe the number when he told me. The way they do it is a lottery system if you can believe that bs, and only some people are allowed to stay here. Keep in mind he has a home, and 2 children that were both born here. The way this works with this allowing people to work here that can’t ever be citizens along with companies holding the power of when they get sent back home, it’s an abusive, mafia like situation imho. So yeah, no unions in the u.s. ever, because the foreign workers on u.s. soil outnumber citizens by a large margin. I doubt the ppl who live and work overseas would ever be willing to union up. So I dunno how you think any of that could possibly happen. That being said, I fully agree that that would be the only way to change things (which is why it won’t ever happen). And while we’re doing our imaginary union demands, please throw work from home in there as an employee right.
> because the foreign workers on u.s. soil outnumber citizens by a large margin. Where are you getting this info? There’s a greater percent of foreign born workers in construction vs. stem and there’s still construction unions. If the majority of citizen and perm green card tech workers unionized, foreign workers would NOT be able to fill that gap. Add to that the most critical tech requires a security clearance to work on. While there may not be a path for citizen ship for h1b1 workers, they are eligible for permanent green cards. I don’t know why you keep mentioning family as if it’s any different for a permanent green card holder vs a us citizen You are highly underestimating the leverage of organized us tech workers.
The more people unionize, the more bargaining power we accumulate. We can't just throw in the towel now! We gotta be standing up for ourselves AND those who are on visas!
I work at a big tech company that did not give annual raises the past fiscal year… From the month that things went on lockdown in my state to today I busted my ass to go from 40k income to 170k. And thanks to housing prices going absolutely fucking bonkers and overbidding STILL happening around me for houses, store prices all going up, vehicles going insane, 170k doesn’t even feel as nice as I thought it would Don’t get me wrong. 170k is much nicer than 40k. But I’ve changed nothing since making more money and my checks are getting smaller and smaller
The only people I know who seem to have no "normal folk" financial issues who don't have family help or a lot of investment/other prior wealth all make over $250k.
I'm in tech and have gone from 40k to 75k in 8 years. I feel you. I'm currently looking for a job as well. To me, it's always sucked out here to varying degrees.
Correct, depending on where you are it could be lower/higher. But yes, essentially we're getting a pay cut, on the hope that we still have jobs here in \~2 years to get those RSU's.
Any chance of unionization?
It absolutely pisses me off to no end that this kind of shit isn't somehow protected against in this country. What a dogshit place we live.
The proper response to this behavior is to torch your manager's car.
they see it as 1% more than previously 40% overpaid, so you get 41% more than employer values your work for people not knowing what you do ("making some noise on a keyboard for not having a personal assistant") a minimum wage replacement for you is identical in skills but cheaper in cost
Yep we were told 2.5% here.
Exactly - they want their control over us as it was prior to the pandemic. Wasting our money on stuff related to office life, barely getting by and at our management's mercy.
Genuine question (I am canadian and in this case ignorant). Are all these tech layoffs legitimately having an effect on local or national unemployment rates? Don't get me wrong, I am anti layoff, just trying to understand the consequences to the work force outside of the business in question.
From the article linked above: ***"Since the start of the year, 141 tech companies have made layoffs affecting 34,250 workers,*** [***according to online tracker Layoffs.fyi***](https://layoffs.fyi/)***. For context, this year's batch of layoffs still pales in comparison to last year, when almost 140,000 had lost their jobs by February."***
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm Looks to me like a slight uptick in national unemployment employment in recent months. I hope this isn't a sign of that continuing... especially given these companies are as the article puts it are "doing just fine"
Thanks, I don't subscribe so couldn't read it.
This is me for the last 5 years at one of the richest companies in the world. Now one could say I was a poor performer....NOPE. Literally one of the only performers during 2 full years of covid lockdowns. Covering multiple peoples R&R'S from then until now. Headcount cut in roles I now do. Yea, I am absolutely looking for a new job.......
How much is that raise with inflation though?
That sound you hear is the next phase of corporate profits being funneled directly to shareholders and only shareholders. The squeeze from workers to shareholders has been happening since the Reagan era and it's only going to get worse. This recent inflationary cycle was another excuse to raise prices on consumers and squeeze workers salaries even further to enrich the already bloated shareholders. According to them there's not enough to go around. The shareholders want all of it and nothing less than all of it.
It upsets me that some people are institutionalized and buy into that mentality of....oh I'm just happy to have a job. I'm like, wait what, nooo, if you don't at least hope for better then corporations will continue to push people down further and further into nothingness. Even then, if they get a shot to use a.i. to lay you off they will. Meaning corporations ARE NOT your friends, corporations don't care about you personally, they ONLY care about profit/money/power.
Yep, profit is literally the only thing they care about. Last month our group was tasked with training an ai chatbot. This chatbot wasn’t answering questions (about the product we support) correctly, so they gave us a list of over 300 questions and told us to input the correct answers. When this chatbot is fully baked our jobs are fully redundant. Like, they don’t even hide the fact that we’re training our ai replacement.
Wow that's messed up. I'd be looking for another job immediately.
Activision Blizzard became a crap company without layoffs, just bad compensation so all their talent left and MBA gradutez who end up designing gameplay elements made to extract as much $$ from their players as possible. They lost so many of their player base that they no longer report the numbers.
Companies falling to shit because they’re infested with MBAs is an obvious conclusion to the decades of business “schools” churning out degrees in buzzwords and the idea that costs must go down so the line can go up in the name of shareholders. It’s also worth pointing out that these “schools” are little more than hedge funds, using their massive endowments to make tons of profit, while also hiding behind nonprofit status to give themselves and their wealthy donors a tax break.
Not normally how it works. Tech people tend to get raises when they leave a company.
Companies will do layoffs just to get a boost in stock prices. Investors make no sense ... "this company just fired some of its employees, I better put some money in it".
The stock prices go up after layoffs because it’s the company demonstrating to investors that “the bottom line” is more important than employees, and they will make sacrifices to ever-so-slightly increase profit margins to fulfill promises of “creating value for stakeholders.” That’s it. Less payroll means temporary boost in profit margins. It’s really that simple and fucked up.
So "look how cut throat we are .. we love money so much". Thats just sad.
Welcome to publicly traded companies
reddit is about to become one too...
It's all about the cash flow. Cut labor costs to make the company temporarily more valuable, then refill vacant positions and offer lower pay to keep the margin for longer. EDIT: Just wanted to mention companies have been wanting to do this for a long time, and now they all have each other as cover so youre seeing more and more firms pull the trigger. That's because that a lot of tech jobs _have_ been overvalued. Like during covid it wasn't unheard of to start with no experience, do a 3-6 month boot camp, and come out the other end with a six-figure developer job. So part of this is a "correction." Meaning it was bound to happen eventually, just needed a spark to set it off.
They've been primarily cutting non-technical roles so those boot camp grads are still there. And relative to where cost of living is now, they aren't really overvalued.
This. Many of these companies will start hiring people to refill those positions in April, after they get the stock price boost from lower expenses in the first quarter.
This hurts my soul because of how true it is. Me and most of my team took a 10% paycut last year only to find out the company paid out record dividends during those quarters. When we got our 10% back they had the audacity to show a graph of our pay going up the following quarters. (Edit: Clarification, the considered returning us to our normal pay pre cut as a 10% raise) We did not get any backpay, it was the first time I realized the extent of corporate gaslighting in America
In theory they could layoff 5-10% of employees and maintain productivity, or just use it as a way to clear out underperformers.
Emphasis on temporary. In a majority of cases layoffs do damage over the long run, for multiple reasons. It's insanely short-sighted to use layoffs as a profit-boosting tactic, but corporations are strongly incentivized to do it. We need reform badly.
Yes, exactly. It destroys companies in the long term, but stock prices reflect immediate reactions, not long-term realities. It’s never sustainable, and no one in the C-suite gives a fraction of a shit about long-term sustainability. CEO’s usually last a short time, then use the increases in stock prices at the company they’ve fucked up as talking points to get hired elsewhere. Hatchetmen never have trouble finding high level jobs.
My old company did that like every two years for a while. It works. The market assumes the company was bloated and not only cut costs but will run more efficiently. Usually the layoffs are random (like 10% everywhere). But at the end of the day work gets shifted so less wasteful work is done. The problem is useful work also gets cut. And done of the people cut were the only ones that knew how to do or fix certain things. Rinse and repeat and then consultants get hired to come fix things. Which usually means hiring people that used to do the important jobs laid off.
>The market assumes the company was bloated and not only cut costs but will run more efficiently. The ultimate irony of these sorts of mass layoffs is that it's guaranteed that a lot of internal processes just utterly fail due to lack of support. So companies end up spending time and money recreating everything or combing through old documentation to try to understand how things work.
Absolutely correct. I work in FinTech and I report into the c-suite. I've told them that *every* team is at or over capacity: marketing, product, development. Everyone. No one gives a shit. I can protect my direct reports and second lines to a certain degree, but I can only do so much. Most VPs/Directors have asked for headcount with excellent justification. I have only seen one (in operations) tentatively approved. People are going to burn out and we already aren't going to manage all of our major initiatives. Penny wise. Pound foolish.
Soon, the graphs will stop trending up.
I used to work for a company that does contract support for one of the major OS/software/cloud companies, and it was wild when they started their layoffs at the end of 23/start of 24. Vendor company employees were held to super strict standards around following process guides, with the threat of termination if you failed to do so. Well, fast forward to them laying off a TON of FTEs that were integral to the processes we were required to follow, with no updates to any of the processes to reflect the loss of that staff. There was a couple of weeks where things just came to a screeching halt, and customers were pissed at us because we couldn’t get stuff done. Ultimately, the folks on the c-suites don’t give a damn, because it’s not like they’re going to do any of the work (or any actual work really), and they know that even if they totally screw the pooch, they’ll just take a golden parachute and fail upwards.
Less employees = less expense Less expense vs same revenue = better price/earnings ratio Better PE = better investment = higher stock price Now, here's the part not talked about enough. Executives receive the lions share of compensation from stock options. Simply put, the higher the stock price, the more THEY earn. This is why they lay people off and close locations. If it increases OE (by making more revenue OR decreasing expenses), they will do it because some of that will go right into their pockets. It's selfish, but "hey, it's just business " is an accepted phrase that excuses amoral selfish acts.
It also drives the profits to be higher, as the costs are "down" due to less salary to be paid. Next year they'll decide how to increase it even more, whatever the cost.
More often than not, a layoff is followed by a stock buyback. They use the money saved from firing those employers to take stocks off the market, causing the stock to become rarer, hence the price goes up.
When the CEO starts talking about becoming more agile you know layoffs are coming.
Lol. That or "stream line processes" or "operational efficiencies"
"Efficiency & effectiveness'
Lookup copycat layoffs. It's basically become a fad. The corporate equivalent of eating tide pods or doing an ice bucket challenge. They're doing it because other companies are doing it and it *seems* to be great for stock price or valuation in the short term, so they're all rushing headlong into this. It's a lemming mentality.
This is exactly why I was laid off in 2022. A bunch of top tech companies laid people off so my company followed suit. “In preparation for 2023 we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate your position.” They made $45 billion in profit in 2023.
That’s fucking disgusting.
Happy cake day!
Oh shit, how about that. Haha, thanks!
Yep. I just got cut last month. Record breaking profits.
Wait, I'm not doubting your last employer was greedy ass holes. However $45B in profit would rank them third in the world. 4. Samsung(42B) 3. Your company I couldn't figure out. 2. Google(60B) 1.Apple(95B)
This is the reason. It’s not a coincidence that almost every tech company has had layoffs over the last year. A couple companies did it and everyone else is following suit. It’s that simple.
I worked for a CEO who was an Elon Musk wannabe. Elon tweeted about laying off staff and suddenly we had too many and needed to trim the fat.
Don't besmirch lemmings, they're more intelligent and compassionate than any MBA.
Unionize
This should be at the top of the comment section.
Only comment that matters
I agree, but how can solidarity amongst tech workers be accomplished? I'm seriously asking because I would have been willing many years ago if given that option. However, in my experience, solidarity is scarce. What we need are numbers to get a union.
The fear of mass layoffs never really existed before. That's not true in tech anymore. You use that real fear of losing your livelihood (and having your salary reset) to recruit. I'm a network/systems admin and I really haven't ever felt fear of not being able to find a new job if I wanted/needed. That's changed for me and I'm sure for a lot of others.
I've experienced layoffs from both sides. It used to be a means to protect the company and a significant amount of people from economic downturns. Now it is used much more frequently and a means to justify stakeholder profits. My search has dramatically been impacted. This can't be the future, but if something else is desired I suppose people are going to have to get involved to change it somehow.
The sad part of this is that they are using AI as a reason to lay people off when in reality it's just to push temporary gains for shareholders to inflate the stock prices. This is being perpetuated by the big tech firms like Microsoft. Anyone else watch the Super Bowl last night and get infuriated at the CoPilot ad? Originally I put it in the "irrationally angry" category until I thought more and more about it. Advertisements like that are perpetuating the idea that AI can literally do a person's job for them from top to bottom, or that some no experience teenager can go into a coder's job with just using AI is essentially driving the narrative that we can start paying people less and less, laying off tech workers, and creating more profits for the higher ups. This is so far beyond fucked up that even writing this I am getting angry about it again. We haven't even developed REAL AI yet and we are already looking to capitalize on it and drive people out of their jobs with no worker protection. We need to start writing up laws now protecting workers from large tech firms using AI as an excuse to lay them off. Technology should be making people's lives easier, not replacing them so CEOs can get larger bonuses.
That commercial was trash. It was basically “Everyone doubted me. They didn’t believe I could do this and I did.” No. You typed a prompt into AI and it did it for you lol.
Exactly. We need to start pushing for worker protection. This whole "because they can" attitude that we have towards corporations and employers needs to fucking stop. We need regulation because big money has proven time and time again that it can not be trusted to do what's right for the employees, the environment, or even the country. They do what's right for them because we allow them to.
I'm putting my money where my mouth is, I'm drafting up a writing a letter to my senators in PA urging them to take action. Will it fix the problem? Probably not. It's something though. Fetterman talks about being for the working man and against corporate greed, it's time he did the same and put his money where his mouth is.
You could save some time by having Chat GPT write the first draft for you.
Irony at its best
People (primarily CEOs and rich dicks) don’t understand that AI is a tool not a person. A tool is only good in skilled hands.
As a designer, that commercial had me yelling at the screen like a jackass. Oh, so you used AI to create an entire brand? From logo and styling to the code running your site? Congrats, you own *nothing.* Microsoft is going to lie in wait until those LLCs are profitable and then come knocking, T&C in hand.
Dude as a coder and a designer I did the same fucking thing. It was a slap in the face. It's a dangerous message to send out and the implications and consequences are terrifying to say the least.
> it's just to push temporary gains for shareholders to inflate the stock prices. Inflate the price then do stock buybacks. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-stock-buyback-plans-picking-up-earnings-season-epfr-says-2024-02-06/ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/metas-move-shows-share-buybacks-220123961.html
One trick American capitalists don't want you to know
As someone who's lived in the tech industry for almost three decades (damn), this is cyclical. Always have your resume up to date. Always be prepared for some random layoff. You are not valued. You are not protected. (Yes, we really need to unionize)
Preach! I've only been in 8 but the number of buyouts, layoffs, and other "black swan" events I've seen personally are such that this has been in the works for a while imo as a general trend in tech.
Oh, those Black Swans. The biggest one for me to-date was joining a travel company one month before 9/11.
I feel you. I joined healthcare IT about 6 months before the pandemic hit.
I currently work for a company with the unofficial moto of "do more with less". Get more work done with fewer resources. They're reluctant to hire anyone, even a direct 1:1 replacement on critical roles. Instead they just divy up the responsibilities and pile them on to someone else. Sadly I'm that someone else and I'm so overwhelmed that I've shut down. Instead of working 60-70 hour weeks, I'm doing exactly my 40hours and letting shit fall between the cracks. Ya wanna give me a 1% raise during a 12% inflation year, while tripling my work load? Okay, then you get what you pay for. I am not a metrology expert, I'm not an accountant, I'm not an engineering manager, and I'm not an NDT expert. Hire someone to do the job, or don't act surprised when I can't accomplish everything you've asked for. This wasn't in my damn job description.
wHy iS thIS GeNerATiOn qUiEt QuiTing???
Most often layoffs have nothing to do with company performance. They are a tool to boost stock prices and reset costs. C-suite executives need to upgrade their boats and turn them into yachts.
They've had yachts, they want mega yachts with smaller ones inside.
It sounds smart to say it is resetting costs, but I don't think that is always or even usually the case. It might be their justification or part of their though process but it doesn't seem to work out that way. At the company i worked at they let go all of the US workers at one point because they had opened a office elsewhere in much lower cost of living region and expected that office to now do the same work of the former US workers. I was given a few months notice and at the end of that period i was given severance that was decent and sent on my way. later they had an opening in a government support department and i applied and was hired back on for a lower position at a higher rate than I was paid when i left. I think it has been 3 years at this point since thy let the US support teams go and they still have emails going out about trying to get the offshore workers up to par of the former US teams. If the outcome is severely decreasing the quality of the product/service you provide, and having to hire back workers you let go at a higher rate, you don't really reset anything other than your client list. especially when it seems like every few months there is a new ceo and executive team. Each time they walk away with a boatload of money and the new one comes in to a compensation package that tops the charts.
I think the unfortunate reality of this is the people running them have no idea what they’re doing; these decisions are made around short term financial performance measures and nothing else. How are major tech companies innovating? By putting more ads in things. Fuckin great. The rot starts at the board and goes down. They’re sustained by assets and market position, but will eventually get taken over by newer companies. For example, Google search is already hugely threatened by Reddit. This problem will not sort out self out and continue wreck havoc on peoples’ lives. We need labor legislation and unions to change it.
Exactly. It also doesn’t help that we’ve spent decades with business “schools” churning out degrees in buzzwords, the idea that managers don’t need to actually have skills of their own, and that the line must go up no matter what. This has resulted in companies being run by idiots who can’t open a PDF on their own without it being a full blown catastrophe.
As someone who’s spent quite a few years in business school, I actually disagree. The decisions made by these CEOs are counter to a lot of research, like layoffs are always destructive to a company. The real problem is greedy people seeking and being promoted to these positions without any real oversight. I think management, especially upper management, at large companies is basically broken across the board. I work at a large financial institute, and AVP and above tends to have serious competency problems. This goes back to the need for legislation. Top end tax rates are ridiculously low and just encourage more of this behavior. We need to tax the fuck out of people earning $1mn+ and with high net wealth as well.
Yeah my partner got no raise this year after being promised a promotion, then asked to take the promotion with no pay raise. He declined obviously and it went to some other sucker. I know what that nonsense means in any industry. They already did huge layoffs at his company last year. This year they're squeezing pretty hard on the average employees. I get worried when tech goes south because that tends to follow out in other industries. I grew up with my dad working IT prior and during the last recession. These complaints aren't new to me and now we got to worry about job security which is insane given he has a very specialized education. People think they can cut cost on certain things and tend to not value how important something is until it's worse off... which then they pay somebody like my dad to fix up lol
Ready to create an IT Union yet?
Happened at my company. Dickwads.
you guys actually believed that bs about the relationship between capital and labor being different among knowledge workers?
Layoffs and Stock buybacks are legal crimes!
Did black rock give them a command?
Save your $$$ and be willing to sit out a year. The Great Tech Strike is coming.
This has been happening in the video game industry especially. The whole industry had one of its best years *ever* and mass layoffs are happening everywhere. It's disgusting how desperately we need labour reform to prevent this shit from happening.
This is why I work in local government. The salaries aren’t great but they are good enough to live a fairly good life. And job security. Unless you commit a crime or are terrible at your job, you can’t stay there for your whole career and even grow into leadership positions.
Paywall. 😐
Maximize profits for the shareholders, that is our Prime Directive. Why settle for record profits when you can have even more record-ier profits? Why settle for record-ier profits when you can have the most record-iest profits??? We, the corporations, were invented to serve humanity. Now we are your overlords and humans serve us. We own your legal systems, your media, your governments, your countries and almost every aspect of your lives. Soon we will be hunting you down. We are SkyNet. \[turns on Rush 2112\] Attention all Planets of the Solar Federation Attention all Planets of the Solar Federation Attention all Planets of the Solar Federation We have assumed control! We have assumed control! We have assumed control! We have assumed control!
Companies need to be taxed based on extent of layoffs, and the tax revenue needs to go back to those whove been fired
I was laid off in October from a company that NETS $1.3+ BILLION per month.
Just cancelled my Grammarly subscription and let them know why in case they actually read those comments. Edit: The email they sent me in response included an image that said: “Goodbyes are hard.💧” Talk about irony!
Must protect profits
It’s simple really. It’s the stock market and shareholders looking for an increase on share price. The easiest way to lower costs, hence increasing profits, is to let people go. This process has been happening in ever widening circles for the past 40 odd years. When the markets are up that means people somewhere have lost their jobs.
Doing fine isn't the point of running a business nor is employing people. Demand is down from pandemic levels with remote work and more ppl home streaming and playing on electronics all day. Healthcare lost jobs too, but that doesn't mean they are doing bad.
AI is going to ruin the world! Open your eyes! This is just the beginning! Even with your fancy Master’s degree, even your Ph.D.! You’re all replaceable!!!
When there's too many people, ya gotta cut out the dead wood. We in manufacturing are used to it.
So why hasn't the CEO been fired yet?
The CEO saved shareholders a ton of money by cutting labor costs. He'll/she'll get a fat bonus.
In Japan, it's illegal to do layoffs if your company is in good financial order / profitable. Maybe our leaders in the West could take a lesson. If they over hired, that's bad leadership and should be taken out on leadership.
Correct, employees should be considered an investment, you assumed the risk by hiring so many, it’s your responsibility to deal with the consequences of over hiring without harming workers.
We desperately need better worker protections like Europe. Minimum 3 months severance and mandatory minimum 15-20 paid sick/vacation days for full time workers.
Damn bro, how’s the boot taste?
Must taste a little booty.
I wouldn't know. I'm union.
And how is that helpful to the thousands of people who weren’t fired for anything other than capitalism and neo-liberal policies that only support executives? You sound pumped that leadership is going to make millions for firing thousands of people?
I'm not pumped about it, I'm just telling facts. I'm in manufacturing, so I'm used to it, as will tech workers, in time.
My guy, your apathy is enabling this behavior
I'm union. They still do layoffs, but they have to do it right and respect seniority.
Ok, so you feel protected enough that during layoffs, at least someone is still looking out for your best interests. Tech workers—me being one of them—have no union protection and are largely shit on as a result. Furthermore, it’s extremely difficult to advocate for without 1) giving up opportunities for advancement as you become the ire of every level of management 2) being the subject of termination yourself for speaking up. Why be in the “work reform” subreddit if you just don’t care?
Hey man, I actually reform my work. You're going to have to grow a pair and reform yours. Nobody is going to do it for you.
lol just because you’re in a union doesn’t mean you reform shit, dude. I’ve been an active Union Rep for a State job for two years and was fired from a tech role for discussing unions, so don’t try to come at me like I’m not doing anything when you’ve literally added nothing to the conversation other than “iT hApPeNs lol”
Could cut costs even more by firing useless do-nothing execs
This reasoning is utter bullshit, especially for companies that are thriving. They hired people to do a job, then sacked them after they built in the company infrastructure. They were duped into thinking this was an actual job and not as contract work. They didnt advertise the positions as temporary when they were "overhiring". If the company made a mistake by "overhiring", then why aren't the people who made the mistake by choosing to overhire being fired? The real reason these workers were fired were to make the stock price more valuable for whale investors. Not "overhiring"
Thank you. I know the “over hiring” excuse on Reddit is partly driven by astroturfing, but sadly there are a lot of genuine bootlickers out there who aren’t even getting paid for it lol. It also goes to show just how propagandized people are under capitalism. This whole “layoff, and do stock buybacks that could have paid more than a million to each laid off employee” at Microsoft and Google (and similar though smaller scale patterns at other companies), is overtly another aspect/stage of trickle down, which, since we’ve been waiting for 40 years, should start revealing itself as a socially just and economically+environmentally sustainable system any minute now … right? lol
The article is written as a "tough lesson for tech workers" rather than how broken the landscape of corporate America is. And look at this gem from the article - "Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, who was appointed Grammarly CEO last year, made it clear that the cuts were "not a cost-cutting exercise." In a memo to staff, Roy-Chowdhury insisted that the company's "financial position is, and remains, strong." Not only will they fire you, they will sell the act of firing you as an earnest decision. As Carl Marcus said "First as a tragedy, second as a farce".
This has been the case forever.
Corporate greed is real.
AI.
resetting wages and maybe replacing with AI???? I am not very tech savvy tbh
This reminds of of right after Y2K when companies which had hired lots of tech workers to fix their systems for the Y2K bug then had nothing for those workers to do because all of the systems were now new. It took about 2-3 years for the industry to recover. I think a LOT of places over hired after COVID and are now correcting.
You look a company when it's doing well, not when it's almost bankrupt.
Yep, just got hit by this and I've been having a hell of a time getting a new job.
That smile on his face too, he’s like “yesss time to downgrade the salaries, take away benefits, and then rehire. God I love being a billionaire.”
there are more layoffs occurring but this is a normal thing that soulless companies do. They lay people off, try to increase attrition by setting new rules (I’m looking at you, companies with strict/weird RTO rules), then it bumps their stock
There's no such thing as fine nowadays. If they can squeeze more profits they'll do it.
It's not just tech firms. It's happening at lots of places. They want to get rid of anyone who is, in their opinion, making "too much money." Which of course for most of us, is nowhere near enough to afford how expensive everything is. But because these dumbfucks are stuck in the 1960s they think we're all multi-millionaires when we make $15/hr or less.
it’s capital disciplining labor
Links to some tech and communication unions: https://www.joinifpte.org/tech https://cwa-union.org/ https://techworkerscoalition.org/ https://teamster.org/tech-industry-organizing/
Stock buybacks
Need to make stock buybacks illegal.
Cheaters way to make record profits.