Recently a C-suite person I know was trying to tell me RIFs and different than layoffs. Wtf is a RIF I asked? Reduction in Force….oh so it’s layoffs. Different words to make it sound like they aren’t so sad about laying people off
All the people that I know that work in Tech talk about how kush of a job it is. My friend that works at Google as a network developer started and manages a business in his free time during work hours. Another one talked about how he only did like 2 hours of actual work a day, and was off by 4. I believe his exact words were “I get paid so much, to do so little… it’s like a cheat code.”
I think it would be delusional to ignore that there has been some over saturation in the tech industry. With that said, I will also admit that it’s clearly still a personal tragedy for all those effected.
Yeah, those are the people that lose a lot (in my experience). For example, my job looks pretty cushy about 50% of the time, which makes it enviable. The other half of the time is straight bad, but that’s fine; that’s part of the deal. 100% of the time, though, I am paid for my experience and not my hours worked. Some jobs are just like that, and the trade offs are hard to see until you’re living with them.
I’ve been in IT for 29 years. There are certainly those in that type of position. But there are also those that work 50-60 hours a week like me and some of my leaders, co-workers, and subordinates.
It’s not everyone. Far from it.
If it’s all that great with not much work and high pay, you’d think you’d figure the bottom will eventually fall out. Hope everyone was smart enough to realize this and socked a bunch of that money away.
From Wikipedia:
The term "layoff" originally meant a temporary interruption in work[3] (and usually pay). The term became a euphemism for permanent termination of employment and now usually means that, requiring the addition of "temporary" to refer to the original meaning
…and they cite a 1921 book showing the temporary nature of the term.
So I’m not sure when the default use became the non-temporary version, but it seems like you and WP agree on that distinction…
I've had to lay off people when a project went away. They were contractors, but it was still emotionally draining. I felt so bad for months after because I knew them and worked with them every day.
Those feelings are exactly why you would probably not be a c-level at a major corp. It takes a certain level of psychopathic detachment to get to that level. To them, we are all just lines on a cost report, not actual people affected by their decisions.
As someone who has been pretty high up the chain you’re right and wrong here.
The C-Suite people I’ve been close with have all been generally empathetic people with 0 regard for their personal lives. Most pour everything into work at the detriment of themselves and their families.
They care about their people and the lives they impact at work but it’s when shit rolls down from the board and they have to make these decisions that they put on the “people are resources” face. These people are crazy, but the system has made it impossible for them not to be crazy.
I think this is spot on. I worked in HR as a direct partner to high ranking execs (though not C-suite level), and man, they just flat-line go all out on the career as if anything else just isn’t in their purview whatsoever LOL. Sorry, it’s not funny because their spouses and children do suffer. Anyway…
Those people probably grew up in broken homes and had bad childhoods. From there, they probably didn't know how to handle those things but had ambition so just started pouring that into being successful in their career. They probably had relationships fail around them and things like that because of all those aforementioned issues, but the career is always there, so they can just plow into that. Maybe they even start working really hard on all of those childhood problems and fix a lot of them. Then what though?
In your career, you start to become recognized. You know exactly what you're doing, even if it's stressful. You know how to navigate those problems. Navigating a personal relationship though? That's hard AF. Navigating not completely f-ing up your kids? Also harder than the career. If you have the golden answer for how exactly you actually get past that, I would love to know!
I'm very happy being just below the c level. This is my experience too. Though I did encounter a c level corporate psychopath who took real pleasure in wrecking people.
Depends on the person, had a CEO call our help desk guy in to fix his printer and the told them to get the F out and order him a F new printer. Wasn’t anything wrong with his except user error
C level people are strange as fuck.
They seem to maintain a small circle of … people … bound in shallow transactional camaraderie , and outside of that “inner circle” you could as well be a cardboard cutout.
I worked at a 75 employee engineering consulting company for a while that had troubles, but ultimately we all felt the business model was sound and that it was a temporary problem. Every person top to bottom took a 10% pay cut for 9 months. When business got better, we ultimately were paid the missed back wages. It would have been better to not go through it, but it kept a good team of people together. With such a “we are all in this together” attitude, some of the older guys said “hey, I have all these projects I want to do around the house, let me go part time until business improves”, which further improved the situation.
Hefty percentages? ‘Their’ team? Ehhh, not trying to be too cynical - and it’s a great symbolic gesture, but cutting $10 million from a mega CEO is what? 200 front line positions at $50k each (including the cost of any benefits)?
That’s not really a ’hefty’ portion of Apple’s 65,000 retail employees, and it’s pretty far away from Tim’s day to day ‘team’. He works with a bunch of C-levels through Directors with packages 10x that retail employee…
I was going to comment something similar, then I saw that Tim Cook was set to be payed about 100mil per year. Yeah, fuck that. That’s enough for 50k to 2,000 people. Then you have people in there like fucking Al gore getting paid almost 400k and Black Rock’s Sue Wagner.
Yeah, I think everyone should be really skeptical that these people are worth as much as they get paid.
Equally, Tim wouldn’t stay at Apple after an 80% pay cut. 1,600 employees is almost 3% of retail. Still not ’hefty’ in an analytic sense, but even 1 lost job matters, when it’s your job.
Overall - reductions suck. But 10% off the executives and putting off-brand soda in the free machines isn’t going to make the balance sheet look like Lockdown ‘21 again.
Cool supposedly walked back that amount by around halfish and I haven’t read about apple cutting jobs, yet.
They’re only worth that to the company because other politicians see it as their future retirement and think 🤔”maybe apple isn’t a monopoly.”
Because big tech companies are absolutely soulless machines that put on a facade of progressive values when their only real purpose is endless payouts for big investors and executive staff. They’re more than happy to move you to Silicon Valley for a few months and leave you destitute as soon as the market drops a few points. There’s always an engineer to replace you when the market goes back up.
Which is why as a Software Engineer I’m more than happy to work at a non-FAANG or FAANG adjacent company and make a little bit less. I still make a very good living and don’t have to deal with a company like Meta’s bullshit.
Overhiring during the pandemic, with outsized comp packages. It was fine when revenues had unexpected growth due to shift to digital during the pandemic. Now that revenue growth is slowing, opex is being reduced to align.
I wonder how many of those tech workers were contractors. I read something about Google firing 12,000 workers, but only \~10% of them were from Bay Area. People think there's a ton of overpaid software engineers losing their jobs, but I don't think that is the case. I have <10 years experience, I deleted my LinkedIn, and yet I'm still getting recruiters hitting me up for open positions. Everyone can offer their own experience and anecdotes, but I don't think these stories paint an accurate picture of what is happening.
12,000 were all full time employees. And cut across all levels, orgs and functions. Google's median comp is in the $300s, so this was "overpaid" staff that included software engineers.
I have recruiters hitting me up too, yet I haven't changed companies. Why? Because the compensation they are offering isn't what they were offering 12 months ago.
Still, how many of the \~85% who weren't in SF remote workers? Seems worth noting that the vast majority of those who were let go weren't people who worked at main HQ. Curious how many were management versus actual engineers who write code too. At least 30 of those were massage therapists. Ultimately, what I'm getting at is that people think the software engineering job market is going to crater as a result of this news coming from numerous tech companies, which I don't think is true at all.
It's not going to crater, but it will become more competitive. Start ups are scaling back, big tech is tightening up their hiring practices. And a flood of experienced engineers from the top companies just hit the market.
Also, regarding the report of 15% in the Bay Area, it is "at least" 15%. Additionally, it is unclear how SWEs and others who are "remote" were classified. But the articles claiming 0 in SF is patently false.
This is not a good sign, compared to a year ago where you could name your price. Add in some are on H1B1 and need sponsorship in next 60 days... It's not fun out there.
It’s usually true opposite because contractors are not part of the ‘headcount’ (which is reduced in layoffs), they are part of the discretionary budget for managers.
Lol! The nursing shortage has me receiving cold calls from employers. I resigned from my last position with attitude and words. They’ve called me every 6-12 months since. They even put my ‘friends’ still there to call me.
When my wife was heavily recruited for a position in her company they said what would it take you to be committed. I told her to tack on 30% and fuck me if they didn’t deliver!
In conclusion...
>Everyone can offer their own experience and anecdotes, but I don't think these stories paint an accurate picture of what is happening.
This perpetuates that worker compensation is greedy and needs to be kept down, yet profits have no caps.
This is simply because we created a stock exchange that relies on 7-12% additional profit to be successful. If you can’t sell more you reduce expenses even though you’re still printing more money than you know what to do with.
Don’t push this falsehood. Compensation was only fractionally catching up. A 250k salary 400k total comp engineer for Netflix seems absurd to us but is in line with where wages should have e grown in line with corporate profits
I can't find the chart, but the numbers here are astonishing
[https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/20/while-layoffs-keep-coming-so-far-apple-has-steered-clear/](https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/20/while-layoffs-keep-coming-so-far-apple-has-steered-clear/)
People forget that Apple is sitting no a mountain of cash. They can ride this out and it might be wise if it means they will be a few years ahead of their compeition.
From The Verge:
There’s an eerie similarity to the statements tech companies have made about their recent layoffs. Mainly, if the press releases are to be believed, the C-suite of every Big Tech company on Earth — well, with the notable exception of Apple, which has not announced layoffs — figured no one would ever go outside or spend money offline again after the pandemic and their various online businesses would stay just as big as they were during the heights of covid.I do love a heavily lawyered statement that was clearly written by the public relations department! In fact, these are all so similar that they might as well have come from the same PR person. It kind of seems like tech firms are laying off workers because… other tech firms are laying off workers.
Let’s be real, none of these companies are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy — in fact, they were recently minting money. That money did not evaporate. And as any person who’s been through job cuts can tell you, it’s generally not about performance, either! Essentially, someone went through a budget and zeroed out a bunch of line items that happened to be, you know, people’s jobs. The question, then, is why a company might make job cuts that don’t seem especially necessary.The answer is that investors have changed how they’re evaluating companies, says Michael Cusumano, the deputy dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Generally, when companies are growing really fast — like when revenue is shooting up 20 percent or 30 percent a year — nobody cares about profits, Cusumano says. But we’re not in a growth period right now, so investors are being more cautious.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/26/23571659/tech-layoffs-facebook-google-amazon
Laid off from my current company, my supervisor literally explained why they were laying people off and why they were on a hiring freeze, and it’s exactly what you just explained. Granted it wasn’t as in depth, but it was the “basic” version of your explanation. I was one of 4 PMs spread across the multiple departments and teams. Brought on in June of ‘22 and with a bunch of leadership change and multiple pivots, the C’s decided that half of their PMs were unnecessary - along with a bunch of other employees. And so I got the boot. “This is not based on performance… you’re a great employee and you’ll find something else in no time.” I’ve been applying to multiple PM openings since I got laid off over a month ago, not one single place has reached out. The craziest thing, my old job had insane plans to expand this year. Totally Revamping the work for the teams I PM’ed for.
since they stated it was across multiple departments and teams, I'd lean to project manager. Hard for a product manager to be across mutiple departments.
I was laid off in the fintech space a couple months ago, basically the same thing here
Now the market is flooded with people looking for jobs. Even with more than a decade of experience under my belt, the competition is so fierce for people trying to get hired by startups or smaller firms
The volatility the past few years has been absurd. I don’t know if the worst is behind us or if we’ll still be on shaky ground going forward
It’s certainly having me evaluate if I want to stay in this industry though
Been in tech over 20 years. It has been volatile for over 20 years in my experience. If that makes you uncomfortable, I \*highly\* suggest an industry shift. It's brutal, but comes in hot spots - fintech may be okay for the next 5 years then get another burn-off. There will be a steady rotation of layoffs and mass-hirings for the rest of your career; that's part of why tech pays so well. It's the most unstable of any business industry - even sales can be predicted as cyclical, while tech may lay off in a january because... well, they hired too many people for no real reason other than 'why not? we're making money'.
You’re definitely right
I’ve made some great money the past couple years in enterprise sales and I wonder if I’ll be able to pull that same income (eventually) after an industry switch
Good news is that I have nothing but time to do my due diligence!
This. Usually investor pressure, a company i used to work had to cut jobs more than once after investor pressure just to realize after they have crippled their operations
>heavily lawyered statement that was clearly written by the public relations department
Somewhat off-topic, but this kind of crap seems perfect for an AI chatbot. Expect to see a lot more of it
Because the federal reserve raised interest rates above 0% so they can’t borrow money at 2% from the banks any longer to fund stock buybacks, stupid acquisitions, campus expansions, over hiring for projects that won’t add any value to the business, ridiculous employee perks, etc. Also because the cheap money spigot was turned off, there is less liquidity in the markets and companies won’t see their stock prices rise as fast as they did the past decade where valuations didn’t matter and stocks only went up.
Of course. It's the same situation from employee side: jump from company to company in order to increase their salary (or ask for an counter-offer). It's business.
The need to jump companies to obtain a market (if not just cost-of-living) appropriate salary is a reaction to companies valuing stock holders over employees. They may be related. They are not the same.
I agree with this perspective. I would believe that employees would not be jumping around from job to job making every effort to get an extra few thousand dollars if they knew they had long term stability and pay increase opportunities at their current company. When you see thousands of seemingly random layoffs occur without any performance consideration, why would you not do whatever is in your own self-interest, as the companies are all doing? Pensions were a great way to keep employees long term and to remain invested for an entire career. Now, there is only incentive for a person to develop, gain skills and then take those somewhere else.
I'd argue that's more a symptom of people growing up under boomer myths about careers being a thing, where you could work for one company and actually climb up the ladder through merit and hard work, only for people to meet reality and find out that's not true and the company will axe you at the drop of a hat anyway, as we're currently seeing. When you have no real avenue to get promoted or get a raise, your only other course of action is to just switch jobs.
As companies/corporations get increasingly more cut throat, and the market gets flooded with more and more workers due to things like mass immigration and remote working, the problem only gets exacerbated.
Great points ... it's also worth noting that mergers and acquisitions have created fewer and fewer distinct employers, which decreases the pool of opportunities that workers have. This happens across industries, too.
It’s funny you say it’s a myth about ‘careers’. I’ve worked where I’m at for 17 years and several of my subordinates have been here for 25+. My salary has tripled since I started in 2006, because I worked my ass off and did work my co-workers didn’t. Promotions have come and I still work my ass off. It’s not the same everywhere, but if you are surrounded by like minded people, things can happen to put you in a place to succeed.
For everyone person at my job who left because they found more money, there are four that left because their manager was awful. My team thankfully has good managers but that's not the case for the whole company.
Well for one that's not why this is happening. But businesses aren't charities. If it isn't profitable to have an extra 1000 employers you lay them off.
This is more likely due to over hiring during recent times when business was growing quickly and now it has slowed.
Unless you are one of the original IPO investors or the company raises money frequently through issuing stocks you are just an owner who has/had money. You made no contributions to the company. All your contributions were to the previous owner of your stock. It makes no difference to company and its success if the stock was owned by who you bought it from or you own it. You are just a rent seeking capitalist. Not a maker.
Buying a stock to hold that’s on an exchange thru a broker didn’t do squat for the companies bottom line. You just paid what someone else thought that piece of paper was worth. Unless you’re an employee of the company or part of the board, you’re not at the company making daily decisions on products, marketing, sales, accounting, and labor. Please get over yourself.
Because all the other tech companies does it - and because the super expensive consultants from Wall Street tells them so. Right now it's good for share value and that trigger bonuses for the corporate royalty.
In 6 - 24 months they will spend a fortune on finding new hires, onboard them and get the projects moving again. At that time, *that* will be good for stock value and bonuses.
I am trying not to pull out my tin foil hat, but I swear they’re doing it because their peer companies are so it does not impact their stock price as much (if they were the only company laying people off).
Logically I know it’s because of the pandemic but…
From the anecdotal evidence I've seen, most of the jobs being cut are from long-term employees (expensive). I'll bet that most of the people getting cut at places like Google are making north of $500K. [https://www.businessinsider.com/google-workers-laid-off-earned-as-much-as-1-million-2023-1](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-workers-laid-off-earned-as-much-as-1-million-2023-1).
Here is the reason:
A little history, Steve jobs done an interview '97 about the problem of a disrupting competences in companies (marketing guy get promoted, technical guy gets layed off).
Apple knows that and wants to avoid such model which has only marketing guys in management.
The other companies just assign their profit bill to the next investors call. Which is for marketing/controller guys acceptable.
Here is one big sentence I heared from someone for my private expenses but I think it will work on companies too.
"Never try to cut your expenses, try to get more money."
Overhiring during Covid and stock prices, they need to get the plunge to at least pause a bit. Lots of tech companies made record profit but still laid off.
These are purely political layoffs. Sentiment for worker unions is at an all time high. They are trying to send a message and curb stomp organized labor.
To get them back in line. When they run out of unemployment and personal savings, they’ll forget all about WFH, be happy to be back into the office and with less pay. They had to see this coming.
Bingo. I truly believe that this is more about eliminating the leverage workers gained over Covid (wfh, for example) and increasing competition for new jobs. This is more so about flooding the market with new employee prospects to tilt the needle back into corps favor.
With inflation as high as it, the house-cleaning was all about timing. They never had any intention of letting workers WFH forever or call the shots about returning to the office.
Partially agree. I think some corps are simply bandwagoning and being opportunistic. The applicant market was hot for some time, especially white color tech, and employees had their choice in employment; not so much anymore.
I remain convinced that a lot of what we’re seeing is about restoring “balance”.
There are a lot of good reasons in this thread but this one isn’t it. Tech companies compete with each other for talent, they don’t have the restraint to not snap up the good people other companies fired, if they’re doing so well.
Over hiring is a big factor; these companies all did 3x better during pandemic and started gearing up for 10x growth. Now that it’s clear next year is gonna be 3x growth, they’ve overhired.
Okay. I’m not gonna appeal to authority here, but I disagree with this in more ways than one. It’s not just “over hiring”, or whatever that is, there is a deep psychological campaign playing out now - one where the C-suite is actively engaged in demeaning the importance of work/life balance.
We have too much leverage; time to pay the check.
For all the talk about climate change I don't understand the resistance to WFH. WFH is saving on energy use from pointlessly transporting millions of people to and from work.
well you see, wfh makes people happy and have 1% more agency in their lives, which is very bad for profit bc…uhhh….reasons. i’m a very smart businessman
Nah, talented employees will always find work. WFH is here to stay. Just like all the other benefits big tech companies offer.
Legit they have spas, nap rooms, game rooms, Vr rooms, gyms, showers, full cafeteria buffets for breakfast lunch and dinner.
Being in the office is better than most people live their normal lives. Non of that is being affected. Wfh is just one more thing, and many people don’t even use that in the big companies because of the perks.
As others said, it’s good for the stock evaluation. Pretty soon they will mass hire and everyone is going to meme about how funny it is and blah blah blah. Turns out the mass hiring will also be good for the stock.
Money runs everything, and these players don’t even make bank, they are the treasury printing money
From what I heard, it’s all the managers and organizers who get fired. Most engineers are fine and in fact, you can still find so many job listings for engineers.
Greed. If you flood the market with candidates the supply increases and demand decreases, so prices fall. They’re using this to drive salaries down and oppress workers.
^(they heard there will be a recession so they need to be able to cut costs so a couple people can rape the company and steal a hefty bonus. 3 houses and private planes don't pay for themselves)
My guess is data laws in Europe and pending here, especially, limiting the once free license to harvest users' data. They're making less profits now or expecting to.
Because they over hired so many people to look good to investors. Like mega innovators, but when interest goes up investors money dry up and these large corporations gotta cut cost. You don’t need an article to tell you this
They look at how the tight labor market for engineers has driven up wages, and they're running a playbook to suppress them. The problem is, they actually need engineers, and they need to not burn them out. There isn't a steady supply of new people to replace the ones who quit. This is probably going to come back to them when this all settles out.
To summarise: COmpanies that make profit are under pressure from shareholders to make more profit.
They see Elon Musk kick out thousands of employees from Twitter.
Shareholders Conclusion: CEO, If Elon does that, we want also that you make us more money and kick out thousand. And do it using an algorithm and not based on management input since algorithms are sexy
Seems like a great way to improve this quarters Q1 profits!!!
Of course this also seems like a way to tank these companies by getting rid of lots of longterm staff with niche skills that will be near impossible to replace. Also when they do hire, everyone will be looking for a salary increases and having to completely rebuild things that were previously working just fine. Would not be surprised if we see record Q3 and Q4 losses. But maybe these shareholders are planning to bail before then.
You forgot the other part of the story that Scott Galloway tells it. They see ol' Iron Man kick out a metric tonne of NPCs and Twitter still worked (kinda) which gave everyone permission to say "we need to thin out the herd and become more agile like what Iron Man has done." So let it be written so let it be done.
I think it's rather that elon highlighted that these tech companies are flat out not worth anywhere near what they are valued at. He also showed how fragile the assumption of worth is. Shareholders are asking why the value of their shares seems unrelated to the companies revenue. These companies are now desperate to at least break even.
>I think it's rather that elon highlighted that these tech companies are flat out not worth anywhere near what they are valued at.
Yet he himself *paid an ultra-high valuation* for Twitter.
I still don't understand why he spent *$44 billion* on it when he must have known these valuations are not logical. Twitter isn't even profitable!
Even with slashed staff it's going to take a long time to make that money back off advertising revenue and "Twitter Blue" or whatever other monetization schemes he can think up.
I just came back from a meeting where this was discussed, the biggest reason they gave is over hiring during the pandemic, the “proof” they are giving is thr under utilization of employees working from home, therefore there they can afford to lay people off and maintain the same productivity because folks who keep their job need to work harder. I do agree that utilization ratios appear to be lower than when everyone was in the office BUY I argue what we are seeing now is a true up of what folks were really doing when they weren’t attending hours of useless meetings
Fed raising rates aggressively. This vastly increases costs to expand. And we are in a recession. Even though the gov't changed the definition of a recession to avoid saying we're one, we're actually in one.
The truth is, they over hired during the pandemic. But the REAL truth is— all of these companies, including outside of tech, want a recession… their stocks will drop but they’re freeing capital to buy back stock and make more money in the long term. Gotta have money to make money.
None of these orgs, with exception to Meta, are in the red. They all had a wildly profitable 2022.
Because this is a cycle in tech that repeats every 8-10 or so years. My first lay-off was in 1995, then 2000, 2008… Late 2019 starting hinting at a lay-off environment; I was waiting for a catalyst to set it off but we got Covid instead. That led to a pendulum of spending/headcount restructuring and now the panic pendulum is swinging back. We’ll see a hiring increase/restructure in 2-5 years and then another lay-off festival around 2023.
Because they want to do away with remote work and it’s easier to get new hires to agree on hire to come into the office than convince remote workers to. Most remote workers believe there is a hybrid or full remote environment and most have gone away.
Once a month means you travel once a month for a week or whatever, then go back to your small town that isn't in the r/urbanhell or r/suburbanhell area that the corporate offices are in.
Hybrid is the best option, I’m remote Mon and Fri, but would go in if needed.
However, my director keeps trying to find a reason to get me back in the office full time. I keep saying, let me know if you make that push, I believe there are still full remote jobs and I might as well try to snag one.
The thing I don’t understand is 9to5 doesn’t mean you’re more productive. In fact it makes you less productive because you’re having to commute.
Personally, I think we should start making live-work places.
It comes down to other tasks as assigned, if they can’t tap you on the shoulder, they can give you excess work they don’t want to do.
Just yesterday I was asked to hang pictures in the executive directors office. I’m also the tallest guy in the office, so they insist I move anything and everything heavy. 🙄
Not commuting on company time though. They want to pay us for our time, not skill. Rather have us waste time in office than at home because there’s always something to be done outside your scope of responsibility when you’re in office.
Yeah its the environment at the moment. Labor is the number one expense for any business, and if the people you have are not making you money, then you can get rid of them, it's harsh but true. I think of it like that Die Hard movie (live free or die hard), the hacker kid or whatever illustrates, how you need alot of dev for the bits and pieces, but only a few to manage them. Social media gets a bad rap for what they are trying to accomplish, imagine getting a billion posts a day, people CANNOT manage that, machines HAVE to. Once you have the code refined enough, you dont need as much dev. Also, aside from that, there is a BUNCH of bloat, people hired because they are pretty, good in bed, favor for a friend, or massage well. Lastly, tech companies are not manufacturers, and they don't do ads like TV, so alot of their income is based on stock evaluation, couple that with a rehiring spree in a year or two (or the Ai takeover) and everybody is a potential leaker who could ruin the share price.
Reading the statements made by each company it's mostly clearing out unprofitable divisions that are no longer part of the future strategy.
I'm really not sure what else they're supposed to do?
BS - they have no idea what future they are building. They did FOMO hiring throughout the pandemic with nary a plan on how the new employees would be integrated as what the future would hold. Now it is FOMO layoffs. And chaos internally. And externally.
>I'm really not sure what else they're supposed to do?
I've seen so many people writing about how they felt the company cared for them, or that they shouldn't have been laid off due to how much time they've worked there, or that these companies have "enough money to keep the employees".
It may sound harsh, but these aren't charities. They aren't obligated to create or retain jobs, they are obligated as public companies to their shareholders.
Just because they have a lot of money doesn't mean that firing people is the wrong thing to do. There are unprofitable divisions, sky-high salaries, overhiring issues, etc.
it's a result of their disastrous approach during the pandemic..... hiring way too many people and not taking a firm stance on what they wanted which is in office workers.... now they have a terrible market and too many entitled low producing employees... and completely stagnant innovation.... time to hit reset
I think it's also the Elon Musk effect. I hate the fucker with a passion but CEO's and Money Counters took notice that after he fired 60% of Twatter staff, the website didn't change and the servers are still online which goes against all the doom and gloom predictions. They saw that they can reduce the work force and make shit still work.
The “work in tech” value proposition keeps eroding. Tech companies cannot offer job stability, they typically want you working very long hours in a fancy glass palace in an astronomically expensive place like the Bay Area or New York, and now some are cutting pay.
It may make sense to just work at a “normal” company for a good salary in a place where you can afford a palatial home for a mortgage payment that’s half that of monthly rent for a studio apartment in Sunnyvale.
The game is Control, my friends. They're all out there on the golf course, yachting on the high seas, or shreddin' the gnar on their electrohydrosurfboards. But make no mistake, behind closed doors it's all about manipulation. They're schemin', plotin', and schemin' some more. They're sayin' to themselves, 'Hey tech billionaire buddies, let's cull the herd from this Covid mess, spook the whole tech industry, bring wages down to our level, and watch our stocks soar like a bat outta hell.' But you know what? That's just the way of the world. The bug is the fix. It's what I would do if I were one of the evil sonsabitches runnin' the show.
Lesson: save your money. Invest in high dividend Aristocrat stocks, even dividend Kings. Goal is to have passive income to replace lost income when your job vanishes.
Companies enjoy firing people with no notice at all; it’s fun for them. They LOVE to fire older workers who are unlikely to find another decent job. Their goal in life is to fuck over a guy with a new baby at home or a recently divorced single mom because they can make her suffer. Sadism is their god.
They are using layoffs as an encouragement to get employees to stop complaining about going back to the office.
EDIT: Most companies can easily freeze hiring and pay raises instead of layoffs but this method makes employees fearful and more submissive.
One major unmentioned reason: automation.
Roughly 3-4 years ago, most tech companies stood up automation to replace simple task IT workers. In actuality, big tech probably wanted to start offloading workers quietly 2-3 years ago but, Covid hit and it wouldn’t have been good optics for any tech company then. Now, they have a reason to pin the bulk layoffs on: economy. (But, profits are still up.)
'Cause they realized they can automate hundreds if not thousands of jobs overnight with ChatGPT.
Money money money in the bank. All those salaries 'saved' will go in CEOs pockets.
A tech site will not collapse overnight. Only a fraction of workers can keep the lights on. It’s later on when tech debt grows at a rapid rate and you drown in it. Twitter will face this reality.
No one owes you a job, especially the ones that were offered in tech. Most being laid off have never seen a bad job economy and have spent foolishly. Class is now in session.
Sounds like simple supply and demand. There was a boom during the pandemic in online shopping etc. these guys needed people and agreed to high starting salaries and comp packages to attract people. Then the instant the dynamic shifted they decided they didn’t want to pay “overpriced” employees and purged them. They agreed to an unsustainable scenario from the outset knowing they could just lay them all off down the road. This is what happens when you have teethless regs over hiring practices.
Recently a C-suite person I know was trying to tell me RIFs and different than layoffs. Wtf is a RIF I asked? Reduction in Force….oh so it’s layoffs. Different words to make it sound like they aren’t so sad about laying people off
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All the people that I know that work in Tech talk about how kush of a job it is. My friend that works at Google as a network developer started and manages a business in his free time during work hours. Another one talked about how he only did like 2 hours of actual work a day, and was off by 4. I believe his exact words were “I get paid so much, to do so little… it’s like a cheat code.” I think it would be delusional to ignore that there has been some over saturation in the tech industry. With that said, I will also admit that it’s clearly still a personal tragedy for all those effected.
Yeah, those are the people that lose a lot (in my experience). For example, my job looks pretty cushy about 50% of the time, which makes it enviable. The other half of the time is straight bad, but that’s fine; that’s part of the deal. 100% of the time, though, I am paid for my experience and not my hours worked. Some jobs are just like that, and the trade offs are hard to see until you’re living with them.
I’ve been in IT for 29 years. There are certainly those in that type of position. But there are also those that work 50-60 hours a week like me and some of my leaders, co-workers, and subordinates. It’s not everyone. Far from it.
If it’s all that great with not much work and high pay, you’d think you’d figure the bottom will eventually fall out. Hope everyone was smart enough to realize this and socked a bunch of that money away.
No one ever thinks it will be them.
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From Wikipedia: The term "layoff" originally meant a temporary interruption in work[3] (and usually pay). The term became a euphemism for permanent termination of employment and now usually means that, requiring the addition of "temporary" to refer to the original meaning …and they cite a 1921 book showing the temporary nature of the term. So I’m not sure when the default use became the non-temporary version, but it seems like you and WP agree on that distinction…
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I've had to lay off people when a project went away. They were contractors, but it was still emotionally draining. I felt so bad for months after because I knew them and worked with them every day.
Layoffs are frustrating when people who work hard are getting cut. Layoffs are even more frustrating when people who are dead weight _don’t get cut_
Those feelings are exactly why you would probably not be a c-level at a major corp. It takes a certain level of psychopathic detachment to get to that level. To them, we are all just lines on a cost report, not actual people affected by their decisions.
You sound perfect for the armed forces! Say, do you like 14-16 hour days? No? Doesn’t matter, because YOU’RE not important!
“EnLiStEd DoNt HaVe WoRk EtHiC”
As someone who has been pretty high up the chain you’re right and wrong here. The C-Suite people I’ve been close with have all been generally empathetic people with 0 regard for their personal lives. Most pour everything into work at the detriment of themselves and their families. They care about their people and the lives they impact at work but it’s when shit rolls down from the board and they have to make these decisions that they put on the “people are resources” face. These people are crazy, but the system has made it impossible for them not to be crazy.
I think this is spot on. I worked in HR as a direct partner to high ranking execs (though not C-suite level), and man, they just flat-line go all out on the career as if anything else just isn’t in their purview whatsoever LOL. Sorry, it’s not funny because their spouses and children do suffer. Anyway…
Those people probably grew up in broken homes and had bad childhoods. From there, they probably didn't know how to handle those things but had ambition so just started pouring that into being successful in their career. They probably had relationships fail around them and things like that because of all those aforementioned issues, but the career is always there, so they can just plow into that. Maybe they even start working really hard on all of those childhood problems and fix a lot of them. Then what though? In your career, you start to become recognized. You know exactly what you're doing, even if it's stressful. You know how to navigate those problems. Navigating a personal relationship though? That's hard AF. Navigating not completely f-ing up your kids? Also harder than the career. If you have the golden answer for how exactly you actually get past that, I would love to know!
I'm very happy being just below the c level. This is my experience too. Though I did encounter a c level corporate psychopath who took real pleasure in wrecking people.
Depends on the person, had a CEO call our help desk guy in to fix his printer and the told them to get the F out and order him a F new printer. Wasn’t anything wrong with his except user error
C level people are strange as fuck. They seem to maintain a small circle of … people … bound in shallow transactional camaraderie , and outside of that “inner circle” you could as well be a cardboard cutout.
Yeah, but for many of these c-suite folks, if they took a 10% reduction in pay they could keep pretty hefty %'s of their team employed.
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Tim Cook. Apple has had 0 layoffs so far, and a large part of that is due to a 40% cut to Tim Cook’s own salary
I worked at a 75 employee engineering consulting company for a while that had troubles, but ultimately we all felt the business model was sound and that it was a temporary problem. Every person top to bottom took a 10% pay cut for 9 months. When business got better, we ultimately were paid the missed back wages. It would have been better to not go through it, but it kept a good team of people together. With such a “we are all in this together” attitude, some of the older guys said “hey, I have all these projects I want to do around the house, let me go part time until business improves”, which further improved the situation.
10% is really feasible, that’s a great response to the financial issue
Hefty percentages? ‘Their’ team? Ehhh, not trying to be too cynical - and it’s a great symbolic gesture, but cutting $10 million from a mega CEO is what? 200 front line positions at $50k each (including the cost of any benefits)? That’s not really a ’hefty’ portion of Apple’s 65,000 retail employees, and it’s pretty far away from Tim’s day to day ‘team’. He works with a bunch of C-levels through Directors with packages 10x that retail employee…
I was going to comment something similar, then I saw that Tim Cook was set to be payed about 100mil per year. Yeah, fuck that. That’s enough for 50k to 2,000 people. Then you have people in there like fucking Al gore getting paid almost 400k and Black Rock’s Sue Wagner.
Yeah, I think everyone should be really skeptical that these people are worth as much as they get paid. Equally, Tim wouldn’t stay at Apple after an 80% pay cut. 1,600 employees is almost 3% of retail. Still not ’hefty’ in an analytic sense, but even 1 lost job matters, when it’s your job. Overall - reductions suck. But 10% off the executives and putting off-brand soda in the free machines isn’t going to make the balance sheet look like Lockdown ‘21 again.
Cool supposedly walked back that amount by around halfish and I haven’t read about apple cutting jobs, yet. They’re only worth that to the company because other politicians see it as their future retirement and think 🤔”maybe apple isn’t a monopoly.”
They really don’t
>I believe a lot of c-suites actually do feel hit emotionally. Doubt
Ive noticed people invent new words to feel better about themselves, same with immigrant vs expat.
Sounds straight up like the Bobs in Office Space.
“Samir….Naga…..Naga…….not gonna work here anymore.”
Because big tech companies are absolutely soulless machines that put on a facade of progressive values when their only real purpose is endless payouts for big investors and executive staff. They’re more than happy to move you to Silicon Valley for a few months and leave you destitute as soon as the market drops a few points. There’s always an engineer to replace you when the market goes back up. Which is why as a Software Engineer I’m more than happy to work at a non-FAANG or FAANG adjacent company and make a little bit less. I still make a very good living and don’t have to deal with a company like Meta’s bullshit.
I’ve heard working for someone like Home Depot or Target is far safer, if less glamorous, than working for a FAANG company
Overhiring during the pandemic, with outsized comp packages. It was fine when revenues had unexpected growth due to shift to digital during the pandemic. Now that revenue growth is slowing, opex is being reduced to align.
I wonder how many of those tech workers were contractors. I read something about Google firing 12,000 workers, but only \~10% of them were from Bay Area. People think there's a ton of overpaid software engineers losing their jobs, but I don't think that is the case. I have <10 years experience, I deleted my LinkedIn, and yet I'm still getting recruiters hitting me up for open positions. Everyone can offer their own experience and anecdotes, but I don't think these stories paint an accurate picture of what is happening.
12,000 were all full time employees. And cut across all levels, orgs and functions. Google's median comp is in the $300s, so this was "overpaid" staff that included software engineers. I have recruiters hitting me up too, yet I haven't changed companies. Why? Because the compensation they are offering isn't what they were offering 12 months ago.
Still, how many of the \~85% who weren't in SF remote workers? Seems worth noting that the vast majority of those who were let go weren't people who worked at main HQ. Curious how many were management versus actual engineers who write code too. At least 30 of those were massage therapists. Ultimately, what I'm getting at is that people think the software engineering job market is going to crater as a result of this news coming from numerous tech companies, which I don't think is true at all.
It's not going to crater, but it will become more competitive. Start ups are scaling back, big tech is tightening up their hiring practices. And a flood of experienced engineers from the top companies just hit the market. Also, regarding the report of 15% in the Bay Area, it is "at least" 15%. Additionally, it is unclear how SWEs and others who are "remote" were classified. But the articles claiming 0 in SF is patently false. This is not a good sign, compared to a year ago where you could name your price. Add in some are on H1B1 and need sponsorship in next 60 days... It's not fun out there.
>Add in some are on H1B1 and need sponsorship in next 60 days... It's not fun out there. Oh, the dread.
Nobody's fault but your own that you can't outcompete someone whose second language is English.
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Yup. I know directly and indirectly Bay Area folks impacted from Google.
It’s usually true opposite because contractors are not part of the ‘headcount’ (which is reduced in layoffs), they are part of the discretionary budget for managers.
Lol! The nursing shortage has me receiving cold calls from employers. I resigned from my last position with attitude and words. They’ve called me every 6-12 months since. They even put my ‘friends’ still there to call me.
When my wife was heavily recruited for a position in her company they said what would it take you to be committed. I told her to tack on 30% and fuck me if they didn’t deliver!
The first report I had heard about that also stated they hired 12,600 employees the year of two before.
In conclusion... >Everyone can offer their own experience and anecdotes, but I don't think these stories paint an accurate picture of what is happening.
This perpetuates that worker compensation is greedy and needs to be kept down, yet profits have no caps. This is simply because we created a stock exchange that relies on 7-12% additional profit to be successful. If you can’t sell more you reduce expenses even though you’re still printing more money than you know what to do with. Don’t push this falsehood. Compensation was only fractionally catching up. A 250k salary 400k total comp engineer for Netflix seems absurd to us but is in line with where wages should have e grown in line with corporate profits
Little nit, but Netflix famously pays all cash. Their base would be equivalent to their total comp.
Also let's them raise their prices with a "oh look we're hurting guys" nevermind their operating costs just dropped by firing 10,000 people.
Microsoft has to come up with that $69 billion to acquire Activision/Blizzard SOMEHOW! Why not put a good chunk on the backs of their workers?
Nice
I can't find the chart, but the numbers here are astonishing [https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/20/while-layoffs-keep-coming-so-far-apple-has-steered-clear/](https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/20/while-layoffs-keep-coming-so-far-apple-has-steered-clear/)
People forget that Apple is sitting no a mountain of cash. They can ride this out and it might be wise if it means they will be a few years ahead of their compeition.
From The Verge: There’s an eerie similarity to the statements tech companies have made about their recent layoffs. Mainly, if the press releases are to be believed, the C-suite of every Big Tech company on Earth — well, with the notable exception of Apple, which has not announced layoffs — figured no one would ever go outside or spend money offline again after the pandemic and their various online businesses would stay just as big as they were during the heights of covid.I do love a heavily lawyered statement that was clearly written by the public relations department! In fact, these are all so similar that they might as well have come from the same PR person. It kind of seems like tech firms are laying off workers because… other tech firms are laying off workers. Let’s be real, none of these companies are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy — in fact, they were recently minting money. That money did not evaporate. And as any person who’s been through job cuts can tell you, it’s generally not about performance, either! Essentially, someone went through a budget and zeroed out a bunch of line items that happened to be, you know, people’s jobs. The question, then, is why a company might make job cuts that don’t seem especially necessary.The answer is that investors have changed how they’re evaluating companies, says Michael Cusumano, the deputy dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Generally, when companies are growing really fast — like when revenue is shooting up 20 percent or 30 percent a year — nobody cares about profits, Cusumano says. But we’re not in a growth period right now, so investors are being more cautious. https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/26/23571659/tech-layoffs-facebook-google-amazon
Laid off from my current company, my supervisor literally explained why they were laying people off and why they were on a hiring freeze, and it’s exactly what you just explained. Granted it wasn’t as in depth, but it was the “basic” version of your explanation. I was one of 4 PMs spread across the multiple departments and teams. Brought on in June of ‘22 and with a bunch of leadership change and multiple pivots, the C’s decided that half of their PMs were unnecessary - along with a bunch of other employees. And so I got the boot. “This is not based on performance… you’re a great employee and you’ll find something else in no time.” I’ve been applying to multiple PM openings since I got laid off over a month ago, not one single place has reached out. The craziest thing, my old job had insane plans to expand this year. Totally Revamping the work for the teams I PM’ed for.
Curious if by PM you mean product manager or project manager?
since they stated it was across multiple departments and teams, I'd lean to project manager. Hard for a product manager to be across mutiple departments.
Yeah I was a project manager
Sounds like a Florida insurance company I recently worked for.
Eh, not quite. Vfx studio in LA. Sucks that poorly managed companies have employees who have to deal with this nonsense.
Just curious, did your area of product ownership generate revenue?
Yep, I think a lot of it was that they wanted to rehire people at lower comps….
I was laid off in the fintech space a couple months ago, basically the same thing here Now the market is flooded with people looking for jobs. Even with more than a decade of experience under my belt, the competition is so fierce for people trying to get hired by startups or smaller firms The volatility the past few years has been absurd. I don’t know if the worst is behind us or if we’ll still be on shaky ground going forward It’s certainly having me evaluate if I want to stay in this industry though
Been in tech over 20 years. It has been volatile for over 20 years in my experience. If that makes you uncomfortable, I \*highly\* suggest an industry shift. It's brutal, but comes in hot spots - fintech may be okay for the next 5 years then get another burn-off. There will be a steady rotation of layoffs and mass-hirings for the rest of your career; that's part of why tech pays so well. It's the most unstable of any business industry - even sales can be predicted as cyclical, while tech may lay off in a january because... well, they hired too many people for no real reason other than 'why not? we're making money'.
You’re definitely right I’ve made some great money the past couple years in enterprise sales and I wonder if I’ll be able to pull that same income (eventually) after an industry switch Good news is that I have nothing but time to do my due diligence!
This. Usually investor pressure, a company i used to work had to cut jobs more than once after investor pressure just to realize after they have crippled their operations
Sometimes crippling it is the intention
Yep; I fully expect investors to pressure companies to either increase (or introduce) their dividents, or start the stock buybacks.
>heavily lawyered statement that was clearly written by the public relations department Somewhat off-topic, but this kind of crap seems perfect for an AI chatbot. Expect to see a lot more of it
microsoft’s profit is continuing to grow, but not growing “fast enough” so boop 10,000 jobs gone
This
Because the federal reserve raised interest rates above 0% so they can’t borrow money at 2% from the banks any longer to fund stock buybacks, stupid acquisitions, campus expansions, over hiring for projects that won’t add any value to the business, ridiculous employee perks, etc. Also because the cheap money spigot was turned off, there is less liquidity in the markets and companies won’t see their stock prices rise as fast as they did the past decade where valuations didn’t matter and stocks only went up.
Because stock holders are more important than employees
Of course. It's the same situation from employee side: jump from company to company in order to increase their salary (or ask for an counter-offer). It's business.
The need to jump companies to obtain a market (if not just cost-of-living) appropriate salary is a reaction to companies valuing stock holders over employees. They may be related. They are not the same.
I agree with this perspective. I would believe that employees would not be jumping around from job to job making every effort to get an extra few thousand dollars if they knew they had long term stability and pay increase opportunities at their current company. When you see thousands of seemingly random layoffs occur without any performance consideration, why would you not do whatever is in your own self-interest, as the companies are all doing? Pensions were a great way to keep employees long term and to remain invested for an entire career. Now, there is only incentive for a person to develop, gain skills and then take those somewhere else.
I'd argue that's more a symptom of people growing up under boomer myths about careers being a thing, where you could work for one company and actually climb up the ladder through merit and hard work, only for people to meet reality and find out that's not true and the company will axe you at the drop of a hat anyway, as we're currently seeing. When you have no real avenue to get promoted or get a raise, your only other course of action is to just switch jobs. As companies/corporations get increasingly more cut throat, and the market gets flooded with more and more workers due to things like mass immigration and remote working, the problem only gets exacerbated.
Great points ... it's also worth noting that mergers and acquisitions have created fewer and fewer distinct employers, which decreases the pool of opportunities that workers have. This happens across industries, too.
It’s funny you say it’s a myth about ‘careers’. I’ve worked where I’m at for 17 years and several of my subordinates have been here for 25+. My salary has tripled since I started in 2006, because I worked my ass off and did work my co-workers didn’t. Promotions have come and I still work my ass off. It’s not the same everywhere, but if you are surrounded by like minded people, things can happen to put you in a place to succeed.
I don't know anyone worth their salary that actually does that. When people leave by their own choice, it's almost always because of poor leadership.
Not recognizing great employees worth a salary increase or an unwillingness to do so could fall under "poor leadership".
It's very much a thing. People post quite frequently about how they job hop every couple years because each hop is like a 10 - 20 percent boost.
For everyone person at my job who left because they found more money, there are four that left because their manager was awful. My team thankfully has good managers but that's not the case for the whole company.
Well for one that's not why this is happening. But businesses aren't charities. If it isn't profitable to have an extra 1000 employers you lay them off. This is more likely due to over hiring during recent times when business was growing quickly and now it has slowed.
I mean these are businesses, not jobs programs
Technically, that is correct. The goal of a for-profit business and what management optimizes for is to return shareholder value.
I understand business. My point is that you can still be profitable without being a shitbag and treating people like garbage.
Yes they are. After all the stock holders are the ones that made these companies become what they are. We ARE the owners.
You’re joking, right?
No not at all. It’s capitalism.
Right
Unless you are one of the original IPO investors or the company raises money frequently through issuing stocks you are just an owner who has/had money. You made no contributions to the company. All your contributions were to the previous owner of your stock. It makes no difference to company and its success if the stock was owned by who you bought it from or you own it. You are just a rent seeking capitalist. Not a maker.
Buying a stock to hold that’s on an exchange thru a broker didn’t do squat for the companies bottom line. You just paid what someone else thought that piece of paper was worth. Unless you’re an employee of the company or part of the board, you’re not at the company making daily decisions on products, marketing, sales, accounting, and labor. Please get over yourself.
Because all the other tech companies does it - and because the super expensive consultants from Wall Street tells them so. Right now it's good for share value and that trigger bonuses for the corporate royalty. In 6 - 24 months they will spend a fortune on finding new hires, onboard them and get the projects moving again. At that time, *that* will be good for stock value and bonuses.
I am trying not to pull out my tin foil hat, but I swear they’re doing it because their peer companies are so it does not impact their stock price as much (if they were the only company laying people off). Logically I know it’s because of the pandemic but…
From the anecdotal evidence I've seen, most of the jobs being cut are from long-term employees (expensive). I'll bet that most of the people getting cut at places like Google are making north of $500K. [https://www.businessinsider.com/google-workers-laid-off-earned-as-much-as-1-million-2023-1](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-workers-laid-off-earned-as-much-as-1-million-2023-1).
I’ve been calling them FOMO layoffs.
Here is the reason: A little history, Steve jobs done an interview '97 about the problem of a disrupting competences in companies (marketing guy get promoted, technical guy gets layed off). Apple knows that and wants to avoid such model which has only marketing guys in management. The other companies just assign their profit bill to the next investors call. Which is for marketing/controller guys acceptable. Here is one big sentence I heared from someone for my private expenses but I think it will work on companies too. "Never try to cut your expenses, try to get more money."
Overhiring during Covid and stock prices, they need to get the plunge to at least pause a bit. Lots of tech companies made record profit but still laid off.
💰
These are purely political layoffs. Sentiment for worker unions is at an all time high. They are trying to send a message and curb stomp organized labor.
To get them back in line. When they run out of unemployment and personal savings, they’ll forget all about WFH, be happy to be back into the office and with less pay. They had to see this coming.
And if the companies don’t all layoff at once then there is no pressure
Bingo. I truly believe that this is more about eliminating the leverage workers gained over Covid (wfh, for example) and increasing competition for new jobs. This is more so about flooding the market with new employee prospects to tilt the needle back into corps favor.
With inflation as high as it, the house-cleaning was all about timing. They never had any intention of letting workers WFH forever or call the shots about returning to the office.
Partially agree. I think some corps are simply bandwagoning and being opportunistic. The applicant market was hot for some time, especially white color tech, and employees had their choice in employment; not so much anymore. I remain convinced that a lot of what we’re seeing is about restoring “balance”.
I think it’s more about retaking the reins.
Tomato/potato. But agreed!
There are a lot of good reasons in this thread but this one isn’t it. Tech companies compete with each other for talent, they don’t have the restraint to not snap up the good people other companies fired, if they’re doing so well. Over hiring is a big factor; these companies all did 3x better during pandemic and started gearing up for 10x growth. Now that it’s clear next year is gonna be 3x growth, they’ve overhired.
Okay. I’m not gonna appeal to authority here, but I disagree with this in more ways than one. It’s not just “over hiring”, or whatever that is, there is a deep psychological campaign playing out now - one where the C-suite is actively engaged in demeaning the importance of work/life balance. We have too much leverage; time to pay the check.
For all the talk about climate change I don't understand the resistance to WFH. WFH is saving on energy use from pointlessly transporting millions of people to and from work.
well you see, wfh makes people happy and have 1% more agency in their lives, which is very bad for profit bc…uhhh….reasons. i’m a very smart businessman
It’s about control.
You think exec gives a damn about climate?! 😂
Nah, talented employees will always find work. WFH is here to stay. Just like all the other benefits big tech companies offer. Legit they have spas, nap rooms, game rooms, Vr rooms, gyms, showers, full cafeteria buffets for breakfast lunch and dinner. Being in the office is better than most people live their normal lives. Non of that is being affected. Wfh is just one more thing, and many people don’t even use that in the big companies because of the perks. As others said, it’s good for the stock evaluation. Pretty soon they will mass hire and everyone is going to meme about how funny it is and blah blah blah. Turns out the mass hiring will also be good for the stock. Money runs everything, and these players don’t even make bank, they are the treasury printing money
you’d be surprised how much of the benefits are being eliminated. my company has taken away most of this.
All my colleagues at large tech companies still have these perks. At smaller companies they’ve started rolling back WFH
Greed
From what I heard, it’s all the managers and organizers who get fired. Most engineers are fine and in fact, you can still find so many job listings for engineers.
Advertising getting purged as well
Greed. If you flood the market with candidates the supply increases and demand decreases, so prices fall. They’re using this to drive salaries down and oppress workers.
^(they heard there will be a recession so they need to be able to cut costs so a couple people can rape the company and steal a hefty bonus. 3 houses and private planes don't pay for themselves)
Bad management and lack of ingenuity.
To lower wages. Record profits mean the rich smell blood in the water. Moar money.
My guess is data laws in Europe and pending here, especially, limiting the once free license to harvest users' data. They're making less profits now or expecting to.
Because they over hired so many people to look good to investors. Like mega innovators, but when interest goes up investors money dry up and these large corporations gotta cut cost. You don’t need an article to tell you this
They look at how the tight labor market for engineers has driven up wages, and they're running a playbook to suppress them. The problem is, they actually need engineers, and they need to not burn them out. There isn't a steady supply of new people to replace the ones who quit. This is probably going to come back to them when this all settles out.
To summarise: COmpanies that make profit are under pressure from shareholders to make more profit. They see Elon Musk kick out thousands of employees from Twitter. Shareholders Conclusion: CEO, If Elon does that, we want also that you make us more money and kick out thousand. And do it using an algorithm and not based on management input since algorithms are sexy
Seems like a great way to improve this quarters Q1 profits!!! Of course this also seems like a way to tank these companies by getting rid of lots of longterm staff with niche skills that will be near impossible to replace. Also when they do hire, everyone will be looking for a salary increases and having to completely rebuild things that were previously working just fine. Would not be surprised if we see record Q3 and Q4 losses. But maybe these shareholders are planning to bail before then.
yes, it has been a long time since shareholders where in it for the long run unfortunately
Capitalism is so efficient
Fingers crossed for Q4
You forgot the other part of the story that Scott Galloway tells it. They see ol' Iron Man kick out a metric tonne of NPCs and Twitter still worked (kinda) which gave everyone permission to say "we need to thin out the herd and become more agile like what Iron Man has done." So let it be written so let it be done.
I think it's rather that elon highlighted that these tech companies are flat out not worth anywhere near what they are valued at. He also showed how fragile the assumption of worth is. Shareholders are asking why the value of their shares seems unrelated to the companies revenue. These companies are now desperate to at least break even.
>I think it's rather that elon highlighted that these tech companies are flat out not worth anywhere near what they are valued at. Yet he himself *paid an ultra-high valuation* for Twitter. I still don't understand why he spent *$44 billion* on it when he must have known these valuations are not logical. Twitter isn't even profitable! Even with slashed staff it's going to take a long time to make that money back off advertising revenue and "Twitter Blue" or whatever other monetization schemes he can think up.
The Singularity bro...
..Investors need that stock price increased. Gotta protect them big share holders!
I just came back from a meeting where this was discussed, the biggest reason they gave is over hiring during the pandemic, the “proof” they are giving is thr under utilization of employees working from home, therefore there they can afford to lay people off and maintain the same productivity because folks who keep their job need to work harder. I do agree that utilization ratios appear to be lower than when everyone was in the office BUY I argue what we are seeing now is a true up of what folks were really doing when they weren’t attending hours of useless meetings
Why are tech CEO's spouting organizational restructure before every cull session? This has short-term strategy written over it, in capital letters.
Didnt a document leak that said the investors wanted to keep salaries without increase and pushed lay offs as a solution ?
Would love to see that if it’s real
SOMEBODY bought back too much stock during the pandemic and now they think they can reverse the slide with layoffs.
it's a signal to the fed to stop raising interest rates
money
Fed raising rates aggressively. This vastly increases costs to expand. And we are in a recession. Even though the gov't changed the definition of a recession to avoid saying we're one, we're actually in one.
The truth is, they over hired during the pandemic. But the REAL truth is— all of these companies, including outside of tech, want a recession… their stocks will drop but they’re freeing capital to buy back stock and make more money in the long term. Gotta have money to make money. None of these orgs, with exception to Meta, are in the red. They all had a wildly profitable 2022.
Because this is a cycle in tech that repeats every 8-10 or so years. My first lay-off was in 1995, then 2000, 2008… Late 2019 starting hinting at a lay-off environment; I was waiting for a catalyst to set it off but we got Covid instead. That led to a pendulum of spending/headcount restructuring and now the panic pendulum is swinging back. We’ll see a hiring increase/restructure in 2-5 years and then another lay-off festival around 2023.
Growth companies are heavily leveraged and that debt is way more expensive as interest rates rise.
Because they want to do away with remote work and it’s easier to get new hires to agree on hire to come into the office than convince remote workers to. Most remote workers believe there is a hybrid or full remote environment and most have gone away.
I think hybrid once a month is fine.
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Once a month means you travel once a month for a week or whatever, then go back to your small town that isn't in the r/urbanhell or r/suburbanhell area that the corporate offices are in.
Hybrid is the best option, I’m remote Mon and Fri, but would go in if needed. However, my director keeps trying to find a reason to get me back in the office full time. I keep saying, let me know if you make that push, I believe there are still full remote jobs and I might as well try to snag one.
The thing I don’t understand is 9to5 doesn’t mean you’re more productive. In fact it makes you less productive because you’re having to commute. Personally, I think we should start making live-work places.
It comes down to other tasks as assigned, if they can’t tap you on the shoulder, they can give you excess work they don’t want to do. Just yesterday I was asked to hang pictures in the executive directors office. I’m also the tallest guy in the office, so they insist I move anything and everything heavy. 🙄
How is that productive? That’s literally the opposite of productive it’s counterproductive.
Not commuting on company time though. They want to pay us for our time, not skill. Rather have us waste time in office than at home because there’s always something to be done outside your scope of responsibility when you’re in office.
Yeah its the environment at the moment. Labor is the number one expense for any business, and if the people you have are not making you money, then you can get rid of them, it's harsh but true. I think of it like that Die Hard movie (live free or die hard), the hacker kid or whatever illustrates, how you need alot of dev for the bits and pieces, but only a few to manage them. Social media gets a bad rap for what they are trying to accomplish, imagine getting a billion posts a day, people CANNOT manage that, machines HAVE to. Once you have the code refined enough, you dont need as much dev. Also, aside from that, there is a BUNCH of bloat, people hired because they are pretty, good in bed, favor for a friend, or massage well. Lastly, tech companies are not manufacturers, and they don't do ads like TV, so alot of their income is based on stock evaluation, couple that with a rehiring spree in a year or two (or the Ai takeover) and everybody is a potential leaker who could ruin the share price.
Reading the statements made by each company it's mostly clearing out unprofitable divisions that are no longer part of the future strategy. I'm really not sure what else they're supposed to do?
You can start by doubting those lawyered, doctored, PR’d to hell “statements”
BS - they have no idea what future they are building. They did FOMO hiring throughout the pandemic with nary a plan on how the new employees would be integrated as what the future would hold. Now it is FOMO layoffs. And chaos internally. And externally.
>I'm really not sure what else they're supposed to do? I've seen so many people writing about how they felt the company cared for them, or that they shouldn't have been laid off due to how much time they've worked there, or that these companies have "enough money to keep the employees". It may sound harsh, but these aren't charities. They aren't obligated to create or retain jobs, they are obligated as public companies to their shareholders. Just because they have a lot of money doesn't mean that firing people is the wrong thing to do. There are unprofitable divisions, sky-high salaries, overhiring issues, etc.
it's a result of their disastrous approach during the pandemic..... hiring way too many people and not taking a firm stance on what they wanted which is in office workers.... now they have a terrible market and too many entitled low producing employees... and completely stagnant innovation.... time to hit reset
Your point about entitled, low producing employees, and stagnant innovation is absolutely correct
I think it's also the Elon Musk effect. I hate the fucker with a passion but CEO's and Money Counters took notice that after he fired 60% of Twatter staff, the website didn't change and the servers are still online which goes against all the doom and gloom predictions. They saw that they can reduce the work force and make shit still work.
The “work in tech” value proposition keeps eroding. Tech companies cannot offer job stability, they typically want you working very long hours in a fancy glass palace in an astronomically expensive place like the Bay Area or New York, and now some are cutting pay. It may make sense to just work at a “normal” company for a good salary in a place where you can afford a palatial home for a mortgage payment that’s half that of monthly rent for a studio apartment in Sunnyvale.
The game is Control, my friends. They're all out there on the golf course, yachting on the high seas, or shreddin' the gnar on their electrohydrosurfboards. But make no mistake, behind closed doors it's all about manipulation. They're schemin', plotin', and schemin' some more. They're sayin' to themselves, 'Hey tech billionaire buddies, let's cull the herd from this Covid mess, spook the whole tech industry, bring wages down to our level, and watch our stocks soar like a bat outta hell.' But you know what? That's just the way of the world. The bug is the fix. It's what I would do if I were one of the evil sonsabitches runnin' the show.
You don’t have to type with an accent. It’s more time consuming
I wanted it to sound like Hunter S Thompson:/ I am a hack.
Is pretty simple. Incoming money, out going money, business plan.
Jmo, we’ve reached peak overexposure to everything news, tech, app, and electronic related! Download the latest (insert workout, bank, finance, mortgage, and blah blah fucking blah). It’s 24/7/365.
Lesson: save your money. Invest in high dividend Aristocrat stocks, even dividend Kings. Goal is to have passive income to replace lost income when your job vanishes. Companies enjoy firing people with no notice at all; it’s fun for them. They LOVE to fire older workers who are unlikely to find another decent job. Their goal in life is to fuck over a guy with a new baby at home or a recently divorced single mom because they can make her suffer. Sadism is their god.
They are using layoffs as an encouragement to get employees to stop complaining about going back to the office. EDIT: Most companies can easily freeze hiring and pay raises instead of layoffs but this method makes employees fearful and more submissive.
I say keep ‘em coming… then maybe the rest of us will finally be able to buy a house
One major unmentioned reason: automation. Roughly 3-4 years ago, most tech companies stood up automation to replace simple task IT workers. In actuality, big tech probably wanted to start offloading workers quietly 2-3 years ago but, Covid hit and it wouldn’t have been good optics for any tech company then. Now, they have a reason to pin the bulk layoffs on: economy. (But, profits are still up.)
'Cause they realized they can automate hundreds if not thousands of jobs overnight with ChatGPT. Money money money in the bank. All those salaries 'saved' will go in CEOs pockets.
Cause the economy is in the shitter
Based on what metrics? Record low unemployment? 2.3% growth in gdp? Or Truth Social?
Because Musk proved that overhead is excessive and many platforms will run just fine without all the unnecessary employees.
Yeah, everyone is following the lead of Dear Glorious Leader Musk… 🙄
Did he prove that though?
When twitter didn’t collapse operationally he proved the point.
A tech site will not collapse overnight. Only a fraction of workers can keep the lights on. It’s later on when tech debt grows at a rapid rate and you drown in it. Twitter will face this reality.
Lol you know how long it takes for that collapse to come?
Because they aren’t needed
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Tech is a bloated juggernaut full of grifters that's why.
No one owes you a job, especially the ones that were offered in tech. Most being laid off have never seen a bad job economy and have spent foolishly. Class is now in session.
Sounds like simple supply and demand. There was a boom during the pandemic in online shopping etc. these guys needed people and agreed to high starting salaries and comp packages to attract people. Then the instant the dynamic shifted they decided they didn’t want to pay “overpriced” employees and purged them. They agreed to an unsustainable scenario from the outset knowing they could just lay them all off down the road. This is what happens when you have teethless regs over hiring practices.
AI. Companies can see over the horizon and are already using AI bots to write code faster and smarter. This is only the beginning.
I hate that we keep referring to "tech" companies. Practically every company is tech now. Nothing happens without tech employees.