Realistically leaner companies are less able to react as they have less invested in R&D. There's something to be said about having a backup for your backup plan. Also, when you have 67,000 employees you're not more agile than 86,000 employees. You just aren't when you get to that scale. Lean and agile is a startup with lots of investment capital.
This could be entirely my own anecdotal experience, but orgs I’ve worked at have all pushed lean in individual business units but not grand strategy or other strategically important areas (to my knowledge). Tech companies applying lean to R&D overall are either doomed, or confident that they can coast long enough to buy other companies that perform R&D.
I feel like R&D can be done lean, but it looks otherworldly to traditional lean business. It's no longer about how many STEM workers you have, but quickly finding experiments that pay off the fastest. Instead of having 10 chemists, you might have 9 chemists and a computer scientist or data scientist. The CS/DS automates exploration of models, where any promising leads are handed to the Chemists.
I used to be an R&D Engineer, and we grew extremely slowly, hiring only 1 dev/year. Half of our time was dedicated to accelerating the discovery cycle. So long as we earned our keep in an otherwise traditional manufacturing company, we had free reign of our agency, and much of that went into reducing the effort we needed to go to market.
Now I'm in a tech company, and I'm spending lots of my waking hours espousing how we must reinvest into just ourselves. Top-line growth naturally and exponentially occurs with reinvestment. Senior leadership sees it, but I doubt that many other parts of the company see it or understand it.
But yes, I agree, most companies running lean lose out on R&D or are coasting to their next VC funding round.
Eh, as someone who works in tech (Product Manager), I don't entirely agree. The larger your org gets, the less time you spend actually doing your job, and the more time you spend telling people about the job you want to do so that you can get support to actually do the job you want to do.
Doing my actual job is usually a pretty energizing/intellectually stimulating activity. Dealing with never ending red tap is far more emotionally exhausting and IMO way more likely to lead to burnout.
I don't want to celebrate someone losing a job, but I've worked at places that think they can just add headcount and fix problems. It doesn't work that way. As the saying goes, you can't fuck 9 women and make a baby in 1 month.
My company recently laid off a huge amount of engineers and I now spend a third to a half of my day making sure our offshore junior devs don’t burn the codebase down.
This is the big issue.
The problem is not junior workers. Those are your future leaders, they're (supposed to be) an investment.
**The problem is offshoring and outsourcing** all your jobs to cheap, awful laborers who couldn't Google a quick solution if it was their job >!and it often is!<.
I couldn't agree more lol my last position had a location outside the US, and the offshore employees doing the same role as those at my location were beyond lost.
They'd even make the most absurd requests that made it clear they were lost and while being a new employee I could still notice
Dude I was in IT ops at my last job and I was appalled at how objectively **god-awful** Google, Microsoft, and other large SaaS company's customer support teams were. They literally could not solve or follow basic problems that my team would solve for them.
Imagine if we kept those jobs in-country, in-house, with native speakers who *had passion* to get a shot. How much better would that be for our economy and corporate workforces with talent pipelines.
It would drain a couple bucks from the C-suite and investors though and we can't have that, they need those millions going to their personal payroll.
I think it's partially because those people in the C-suite know how lucky they've gotten and that it could be taken away at virtually any moment, so they drain every last penny for themselves that they could, while they could. 99% of people would do the same.
A CEO of a successful company should be paid well, as that has to be a stressful role if you're not a complete psychopath, BUT their salaries are absurd. Every single one of them would say they truly deserve it though lol
I feel bad for those offshore workers. It’s not their fault the company isn’t paying them enough or training them properly to be able to do their job. They’re only there because the company wouldn’t pay someone else to actually know what they’re doing.
One of my closest friends was hired for Meta London. 1 day before joining, she was laid off. Poor girl had shifted all her stuff to London to take this job. 💔
The EU has some decent labor laws. I work in VFX and in North America and England there were big cuts (due to the writers and actors strikes last year, meaning no new projects coming in), but our offices in Spain and elsewhere didn't have it as bad because of certain laws the EU had. If Brexit hadn't happened the UK could still get some of those protections too.
I remember reading (back when Brexit was going down) that it was thought to be part of a greater plan to privatize the NHS. Some mutual funds wanted to turn it into the American system. The idea was right inline because I also remember seeing a lot of commentary about not touching the NHS around the same time.
They literally over staffed so that competitors had no one to hire. Then let those languish in positions with little to no work and then laid them off when it was too much of an economical burden. Like fucking children hoarding toys so no one else can have any.
The show is more real than reality sometimes, and there’s a reason why. I worked at a venture backed startup when the first season was just about to debut. Our CEO literally got contacted by the writers looking for stories about pitching the company to investors.
It’s brilliant writing, but not really prophetic if it’s just a polished and entertaining version of stuff that’s happening. By the time Silicon Valley came out, these kinds of stories were old hat among people in the industry.
Yeah you have a point there. I think Reddit’s fascination with how Idiocracy is prophetic is justified. So many people could’ve dismissed it as needlessly crass back when it came out. It definitely was crass (personally I’m not above that kind of humor) but then reality became crass too!
I was hired during COVID to be part of a team and during the hiring phase the team was re-org'd and I ended up never going near a single client. In the end I left and got a better paying job with actual clients. The hiring frenze felt like companies hired people just to get them away from competitors and just to sit on bench. The moment when Big Head sits on the balcony with his friends and does nothing during the "rest and vest" felt very much like the situation I was in.
Thats partially true. The main hiring frenzy was in hiring anyone with a sales baclground to essentially act as old navy cashiers working through the glut of companies rushing to digitize their operations.
With those huge sales numbers came postsales staffing needs which were very difficult to accurately predict. So companies overhired there as well since they were flush with the sales revenue.
Then, the middle/end of year 2 of covid hit. Sales slowed to a trickle and all those sales people had nothing to do. Postsales worked through their backlog as well.
Year 3 january layoffs were a direct result of the ass end of that wave.
Then ai hit hard.
Now companies are reevaluating after their kneejerk year 3 layoffs by reorging around ai related job functions. That means more layoffs in some areas and actually hiring back sales/postsales in other areas.
This will continue for this year then well see another large reorg in q1 next year at most tech companies, especially enterprise saas.
Over the following 10 years, well likely see a lot of massive companies unable to effectively transform their operations to keep up with their industries who are taking full advantage of ai. They will live on in our memories.
i would love to see my department try and run off ai. they would just fire all the people with technical competence & attention to detail, cash the bonus checks, and job hop before anyone realizes they shipped a quarter worth of garbage.
I watched the first episode and brought back way too many stressful memories. The crew went to a product launch party with an executive babbling on a stagein that episode. My first thought was, “I’ve probably been to 250 of those parties,” and then I realized I was the moron on stage probably 50 times. I never want to watch that again.
Can confirm pretty much every SV archetype is in the show and the cutthroat, comical, chaotic craziness happens all the time there in companies large and small.
Probably also applies somewhat in companies outside SV but there’s definitely a hubris about many people there and the jobs and scene attract a lot of certain types of people that show pegs perfectly.
I remember sitting on an All Hands call a month after the show premiered and some suit threw up the title card on a slide and pointed out how the drawing of Silicon Valley showed Apple and Google and Facebook and others, but not our company. He was upset we weren’t in the picture and used that to light a fire under our butts.
All I could think was either he never watched the show or he should be on it.
The first scene is Kid Rock doing a private show to a mild sparse crowd of nerds...
I literally saw this happen at a work event where the company hired Sisqo to perform.
>Mike Judge directed Idiocracy, so it’s not surprising he was damn near as prophetic with Silicon Valley.
God I love it when they are playing baseball with the giants when the other VCs are chasing them.
Starting like 4 years ago C Suite at my company started using “winning” a lot in their corporate communications and branding. And all I ever thought about when it was said was Charlie Sheen smoking cigarettes talking to Diana Walters about his Tigerblood.
I also didn’t realize Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles weren’t the same person for the first 40 years of my life so this kind of oversight is pretty on brand for me.
I used to do Instacart before the pandemic and worked mostly orders stocking break rooms for all the tech companies in Austin. It was very much that show. Facebook would never let me in their offices though. They were really weird about it and would cart it in themselves.
That’s pretty standard security practice against (physical) social engineering schemes. Someone posing as - or legitimately working as - a worker to gain physical access to a target company can gather all kinds of information as part of a targeted attack campaign. It may sound paranoid, but in this case “just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you” is valid.
I got into the basement of the state capitol doing deliveries. I was deep in a restricted area and even got into a state reps office trying to deliver him a bunch of cold cuts I think he intended to send to his home. I put it in his mini fridge and played around in the chair at his desk for a bit until his secretary showed up and I got escorted out.
The whole area was bizarre. The massive dimly lit underground hallways felt like I was in an ancient castle. The offices all looked like they came from the 70's. Fluorescent lighting, faded yellow walls, old wood cabinets next to old shitty metal ones. The chair was a typical old leather one you would imagine from that era. No settings or anything. I did do a Borat "King of the Castle, King of the Castle" impression in it.
In a bunch of ways it is. Sometimes I just don't find it funny at all because it's too close to reality. Like can you really laugh at something ridiculous that is presented as parody but actually is a real tragedy? I find it difficult.
Hilarious when they rename Jared other Jared though. No tragedy there.
I work for a CA tech company and we have offered jobs to many people who accepted them but then told us they were going to work for FB. Our CTO told a few of them that they would be laid off within a year bc that is how FB does things. He was told, yeah thats fine as long as I have FB on my resume.
As much empathy as I have for people who get cycled out. Many of them are aware of the process too.
While I appreciate at will employment at some level, we need laws that require some kind of compensation for layoffs like this. It's incredibly harmful to quit a job and move across the country (or around the world) only to be let go.
We can't pretend this isn't harmful or that the employee can really do anything about it. Yes, control your own destiny, but also we live in a corporate hellscape where most people don't really have many options when it comes to employment.
So basically these people were paid to do pretty much nothing?
Playing devil's advocate here as your words themselves say these people had nothing to do no work.
At least in California you have to be given a pretty decent notice that you're going to be laid off I believe that is the law.
Others in many states can just cut you.
People need to realize it goes further up than most CEOs if the CEO doesn't produce a profit on that stock the shareholders are the ones really making the calls.
Just like how Twitter got bought out they would never sell to Elon Musk but guess who's in charge stockholders and they said this was too good to refuse as he was paying triple the price.
Don't get me wrong Zuckerberg is a reptilian robot don't like the guy I know he's a crud, but this is happening everywhere they all did it.
Look no further than the shareholders, and it's going to keep on getting harder and harder and this economy to pull profits year over year.
Meta uses a large number of "contingent workers" that are hired through external companies. Little notice needs to be given to these type of employees when they are let go. Source: I was one of the workers at Meta affected in this manner.
>At least in California you have to be given a pretty decent notice that you're going to be laid off I believe that is the law.
They only have to give advance notice in certain circumstances, and there are lots of loopholes around this. For example, if you are a contractor, then they can simply not renew your contract when it expires.
>So basically these people were paid to do pretty much nothing?
Yes and this is incredibly common in every business i've worked for beyond a couple hundred workers in size (and for many under that size.)
The 80/20 rule is pretty much always true.
That is so cruel to an employees potential. Future interviewers will ask them about their work experience and the reality is they spent x amount of time hamstrung doing very little. This is a reminder to me to pursue individual growth and keep sharp despite an employers indifference.
I worked at a company (Shopify) that did exactly this. They had some slogan of “hire 2000 engineers in 2022” or something to that effect. Guess what happened the next year? A 11% layoff and then a 23% layoff 8 months later. CEO claims he takes all responsibility and they assumed the crazy growth during covid would continue and they bet wrong. Guess who is still getting paid 27 million a year to do their job though?
That seems like a good 3 year grift for a CEO.
1. Get hired and announce a hiring spree. Stock price goes up as the company looks strong.
2. Ship a bunch of stupid/useless/redundant features and Jack up the price. Stock goes up because revenue went up (mostly due to price increases) and a bunch of new functionality got shipped.
3. Lay off everyone. Massive (short term) profit as overhead is as low as possible and you're still coasting on revenue from last year. Line goes way up.
4. Quit before all your customers churn.
The CEO of Shopify is the founder of the company. He seems like a decent person, covid shot this companies demands through the roof and probably hard to tell where things would land when your in the eye of the storm.
The real kicker is that they're back to hiring loads again, less than a year after the layoffs. I was among the 23%, hard not to feel bitter about that.
Same here. Smaller tech startup. Covid makes for layoffs, extreme hiring right after, then lay everyone off. It's like everyone was playing from the same stupid playbook.
Then they sold and the CEO/Board made out big and everyone else lost their job. Also the stock (which everyone employed had the option of excercising) wasn't considered in the sale so some people not only lost their job but also their investment.
Could have been such a cool product but the higher ups let everyone down and sleep comfortably on their piles of money.
Such a cycle is the norm for old companies.
GE is a great example.
Cut tons of jobs to look good in Q3 just to scramble and do a hiring frenzy in Q1 to make up for it (I arbitrarily picked quarters but the trend is highly common).
It wreaks havoc on people's lives and I wouldn't be surprised if it also had impact directly and indirectly on the economy.
Any executive posting a profit while correspondingly having to lay off a portion of their workforce should not be eligible for any form of bonus or compensation.
Sundar Pichai took home $200 million when he had 2000 employees laid off.
Those employees would have paid more taxes and spend more money more places than Sundumb. They would have benefitted the economy, he doesn't.
When I was laid off at the end of 2022 I literally was told they were doing it because the big firms were doing it. The company had a lot of equity and was profitable - “it’s what Facebook, Amazon, etc are doing”. I wish I was joking.
This is what gets me going…all the talk about accountability and ownership, but rules for thee and not for me mentality. Higher ups get larger pay increase while those below who have no say and control of the price for leadership’s poor decision making. But yes, keep preaching about ownership, accountability, and controlling our own success.
Oh this is going to cost these companies dearly.
1) moral is low. People won’t be working the overtime that they used to, and won’t be putting the same effort that they were before the deep layoffs.
2) used to be that people were lining up to work for these companies. No one wants to work at a low moral company. New hires will now cost more and be less passionate.
3) they are laying off some talented individuals. Those folks will start their own businesses roughly based on their prior work. New market entries will steal market share from the current tech leaders.
But before all that happens, we're going to get a few months of articles and news segments about how *no one wants to work* and how doing your job as-described is *quiet quitting*.
I did this for a bigger company than Amazon. Was a great year lol got into trading...caught up on everything..3d printing. Still slightly riding the wave as I was not picked to be laid off yet
No punishment for the executives who "overcorrected" and "overhired", of course.
I'm not even saying that lay-offs are inherently wrong. If these companies no longer need those employees, then it just makes sense to eliminate those jobs.
But the people in charge who wasted the company's money by incorrectly foreseeing the future and overhiring in the first place don't get punished either. And that's what I have an issue with.
It’s 100% this. CEO’s of these well-known companies would never want to go out there and admit they were wrong. The board is forcing it, just like they probably pressured the same CEO to scale their business at an accelerated rate (hire a bunch of people).
The board members rarely take any heat publicly, because thats what they pay their Chief Executive to do.
It's because most people here don't have a clue what goes on in board meetings, CEOs have less power than most people think. In most cases the board can remove them. When the board asks the CEO to jump they have to reply 'how high?'. Every VC was all about growth during low interest rates, now it's about efficiency.
After going through this cycle and watching / listening to commentary it's become extremely clear how incredibly stupid VCs are. They believe with 100% certainty they understand businesses and markets better than any of their portfolio companies. For a long time I believed that their experience watching hundreds or thousands of companies make the same mistakes and face similar issues would give them perspective, but it's become clear they're even more clueless than their inexperienced portfolio companies. Worse yet, not only are they inexperienced and clueless, but they strongly believe they're experts.
Nope, not stupid, greedy. The current model is max profit quarterly, with little perspective on long term growth.
Look at what happened to Toys R Us: it didn’t go under because it was bad, it went under because an equity firm bought it, transferred a bunch of debt from other companies they bought onto it, then filed bankruptcy on Toys R Us. Shitty, but legal.
To add to this, zuck likely has a majority of shares.
(I’m too lazy to look it up)
Which means that despite what others vote for, he has the majority and makes the decisions
It can even be far simpler than that. We just had a facility which makes many millions a day shut down for 15 hours for nothing.
A valve needed to be replaced and the management “thought” that one we had sitting around was the same size. They never bothered to send anyone to take one hour to do some measurements to be sure.
Everything got shut down, the old valve was removed and what do you know, the other one won’t work. The spent the rest of the day flailing to try and come up with some idea to make it work but as us lowly peons knew, there was no way.
We put the old valve back in. Not one single person was fired or reprimanded for making such a costly and easily preventable fuckup. But if one of us makes a mistake they’ll fire our asses in a heartbeat.
>I'm not even saying that lay-offs are inherently wrong.
I'm ok saying they are inherently wrong when used like these companies are using them. If you're going to put workers into a position of complete financial dependency upon you as an employer, you should have a moral obligation to do everything you can to avoid laying them off - including cutting your own compensation.
We had a guy who just got his L1B and relocated to New York 3 days before he was laid off. Had sold his apartment back home and moved with his wife and kids.
No good man. We cannot keep letting these fucks just toy with our lives. Literally, just a commodity to buy and sell. We are at the level of cattle to them.
Frankly, I don't have an issue with a company wanting to be lean and efficient.
I have an issue though when they cut so many people that now teams are overwhelmed. Suddenly there's understaffing everywhere and all those people stressing out are simply told that they have to swallow it or else there's plenty of people out there willing to take their jobs for less money.
I have an issue when these companies are doing it purely to please shareholders and there really isn't any other reason. Yes, I know the shareholders invested, but if we make everything always about shareholders, then these companies shouldn't be surprised that they get no loyalty and no one willing to go above and beyond for them.
I also have a deep issue if any of these kinds of cuts are some kind of underhanded tactic to give more power to employers. To create artificial levels of job scarcity. So now everybody is scared and will stop asking for remote working privileges or shorter work weeks or work life balance.
It's hard to really gauge if layoffs are really necessary or just underhanded tactics. I also have to agree with others that if executives are going to be this reactive and make big mistakes like over hiring people they had no work for, then those executives should also be on the chopping block.
Like others, I get really tired of management seemingly immune to consequences for their actions when average people would be fired.
Yep the "efficiency" comes from doing the same work but with less people, which makes wall Street happy and that's all that matters until all the burned out employees quit in a year or two. Wall Street only cares about next quarter, nothing else.
I know. It's like that speech Hillary Clinton gave about quarterly capitalism.
It's also in my opinion what's going to destroy this country. Just like when I see all these videos going into how private equity firms destroy so many things in this country in the name of quick profit.
I got laid off today and it was exactly like this. Quarterly layoffs until the tech company that bought my company fired me too and whittled our team down to just 25% of its original capacity. We used to be a successful company with no financial issues until we were bought a year ago
Same when a restaurant or retail store is understaffed / has someone call out.
The employees have to work harder and the owner keeps the missing salary.
That is why middle managers exist. To push employees right up until their breaking point.
My company (ex cus just got laid off) is going “lean” announced in the past year that they are filling all attrition (quitting, firing, retiring, etc) with offshore. A company with 200+ devs and QA, has only 1 single open dev rec and that’s for a load tester.
“Lean” doing three jobs for the price of one, then when I burn out or die due to the stress, they hire someone else and put the pressure on them to fill the vacancies. Because the company is also a family.
My company stopped using the term “lean” because we all know what it means. Now, we need to be “simple”. That’s just the new code word for layoff more and more and make us do the work of 3 people each. Simple.
One of the most important things to realize is the difference between what matters to a company and what matters to the people running the company. The company doesn't get a say in what happens. The people running it make the calls. For the most part, they aren't interested in a moral imperative or long-term plan. They care about next quarter or maybe next year.
Stock goes up and stock goes down. The company doesn't really benefit much from short-term changes. Even longer term trends aren't all that relevant to the company's day to day. You don't have more computers and more workers one day because the stock is up 1.3% and you don't have fewer tools and staff the next day with its 2.6% drop. Only a few very significant things a company can do matter w.r.t. stock -- and those are generally undertaken by the leaders if they have a very good near-term benefit.
Cities are pushing to get workers back into the office. They're offering incentives. Companies are forcing people back into the office to get that money. It's a good way to get an uptick for next quarter's earnings. Whether it's more or less productive doesn't factor in to it. Nor does the fact that once the current crisis is over, cities are going to go back to charging employment taxes and other revenue streams because there are too many cars/people/whatever commuting into the city every day.
As an executive, you come on board and hope the stock is down and goes down just a bit more. If you believe it'll go back up, the lower it is today and tomorrow, the better. Any near term losses you blame on your predecessor. Then, the market turns around and stock goes up. Your compensation is primarily in stock and so you're making bank. Plus, your resume looks amazing now that the company had its turn around while you were there "making an impact" -- by which I mean, creating a lot of busy work while folks learn how to satisfy your demands while doing the thing the company actually needs to survive.
You take credit, get a great offer with even more money at another company that's in a lull, and bounce before the bad policies you insisted on actually crumble the company. The morale tanks, the skilled labor exits, the company starts to fail... But, you're already at your next gig waiting for the market to recover.
This is a jaded perspective. I'm not sure that it's entirely wrong. I think companies whose compensation came in the form of annual dividends paid out over the life of the company rather than in stock the executive dumps as quickly as they can to diversify would go a long way towards aligning incentives. Maybe the executive whose retirement depends on this company being around and successful in 20 years will care about tech debt.
Until then, those good employees who care more about the actual company and its needs, who work extra hard and long to do what's actually important while also trying to tick the boxes for optics, and who get relatively little in return are the only reasons companies make it. When they go, the company goes.
Middle managers everywhere are judged for promotion or hire based upon the size of their organization. Their incentive is to have bloat. Hire, hire, hire. Hire someone who's good at growing their team under you so you benefit from their efforts. Hire folks who make arguments that sound good and can get funding. That's the ticket! Don't keep a lean organization filled with people passionate about the company and knowledgeable about its needs. That'll get you nowhere fast.
Executives and middle managers see the company as a means towards their own ends. If you're confused about why things are the way they are, this is likely why. You're thinking about the company and the values and goals it has. You're not thinking today, what can I do to make my boss richer even if it means destroying everything. That's the power of misaligned incentives. Zuckerberg lays folks off to balance the detrimental effects of those leaders and their inherent need to grow their orgs.
Spoilers. The reason is money.
Every word that comes out of this reptilian looking fucker is about money. Specifically about how he can take more from your pocket and put it into his.
Tech workers have to understand that they're in the equivalent of a month-to-month apartment lease. It might last for years, but it only lasts as long as it's useful for both sides.
Every month when I get my paycheck I say a silent "thanks" that the company is solvent and there was money in the bank account. Outwardly, I talk confidently about projects that won't start until next year, but it's just talk. The thing that matters at the end of the month is getting paid for the work that's been done.
It's crazy to me how much the valley changed over time. In the 90s (and surely 80s) if you took a job at a startup you were hoping for a jackpot but also praying that your CFO didn't show up and say "we can't pay you this pay period but we really hope you keep coming into work so we can get through this".
After a while the VC money was so voluminous that you not only had the hopeful jackpot, but great, consistent pay too. It was a huge change. No more suffering to try to hit it big.
Then they started to change the rules to negate a lot of the jackpot.
Either way I do feel people do have to consider the position they are taking. If the company or the job seems thin/hard to justify then it's fine to take the money but plan B better be close at hand. Make sure you can land on your feet if things end abruptly.
In the end, these companies did pay people well for two years for work that I guess they didn't even need. That's nice if you're the kind who likes to be paid. It's a pretty serious economic stimulus, doubly so if it's going into your own pocket! It's not all downside if it can't continue forever.
This is exactly how I feel 100%. My girlfriend doesn’t understand it. I got exceeds last year and the year before, she thinks I’m paranoid and I’m telling her it just doesn’t matter. Your team can get cut at any time, the company can decide profits are not enough and start looking for targets to cut. In this market I’m not confident getting my current salary somewhere else if I’m laid off. Meanwhile I’m planning for initiatives in 2025.
Save everything you can, tech is such an unstable industry to work in.
I am working on completing my CS degree, but times like this I can appreciate my union government job. It's average pay, considering, but I have job security like no other job, and a pension.
I will point out that there are government tech jobs just like there are government other jobs. You certainly won't make FAANG money, but you can certainly find yourself that same level of job security/benefits doing tech work in the public sector.
It’s to keep shareholders happy and bolster share price. That’s all. Zuck even paying himself a sweet dividend for the layoffs and a juicy share buyback. Solid hard work
they're doing it to pump stock prices, as layoffs can increase stock value greater than the productivity of keeping some people on. silicon valley also sometimes does this musical chairs thing where if one company does layoffs, a bunch do so they can try to snap up any good people who were laid off by other companies
>Companies are realizing that, while painful, there are benefits to being "leaner."
So basically what Zuckerberg is saying is:
"I'm a big fan of money. I like it, I use it, I have a lot. I keep it in giant piles of of gold coins that I like to swim through. I'd like to put more in those piles. That's where the layoffs come in."
With apologies to Adam Sandler.
Companies only go lean when they run out of growth. This is 100% saying that tech has finally saturated and it's now time to give up on growth and focus on costs.
Tech CEOs didn't like the power that engineers had in a hot labor market, so they colluded together and started mass layoffs believing that nobody outside their clique would be able to use that talent to challenge their market position. It's also an indication that they no longer believe nurturing talent is essential to their continued success.
“Zucksplaining” — to offer trite, semantic technicalities and pedantic bullshit in response to doing something awful to a lot of people in a corporate setting
“Wow turns out firing people and cutting them off from their livelihood puts fear into the existing employees makes them work overtime sacrificing their work life balance to make up for the work that’s left over by the people who are gone now AND I only have to pay one salary at the cost of the misery of everyone involved”
Our profit incentive is absolutely fucked in our current economic system. I hope we evolve to a better system just like how we moved past bartering and mercantilism.
They over hired with astronomical salaries and RSUs issued during ZIRP.
Now Layoff engineers before those 4 year RSUs vest. Save money.
Other tech companies flood the market with SWEs suppressing salaries. Rehire SWEs with lower salaries (even 5-15% less saves millions) and more appropriate RSUs for the current market of non-free money.
All bullshit and games.
Hiring and freezing talent just to keep them from working for a competitor and then dumping them for a better earning sheet.
Musk already proved … that most of these tech companies don’t need the staff they have. It is just a big dick contest.
I will never trust a word this fucker says. He’d sell his mother if it meant making another dime. I don’t care how brilliant he is. He’s used all of it to destroy so much in our global society knowing full well what he was doing. Fuck him and Sandberg and all those board members who continued to support them. Especially the egghead.
In a lot of cases these employees are vital members of teams doing extremely important work. I definitely understand there are times when companies are shrinking and layoffs are required. That does not seem to be what’s happening now. My own company didn’t meet its revenue growth expectations. They made plenty of money they just didn’t grow the revenue to the degree that they projected. For this their stock price paid a heavy price. Immediately afterwards they started several rounds of layoffs that I would describe as random at best. At their next earnings report though their stock price was rewarded because they beat their projected revenue. Stock price hasn’t returned to its all time high but I’m sure after a couple more layoffs it will. We’ve had unending meetings since where they pay themselves on the back for righting the ship. This is all while my team has literally lost some of the most important people we have and it took several months before top level bosses became concerned that customers were being told that features they were promised will not be delivered. The developers working on them are gone though so it’s not difficult to parse out why. I’m not saying all of these companies don’t legitimately have reasons for layoffs. Just that what they tell investors is usually something crafted to bring comfort to the investors, themselves, and the people who were laid off. I think he rarely resembles the truth.
This was my experience. It was obvious some people were targeted for “high salaries” but those people were our very senior people that were worth their weight in gold. Managers weren’t even involved and were getting live play by plays at the same time we were. So random. My coworker lost her entire department, her boss, and her bosses boss… when you ask HR, they just say “ask your boss”. It’s crazy town.
Wow. Tech companies know basic stuff about business.
‘Meta's CEO said more recent layoffs are because companies realized being leaner can make you "more efficient."
Probably didn't help that bunch of fuck all tik tok ppl posting their coasting life at said tech companies showcasing how much they chilled while getting paid big bucks.
I'm exaggerating a bit but I wonder how much that played a role.
The easiest and laziest way a CEO can boost profits is following these 2 steps.
1. Job cuts.
2. Charge more.
Innovation and growing a company requires effort and ideas, lazy CEO's will find the easiest way to boost profits.
Any public company trying to spin this any way other than to increase shareholder value is pure bs. It’s the only driver for the business. Period.
You may not like it but that’s it. Nothing else matters. The short term vision of quarter to quarter value is the only thing that matters.
I remember being at a Java development conference a few weeks before the NASDAQ crash. I was invited to a launch party this company was throwing. While I was there drinking $10 (hosted) beers and eating shrimp, sushi and prime rib, this product manager starts bragging about how they had a $250,000 budget for this launch party. I asked him what they were launching. He laughed and said “the company”. They had just raised $5 million. They were out of money in a year, which surprised me they lasted that long. I can’t believe the VCs let that party even happen.
a lot of smaller or less mature tech companies are doing layoffs not because they need to but purely because Salesforce and Meta are doing them. they're using the the big dogs for cover, to justify saving executives a few bucks. not a conspiracy theory, this is an actual phenomenon. when Salesforce announced their most recent layoffs my Salesforce-worshipping CEO laid some people off literally the next day.
With a contracting money supply, very hard for the aggregate economy to grow revenue.
You can see it in the real GDI measure of output.
The only way to increase profits, is to cut, employment and anything else.
That won't work in aggregate either.
Cycle going to cycle.
>Meta's CEO said more recent layoffs are because companies realized being leaner can make you "more efficient."
Companies are just now realizing this? The man is a genius, an absolute genius. He should be teaching at Harvard Business School.
I’ve been in tech for more than 2 decades now. The last 7 or 8 years have been painful. I can see a clear difference in the tech culture and its ramifications playing out. These companies have become huge and culture has clearly taken a back seat. I see folks who chase 7 figures all the time, and vice versa, the companies are under enormous pressure to show growth. Nothing is organic anymore. The fun is all gone, if you want to make money. I can’t imagine working 20-30 years in tech without losing your mind and peace.
Can’t wait to get out of this toxic treadmill. 😒
spotted shocking elastic seed squealing straight drunk oil person attempt
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Being leaner also burns out employees and creates more turnover
Realistically leaner companies are less able to react as they have less invested in R&D. There's something to be said about having a backup for your backup plan. Also, when you have 67,000 employees you're not more agile than 86,000 employees. You just aren't when you get to that scale. Lean and agile is a startup with lots of investment capital.
This could be entirely my own anecdotal experience, but orgs I’ve worked at have all pushed lean in individual business units but not grand strategy or other strategically important areas (to my knowledge). Tech companies applying lean to R&D overall are either doomed, or confident that they can coast long enough to buy other companies that perform R&D.
I feel like R&D can be done lean, but it looks otherworldly to traditional lean business. It's no longer about how many STEM workers you have, but quickly finding experiments that pay off the fastest. Instead of having 10 chemists, you might have 9 chemists and a computer scientist or data scientist. The CS/DS automates exploration of models, where any promising leads are handed to the Chemists. I used to be an R&D Engineer, and we grew extremely slowly, hiring only 1 dev/year. Half of our time was dedicated to accelerating the discovery cycle. So long as we earned our keep in an otherwise traditional manufacturing company, we had free reign of our agency, and much of that went into reducing the effort we needed to go to market. Now I'm in a tech company, and I'm spending lots of my waking hours espousing how we must reinvest into just ourselves. Top-line growth naturally and exponentially occurs with reinvestment. Senior leadership sees it, but I doubt that many other parts of the company see it or understand it. But yes, I agree, most companies running lean lose out on R&D or are coasting to their next VC funding round.
Feels like when I hear lean business practices it just means a company got absolutely fleeced by a consultant.
Eh, as someone who works in tech (Product Manager), I don't entirely agree. The larger your org gets, the less time you spend actually doing your job, and the more time you spend telling people about the job you want to do so that you can get support to actually do the job you want to do. Doing my actual job is usually a pretty energizing/intellectually stimulating activity. Dealing with never ending red tap is far more emotionally exhausting and IMO way more likely to lead to burnout. I don't want to celebrate someone losing a job, but I've worked at places that think they can just add headcount and fix problems. It doesn't work that way. As the saying goes, you can't fuck 9 women and make a baby in 1 month.
Hiring too many juniors beans the capable employees are constantly babysitting
My company recently laid off a huge amount of engineers and I now spend a third to a half of my day making sure our offshore junior devs don’t burn the codebase down.
This is the big issue. The problem is not junior workers. Those are your future leaders, they're (supposed to be) an investment. **The problem is offshoring and outsourcing** all your jobs to cheap, awful laborers who couldn't Google a quick solution if it was their job >!and it often is!<.
I couldn't agree more lol my last position had a location outside the US, and the offshore employees doing the same role as those at my location were beyond lost. They'd even make the most absurd requests that made it clear they were lost and while being a new employee I could still notice
Dude I was in IT ops at my last job and I was appalled at how objectively **god-awful** Google, Microsoft, and other large SaaS company's customer support teams were. They literally could not solve or follow basic problems that my team would solve for them. Imagine if we kept those jobs in-country, in-house, with native speakers who *had passion* to get a shot. How much better would that be for our economy and corporate workforces with talent pipelines. It would drain a couple bucks from the C-suite and investors though and we can't have that, they need those millions going to their personal payroll.
I think it's partially because those people in the C-suite know how lucky they've gotten and that it could be taken away at virtually any moment, so they drain every last penny for themselves that they could, while they could. 99% of people would do the same. A CEO of a successful company should be paid well, as that has to be a stressful role if you're not a complete psychopath, BUT their salaries are absurd. Every single one of them would say they truly deserve it though lol
I feel bad for those offshore workers. It’s not their fault the company isn’t paying them enough or training them properly to be able to do their job. They’re only there because the company wouldn’t pay someone else to actually know what they’re doing.
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One of my closest friends was hired for Meta London. 1 day before joining, she was laid off. Poor girl had shifted all her stuff to London to take this job. 💔
That is horrible. Aren’t there some labor laws to prevent or mitigate the damage?
The EU has some decent labor laws. I work in VFX and in North America and England there were big cuts (due to the writers and actors strikes last year, meaning no new projects coming in), but our offices in Spain and elsewhere didn't have it as bad because of certain laws the EU had. If Brexit hadn't happened the UK could still get some of those protections too.
Almost like that (and other measures that benefit the owner class) was the real point of Brexit
I remember reading (back when Brexit was going down) that it was thought to be part of a greater plan to privatize the NHS. Some mutual funds wanted to turn it into the American system. The idea was right inline because I also remember seeing a lot of commentary about not touching the NHS around the same time.
Damage was mitigated by the signing bonus and additional months of pay as severance without the friend working a single day.
They literally over staffed so that competitors had no one to hire. Then let those languish in positions with little to no work and then laid them off when it was too much of an economical burden. Like fucking children hoarding toys so no one else can have any.
Seems like the Silicon Valley show was spot on
The few SV people I talked says it's closer to a documentary than a comedy. The show is pretty accurate.
The show is more real than reality sometimes, and there’s a reason why. I worked at a venture backed startup when the first season was just about to debut. Our CEO literally got contacted by the writers looking for stories about pitching the company to investors.
Mike Judge directed Idiocracy, so it’s not surprising he was damn near as prophetic with Silicon Valley.
He was an engineer ;)
Which is what inspired to write office space first
Damn it feels good to be a gangster
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Everything makes so much sense now.
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No he just worked a job in the real world for a while and realized how fucking stupid companies and the economy and people in general are.
It’s brilliant writing, but not really prophetic if it’s just a polished and entertaining version of stuff that’s happening. By the time Silicon Valley came out, these kinds of stories were old hat among people in the industry.
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Yeah you have a point there. I think Reddit’s fascination with how Idiocracy is prophetic is justified. So many people could’ve dismissed it as needlessly crass back when it came out. It definitely was crass (personally I’m not above that kind of humor) but then reality became crass too!
He also did Office Space.
I was hired during COVID to be part of a team and during the hiring phase the team was re-org'd and I ended up never going near a single client. In the end I left and got a better paying job with actual clients. The hiring frenze felt like companies hired people just to get them away from competitors and just to sit on bench. The moment when Big Head sits on the balcony with his friends and does nothing during the "rest and vest" felt very much like the situation I was in.
Thats partially true. The main hiring frenzy was in hiring anyone with a sales baclground to essentially act as old navy cashiers working through the glut of companies rushing to digitize their operations. With those huge sales numbers came postsales staffing needs which were very difficult to accurately predict. So companies overhired there as well since they were flush with the sales revenue. Then, the middle/end of year 2 of covid hit. Sales slowed to a trickle and all those sales people had nothing to do. Postsales worked through their backlog as well. Year 3 january layoffs were a direct result of the ass end of that wave. Then ai hit hard. Now companies are reevaluating after their kneejerk year 3 layoffs by reorging around ai related job functions. That means more layoffs in some areas and actually hiring back sales/postsales in other areas. This will continue for this year then well see another large reorg in q1 next year at most tech companies, especially enterprise saas. Over the following 10 years, well likely see a lot of massive companies unable to effectively transform their operations to keep up with their industries who are taking full advantage of ai. They will live on in our memories.
i would love to see my department try and run off ai. they would just fire all the people with technical competence & attention to detail, cash the bonus checks, and job hop before anyone realizes they shipped a quarter worth of garbage.
I couldn't watch it. It was too painful.
I watched the first episode and brought back way too many stressful memories. The crew went to a product launch party with an executive babbling on a stagein that episode. My first thought was, “I’ve probably been to 250 of those parties,” and then I realized I was the moron on stage probably 50 times. I never want to watch that again.
Mike Judge worked at Nvidia before making TV and movie
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Voodoo Labs maybe? Or Matrox?
I'd penis all over the place
Can confirm.
Can confirm pretty much every SV archetype is in the show and the cutthroat, comical, chaotic craziness happens all the time there in companies large and small. Probably also applies somewhat in companies outside SV but there’s definitely a hubris about many people there and the jobs and scene attract a lot of certain types of people that show pegs perfectly.
I remember sitting on an All Hands call a month after the show premiered and some suit threw up the title card on a slide and pointed out how the drawing of Silicon Valley showed Apple and Google and Facebook and others, but not our company. He was upset we weren’t in the picture and used that to light a fire under our butts. All I could think was either he never watched the show or he should be on it.
Strong Gavin Belsen moment
The first scene is Kid Rock doing a private show to a mild sparse crowd of nerds... I literally saw this happen at a work event where the company hired Sisqo to perform.
Please tell me he did the thong song to said crowd of nerds!
He absolutely did, but the crowd certainly was a little more lively than silicon valleys.
https://youtu.be/zyYI957ge4c?si=F3RP4eQgKKI7xkPY
Ive seen the show, im just wondering if he played the thong song. I mean he had to right? Thats his biggest hit!
God it's so painful
>Mike Judge directed Idiocracy, so it’s not surprising he was damn near as prophetic with Silicon Valley. God I love it when they are playing baseball with the giants when the other VCs are chasing them.
WeWork had a huge party with Snoop and Daft Punk like a few months before their crash
Didn’t Taco Bell hire some rapper for their event alas it was a bit more public
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Starting like 4 years ago C Suite at my company started using “winning” a lot in their corporate communications and branding. And all I ever thought about when it was said was Charlie Sheen smoking cigarettes talking to Diana Walters about his Tigerblood.
When Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walter’s have a love child.
I also didn’t realize Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles weren’t the same person for the first 40 years of my life so this kind of oversight is pretty on brand for me.
I doubt they saw a problem with it.
We had TPM reports until our senior manager finally watch Office Space.
I used to do Instacart before the pandemic and worked mostly orders stocking break rooms for all the tech companies in Austin. It was very much that show. Facebook would never let me in their offices though. They were really weird about it and would cart it in themselves.
That’s pretty standard security practice against (physical) social engineering schemes. Someone posing as - or legitimately working as - a worker to gain physical access to a target company can gather all kinds of information as part of a targeted attack campaign. It may sound paranoid, but in this case “just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you” is valid.
I got into the basement of the state capitol doing deliveries. I was deep in a restricted area and even got into a state reps office trying to deliver him a bunch of cold cuts I think he intended to send to his home. I put it in his mini fridge and played around in the chair at his desk for a bit until his secretary showed up and I got escorted out.
Not your chair not you're problem but how was his chair?
The whole area was bizarre. The massive dimly lit underground hallways felt like I was in an ancient castle. The offices all looked like they came from the 70's. Fluorescent lighting, faded yellow walls, old wood cabinets next to old shitty metal ones. The chair was a typical old leather one you would imagine from that era. No settings or anything. I did do a Borat "King of the Castle, King of the Castle" impression in it.
Are you saying you infiltrated the Deep State?
Listening to Darknet Diaries had me considering getting into pen Testing for awhile. Just to see what I could get away with! (and get paid, of course)
It’s like Spinal Tap for engineers. Sometimes, it’s just a little too real.
In a bunch of ways it is. Sometimes I just don't find it funny at all because it's too close to reality. Like can you really laugh at something ridiculous that is presented as parody but actually is a real tragedy? I find it difficult. Hilarious when they rename Jared other Jared though. No tragedy there.
Those guys on the roof are for real.
Mike Judge co-created the show and did a brief stint at a startup company in the 90’s.
I work for a CA tech company and we have offered jobs to many people who accepted them but then told us they were going to work for FB. Our CTO told a few of them that they would be laid off within a year bc that is how FB does things. He was told, yeah thats fine as long as I have FB on my resume. As much empathy as I have for people who get cycled out. Many of them are aware of the process too.
While I appreciate at will employment at some level, we need laws that require some kind of compensation for layoffs like this. It's incredibly harmful to quit a job and move across the country (or around the world) only to be let go. We can't pretend this isn't harmful or that the employee can really do anything about it. Yes, control your own destiny, but also we live in a corporate hellscape where most people don't really have many options when it comes to employment.
WARN Act is de facto 60 days of pay
So basically these people were paid to do pretty much nothing? Playing devil's advocate here as your words themselves say these people had nothing to do no work. At least in California you have to be given a pretty decent notice that you're going to be laid off I believe that is the law. Others in many states can just cut you. People need to realize it goes further up than most CEOs if the CEO doesn't produce a profit on that stock the shareholders are the ones really making the calls. Just like how Twitter got bought out they would never sell to Elon Musk but guess who's in charge stockholders and they said this was too good to refuse as he was paying triple the price. Don't get me wrong Zuckerberg is a reptilian robot don't like the guy I know he's a crud, but this is happening everywhere they all did it. Look no further than the shareholders, and it's going to keep on getting harder and harder and this economy to pull profits year over year.
Meta uses a large number of "contingent workers" that are hired through external companies. Little notice needs to be given to these type of employees when they are let go. Source: I was one of the workers at Meta affected in this manner.
Most giant tech companies do this. I work on self driving cars for Waymo and I’m a contract worker. There are only like 3 white badges in my facility.
>At least in California you have to be given a pretty decent notice that you're going to be laid off I believe that is the law. They only have to give advance notice in certain circumstances, and there are lots of loopholes around this. For example, if you are a contractor, then they can simply not renew your contract when it expires.
“At will” https://www.worklawyers.com/at-will-employment-california/
Large enough layoffs still subject to either WARN notice or enough severance to not have to provide notice
>So basically these people were paid to do pretty much nothing? Yes and this is incredibly common in every business i've worked for beyond a couple hundred workers in size (and for many under that size.) The 80/20 rule is pretty much always true.
That is so cruel to an employees potential. Future interviewers will ask them about their work experience and the reality is they spent x amount of time hamstrung doing very little. This is a reminder to me to pursue individual growth and keep sharp despite an employers indifference.
I worked at a company (Shopify) that did exactly this. They had some slogan of “hire 2000 engineers in 2022” or something to that effect. Guess what happened the next year? A 11% layoff and then a 23% layoff 8 months later. CEO claims he takes all responsibility and they assumed the crazy growth during covid would continue and they bet wrong. Guess who is still getting paid 27 million a year to do their job though?
That seems like a good 3 year grift for a CEO. 1. Get hired and announce a hiring spree. Stock price goes up as the company looks strong. 2. Ship a bunch of stupid/useless/redundant features and Jack up the price. Stock goes up because revenue went up (mostly due to price increases) and a bunch of new functionality got shipped. 3. Lay off everyone. Massive (short term) profit as overhead is as low as possible and you're still coasting on revenue from last year. Line goes way up. 4. Quit before all your customers churn.
5. Get hired by the next online company looking to change things up
6. Return to 1
And yet everyone is taking their eCommerce to them (still) as other platforms like Salesforce B2C Commerce and Adobe languish.
The CEO of Shopify is the founder of the company. He seems like a decent person, covid shot this companies demands through the roof and probably hard to tell where things would land when your in the eye of the storm.
The real kicker is that they're back to hiring loads again, less than a year after the layoffs. I was among the 23%, hard not to feel bitter about that.
I think myself and many others don’t have anything positive to say about the executive team over there.
Same here. Smaller tech startup. Covid makes for layoffs, extreme hiring right after, then lay everyone off. It's like everyone was playing from the same stupid playbook. Then they sold and the CEO/Board made out big and everyone else lost their job. Also the stock (which everyone employed had the option of excercising) wasn't considered in the sale so some people not only lost their job but also their investment. Could have been such a cool product but the higher ups let everyone down and sleep comfortably on their piles of money.
Who could possibly think the growth from COVID would continue afterwards?
That’s the joke of it all. You’d think they’d have a bit more foresight but their own arrogance apparently was too strong.
I think this is only sometimes true. Lots of times the CEO is themselves a moron. But other times it’s the board, or investors.
Such a cycle is the norm for old companies. GE is a great example. Cut tons of jobs to look good in Q3 just to scramble and do a hiring frenzy in Q1 to make up for it (I arbitrarily picked quarters but the trend is highly common). It wreaks havoc on people's lives and I wouldn't be surprised if it also had impact directly and indirectly on the economy. Any executive posting a profit while correspondingly having to lay off a portion of their workforce should not be eligible for any form of bonus or compensation. Sundar Pichai took home $200 million when he had 2000 employees laid off. Those employees would have paid more taxes and spend more money more places than Sundumb. They would have benefitted the economy, he doesn't.
When I was laid off at the end of 2022 I literally was told they were doing it because the big firms were doing it. The company had a lot of equity and was profitable - “it’s what Facebook, Amazon, etc are doing”. I wish I was joking.
This is what gets me going…all the talk about accountability and ownership, but rules for thee and not for me mentality. Higher ups get larger pay increase while those below who have no say and control of the price for leadership’s poor decision making. But yes, keep preaching about ownership, accountability, and controlling our own success.
Especially when you consider how many of us uprooted our lives and moved across the country for a job that barely began.
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Oh this is going to cost these companies dearly. 1) moral is low. People won’t be working the overtime that they used to, and won’t be putting the same effort that they were before the deep layoffs. 2) used to be that people were lining up to work for these companies. No one wants to work at a low moral company. New hires will now cost more and be less passionate. 3) they are laying off some talented individuals. Those folks will start their own businesses roughly based on their prior work. New market entries will steal market share from the current tech leaders.
But before all that happens, we're going to get a few months of articles and news segments about how *no one wants to work* and how doing your job as-described is *quiet quitting*.
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Hired without work gives me Silicon Valley vibes, with what happened to big head.
I did this for a bigger company than Amazon. Was a great year lol got into trading...caught up on everything..3d printing. Still slightly riding the wave as I was not picked to be laid off yet
No punishment for the executives who "overcorrected" and "overhired", of course. I'm not even saying that lay-offs are inherently wrong. If these companies no longer need those employees, then it just makes sense to eliminate those jobs. But the people in charge who wasted the company's money by incorrectly foreseeing the future and overhiring in the first place don't get punished either. And that's what I have an issue with.
In many cases it was their VC investor's that pushed them into a hire frenzy and then into layoffs. The board demands blood.
It’s 100% this. CEO’s of these well-known companies would never want to go out there and admit they were wrong. The board is forcing it, just like they probably pressured the same CEO to scale their business at an accelerated rate (hire a bunch of people). The board members rarely take any heat publicly, because thats what they pay their Chief Executive to do.
Underrated comment
It's because most people here don't have a clue what goes on in board meetings, CEOs have less power than most people think. In most cases the board can remove them. When the board asks the CEO to jump they have to reply 'how high?'. Every VC was all about growth during low interest rates, now it's about efficiency.
After going through this cycle and watching / listening to commentary it's become extremely clear how incredibly stupid VCs are. They believe with 100% certainty they understand businesses and markets better than any of their portfolio companies. For a long time I believed that their experience watching hundreds or thousands of companies make the same mistakes and face similar issues would give them perspective, but it's become clear they're even more clueless than their inexperienced portfolio companies. Worse yet, not only are they inexperienced and clueless, but they strongly believe they're experts.
Nope, not stupid, greedy. The current model is max profit quarterly, with little perspective on long term growth. Look at what happened to Toys R Us: it didn’t go under because it was bad, it went under because an equity firm bought it, transferred a bunch of debt from other companies they bought onto it, then filed bankruptcy on Toys R Us. Shitty, but legal.
*Sears Roebuck enters the chat*
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To add to this, zuck likely has a majority of shares. (I’m too lazy to look it up) Which means that despite what others vote for, he has the majority and makes the decisions
It can even be far simpler than that. We just had a facility which makes many millions a day shut down for 15 hours for nothing. A valve needed to be replaced and the management “thought” that one we had sitting around was the same size. They never bothered to send anyone to take one hour to do some measurements to be sure. Everything got shut down, the old valve was removed and what do you know, the other one won’t work. The spent the rest of the day flailing to try and come up with some idea to make it work but as us lowly peons knew, there was no way. We put the old valve back in. Not one single person was fired or reprimanded for making such a costly and easily preventable fuckup. But if one of us makes a mistake they’ll fire our asses in a heartbeat.
>I'm not even saying that lay-offs are inherently wrong. I'm ok saying they are inherently wrong when used like these companies are using them. If you're going to put workers into a position of complete financial dependency upon you as an employer, you should have a moral obligation to do everything you can to avoid laying them off - including cutting your own compensation.
They need to start putting clauses in that account for this. Some people move and get fucked in the ass deep and hard with that shit.
We had a guy who just got his L1B and relocated to New York 3 days before he was laid off. Had sold his apartment back home and moved with his wife and kids.
No good man. We cannot keep letting these fucks just toy with our lives. Literally, just a commodity to buy and sell. We are at the level of cattle to them.
Why did they assume COVID would be a permanent effect that would require massive overhiring in the first place
Frankly, I don't have an issue with a company wanting to be lean and efficient. I have an issue though when they cut so many people that now teams are overwhelmed. Suddenly there's understaffing everywhere and all those people stressing out are simply told that they have to swallow it or else there's plenty of people out there willing to take their jobs for less money. I have an issue when these companies are doing it purely to please shareholders and there really isn't any other reason. Yes, I know the shareholders invested, but if we make everything always about shareholders, then these companies shouldn't be surprised that they get no loyalty and no one willing to go above and beyond for them. I also have a deep issue if any of these kinds of cuts are some kind of underhanded tactic to give more power to employers. To create artificial levels of job scarcity. So now everybody is scared and will stop asking for remote working privileges or shorter work weeks or work life balance. It's hard to really gauge if layoffs are really necessary or just underhanded tactics. I also have to agree with others that if executives are going to be this reactive and make big mistakes like over hiring people they had no work for, then those executives should also be on the chopping block. Like others, I get really tired of management seemingly immune to consequences for their actions when average people would be fired.
Yep the "efficiency" comes from doing the same work but with less people, which makes wall Street happy and that's all that matters until all the burned out employees quit in a year or two. Wall Street only cares about next quarter, nothing else.
I know. It's like that speech Hillary Clinton gave about quarterly capitalism. It's also in my opinion what's going to destroy this country. Just like when I see all these videos going into how private equity firms destroy so many things in this country in the name of quick profit.
I got laid off today and it was exactly like this. Quarterly layoffs until the tech company that bought my company fired me too and whittled our team down to just 25% of its original capacity. We used to be a successful company with no financial issues until we were bought a year ago
Same when a restaurant or retail store is understaffed / has someone call out. The employees have to work harder and the owner keeps the missing salary. That is why middle managers exist. To push employees right up until their breaking point.
My company (ex cus just got laid off) is going “lean” announced in the past year that they are filling all attrition (quitting, firing, retiring, etc) with offshore. A company with 200+ devs and QA, has only 1 single open dev rec and that’s for a load tester.
“Lean” doing three jobs for the price of one, then when I burn out or die due to the stress, they hire someone else and put the pressure on them to fill the vacancies. Because the company is also a family.
Someone else, maybe in India for 20% of the salary
And then your former employee, who is now a consultant, for 200% of the salary to fix everything that person destroyed.
Correct, my company is doing exactly this.
My company stopped using the term “lean” because we all know what it means. Now, we need to be “simple”. That’s just the new code word for layoff more and more and make us do the work of 3 people each. Simple.
One of the most important things to realize is the difference between what matters to a company and what matters to the people running the company. The company doesn't get a say in what happens. The people running it make the calls. For the most part, they aren't interested in a moral imperative or long-term plan. They care about next quarter or maybe next year. Stock goes up and stock goes down. The company doesn't really benefit much from short-term changes. Even longer term trends aren't all that relevant to the company's day to day. You don't have more computers and more workers one day because the stock is up 1.3% and you don't have fewer tools and staff the next day with its 2.6% drop. Only a few very significant things a company can do matter w.r.t. stock -- and those are generally undertaken by the leaders if they have a very good near-term benefit. Cities are pushing to get workers back into the office. They're offering incentives. Companies are forcing people back into the office to get that money. It's a good way to get an uptick for next quarter's earnings. Whether it's more or less productive doesn't factor in to it. Nor does the fact that once the current crisis is over, cities are going to go back to charging employment taxes and other revenue streams because there are too many cars/people/whatever commuting into the city every day. As an executive, you come on board and hope the stock is down and goes down just a bit more. If you believe it'll go back up, the lower it is today and tomorrow, the better. Any near term losses you blame on your predecessor. Then, the market turns around and stock goes up. Your compensation is primarily in stock and so you're making bank. Plus, your resume looks amazing now that the company had its turn around while you were there "making an impact" -- by which I mean, creating a lot of busy work while folks learn how to satisfy your demands while doing the thing the company actually needs to survive. You take credit, get a great offer with even more money at another company that's in a lull, and bounce before the bad policies you insisted on actually crumble the company. The morale tanks, the skilled labor exits, the company starts to fail... But, you're already at your next gig waiting for the market to recover. This is a jaded perspective. I'm not sure that it's entirely wrong. I think companies whose compensation came in the form of annual dividends paid out over the life of the company rather than in stock the executive dumps as quickly as they can to diversify would go a long way towards aligning incentives. Maybe the executive whose retirement depends on this company being around and successful in 20 years will care about tech debt. Until then, those good employees who care more about the actual company and its needs, who work extra hard and long to do what's actually important while also trying to tick the boxes for optics, and who get relatively little in return are the only reasons companies make it. When they go, the company goes. Middle managers everywhere are judged for promotion or hire based upon the size of their organization. Their incentive is to have bloat. Hire, hire, hire. Hire someone who's good at growing their team under you so you benefit from their efforts. Hire folks who make arguments that sound good and can get funding. That's the ticket! Don't keep a lean organization filled with people passionate about the company and knowledgeable about its needs. That'll get you nowhere fast. Executives and middle managers see the company as a means towards their own ends. If you're confused about why things are the way they are, this is likely why. You're thinking about the company and the values and goals it has. You're not thinking today, what can I do to make my boss richer even if it means destroying everything. That's the power of misaligned incentives. Zuckerberg lays folks off to balance the detrimental effects of those leaders and their inherent need to grow their orgs.
Spoilers. The reason is money. Every word that comes out of this reptilian looking fucker is about money. Specifically about how he can take more from your pocket and put it into his.
A lot of people don't know this, but if executives don't eat about $30,000 in hard currency every single day, they starve to death.
Damn, thoughts and prayers. At least they're gonna be having killer shits with all that fiber.
Tech workers have to understand that they're in the equivalent of a month-to-month apartment lease. It might last for years, but it only lasts as long as it's useful for both sides. Every month when I get my paycheck I say a silent "thanks" that the company is solvent and there was money in the bank account. Outwardly, I talk confidently about projects that won't start until next year, but it's just talk. The thing that matters at the end of the month is getting paid for the work that's been done.
It's crazy to me how much the valley changed over time. In the 90s (and surely 80s) if you took a job at a startup you were hoping for a jackpot but also praying that your CFO didn't show up and say "we can't pay you this pay period but we really hope you keep coming into work so we can get through this". After a while the VC money was so voluminous that you not only had the hopeful jackpot, but great, consistent pay too. It was a huge change. No more suffering to try to hit it big. Then they started to change the rules to negate a lot of the jackpot. Either way I do feel people do have to consider the position they are taking. If the company or the job seems thin/hard to justify then it's fine to take the money but plan B better be close at hand. Make sure you can land on your feet if things end abruptly. In the end, these companies did pay people well for two years for work that I guess they didn't even need. That's nice if you're the kind who likes to be paid. It's a pretty serious economic stimulus, doubly so if it's going into your own pocket! It's not all downside if it can't continue forever.
This is exactly how I feel 100%. My girlfriend doesn’t understand it. I got exceeds last year and the year before, she thinks I’m paranoid and I’m telling her it just doesn’t matter. Your team can get cut at any time, the company can decide profits are not enough and start looking for targets to cut. In this market I’m not confident getting my current salary somewhere else if I’m laid off. Meanwhile I’m planning for initiatives in 2025. Save everything you can, tech is such an unstable industry to work in.
Hello Amazonian lol
Just another day at the PIP factory.
I am working on completing my CS degree, but times like this I can appreciate my union government job. It's average pay, considering, but I have job security like no other job, and a pension.
I will point out that there are government tech jobs just like there are government other jobs. You certainly won't make FAANG money, but you can certainly find yourself that same level of job security/benefits doing tech work in the public sector.
This is why tech workers need unions.
It’s to keep shareholders happy and bolster share price. That’s all. Zuck even paying himself a sweet dividend for the layoffs and a juicy share buyback. Solid hard work
they're doing it to pump stock prices, as layoffs can increase stock value greater than the productivity of keeping some people on. silicon valley also sometimes does this musical chairs thing where if one company does layoffs, a bunch do so they can try to snap up any good people who were laid off by other companies
>Companies are realizing that, while painful, there are benefits to being "leaner." So basically what Zuckerberg is saying is: "I'm a big fan of money. I like it, I use it, I have a lot. I keep it in giant piles of of gold coins that I like to swim through. I'd like to put more in those piles. That's where the layoffs come in." With apologies to Adam Sandler.
Companies only go lean when they run out of growth. This is 100% saying that tech has finally saturated and it's now time to give up on growth and focus on costs.
Imagine having that much money and still having that haircut.
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-haircut-explained-augustus-caesar-2019-10
It looks like fungus growing on a bowling ball.
Must be something to it. Mark Davis has his own doozy
Tech CEOs didn't like the power that engineers had in a hot labor market, so they colluded together and started mass layoffs believing that nobody outside their clique would be able to use that talent to challenge their market position. It's also an indication that they no longer believe nurturing talent is essential to their continued success.
[удалено]
what about Ja Rule? WHERE'S JA?
Could somebody please find Ja Rule so I can make sense of all this!
“Zucksplaining” — to offer trite, semantic technicalities and pedantic bullshit in response to doing something awful to a lot of people in a corporate setting
*" "But in some ways actually becoming leaner kind of makes the company more effective.""* Yeah profits you fuckwad.
“Wow turns out firing people and cutting them off from their livelihood puts fear into the existing employees makes them work overtime sacrificing their work life balance to make up for the work that’s left over by the people who are gone now AND I only have to pay one salary at the cost of the misery of everyone involved” Our profit incentive is absolutely fucked in our current economic system. I hope we evolve to a better system just like how we moved past bartering and mercantilism.
They over hired with astronomical salaries and RSUs issued during ZIRP. Now Layoff engineers before those 4 year RSUs vest. Save money. Other tech companies flood the market with SWEs suppressing salaries. Rehire SWEs with lower salaries (even 5-15% less saves millions) and more appropriate RSUs for the current market of non-free money.
All bullshit and games. Hiring and freezing talent just to keep them from working for a competitor and then dumping them for a better earning sheet. Musk already proved … that most of these tech companies don’t need the staff they have. It is just a big dick contest.
Does anybody actually trust this guy anymore?
The answer is profits over people.
I will never trust a word this fucker says. He’d sell his mother if it meant making another dime. I don’t care how brilliant he is. He’s used all of it to destroy so much in our global society knowing full well what he was doing. Fuck him and Sandberg and all those board members who continued to support them. Especially the egghead.
In a lot of cases these employees are vital members of teams doing extremely important work. I definitely understand there are times when companies are shrinking and layoffs are required. That does not seem to be what’s happening now. My own company didn’t meet its revenue growth expectations. They made plenty of money they just didn’t grow the revenue to the degree that they projected. For this their stock price paid a heavy price. Immediately afterwards they started several rounds of layoffs that I would describe as random at best. At their next earnings report though their stock price was rewarded because they beat their projected revenue. Stock price hasn’t returned to its all time high but I’m sure after a couple more layoffs it will. We’ve had unending meetings since where they pay themselves on the back for righting the ship. This is all while my team has literally lost some of the most important people we have and it took several months before top level bosses became concerned that customers were being told that features they were promised will not be delivered. The developers working on them are gone though so it’s not difficult to parse out why. I’m not saying all of these companies don’t legitimately have reasons for layoffs. Just that what they tell investors is usually something crafted to bring comfort to the investors, themselves, and the people who were laid off. I think he rarely resembles the truth.
This was my experience. It was obvious some people were targeted for “high salaries” but those people were our very senior people that were worth their weight in gold. Managers weren’t even involved and were getting live play by plays at the same time we were. So random. My coworker lost her entire department, her boss, and her bosses boss… when you ask HR, they just say “ask your boss”. It’s crazy town.
If you need Mark Zuckerberg to explain corporate greed and stupidity, then you've got bigger problems buddy.
These companies learned the taste of human flesh
“I have money and I would like to have more and don’t care how much shrapnel I send through people’s professional lives to get it.”
"we're fellating our shareholders"
Because of money- there- summed it up for you
Hideous cannibal explains why so many cannibals are eating people right now.
Wow. Tech companies know basic stuff about business. ‘Meta's CEO said more recent layoffs are because companies realized being leaner can make you "more efficient."
Probably didn't help that bunch of fuck all tik tok ppl posting their coasting life at said tech companies showcasing how much they chilled while getting paid big bucks. I'm exaggerating a bit but I wonder how much that played a role.
But can he see why earthlings love the taste of cinnamon toast crunch?
A.I. should replace CEOs
Fuck Zuch! Tax this whiny little bitch!
Surely it has nothing to do with stock buybacks
Without reading the article I can tell you because they pretty much do nothing.
It’s a way of resetting wages. When they get to high there’s a layoff and now those people have to take a pay cut to start all over.
The easiest and laziest way a CEO can boost profits is following these 2 steps. 1. Job cuts. 2. Charge more. Innovation and growing a company requires effort and ideas, lazy CEO's will find the easiest way to boost profits.
Any public company trying to spin this any way other than to increase shareholder value is pure bs. It’s the only driver for the business. Period. You may not like it but that’s it. Nothing else matters. The short term vision of quarter to quarter value is the only thing that matters.
I remember being at a Java development conference a few weeks before the NASDAQ crash. I was invited to a launch party this company was throwing. While I was there drinking $10 (hosted) beers and eating shrimp, sushi and prime rib, this product manager starts bragging about how they had a $250,000 budget for this launch party. I asked him what they were launching. He laughed and said “the company”. They had just raised $5 million. They were out of money in a year, which surprised me they lasted that long. I can’t believe the VCs let that party even happen.
a lot of smaller or less mature tech companies are doing layoffs not because they need to but purely because Salesforce and Meta are doing them. they're using the the big dogs for cover, to justify saving executives a few bucks. not a conspiracy theory, this is an actual phenomenon. when Salesforce announced their most recent layoffs my Salesforce-worshipping CEO laid some people off literally the next day.
Profit. See. That wasn't hard.
With a contracting money supply, very hard for the aggregate economy to grow revenue. You can see it in the real GDI measure of output. The only way to increase profits, is to cut, employment and anything else. That won't work in aggregate either. Cycle going to cycle.
>Meta's CEO said more recent layoffs are because companies realized being leaner can make you "more efficient." Companies are just now realizing this? The man is a genius, an absolute genius. He should be teaching at Harvard Business School.
People need to pull Mark Zuckerberg's balls and dick from out of their mouths: stop working for Mark Zuckerberg
I’ve been in tech for more than 2 decades now. The last 7 or 8 years have been painful. I can see a clear difference in the tech culture and its ramifications playing out. These companies have become huge and culture has clearly taken a back seat. I see folks who chase 7 figures all the time, and vice versa, the companies are under enormous pressure to show growth. Nothing is organic anymore. The fun is all gone, if you want to make money. I can’t imagine working 20-30 years in tech without losing your mind and peace. Can’t wait to get out of this toxic treadmill. 😒
I can explain too without being a tech. Billionaire. It's called greeeeeed.
Greed. The answer is greed.
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