If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.
Companies reduce initiatives and headcount at the same time.
It's usually approached as a budget reduction exercise: Company is reducing budgets by X%. Select which projects get cancelled. Now work with managers to identify enough employees to lay off to reduce headcount spend by X%. Now reorganize remaining employees across remaining projects, with the understanding that a few extra people will leave due to future layoff fears.
The idea that companies like Twitter/X just removed a lot of employees and then operated exactly the same as before is a myth being propagated online right now, but companies must change their operations as part of layoffs. It's usually not obvious from the outside because the core product always gets attention, but side initiatives, internal tooling, new feature concepts, and even less-visible things (think bot/spam detection on X) lose attention that they may have needed.
But no, the idea that companies are making 10% of their workforce disappear at no cost to the business is just fantasy. The only time I saw this happen was when a company hired so fast that they didn't have work for some people to do, but that mistake was quickly recognized.
Twitter/X hasn't seen notable user growth since ~2015/16 and has been absolutely flat since then, coming up on a decade now. It was 325 million active users in 2015 and it's still about 300 million active users today (spring 2024). A decade of no growth. I don't know if twitter is functioning exactly the same as it was before, but if you have to pay the bills, cutting 80% of the workforce and holding the line seems to have worked in this case.
Having 5000 engineers on tap for... potential user growth? Makes sense if you're planning on user growth, but Twitter is kind of the poster child of "we don't need engineers for anticipated growth" given a near-decade of totally flat userbase number.
Twitter shed 80% and still works, is still the go to outside of fringe empty echo chambers of the left and right divide. Not only that but they added a significant amount of features like Grok, which I know nothing about really, and Substack like payments.
> the idea that companies are making 10% of their workforce disappear at no cost to the business is just fantasy
Until it is not. I am regularly interviewing people with remarkable low skills who want salary of a full-fledged software engineers, and they even had that salary before. Lots of companies overhired low-quality workforce in the last five years, maybe it's time to fix that.
If you have a project/company that's already running well and you fire almost everybody except a skeleton crew, you'd be amused but things don't crumble down instantly. Technical debt piles up and everything goes to maintenance mode, when you need the insight of the good people who left is when you realise that going to the previous state will cost you a lot more time and money than you might possibly predict.
On a much smaller scale, six years ago I inherited a service which previously had two people working on it full time. I've spent about a day a month on doing the bare minimum to keep it working ever since. Clearly we were massively overinvesting in it previously, right?
Recently it broke, and I have no clue how to get it working again. Fortunately it's just an internal thing so it's just disrupting work and not causing problems with customers, but now we're having to abruptly scramble to migrate off it and it's going to push back a lot of timelines. We got away with coasting on our upfront investment for six years, but it didn't last forever.
For starters, productivity is a broad term, so without defining what it means in context it isn’t doing anyone any favors.
You won’t feel the dip or record it until after the event happens, and often not right away. When productivity drops a year from now for example, that could be due to layoffs. It’s not always immediate in its impact.
I also question this from the other side: why are executives who set the company priorities not also axed? They are the ones that ultimately messed up as they had poor strategic vision. Their ineffectual leadership is how it got there in the first place, if they aren’t gone how on earth do you know that it wasn’t their responsibility for the decrease in productivity? Logically one would think that axing the executives first and then seeing how productivity increases or decreases with new leadership would make more sense
> They are the ones that ultimately messed up as they had poor strategic vision
Everything is a gamble, the right decision can still lead to a bad result due to randomness. So just because a gamble didn't pan out doesn't mean that it was the wrong thing to do.
For example, not hiring extra is also a gamble, it means you gamble on the market not growing and you would lose a ton of money if the market didn't stall.
Honestly, I think taking the company's side is the contrarian opinion. The knee-jerk reaction is to judge them as the evil man oppressing working families.
Why? The vast majority of people have not worked in managerial positions with high levels of responsibility to understand the decision-making and interest balancing processes required for a large organization to operate.
But everyone's been a victim of managers at least once, and certainly seen bad ones. And many people think they can imagine what's entailed in the job. Your questions about ownership and responsibility are not invalid, but they are also the most accessible (easiest) questions. You don't get to see the sausage unless you're on the inside and most people can only imagine what that looks like, and then tend to imagine the worst or most malicious alternatives. Thinking beyond those questions isn't always warranted, but doing so does require a perspective that most people don't have direct experience with.
> why are executives who set the company priorities not also axed? They are the ones that ultimately messed up as they had poor strategic vision.
Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not.
And managing staff size is like 1% of their job. They're also busy running their divisions, managing roadmaps and objectives and all sorts of non-staff resource planning, etc.
It's entirely reasonable to think economic and competitive conditions will probably be such that we should hire more, and then your competitive situation changes and you have to have some layoffs.
That doesn't mean anybody made mistakes or the executives should be fired as well. It just means that nobody has a crystal ball. Very little future estimation that is done in the business world turns out to be perfectly correct.
Sometimes executives do mess up in big ways and get fired just like anybody at any level. But that has nothing to do with layoffs in any special way.
For the sake of argument, does that mean all those employees were useless or does it mean the management isn't doing a good job of allocating them to effective work? I've been at a few companies that were rudderless and yeah, letting go of people wouldn't have made much difference because the leadership didn't know what to do with them anyway.
A lot of high growth companies simply hire too many people because too many people is usually better for maximizing growth rate than too few people. (If a company's focus shifts from maximizing growth rate to, e.g., optimizing for cash flow or profit instead of growth rate, the equation shifts and lay offs happen)
Having extra people on staff who aren't needed can be good as long as you expect to need them in the near future. That obviously creates the risk of needing to terminate the positions if the need for the person never materializes.
It takes 2-3 months to hire someone after opening a role, and 6-9 months to onboard them. So 8-12 months to fill a role with someone fully up and running. That's a really long time which is why so many high growth companies fill roles they don't actually need right now.
They bet on projects but those projects didn't pan out, every company does this, every hire is a gamble. Even a cafeteria that hires a new person assumes future demand will keep up or increase, if that prediction was wrong the person will not be needed and will be laid off, that is just how business works.
This is much better than the "you get what you use" resource allocation where organizations never shrinks, we want them to shrink when they don't have any useful work to do.
If the company is rudderless and unable to allocate effective work to employees, it won't be doing well. This is about companies that are doing well. At least, that's the premise of the article.
Not to mention that those bullshit jobs that don't really impact the company's earnings initially tends to include stuff like fixing the IT systems and handling customer issues within an acceptable time frame...
Productivity inertia is a thing. It's common for things to keep rolling in the short term after a big layoff. Over time, though, the little things that so many faceless now-gone people were dutifully keeping going the whole time start to degrade and the cracks get bigger. It's not like these people were all working line jobs where there's an obvious productivity falloff like a now-unmanned conveyer dumping product on the floor.
This. Attrition often doesn't appear until the next vesting cliff / bonus. If leadership is not careful, they could lose a lot of key people all at once. For a big company like Google this is easy to stomach (they still pay well enough that _someone_ can be made to do the work eventually) but this could well be death to a startup.
Even an understaffed team can crawl along with a skeleton crew for a while, but you will burn people out. A burned out team ceases to make forward progress and is going to act like things are in maintenance mode. You're liable to spend more money and SWE-hours looking for backfills vs if you'd just kept your team intact.
You can fire half the commercial pilots, and planes will continue to fly without a hitch. Why have two pilots, when one will do. Trucks have one driver and work just fine.
Eventually some planes will crash, but it's ok as long as it happens after effective management gets their bonus and moves on to optimise another company.
If I went into your body and deleted all your DNA, you'd feel fine too. Chugging along. For a while.
Here's another thing: the productivity that's being tracked isn't aligned with the value that the consumer is paying for. You can see this in government contracting a lot, where the consumer doesn't even see the product - they just see the paperwork. If you're really good at "producing" paperwork, you don't need anything else for a very, very, very long time.
How did you measure that? How long are you tracking it? How are you isolating other factors?
While you figure that out, what accountability does your organization have towards the hundreds of thousands of human individuals whose lives were just grossly disrupted and sent into potentially catastrophic strain?
Different societies have found different answers to the accountability question.
Whether or not the jobs were individually bullshit (almost all jobs are, as are almost all companies) has little to do with the conversation.
My productivity has been severely impacted, actually, without even going into the mental health / stress / morale effects. I've seen two rounds of layoffs at my current employer and today I am utterly and completely fucking swamped in work. New initiatives showing up in January, directly from corporate sponsors at the SVP and executive level, despite the Great Big Fucking Deal they made about us getting our 2024 "roadmap" to them in November of 2023. Bullshit jobs or not, I'm not sure why I'm expected to have to pick up the slack and do more work at the same time.
You can make pretty significant cuts to R&D and see short term revenue and productivity stay pretty level. In fact it should improve your metrics since you are spending less and selling just as many of your existing products as you were before.
Whether that is a good long term strategy is a different question.
The discrepancy is time i.e. time for things to happen. All organizations have inertia and they will continue as they will until they don't - slowly, until all at once in the end. Maybe that company will retool with a new cadre of recruits, and catch up, or maybe they won't. That's the bet the mgmnt are making. Can I anticipate the next inflection, and if it's later than I expect, will I be somewhere else and outside of the blast radius?
If only a handful of people are capturing all the profits, and everyone else is unemployed, homeless, and hungry... that's how you get a decline in society.
Operations is one part of a business. Canning your development and marketing doesn’t affect that right away. Everything gets a little shittier over time.
The best tech example is IBM. They descended from industry leader to desiccated husk, only sustained by legacy business and acquisitions.
> and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing?
A few issues to consider:
1. Many companies can continue to operate for a time purely based on momentum and existing pipelines. That does not mean that this is sustainable.
2. The lack of a visible dip does not mean the internals are healthy. Often layoffs are accompanied with an expectation to "do more with less", which generally means the conditions going south for remaining workers.
3. In an economy that is predicated on everyone having a job or enough income to spend money to support the continued existence of companies, it is not sufficient to look only at the output of the company itself.
Bullshit jobs may be a real thing, but much of the system is built on "bullshit", all in service of perpetuating the ongoing success of the system.
If every company could automate every function and there were no employees anywhere, this would obviously not be sustainable in the long run, and it becomes more apparent that the role of the worker is not just about the company's output, and is intrinsic to the whole system, and that's something we'll have to contend with eventually.
I'm not arguing that this is a good thing, or that companies should keep people for no reason, but we're in an era where technology is increasingly disrupting core aspects of the system.
> If every company could automate every function and there were no employees anywhere, this would obviously not be sustainable in the long run
Perhaps not, but I'm not sure it would be for the reason you are implying.
What is this hypothetical company that automates every function and has no employess anywhere producing? And what price can that thing fetch in the market? If the marginal cost of producing additional units is basically zero, which is what the hypothetical implies, then the products should be basically free, since standard microeconomics says that price = marginal cost. Which means nobody would need jobs to afford these products. Which means this condition would be sustainable in the hypothetical as you state it: sure, there would be no employees, but there would also be no need for the jobs that no longer exist.
Of course in the real world there are plenty of ways this could go sideways, but they all basically boil down to: in the real world, governments mess with markets in ways that prevent price from being driven down to marginal cost. That means many things (food, for example) cost more than they should, which means people need more income than they should need if the market were truly free. So what is really not sustainable is governments trying to mess with markets. If that stopped, we could make the necessities of life basically free. That would be a good use of technology.
> 2. The lack of a visible dip does not mean the internals are healthy. Often layoffs are accompanied with an expectation to "do more with less", which generally means the conditions going south for remaining workers.
I've always wondered: If the layoff is happening because the company over-hired and the roles are no longer needed, then why do existing employees need to step up and do those roles that the company just said are no longer needed?
It could mean the companies are sacrificing long term investment for short term gains. Maybe some of those employees are allocated to failing projects, but it's straight out of the MBA book to kill off stuff that maintains the company position long term or innovates in service of short term bumps in profitability. That guarantees large payouts for execs and shareholders.
As companies get bigger they tend to get more bloated and disorganized. A lot of initiatives end up not being worth continuing on, so they lay off the people working on those initiatives. Better companies will reallocate talent to new, better initiatives so they don't lose the knowledge in their workforce, but that seems rare.
How long do you allow for evaluating if there is a dip? And will times never change?
And even if there is really none, then sure it makes sense from the company point of view and pure profit perspective. But if the company is well of, why lay off experienced, trusted and loyal workforce still? You always need slack room, like you need some money put aside.
And another level, work puts meaning to our lives.. either we allow for other meaningful things supported by some UBI, or we should rethink if profiting companies really need to ultra-maximize, or how they can also do a little welfare for their employed work force.. imo it's a pity the employee owned model is not more widespread, and it is all for the few.
But anyway, different end of a very wide spectrum. Certainly, struggling companies must get rid of the bloat, bullshit jobs, and evil within, if it needs that to survive and is the actual problem ;)
One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch.
A company I used to work for set up a team to develop a new product for a new market. After 3 years they were still unprofitable, the product was shut down and the entire team was fired. This obviously had no direct effect on the companies overall productivity. Was that team doing a "bullshit job"?
If you fire the team doing R&D on the next generation of one of your products or the team working on launching your company into an entirely new market or the team the works on internal tooling or some of the people managing key account relationships with certain customers or suppliers or many other similar jobs then the company can absolutely keep going without a hitch, for a while.
What's your timescale? If you take medicine for a chronic condition you can often skip a dose without problem, maybe even two, but eventually you presumably revert back to where you were before treatment.
I saw a lot of this back in the "reengineering the corporation" craze in the 90s (and then the "lean organization" and so on). They cut all the slack out of the system so in steady state everything seemed to work. But the world is not consistently in a steady state.
So fire that guy doing backups, and save money by not paying for the redundant network connection you've never used. Stock goes up, prepare three envelopes, and retire!
Large companies reinvest most of their profits as bets on the future — building new arms of the company, that initially do nothing but quiet R&D for months/years — but which might bring the company entirely new revenue-lines years down the line.
Much of a large company's headcount at any point in time, is people hired to work on these bets on the future. You can fire all of these people, and nothing will happen to the company's day-to-day operations.
But the company's stock will take a nosedive nevertheless — because the promise of future increased returns had already been factored into the share price, and that factor now has to be removed.
That people have to be employed artificially so they don't starve: is the problem. UBI has the potential to remove a lot of bullshit jobs, companies can run much leaner when they aren't responsible for a citizen's needs.
How would you check for the visible dip in the productivity? and in what time frame? Sometimes it is not easy to measure the impact of layoffs on the org in the short term and it may take some time to realize it.
The global team I was in halved while I was at the bank, partly from cuts and partly from people deciding to take their various opportunities to leave and then not being replaced. By the time I departed with severe burnout, I had been consistently putting in 15-hour days for 19 months, and that as a fairly senior member of management (regarded by the business as an exec) just to keep our processes running. In Switzerland, that's not normal. But from the outside, yes, we just kept chugging along, so obviously we were finally the right size.
Yes. Getting fired ruins lives. It causes divorces, suicides, depression, home defaults, and more. Firing and laying people off should be more painful for the company than it should be for the firees.
> Firing and laying people off should be more painful for the company than it should be for the firees.
Why? How?
You start making it painful for the company to lay off people, I anticipate they stop hiring people to minimize risk, and then unemployment shoots up and presents it's own set of (some overlapping) problems.
If the people working for the company has finished making the product, then after that they would have to be tasked with making a new product. So, yes, if the product is delivered then there shouldn't be any dip in revenue if you fire the people who made it.
Companies keep these productive people if they want to grow and deliver even more products. They fire these productive people if they're not aiming for more growth at the moment.
I use some old software that nobody has been working on for a decade and it still works perfectly, to give an example.
I'd rather those profits be spread out among additional employees (who might help the company either produce better stuff or give better service to customers) than to shareholders.
You could probably cut every employee’s salary by 10% without noticing a visible dip in productivity. Maybe that means that visible measures of productivity are lagging indicators?
IME (having gone through 3 layoffs), you can squeeze a lot out of fearful employees. I haven't be able to see that sustained over the course of 12+ months though.
If your company did something that made everyone's job 10% more miserable
-like maybe all salaried people need to work an extra hour every day to cover the laid off people's work-
Productivity per employee would go up, and it would be impossible to really attribute any negative impact to the product to the layoff!
But would that have been a wise decision for the company? If it was wise, the company should keep laying off more people, but how can you tell when it has gone too far?
Simply because the impact never happens instantly. Companies life span is different than humans, and just because you didn’t see it happening in the coming months right after they did, it doesn’t mean there’s no gradual decline, keep in mind this also does not account the gradual hiring after that event, they news will be reported that they terminated 10%, but who’s going to report a 1% hiring every month in the year after?
I think it's this is more of a real point. Honestly if someone who works in a large bureaucratic organization, the amount of people who do next to nothing is astounding. Is that a bad thing? Yes to some degree, however we do need to have jobs for people to do no matter what and if this gives them something to do everyday and they feel like they're contributing something then maybe that's all they need to do.
Imagine there are 2 groups of people. The first group endeavors to automate and streamline their work as much as possible such that there isn't much left on their plate when the feature well runs dry. Another group has stymied every attempt at automation such that every deploy is a two day long process involving a dozen people. Who do you think management sees as replaceable?
Yes. These companies are faceless entities, literal money printing machines where some people in charge are the gods who get to decide what to do with the money printer.
They hold an insane monopolistic position. Often these companies utilize verticals which obliterate entire business segments because they are allowed to give products for free (MS Teams for example).
Another is that that 10% of work is distributed to the remaining 90%, who now work harder and are more stressed, but well aware that they were lucky to keep their jobs and therefore willing to absorb an extra hour a day.
Which, free market and all that, may just be smart business. But I don’t think it’s necessarily good management in the long term.
This is an interesting thought experiment, because in that situation the company should cut another 10%, and so on, until they get some sort of message they can't cut anymore.
In many cases the company can run fine for a while... the systems that engineers already built will continue to function until a certain point. Once they start breaking/failing the company needs to hire additional people for maintenance/improvements. Often these are people who hadn't worked on the original systems and don't have a full understanding of the stack/systems involved this leads to many other issues... knowledge fragmentation, tech debt, maintenance difficulties, increased bugs, etc.
I've seen this happen many times in large orgs, and the people making the decisions to cut engineers in certain areas often aren't responsible for what happens down the line and don't need to deal with the fallout. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Productivity is a lagging indicator. Anxious, scared, overworked people can still be "productive" for weeks even months, it's just not sustainable in the long run.
Similarly, many systems can continue functioning (seemingly without a hitch) when you cease all maintenance and preventive care. Eventually, they will fail.
"these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch"
That's not always true though. I've been on both sides of layoffs: laid off and remained. Sometimes the people who remain are asked to do more with less. I was even asked to do more with less pay at one point.
Delayed impact is rarely taken into account. You fire people who's impact is going to show up 2-3-6 months from now. Same goes to maintenance. Stop doing maintenance you can save money in the short term. Should you stop doing maintenance? Should you fire this many people?
> that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch
unless those 10% were working on things which may become important to the company in the future; a company that just "chuggs along" will eventually die
Bullshit job phenomenon is inevitable because the game encourages a winner takes all scenario for now. One or two market leaders keep accumulating all the capital and then instead of using their hires to move the needle of progress forward, they force most of them into some pointless hyperspecialisation or stuff like denying competitors of needed talent.
All this just means that the balance of society has tilted to one unsustainable direction. Society simply needs much better antitrust (or other) laws to the point that every monopoly/duopoly is broken down and balance is restored.
I will use twitter as a hypothetical example. If only twitter can raise capital to the point where it can handle enough traffic at scale and be an arbitor of global news, then it can easily use its resources and reputation to create and staff bullshit jobs without much consequence.
To bring back balance:
1. other legal jurisdictions should ban or tax twitter out of existence over there and raise their own monopolies, for which they will likely need a global workforce
2. cost of investing in twitter or the cost of holding large investments in twitter should be increased so that the instead of accumulating capital in the market leader, people are incentivised to let their money be reinvested into competitors.
This will be resisted by those who already have enormous sums of money invested into the market leader, which unfortunately also happens to be the people who make the rules.
Or those people are doing work that takes a longer time frame to impact the company. Sure it’s fine for the next year, but once you start dealing with issues down the line you’ll wish you had been taking care of all that work.
It’s simple. People stop taking vacations and work longer hours and make up the missing 10% of labor. You also no longer have spare capacity for sick days or people leaving, but that doesn’t all come to roost on day one.
One relevant question is would the fired person have been better off had they not been hired or the job didn't exist in in the first place? It's far from clear to me, but admittedly doesn't soften the blow either way.
Price's law didn't really fit well even within the context in which he created it. Lotka's Law fits better.
And they aren't laws, just heuristics, that the tech world likes to propagate as if they are laws, when if fact most tech people that believe they are part of the "square root people", but really just lack an appreciation for what is often really going on.
That feels reductive. Are the people left working 80 hours a week now, maybe? Are they sacrificing long-term goals to keep short-term productivity in place? Etc.
It’s a bad thing for everyone who depends on the company for their livelihood. The company that decided to hire them, the management that used their headcount to justify a higher valuation.
People are burning out, working the jobs of 3 people and are told they’re lucky to have a job. It’s not bullshit if it’s unsustainable.
> The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.
Which part is bullshit? The part where, in order to survive, everyone* needs a job? Or the part where, because everyone* needs a job, some jobs might not be as important as others?
Just laying off 10% of your employees is easy. If a company can identify the 10% of their workforce that isn't contributing anything, that would speak very highly of their management processes. And in any sufficiently large company, there are always 10% that are either adding nothing or are creating negative value.
I too rely on jobs, right now, but jobs are not something we are entitled to, especially forever jobs, and I cant stand people that act like that
Accumulate capital, make it grow
If you fail, your life is encumbered in ways that prevent you from doing that, there are limited programs in the US for you, but burdening corporations is a symptom
Redundancy isn’t a bad thing, it’s what lets you go on vacation sometimes. It’s hard to know how much you should have, and it’s no surprise it’s one of the first things to go when companies downsize.
Sure, some bullshit is going to slip in, but it’s still a bunch of human beings trying to make a living on this dumb rock. Software itself is all bullshit in the grand scheme of things.
I agree. We are gradually discarding (again) all possible methods of resource allocation other than market capitalism, so we have to make up pretend jobs for people to do in order to give ourselves the excuse to feed them. For some reason, we think that companies should maintain this insane indirection as a public service.
We're not paying people to dig holes and fill them up as a society, instead we're demanding that centers of production and growth willingly disdain productivity in order to subsidize people digging holes and filling them up.
We'd be far better off directly subsidizing education, health care, or even customer service and scientific research than demanding that the real sources of all economic growth (and prosperity) have departments printing out reams of paper for another department to shred. Efficiency and technology lower costs and (when properly distributed) give people more time for leisure across the system. You aren't sticking it to the fat cats by telling them not to do layoffs; if you want to stick it to the fat cats, tax their profits and strip layers of economic indirection/middlemen.
"If hundreds or thousands of people suddenly have no income, putting them in a position of severe hardship and potential homelessness, but it doesn't have any direct negative effects on me personally, is it really a bad thing?"
> If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing?
How can you be so callous? This is why people don't like startup people.
Yes, obviously it's a bad thing, because those people are now without a source of income and often without health insurance. I say "obviously" because it's pretty reasonable to expect people aren't sociopaths, and care about the well-being of others. It's only within your sick bubble where maximizing profit at the expense of human suffering is considered a reasonable option. Unfortunately, people like you have a disproportionate power in our society.
I'm not saying you're a sociopath, I'm saying that the economic ideology which is commonplace on Hacker News makes normal people who believe it behave like sociopaths.
Sure, in a society with a reasonable safety net where losing your job wasn't a potential death sentence, laying off some workers occasionally would be fine. But we don't live in a Keynesian fantasy-world, we live in a world where insurance companies have death panels.
Would it also be preferable for companies to act as de-facto charities and hire an extra 10% (or an extra hundreds to thousands) of people in order to provide some of the people who are currently out of work a source of income and health insurance?
thank you for saying this. the archives of HN comments are going to make a fascinating case study for the next civilization explaining why this one collapsed.
"Poor people used to live in slums. Now the economically disadvantaged occupy substandard housing in the inner cities. And they're broke! They're broke! They don't have a negative cash-flow position. They're ****ing broke! Cause a lot of them were fired. You know, fired. Management wanted to curtail redundancies in the human resources area, so many people are no longer viable members of the workforce."
A term which I hate because potentially everyone on the team was “impacted” if they have to do the same work with fewer people. It’s just one person who isn’t getting paid.
I'm pretty sure a lot of this is connected to the bond market. Companies are running out of operating capitol. When they try and get an operating loan the terms are onerous. Rather than refinance they are electing to perform layoffs to maintain solvency.
It does not matter how good you are doing in contrast to previous years. If your loan comes due and you can't afford another one to keep that revolving credit going you need to free up the capitol to pay.
I work for a company that does something that I guess is a bit unusual - they use the revenue from our customers to pay employee salaries. If you would have asked me, this would seem like the obvious way to do things, but I'm told that debt is very important for some reason or other. As Homer Simpson has been known to say, "I don't know how the economy works".
It's about percentages. If the CFO expects that the company can earn 10% on any capital, and they can borrow at 1%, then they will do that. In effect, this means that they will make 9% for free. Even more so, the CFO's bonus probably depends on the net income, so it's a great deal.
It's all fun and games until the tide goes out. Then you suddenly might need to rollover the debt at new rates like 6% while the company earnings also go down because everyone can spend a bit less. Suddenly, you might lose a few procent (or more!) on the loans. It's a bit of a double whammy.
When interest rates are very low, companies are incentivized to borrow more as they can get better returns by investing their own cash flow into assets with predictable returns. When those interest rates go higher and these higher interest rates are coupled with harsher terms, then the ability to invest decreases, companies view reducing headcount as the way to survive to the next phase.
How very dare you suggest that organic growth is the way forward? Everyone here knows that unless you've hit your series c and are soaring for unicorn status then you might as well just not exist at all.
Yup. And this is why smart companies avoid that game.
I know one regional company who sells nationally/internationally which has done that for decades. Decades ago, the owner asked the local bank for a growth loan for some equipment and was turned down. The next week, he found out that one of his employees, who depends 100% on his company for income, went to the same bank for a motorcycle loan and was approved. the business owner was so outraged at the bank's stupid decision-making (if the business isn't good for the money, how will the employee be good for it?) that he decided to never use bank debt for growth again. That was in the 1960s, and the company is doing great, focusing on product and service and not financial games, with very expansive and expanding facilities and workforce. The regional bank was absorbed long ago.
Remember: no matter how much banks advertise being your partner and friend, they are not.
They're not your friend, because they're in the business of making money.
Unless that business was the only employer in the area, the owner was basically just having a tantrum over the idea that different kinds of loans for different amounts of money might have different decision-making processes behind them. When my credit union decided to give me a car loan, they didn't look into the solvency of my employer, they just saw that I have good credit and a steady income and took a safe 5-digit gamble. It may have hurt the owner's feelings to essentially be told "we're pretty sure we can make our money back on this $1000 motorcycle loan which has a very easy-to-deal-with collateral, but we don't want to give you a $100000 for specialized equipment"
They elected to do that because the 1 billion dollar write down yield 300 billion in market value -- firing people literally raised their market cap more than what those people could earn doing a real job earning real revenue.
To be clear, this is not people being fired for bullshit jobs. This is people being fired because their 1 billion in revenue is a fraction of the 300 billion in stock price opportunity.
Instead of minimizing costs by performing massive workforce reductions and while not earning profit, corporate officers could just... earn some profit to keep the momentum going. And to go beyond, beyond initial starting conditions.
But that's asking for too much from the average corporate leadership. Efficiency and technology acquisition are too much for these agents of the entrenched hegemony. So, what we have right now is a form of nationalist socialist welfare that looks like our current financial-administrative system. There's some momentum and inertia, but it's all being wasted on keeping unproductive fat cats alive.
And that's okay. Because smart people will be leaving this oppressive Egypt under a stubborn Pharaoh. For much better lands and pasture. And while that happens, profit will start to look like a heinous crime to these welfare recipients. Who naturally will not be invited to the awesome parties that's coming in the future.
Something like Eloi and Morlocks, if you wanna get biological about it. Eloi and Morlocks, though, are just the starting point. H.G. Wells didn't have anime music videos to inspire him to think about the more accurate possibilities of a matrix of biological degradation and environmental niche adaptation.
I can't decide if I'd prefer to hear a bunch of nonsense from an executive at the moment of being let go, or no explanation and just an email saying I'm part of a layoff.
I'll be forever proud that when I got the call from my senior manager, I started with, "so you got some bad news for me"? No matter how bad the situation, it seems like my snark will never fail me.
The nonsense (thank you for your valuable contributions) makes me nauseous. I'm so sick of that shit. We as a society need to stop sugarcoating (denial, rationalization) and be more candid. Otherwise the words just become more and more meaningless and nobody can trust anything anybody says.
So I know which I would choose, is what I'm trying to say. Like a band-aid.
> You’ve helped us bullshit so much that the only possible way for you to continue to help us bullshit is by no longer working here, effective immediately.
"Our Company is Doing So Well That You're All Fired"
The title seems to presume that "you all" are contributing to the company doing so well. If you're not, then firing you will have no effect on the company doing well or not, except it will reduce costs. Arguably the company may do better without you as by firing you they have reduced costs.
This is, roundly, impossible to measure in real time as investments take long time horizons to mature. But its easy to self-justify as survivorship bias.
What about when companies are doing layoffs but still continue hire at exactly the same time? Sometimes, they even hire for the same positions that were just laid off.
Are there ever conversations where employees are asked to take a pay cut instead of being laid off?
I've seen it done for consultants before - in fact was working for mega financial services company in the years heading up to the 2008 crash. When it hit, they told all the consultants from the big consulting firms (i.e. Anderson etc) they needed to take a 50% cut if they wanted to stay on - almost all accepted the new rate.
Months later, when things continue to go really bad in the economy, they told them same firms, they needed to take another 50% cut (so now down 75%), most took that as well, but not all. Those that didn't take it largely found themselves unemployed for a very long time.
Just goes to show you how bloated those rates were to begin with.
And what about companies who do layoffs and then have to scramble to try to re-hire some of the very key, crucial people that were "accidentally" let go?
I have twice been asked to take a pay cut: once long ago at a startup when the funding dried up, and early in the pandemic when my (fairly large) employer got nervous.
large companies move like cogs. one team suddenly sees the value of X role that another team is letting go of. but i like how some of them don't try to help existing employee switch teams.
Side thought I had: I've met a lot of software developers that will say "I'm trying to automate myself out of a job". It feels a lot different when you actually do lose your job. I know that isn't what's going on here, it's other economic trends, but this just made me think of that.
Ideally when you automate yourself out of one job, you are then available to take on another, and also to have more flexibility and higher compensation as part of that process. This is pretty much what “leveling up” is. Either literal automation, or automation through establishing process, culture, and hires around you.
If you want to automate yourself and then stop working you need to be an owner.
Readit News
It's usually approached as a budget reduction exercise: Company is reducing budgets by X%. Select which projects get cancelled. Now work with managers to identify enough employees to lay off to reduce headcount spend by X%. Now reorganize remaining employees across remaining projects, with the understanding that a few extra people will leave due to future layoff fears.
The idea that companies like Twitter/X just removed a lot of employees and then operated exactly the same as before is a myth being propagated online right now, but companies must change their operations as part of layoffs. It's usually not obvious from the outside because the core product always gets attention, but side initiatives, internal tooling, new feature concepts, and even less-visible things (think bot/spam detection on X) lose attention that they may have needed.
But no, the idea that companies are making 10% of their workforce disappear at no cost to the business is just fantasy. The only time I saw this happen was when a company hired so fast that they didn't have work for some people to do, but that mistake was quickly recognized.
When trying to upgrade to verified org: "An unexpected error occurred"
When trying to change my display name: "An unexpected error occurred"
When trying to run an ad: "Awaiting verification" for a week
Contacting support through messages: No response
Finally finding a way to submit a ticket: 3 day response time with a standard response that didn't resolve the issue.
Responded to that ticket and haven't gotten a response in days.
I don't think they're operating at the same level as they used to :)
Having 5000 engineers on tap for... potential user growth? Makes sense if you're planning on user growth, but Twitter is kind of the poster child of "we don't need engineers for anticipated growth" given a near-decade of totally flat userbase number.
80% is a lot and it works just fine. 7,500 to 1,300 in Jan 2023. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
Until it is not. I am regularly interviewing people with remarkable low skills who want salary of a full-fledged software engineers, and they even had that salary before. Lots of companies overhired low-quality workforce in the last five years, maybe it's time to fix that.
Recently it broke, and I have no clue how to get it working again. Fortunately it's just an internal thing so it's just disrupting work and not causing problems with customers, but now we're having to abruptly scramble to migrate off it and it's going to push back a lot of timelines. We got away with coasting on our upfront investment for six years, but it didn't last forever.
For starters, productivity is a broad term, so without defining what it means in context it isn’t doing anyone any favors.
You won’t feel the dip or record it until after the event happens, and often not right away. When productivity drops a year from now for example, that could be due to layoffs. It’s not always immediate in its impact.
I also question this from the other side: why are executives who set the company priorities not also axed? They are the ones that ultimately messed up as they had poor strategic vision. Their ineffectual leadership is how it got there in the first place, if they aren’t gone how on earth do you know that it wasn’t their responsibility for the decrease in productivity? Logically one would think that axing the executives first and then seeing how productivity increases or decreases with new leadership would make more sense
HN has a lot of "wish I was a tech CEO" types, plus the general dose of contrarianism that runs deep in this place.
Everything is a gamble, the right decision can still lead to a bad result due to randomness. So just because a gamble didn't pan out doesn't mean that it was the wrong thing to do.
For example, not hiring extra is also a gamble, it means you gamble on the market not growing and you would lose a ton of money if the market didn't stall.
(With apologies to Upton Sinclair.)
Corporate and Political propaganda since the Powell Memo.
Why? The vast majority of people have not worked in managerial positions with high levels of responsibility to understand the decision-making and interest balancing processes required for a large organization to operate.
But everyone's been a victim of managers at least once, and certainly seen bad ones. And many people think they can imagine what's entailed in the job. Your questions about ownership and responsibility are not invalid, but they are also the most accessible (easiest) questions. You don't get to see the sausage unless you're on the inside and most people can only imagine what that looks like, and then tend to imagine the worst or most malicious alternatives. Thinking beyond those questions isn't always warranted, but doing so does require a perspective that most people don't have direct experience with.
Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not.
And managing staff size is like 1% of their job. They're also busy running their divisions, managing roadmaps and objectives and all sorts of non-staff resource planning, etc.
It's entirely reasonable to think economic and competitive conditions will probably be such that we should hire more, and then your competitive situation changes and you have to have some layoffs.
That doesn't mean anybody made mistakes or the executives should be fired as well. It just means that nobody has a crystal ball. Very little future estimation that is done in the business world turns out to be perfectly correct.
Sometimes executives do mess up in big ways and get fired just like anybody at any level. But that has nothing to do with layoffs in any special way.
Having extra people on staff who aren't needed can be good as long as you expect to need them in the near future. That obviously creates the risk of needing to terminate the positions if the need for the person never materializes.
It takes 2-3 months to hire someone after opening a role, and 6-9 months to onboard them. So 8-12 months to fill a role with someone fully up and running. That's a really long time which is why so many high growth companies fill roles they don't actually need right now.
This is much better than the "you get what you use" resource allocation where organizations never shrinks, we want them to shrink when they don't have any useful work to do.
Human labor is becoming superfluous in the face of self-sustaining capital arising or whatever.
Sometimes problems take time to present themselves.
Even an understaffed team can crawl along with a skeleton crew for a while, but you will burn people out. A burned out team ceases to make forward progress and is going to act like things are in maintenance mode. You're liable to spend more money and SWE-hours looking for backfills vs if you'd just kept your team intact.
Eventually some planes will crash, but it's ok as long as it happens after effective management gets their bonus and moves on to optimise another company.
Here's another thing: the productivity that's being tracked isn't aligned with the value that the consumer is paying for. You can see this in government contracting a lot, where the consumer doesn't even see the product - they just see the paperwork. If you're really good at "producing" paperwork, you don't need anything else for a very, very, very long time.
God, I wonder what kind of people are out there typing these messages.
How did you measure that? How long are you tracking it? How are you isolating other factors?
While you figure that out, what accountability does your organization have towards the hundreds of thousands of human individuals whose lives were just grossly disrupted and sent into potentially catastrophic strain?
Different societies have found different answers to the accountability question.
Whether or not the jobs were individually bullshit (almost all jobs are, as are almost all companies) has little to do with the conversation.
Whether that is a good long term strategy is a different question.
They don't, they just stop doing some things and pile on extra unpaid work on those left.
The best tech example is IBM. They descended from industry leader to desiccated husk, only sustained by legacy business and acquisitions.
Companies exist at the allowance of a nation-state for the benefit of the people.
If the benefit is attenuated, the people, via government, can sanction the corporations.
If the corporation is succeeding and paying more into the public till by providing fake jobs, what's the problem? They're not succeeding hard enough?
I think the error you've made is that you've mistakenly projected your sense of "fairness" on corporations.
Corporations aren't people my friend.
A few issues to consider:
1. Many companies can continue to operate for a time purely based on momentum and existing pipelines. That does not mean that this is sustainable.
2. The lack of a visible dip does not mean the internals are healthy. Often layoffs are accompanied with an expectation to "do more with less", which generally means the conditions going south for remaining workers.
3. In an economy that is predicated on everyone having a job or enough income to spend money to support the continued existence of companies, it is not sufficient to look only at the output of the company itself.
Bullshit jobs may be a real thing, but much of the system is built on "bullshit", all in service of perpetuating the ongoing success of the system.
If every company could automate every function and there were no employees anywhere, this would obviously not be sustainable in the long run, and it becomes more apparent that the role of the worker is not just about the company's output, and is intrinsic to the whole system, and that's something we'll have to contend with eventually.
I'm not arguing that this is a good thing, or that companies should keep people for no reason, but we're in an era where technology is increasingly disrupting core aspects of the system.
Perhaps not, but I'm not sure it would be for the reason you are implying.
What is this hypothetical company that automates every function and has no employess anywhere producing? And what price can that thing fetch in the market? If the marginal cost of producing additional units is basically zero, which is what the hypothetical implies, then the products should be basically free, since standard microeconomics says that price = marginal cost. Which means nobody would need jobs to afford these products. Which means this condition would be sustainable in the hypothetical as you state it: sure, there would be no employees, but there would also be no need for the jobs that no longer exist.
Of course in the real world there are plenty of ways this could go sideways, but they all basically boil down to: in the real world, governments mess with markets in ways that prevent price from being driven down to marginal cost. That means many things (food, for example) cost more than they should, which means people need more income than they should need if the market were truly free. So what is really not sustainable is governments trying to mess with markets. If that stopped, we could make the necessities of life basically free. That would be a good use of technology.
I've always wondered: If the layoff is happening because the company over-hired and the roles are no longer needed, then why do existing employees need to step up and do those roles that the company just said are no longer needed?
And even if there is really none, then sure it makes sense from the company point of view and pure profit perspective. But if the company is well of, why lay off experienced, trusted and loyal workforce still? You always need slack room, like you need some money put aside.
And another level, work puts meaning to our lives.. either we allow for other meaningful things supported by some UBI, or we should rethink if profiting companies really need to ultra-maximize, or how they can also do a little welfare for their employed work force.. imo it's a pity the employee owned model is not more widespread, and it is all for the few.
But anyway, different end of a very wide spectrum. Certainly, struggling companies must get rid of the bloat, bullshit jobs, and evil within, if it needs that to survive and is the actual problem ;)
A company I used to work for set up a team to develop a new product for a new market. After 3 years they were still unprofitable, the product was shut down and the entire team was fired. This obviously had no direct effect on the companies overall productivity. Was that team doing a "bullshit job"?
If you fire the team doing R&D on the next generation of one of your products or the team working on launching your company into an entirely new market or the team the works on internal tooling or some of the people managing key account relationships with certain customers or suppliers or many other similar jobs then the company can absolutely keep going without a hitch, for a while.
I saw a lot of this back in the "reengineering the corporation" craze in the 90s (and then the "lean organization" and so on). They cut all the slack out of the system so in steady state everything seemed to work. But the world is not consistently in a steady state.
So fire that guy doing backups, and save money by not paying for the redundant network connection you've never used. Stock goes up, prepare three envelopes, and retire!
This presupposes a company can even somewhat accurately track productivity for the short, medium, or long term.
Much of a large company's headcount at any point in time, is people hired to work on these bets on the future. You can fire all of these people, and nothing will happen to the company's day-to-day operations.
But the company's stock will take a nosedive nevertheless — because the promise of future increased returns had already been factored into the share price, and that factor now has to be removed.
Why? How?
You start making it painful for the company to lay off people, I anticipate they stop hiring people to minimize risk, and then unemployment shoots up and presents it's own set of (some overlapping) problems.
Companies keep these productive people if they want to grow and deliver even more products. They fire these productive people if they're not aiming for more growth at the moment.
I use some old software that nobody has been working on for a decade and it still works perfectly, to give an example.
-like maybe all salaried people need to work an extra hour every day to cover the laid off people's work-
Productivity per employee would go up, and it would be impossible to really attribute any negative impact to the product to the layoff!
But would that have been a wise decision for the company? If it was wise, the company should keep laying off more people, but how can you tell when it has gone too far?
Companies are just collective endeavours of multiple humans trying to produce value to other humans.
They hold an insane monopolistic position. Often these companies utilize verticals which obliterate entire business segments because they are allowed to give products for free (MS Teams for example).
This should not happen.
Another is that that 10% of work is distributed to the remaining 90%, who now work harder and are more stressed, but well aware that they were lucky to keep their jobs and therefore willing to absorb an extra hour a day.
Which, free market and all that, may just be smart business. But I don’t think it’s necessarily good management in the long term.
I've seen this happen many times in large orgs, and the people making the decisions to cut engineers in certain areas often aren't responsible for what happens down the line and don't need to deal with the fallout. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Similarly, many systems can continue functioning (seemingly without a hitch) when you cease all maintenance and preventive care. Eventually, they will fail.
That's not always true though. I've been on both sides of layoffs: laid off and remained. Sometimes the people who remain are asked to do more with less. I was even asked to do more with less pay at one point.
Probably not.
unless those 10% were working on things which may become important to the company in the future; a company that just "chuggs along" will eventually die
All this just means that the balance of society has tilted to one unsustainable direction. Society simply needs much better antitrust (or other) laws to the point that every monopoly/duopoly is broken down and balance is restored.
I will use twitter as a hypothetical example. If only twitter can raise capital to the point where it can handle enough traffic at scale and be an arbitor of global news, then it can easily use its resources and reputation to create and staff bullshit jobs without much consequence.
To bring back balance:
1. other legal jurisdictions should ban or tax twitter out of existence over there and raise their own monopolies, for which they will likely need a global workforce
2. cost of investing in twitter or the cost of holding large investments in twitter should be increased so that the instead of accumulating capital in the market leader, people are incentivised to let their money be reinvested into competitors.
This will be resisted by those who already have enormous sums of money invested into the market leader, which unfortunately also happens to be the people who make the rules.
It's great for the company. Not so much for the people.
It's a matter of perspective.
> The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.
Perhaps, but who's fault is that? Sounds like the company's problem. Who suffers from the layoffs however? Per your example, not the company.
And they aren't laws, just heuristics, that the tech world likes to propagate as if they are laws, when if fact most tech people that believe they are part of the "square root people", but really just lack an appreciation for what is often really going on.
People are burning out, working the jobs of 3 people and are told they’re lucky to have a job. It’s not bullshit if it’s unsustainable.
Which part is bullshit? The part where, in order to survive, everyone* needs a job? Or the part where, because everyone* needs a job, some jobs might not be as important as others?
*Y'all know what I mean.
Accumulate capital, make it grow
If you fail, your life is encumbered in ways that prevent you from doing that, there are limited programs in the US for you, but burdening corporations is a symptom
Sure, some bullshit is going to slip in, but it’s still a bunch of human beings trying to make a living on this dumb rock. Software itself is all bullshit in the grand scheme of things.
We're not paying people to dig holes and fill them up as a society, instead we're demanding that centers of production and growth willingly disdain productivity in order to subsidize people digging holes and filling them up.
We'd be far better off directly subsidizing education, health care, or even customer service and scientific research than demanding that the real sources of all economic growth (and prosperity) have departments printing out reams of paper for another department to shred. Efficiency and technology lower costs and (when properly distributed) give people more time for leisure across the system. You aren't sticking it to the fat cats by telling them not to do layoffs; if you want to stick it to the fat cats, tax their profits and strip layers of economic indirection/middlemen.
Also HN: "You can't have less than 1000 people for that!!"
As long as they can find people to educate themselves on the systems fast enough it's not an issue.
I'm sure there's chafe in that 10%, but not all of it is.
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How can you be so callous? This is why people don't like startup people.
Yes, obviously it's a bad thing, because those people are now without a source of income and often without health insurance. I say "obviously" because it's pretty reasonable to expect people aren't sociopaths, and care about the well-being of others. It's only within your sick bubble where maximizing profit at the expense of human suffering is considered a reasonable option. Unfortunately, people like you have a disproportionate power in our society.
I'm not saying you're a sociopath, I'm saying that the economic ideology which is commonplace on Hacker News makes normal people who believe it behave like sociopaths.
Sure, in a society with a reasonable safety net where losing your job wasn't a potential death sentence, laying off some workers occasionally would be fine. But we don't live in a Keynesian fantasy-world, we live in a world where insurance companies have death panels.
If 100 fewer employees is bad; is 100 more good?
You're "impacted".
George Carlin. https://youtu.be/vuEQixrBKCc?si=cLfi4-hH78PA6ZEg&t=217*
"Unfortunately, you have been impacted by my resignation"
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If they say impacted, people complain that it's euphemistic.
In the end, people just want to complain, and they're going to do it either way.
It does not matter how good you are doing in contrast to previous years. If your loan comes due and you can't afford another one to keep that revolving credit going you need to free up the capitol to pay.
It's all fun and games until the tide goes out. Then you suddenly might need to rollover the debt at new rates like 6% while the company earnings also go down because everyone can spend a bit less. Suddenly, you might lose a few procent (or more!) on the loans. It's a bit of a double whammy.
I can help you out here :)
In addition to revenue, debt is a source of funding for investment into growth.
For example, if you can get a return of 8% on an investment, it make sense to borrow capital at a 5% rate. But not at a 10% rate.
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I know one regional company who sells nationally/internationally which has done that for decades. Decades ago, the owner asked the local bank for a growth loan for some equipment and was turned down. The next week, he found out that one of his employees, who depends 100% on his company for income, went to the same bank for a motorcycle loan and was approved. the business owner was so outraged at the bank's stupid decision-making (if the business isn't good for the money, how will the employee be good for it?) that he decided to never use bank debt for growth again. That was in the 1960s, and the company is doing great, focusing on product and service and not financial games, with very expansive and expanding facilities and workforce. The regional bank was absorbed long ago.
Remember: no matter how much banks advertise being your partner and friend, they are not.
Unless that business was the only employer in the area, the owner was basically just having a tantrum over the idea that different kinds of loans for different amounts of money might have different decision-making processes behind them. When my credit union decided to give me a car loan, they didn't look into the solvency of my employer, they just saw that I have good credit and a steady income and took a safe 5-digit gamble. It may have hurt the owner's feelings to essentially be told "we're pretty sure we can make our money back on this $1000 motorcycle loan which has a very easy-to-deal-with collateral, but we don't want to give you a $100000 for specialized equipment"
They chose to fire thousands and yet have sufficient to invest further into markets all over the world.
Burn and churn is just much easier and lax labor laws do not prohibit such tendencies!
To be clear, this is not people being fired for bullshit jobs. This is people being fired because their 1 billion in revenue is a fraction of the 300 billion in stock price opportunity.
Ask me how I know...
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But that's asking for too much from the average corporate leadership. Efficiency and technology acquisition are too much for these agents of the entrenched hegemony. So, what we have right now is a form of nationalist socialist welfare that looks like our current financial-administrative system. There's some momentum and inertia, but it's all being wasted on keeping unproductive fat cats alive.
And that's okay. Because smart people will be leaving this oppressive Egypt under a stubborn Pharaoh. For much better lands and pasture. And while that happens, profit will start to look like a heinous crime to these welfare recipients. Who naturally will not be invited to the awesome parties that's coming in the future.
Something like Eloi and Morlocks, if you wanna get biological about it. Eloi and Morlocks, though, are just the starting point. H.G. Wells didn't have anime music videos to inspire him to think about the more accurate possibilities of a matrix of biological degradation and environmental niche adaptation.
So I know which I would choose, is what I'm trying to say. Like a band-aid.
> You’ve helped us bullshit so much that the only possible way for you to continue to help us bullshit is by no longer working here, effective immediately.
The title seems to presume that "you all" are contributing to the company doing so well. If you're not, then firing you will have no effect on the company doing well or not, except it will reduce costs. Arguably the company may do better without you as by firing you they have reduced costs.
Are there ever conversations where employees are asked to take a pay cut instead of being laid off?
Months later, when things continue to go really bad in the economy, they told them same firms, they needed to take another 50% cut (so now down 75%), most took that as well, but not all. Those that didn't take it largely found themselves unemployed for a very long time.
Just goes to show you how bloated those rates were to begin with.
Well, the second time it wasn’t really a request.
If you want to automate yourself and then stop working you need to be an owner.