> Companies that handled layoffs poorly are likely to have a harder time convincing ex workers to go back, Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School who's studied layoffs, said.
Yeah, you don't need an MBA to know that, but good that's being said
> Salesforce execs, and Benioff in particular, have over the years encouraged workers to view their colleagues and the company itself as "Ohana," a Hawaiian term referring to family.
That's level 8 of drinking your own Koolaid. From Salesforce? I'd consider them only less impersonal than Oracle, and pretty much that's it.
Being laid off and re-hired later is common in blue-collar professions, and that's the way we are moving to in the long term. Be frugal, save money, because the future doesn't look very bright.
Companies continue to want to pretend like software development is a factory assembly line. Weird how those sprint commitments never get hit in the same way as “we want X cars to roll off the line this month.” It must be the workers. /s
Maybe they can standardize this crap through more abstractions like React using the new AI available LLMs. So that now you pull a 3GB of code to compile just a "Hello World" website.
I am not a financial advisor, but I think most financial advisors would not recommend you save all your money in cash, in no small part because of potential inflation.
I think the typical rule is to save N months of bills [1] in cash (or something cash-adjacent like a CD or T-Bill), and the rest in an index fund/ETF from something like Vanguard of Fidelity or something like that. This allows you to somewhat "outsource" the problems of inflation to corporations.
[1] the size of N probably depends on the person and cost of living and all that fun stuff, but I think it's usually 6.
That is very interesting, and I suppose it speaks to the historical amnesia among IT specialists, since I believe the majority of us don’t really see ourselves as belonging to the working class.
If the majority of your income comes from labor, as opposed to interest on capital, you are working class. The non-working class likes more divisions between the working class, so works to perpetuate this misunderstanding.
Maybe the above poster was referencing the startup founders and early employees on HN, who could be considered to not be working class, depending on their ownership stake and success of their company.
There are only 2 classes, the worker class, and the ownership class that doesn't really have to work (e.g. could stop working tomorrow and be fine until retirement/death)
Yeah, I was unemployed for four months this year due to layoffs. It was unpleasant, obviously, but I am extremely glad that I have been really vigilant about saving money for the last few years. It sucks not having an income, but it sucks less if you have a nice, healthy savings to draw from. It moves the problem away from the "how will I eat or afford rent?" territory, and more towards the "I guess I'll buy that thing next year" territory.
Whether or not the future looks bright, this is sound advice for everyone. As an immigrant to the US, one of my biggest culture shocks was how little the average American saves, and how little it's emphasized in the culture. Perhaps it speaks to how much faith the public has in government-provided social programs, despite the popular notion that the US does very little for its poor and elderly. (Are things different in Western Europe?)
From what I've read, it actually appears to be somewhat generational; apparently Gen-Z has, broadly speaking, actually picked up some good habits and seems to be saving money at a higher rate than previous generations. [1]
Of course, speaking about people in terms of generations is not something I really enjoy doing (especially since it does seem like millennials get a disproportionate level of hate on that front), but I think in the case of Gen-Z a lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of them grew up right around the 2008 financial crash and realized how important saving money is.
Let's not be hyperbolic, these people were paid better than 90-5% of workers in the wealthiest country int he world.
* [EDIT] since no one seems to understand my point here let me clarify. It is crass and stupid to compare layoffs at big tech to violence against women and human trafficking. Just utterly disgusting and it comes across as entitled and totally disconnected. You can support labor without comparing like wealthy workers to the most vulnerable people in society and pretending you have similar grievance.
It basically is though. I'm pointed out that despite being poorly treated, the people in question are among the wealthiest int he whole world. They are in no way comparable to victims of trafficking. The original comment just came across as hyperbolic, crass, and entitled.
No one is saying that, especially me. I'm saying the comparison is dumb, crass, and minimizes the seriousness of violence against women and human trafficking.
I’d prefer to see more people raised to join the middle class rather than comments like this with sympathy for the overlords stamping out the last vestiges of the middle class.
Oh please. These workers are wealthy by any reasonable definition. I 100% agree that raising people into the middle class is great goal. But comparing some overzealous layoffs and ham-fisted re-hiring to violence against women and human trafficking is just dumb and gross.
I don't think you get it. The wealth of the people has nothing to do with this. A cheap prostitute and a well paid engineer deserve the same respect. Why are you bringing wealth or social status into it?
> The wealth of the people has nothing to do with this.
Yes it does. Being laid off and rehired before your VERY generous severance runs out is nothing like the disrespect someone in sex work often has to endure. The comparison is totally disconnected from reality. Being wealthy and of high social standing in the US immunizes you from the kind of deprivations faced by people in the informal economy.
Obviously both deserve respect, it just in my opinion minimizes the plight of people being trafficked to compare that to a big tech layoff. It just sounds clueless.
You can't assume everyone received a severance, had enough severance or wasn't severely impacted by the layoff (just because they made a decent living prior).
There's a non-zero percent one or more laid off individuals killed themselves due to losing their job. Don't minimize that.
Where's the actual joke? It wasn't structured like a joke, and as someone who enjoys a crass joke, I can confidently say I didn't find it funny.
Meta and Salesforce both gave out severance. Meta's packages were well reported on and were through the end of this year at full pay with healthcare.
> There's a non-zero percent one or more laid off individuals killed themselves due to losing their job. Don't minimize that.
This is gishgallop. You're just bringing in new unrelated things. to muddy the issue. Moreover, do you think wealthy laid off people have higher or lower rates of self harm vs victims of human trafficking?
I didn’t see you were replying to a comment that had been removed when I responded. At the time I replied to you, no where in your post nor the linked article were sex workers or human trafficking mentioned. I assume the one you replied to said that, which again I never saw. In my mind we’re talking about people being laid off from their jobs and then the offending company turning back around and asking for them back at a lower salary.
The original comment I replied to compared laid off facebook workers to sex workers being beaten by their pimps, which I thought was really over the top and kind of terrible.
> The advice varied to return but keep looking, don't return, or demand more pay to return.
Sounds about right to me. "Return but keep looking" is probably the nightmare scenario for the employer. The worker hasn't found a job yet, and is only going to be 50% paying attention when they come back.
(Not judging the employee here. Just the idiot that order the lay off of people the company needed.)
Link to another discussion pointing out that M$ layoffs were the result of wall st. investment firms and hedge fund managers wanting to reduce tech salaries.
What evidence is there to indicate the board of directors or CEO of one of the world’s richest and most profitable businesses is controlled by much less powerful and less wealthy Wall St investment firms and hedge fund managers?
You could make the same argument about the US government, and yet the "much less powerful and less wealthy" groups still have a ton of influence over it. You are expecting it to make perfect logical sense, when it could all be very easily explained with one word: greed.
Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt and stop believing that the ultra rich don't all work together to take more of your money, because they do, they have been forever, and they continue to do so forever.
A simpler explanation for Microsoft’s actions is that the Microsoft board of directors and CEO wanted those actions to occur, for their own benefit.
The whole hedge fund manager and Wall St boogeyman is nonsense. Who even is “Wall St”? Lots of people own shares of Microsoft. There are probably a bunch of people who influence Microsoft’s leaders more than some paper pushers in NYC.
The ownership of Microsoft is so diffuse, I am just asking for some evidence or even who these “Wall St” and “hedge funds” are that somehow control the hiring/firing decisions of a business that is 100x bigger and more profitable than them.
A lot of "rich" tech CEOs don't have massive amounts of cash, they have big equity stakes in their companies. It's paper wealth strongly tied to their company's share price.
Many of these companies' share prices is heavily influenced because a handful of hedge funds own a majority of the shares. For example, look at Pinterest: the general public makes of 11.7% of share owners while institutional investors make up 74% of share owners.
If those hedge funds all decide they're unhappy with the "rich CEO's" decision, they can dump the shares all at once, it will tank the price, and the CEO's are no longer rich. Most of these tech companies also have compensation structure where employee income is also significantly in stock, a price dump could cause mass attrition which can trigger a death spiral.
If you look at activist investors letters to Twitter, Pinterest, Google from hedge funds like Elliott Management, their pressure to cut employees compensation, employee perks, etc....this isn't some conspiracy theory. Wall Street hedge funds absolutely have massive influence on Silicon Valley tech companies because ultimately they do still control the purse strings.
> a handful of hedge funds own a majority of the shares
> institutional investors
Hedge funds are a minority of institutional investors. Most of those institutional investors are companies like Vanguard or BlackRock, who in turn just hold shares on behalf of their customers; basically, anyone who contributes to a 401k with a "Vanguard Target Retirement 2060 Fund" or whatever.
> If those hedge funds all decide they're unhappy with the "rich CEO's" decision, they can dump the shares all at once, it will tank the price, and the CEO's are no longer rich.
This is true, but the funds will also lose money (or miss out on gains in the future). Activist investors like Elliott absolutely do exist, but most AUM is managed by non-activist investors. Elliott, for example, had $71B in AUM as of last year; Vanguard alone was over 100x the size in that same year.
The most common reason I heard in their announcements was that they drastically over-hired during the pandemic and needed to downsize to adjust to "market conditions". Are they saying market conditions have substantially improved?
I don't think so. If it's meant to be temporary, doesn't it get called a furlough instead? That's the "we're not firing you because we want you to do work for us later, but also we're going to stop paying you" option.
Furlough can be very different. Usually "furloughed" employees are still employed and continue receiving benefits (health insurance, etc). I guess if there were no benefits they would be the same though.
I think the meaning has fully shifted to imply permanence, for at least a couple decades now. The word that comes to mind for a temporary situation is furlough, although I’ve mainly heard that used in a government context.
Maybe the difference is that most people now change jobs often enough, that the government is the only entity that would promise to re-employ those they temporarily couldn’t pay.
I think it just means "let go not because of individual performance" as opposed to "fired" meaning "let go because of bad individual performance."
It think of it in the sense that you are talking about though because I grew up with a lot of people in the building trades. They often use "laid off" to mean basically "there's not enough work so I'm not getting hours until there is more" (eg temporary). But I think that is pretty specific to those industries where there is pretty fixed pool of labor and the work is highly seasonal.
Whether we actually do something about companies constantly introducing volatility to our social livelihoods, abusing workers, and eroding our buying power is really up to us though.
You have to make it heinously unprofitable, since that's really the only mechanism in capitalism that would course-correct this behavior.
I have no management experience, but I wonder if there's a certain level up the ladder where one person just can't do most/all things well? There are so many problems and teams, even being accountable to a fraction of them would be taxing.
Not saying this to remove accountability, but I know I would personally collapse in that job.
Let go of the wrong people, and now the best of those won't be back. Ever wonder why aerospace/manufacturing has a hard time getting the crème de la crème? This is why. We got layoff/rehire cycles at least once a year.
It's like when you sell all of your crap in an RPG but then find out no one will sell you back the Really Cool Thing you whoops-dumped in the sale. It's an eff-up, but when you got cheat codes, it really doesn't matter.
An analogy for the desperate looking for employment, colluding to suppress wages across the industry, skewed supply-demand ratios in their favor. Take your pick.
I think 1 and 3 are the same thing, but collusion sounds like it would be much more of a cheat code. Still, if it's not clear which one of those things they meant, then whatever they were implying is totally lost, and it's not a good place to use an analogy.
Financialization. The capability to create "today money" from "tomorrow money" at extremely low levels of perceived risk. Sometimes we dip our webbed flippers into the idea of negative risk, with predictable - but extremely today-dollar-rific - results.
Offtopic, but this magical money-generation capability is commonly perceived as a standin for any value-generation capability, from aerodynamics to materials science. Go wander the C-Suite of a major aerospace firm and count the engineering degrees, then go back and count the MBAs. It's every bit as absurd as late-stage Soviet Russia injecting "Socialism" into fields like fluid dynamics.
If this disagrees with anyone's ideology, I preemptively apologize. Go ahead and throw stuff at the monitor.
I missed out on the property boom at a personal level because I was not taught the value of debt. So I get your point. We didn't purchase a home because it always seemed like a bubble that simply could not inflate further. All the while, property prices went up, up and up. (referring to Canadian housing)
So mistake made, lesson learned. In a world where money is expensive (fed rate sets the lowerbound), where are the opportunities?
I am not an investing genius or even a decent layman - I am prone to episodes of terrible personal injury - but the obvious answer seems to be "destroy the future, short the present".
Here's a trick, though: if you don't believe in the future, how do you cash out of the present, or out of anything? Now we move into the shadow realm of metaphor and ideology. This has been a pretty big deal since at least 1972, and more urgently since 2008, when all kinds of super-weird-ass money tricks were spawned.
From what I've heard, I believe they are paying market rate for the new role, so for people who have been at the company for a while and stagnated in the pay bands it can be a raise
The industry used to have lifers in the last century. That reduced to 10 years at a company in the dotcoms. That reduced to 4 years at a company in the 00s. That reduced to 18 months pre-pandemic.
Right now, I don't even know why software engineers should do anything but keep hopping jobs all the time. There is less value in promotions/raises/loyalty than in constant hopping.
The "more to life" part cannot even be obtained at massively profitable companies because the companies will yank you at the slightest sign of slowdown.
You might not want to hop but the company might want you to hop.
I don't think my employer has ever laid anyone off. Some people have been fired for cause and some people have quit but no layoffs. Not all companies are giant corporate behemoths that run everything by metrics.
Maybe it's the era when I started working, but for ICs, I think 2-5 years is the sweet spot. Any shorter and you weren't fully productive at the company and never built connections. Any longer and your skills get too tied to the company and your perspective become stale.
"Inability to commit"? More like, companies treat employees as disposable, don't give appropriate raises or promotions, and through their incompetence force employees to move on to obtain the market salary for their efforts. If anything, their existing company should be willing to pay MORE because they're already familiar with that company's systems and have useful knowledge built up over time.
Many employees would love to "commit". When's the last time anyone offered a software engineer a 2 or 3 year contract, with a 6 months salary severance if they're terminated before the end of the contract? Who's afraid of commitment here?
During healthier job markets, I've seen tons of candidates job hopping every 12-24 months to get better pay etc. This is wasteful of time for the companies, who train these employees up before they're fully productive.
Now, in a recession, there is more of a scarcity mindset on the side of the workers as you are showing.
Someone job hopping every 12 months in a low-interest-rate climate isn’t doing it because they’re being “mistreated” by their current employer, over and over again. They’re exploiting a high demand job market to leverage their current position and get higher pay as an incentive to leave. This happened a lot in the Trump years when the economy was happy.
With regard to contracts, it’s a fair point. But what other white collar work has those?
This is a lazy article that just says that these companies are still hiring people. Big companies will always be hiring people as there is constantly positions that need to be backfilled or new priorities that need extra headcount.
Having a layoff doesn't mean a company will never hire anyone ever again. It's common for people who were laid off from something the company is no longer prioritizing to be able to find a position in an area that the company is now prioritizing.
> the company itself as "Ohana," a Hawaiian term referring to family.
I don't care if you truly feel like family where you work - please stop believing this bullshit. The socialization and fraternization of work is big fat lie that routinely gets employees to act as volunteers.
Your CEO is probably a socio- or psychopath and will say and do whatever benefits them the most. Even if they are not, they ultimately answer to investors/shareholders, not their "family." If you were truly family to them, they would take a pay-cut before sacking you.
Again, the concept "Ohana" at work, as a matter of fact, is NEVER true.
I will say I have made some great friends from work, some life long lasting relationships I hope...but I don't think any of those people are the ones that preach the whole 'family' thing. You don't need to be reminded who your family or close friends are...it kind of just comes from the experiences you've been through.
If it's a family, it's the kind of family you see in movies where father knows best and everyone does what he says.
I preferred Netflix's honesty -- they always said "we're a sports team. We bring on top performers, and we cut low performers. Sometimes we even cut top performers that we just don't need anymore. But if you are a top performer with a skill that we need, you'll always have a job".
Who said this? "Sometimes we even cut top performers" sounds like something an unusually introspective executive might write in their memoir, after they are safely retired.
HR would say it all the time. Usually after a top performer was let go and we wondered why and they would say "we just didn't need their role anymore".
Very interesting. I can see that causing... extreme uneasiness, in some environments. But Netflix sounds challenging but cheerful and honest, the way you describe it.
Yeah. It's way better when both sides are clear about it being nothing more than a business transaction. I assume that you wouldn't be looking for a job long as a redundant Netflix top performer.
If this is you, don't overlook the opportunity to negotiate. Being asked back is already recognizing that you're more valuable than a new employee would be.
You can also ask for things like a generous signing bonus with the the condition that if you leave through no fault of your own, you keep the whole bonus. It's a way to make sure both sides are serious.
Companies are no longer negotiating and also low balling you. You should absolutely ask for market rates + raise + bonus to cover the lost wages. If they don't negotiate, then it's not worth going back.
I remember in the 90s my mom would go through phases with Corning, getting laid off, then rehired, laid off again, all by the stock price, contracts, etc. I really hope the tech industry doesn't get into this model.
I generally share a skeptical take when it comes to employment, but there is also a less devious narrative that fits the available evidence.
These companies wanted to cut projects and orgs because they didn’t see a future in them. They needed the ability to make clean cuts, which meant taking out some of the meat with the fat. Otherwise the layoffs get drawn out and messy with internal fighting over headcount.
I bet the employees who got laid off then rehired are pretty happy. Some of them even got a 4 month garden leave of sorts, then return to their old company.
IMHO being laid off is stressful, even if you can logically tell yourself it's not yet time to worry (i.e. you have a good amount of savings). I sincerely doubt these employees felt anything like being on vacation.
As to a "less devious narrative," I think all we need to do is remove this idea of planned outcome (lower wages for people working in software) in order to strike the "devious" from this theory. It's clear Wall Street wanted tech companies across the board to shed employees, as others have pointed out that's probably enough to get CEOs to lay people off.
I feel that institutional knowledge is incredibly important, especially in tech, and probably undervalued with the decision to layoff. On boarding costs for new engineers is very high. Layoff and rehire cycles don't make sense in tech for those reasons.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 407 ms ] threadYeah, you don't need an MBA to know that, but good that's being said
> Salesforce execs, and Benioff in particular, have over the years encouraged workers to view their colleagues and the company itself as "Ohana," a Hawaiian term referring to family.
That's level 8 of drinking your own Koolaid. From Salesforce? I'd consider them only less impersonal than Oracle, and pretty much that's it.
Put out 3 ideas in the time it takes another company to put out 1, and optimize the ideas that gain traction.
I think the typical rule is to save N months of bills [1] in cash (or something cash-adjacent like a CD or T-Bill), and the rest in an index fund/ETF from something like Vanguard of Fidelity or something like that. This allows you to somewhat "outsource" the problems of inflation to corporations.
[1] the size of N probably depends on the person and cost of living and all that fun stuff, but I think it's usually 6.
Whether or not the future looks bright, this is sound advice for everyone. As an immigrant to the US, one of my biggest culture shocks was how little the average American saves, and how little it's emphasized in the culture. Perhaps it speaks to how much faith the public has in government-provided social programs, despite the popular notion that the US does very little for its poor and elderly. (Are things different in Western Europe?)
Of course, speaking about people in terms of generations is not something I really enjoy doing (especially since it does seem like millennials get a disproportionate level of hate on that front), but I think in the case of Gen-Z a lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of them grew up right around the 2008 financial crash and realized how important saving money is.
[1] https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/gen-z-financial-goals-2...
* [EDIT] since no one seems to understand my point here let me clarify. It is crass and stupid to compare layoffs at big tech to violence against women and human trafficking. Just utterly disgusting and it comes across as entitled and totally disconnected. You can support labor without comparing like wealthy workers to the most vulnerable people in society and pretending you have similar grievance.
Paying more money doesn't change the poor experience.
Yes it does. Being laid off and rehired before your VERY generous severance runs out is nothing like the disrespect someone in sex work often has to endure. The comparison is totally disconnected from reality. Being wealthy and of high social standing in the US immunizes you from the kind of deprivations faced by people in the informal economy.
Obviously both deserve respect, it just in my opinion minimizes the plight of people being trafficked to compare that to a big tech layoff. It just sounds clueless.
You can't assume everyone received a severance, had enough severance or wasn't severely impacted by the layoff (just because they made a decent living prior).
There's a non-zero percent one or more laid off individuals killed themselves due to losing their job. Don't minimize that.
Meta and Salesforce both gave out severance. Meta's packages were well reported on and were through the end of this year at full pay with healthcare.
> There's a non-zero percent one or more laid off individuals killed themselves due to losing their job. Don't minimize that.
This is gishgallop. You're just bringing in new unrelated things. to muddy the issue. Moreover, do you think wealthy laid off people have higher or lower rates of self harm vs victims of human trafficking?
Sounds about right to me. "Return but keep looking" is probably the nightmare scenario for the employer. The worker hasn't found a job yet, and is only going to be 50% paying attention when they come back.
(Not judging the employee here. Just the idiot that order the lay off of people the company needed.)
If they want to make shortsighted decisions to hit quarterly goals, they should be reminded of the high price of short term thinking.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37643608
Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt and stop believing that the ultra rich don't all work together to take more of your money, because they do, they have been forever, and they continue to do so forever.
I will rephrase my comment.
A simpler explanation for Microsoft’s actions is that the Microsoft board of directors and CEO wanted those actions to occur, for their own benefit.
The whole hedge fund manager and Wall St boogeyman is nonsense. Who even is “Wall St”? Lots of people own shares of Microsoft. There are probably a bunch of people who influence Microsoft’s leaders more than some paper pushers in NYC.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/holders/
The ownership of Microsoft is so diffuse, I am just asking for some evidence or even who these “Wall St” and “hedge funds” are that somehow control the hiring/firing decisions of a business that is 100x bigger and more profitable than them.
Some of the companies that own MSFT stock easily have enough muscle to push them around with regulations, PR, or by voting their shares.
Many of these companies' share prices is heavily influenced because a handful of hedge funds own a majority of the shares. For example, look at Pinterest: the general public makes of 11.7% of share owners while institutional investors make up 74% of share owners.
Source: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/with-75-ownership-of-the-sha...
If those hedge funds all decide they're unhappy with the "rich CEO's" decision, they can dump the shares all at once, it will tank the price, and the CEO's are no longer rich. Most of these tech companies also have compensation structure where employee income is also significantly in stock, a price dump could cause mass attrition which can trigger a death spiral.
If you look at activist investors letters to Twitter, Pinterest, Google from hedge funds like Elliott Management, their pressure to cut employees compensation, employee perks, etc....this isn't some conspiracy theory. Wall Street hedge funds absolutely have massive influence on Silicon Valley tech companies because ultimately they do still control the purse strings.
> institutional investors
Hedge funds are a minority of institutional investors. Most of those institutional investors are companies like Vanguard or BlackRock, who in turn just hold shares on behalf of their customers; basically, anyone who contributes to a 401k with a "Vanguard Target Retirement 2060 Fund" or whatever.
> If those hedge funds all decide they're unhappy with the "rich CEO's" decision, they can dump the shares all at once, it will tank the price, and the CEO's are no longer rich.
This is true, but the funds will also lose money (or miss out on gains in the future). Activist investors like Elliott absolutely do exist, but most AUM is managed by non-activist investors. Elliott, for example, had $71B in AUM as of last year; Vanguard alone was over 100x the size in that same year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff
I think the meaning has fully shifted to imply permanence, for at least a couple decades now. The word that comes to mind for a temporary situation is furlough, although I’ve mainly heard that used in a government context.
Maybe the difference is that most people now change jobs often enough, that the government is the only entity that would promise to re-employ those they temporarily couldn’t pay.
It think of it in the sense that you are talking about though because I grew up with a lot of people in the building trades. They often use "laid off" to mean basically "there's not enough work so I'm not getting hours until there is more" (eg temporary). But I think that is pretty specific to those industries where there is pretty fixed pool of labor and the work is highly seasonal.
What a great testament to the management acumen at these companies.
Whether we actually do something about companies constantly introducing volatility to our social livelihoods, abusing workers, and eroding our buying power is really up to us though.
You have to make it heinously unprofitable, since that's really the only mechanism in capitalism that would course-correct this behavior.
Not saying this to remove accountability, but I know I would personally collapse in that job.
It's like when you sell all of your crap in an RPG but then find out no one will sell you back the Really Cool Thing you whoops-dumped in the sale. It's an eff-up, but when you got cheat codes, it really doesn't matter.
Now, if someone takes your cheat codes away . .
Offtopic, but this magical money-generation capability is commonly perceived as a standin for any value-generation capability, from aerodynamics to materials science. Go wander the C-Suite of a major aerospace firm and count the engineering degrees, then go back and count the MBAs. It's every bit as absurd as late-stage Soviet Russia injecting "Socialism" into fields like fluid dynamics.
If this disagrees with anyone's ideology, I preemptively apologize. Go ahead and throw stuff at the monitor.
So mistake made, lesson learned. In a world where money is expensive (fed rate sets the lowerbound), where are the opportunities?
Here's a trick, though: if you don't believe in the future, how do you cash out of the present, or out of anything? Now we move into the shadow realm of metaphor and ideology. This has been a pretty big deal since at least 1972, and more urgently since 2008, when all kinds of super-weird-ass money tricks were spawned.
Right now, I don't even know why software engineers should do anything but keep hopping jobs all the time. There is less value in promotions/raises/loyalty than in constant hopping.
You might not want to hop but the company might want you to hop.
Because if you do, they'll stop hiring you - that only goes one way.
Many employees would love to "commit". When's the last time anyone offered a software engineer a 2 or 3 year contract, with a 6 months salary severance if they're terminated before the end of the contract? Who's afraid of commitment here?
Now, in a recession, there is more of a scarcity mindset on the side of the workers as you are showing.
Nah, it takes a few months at most.
> Now, in a recession, there is more of a scarcity mindset on the side of the workers as you are showing.
Nope, just saying that employees respond to how they expect to be treated.
Also, you avoided most of my main points.
With regard to contracts, it’s a fair point. But what other white collar work has those?
Having a layoff doesn't mean a company will never hire anyone ever again. It's common for people who were laid off from something the company is no longer prioritizing to be able to find a position in an area that the company is now prioritizing.
I don't care if you truly feel like family where you work - please stop believing this bullshit. The socialization and fraternization of work is big fat lie that routinely gets employees to act as volunteers.
Your CEO is probably a socio- or psychopath and will say and do whatever benefits them the most. Even if they are not, they ultimately answer to investors/shareholders, not their "family." If you were truly family to them, they would take a pay-cut before sacking you.
Again, the concept "Ohana" at work, as a matter of fact, is NEVER true.
All that to say...I agree!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Sociopathy
I preferred Netflix's honesty -- they always said "we're a sports team. We bring on top performers, and we cut low performers. Sometimes we even cut top performers that we just don't need anymore. But if you are a top performer with a skill that we need, you'll always have a job".
These companies wanted to cut projects and orgs because they didn’t see a future in them. They needed the ability to make clean cuts, which meant taking out some of the meat with the fat. Otherwise the layoffs get drawn out and messy with internal fighting over headcount.
I bet the employees who got laid off then rehired are pretty happy. Some of them even got a 4 month garden leave of sorts, then return to their old company.
As to a "less devious narrative," I think all we need to do is remove this idea of planned outcome (lower wages for people working in software) in order to strike the "devious" from this theory. It's clear Wall Street wanted tech companies across the board to shed employees, as others have pointed out that's probably enough to get CEOs to lay people off.
Understatement of the year. Who in their right mind would go back without at least better pay?
We change employer to get better pay. Getting re-hired also counts as a new employer for this purpose.
Someone who is looking at their upcoming mortgage payments and their empty savings account.