CEO Feels Terrible About Laying Off 900 Employees over Video Chat | Hacker News Reader

CEO Feels Terrible About Laying Off 900 Employees over Video Chat

vice.com

34 pointsawoodbeck22 comments

This article is reaching. While layoffs do suck, and the CEO could have more eloquently empathized with the terminated employees, there is no easy way to do this. With remote work, you live by the sword and die by the sword. They’ll hire you over video chat and fire you over video chat.

Perhaps the author could read up on how his own employer does layoffs[0].

On a related note, Better.com had a very slick interface and was responsive in the beginning but suffered from generally incompetent loan advisors.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/business/media/vice-media...

You don’t think laying off nearly 1000 people en masse with a video is cruel and unusual? I do. This is a terrible look for the company in my opinion and I’m glad this article exposed it.

I would rather be told in the privacy of my house then in a office and have to walk by all the other folks in the other meeting.

If someone forces me into the office, I will cough at them.

What the hell. Just do video call.

For what its worth, I've seen something even more tacky than this. A company rented a ballroom of a hotel and had 2 meetings. 9am: Lay off several hundred people. 10am: Celebration for those still employed. Some people designated for 9am showed up late. It was very awkward.

I’ve been there on the IT side. Company had two meetings simultaneously on either side of the building and I was in the server room disabling GSuite accounts and remotely locking laptops.

Absolutely brutal 40% headcount slash after we lost a major client. And, someone went to the “stay” meeting that was escorted to the correct meeting by a manager too.

Reminds me of The Joker breaking a cuestick in half and throwing it to the two surviving henchman and saying "Good News - there is a new position opening up in my organization".

Definitely not cruel if handled correctly. Provide compensation and support post work for finding a new job. It can be handled super humanely.

So you are the CEO and can't visit anyone physically for obvious reasons. How do you propose you do it?

There’s a much better way to do this and while it’s time-consuming it’s the right thing to do. You have their immediate manager reach out individually with an HR Business Partner on the call to help manage the conversation and answer immediate questions about severance, immigration etc. May need to some group calls where whole teams are let go but as personal as possible is the goal. I’ve seen it done this way where there more than 1000 so it’s doable with large RIFs. By doing it this way you also maintain a chance they’ll come back when you’re doing better and that you won’t risk expensive wrongful termination claims.

> Perhaps the author could read up on how his own employer does layoffs

They did it the normal way, individual private notification. It would be remiss not to mention it afterward at the next all-hands meeting.

> They’ll hire you over video chat and fire you over video chat.

They didn't hire anyone on a one-way broadcast-only video conference with 900 attendees.

> They did it the normal way, individual private notification.

Over a messaging app? How is that normal or better?

> They didn't hire anyone on a one-way broadcast-only video conference with 900 attendees.

CEO doesn't hire anyone individually either. So, is it better to push this layoff responsibility to the hiring manager?

I have no idea why hiring and firing need to be symmetrical.

When I was hired, I was congrat'ed by multiple people through personal email. Should we keep that symmetry as well? Or should we be arbitrarily selective?

> Over a messaging app?

Who said a messaging app? The Vice story says Google Meet video chat.

> How is that normal or better?

Most people don't want to be entirely impassive spectators while someone who can't see or hear them upends their career plans with uncontested fluffy business jargon.

> So, is it better to push this layoff responsibility to the hiring manager?

Yes, I've been laid off once and a colleague twice, and that's how it's gone each time. The whole reason there are articles written about this incident is that it's so sensationally exceptional.

there's a special place in hell for billionaires laying people off with one week severance before Christmas.

This is the type of stuff that breaks people. Awful company, I hope the bad press eradicates them, and the ceo loses everything.

I'm not disagreeing at all, and I don't know the details in this case, but it's entirely possible to be a billionaire on paper and be _wildly_ incapable of paying salaries to 900 people. 900 x ~150,000 = 135,000,000. If the company was losing 100M a year during the next valuation moment, it's very possible this CEO would no longer be even close to being a billionaire. Cash in hand and valuation are very different things.

Again, not excusing any of this, the video was extremely cringe and I can't believe he went with "for those of you in the US, we'll be doing the legal minimum, for everyone else, sorry!", but as someone who is "worth" almost a million dollars, and who cannot afford to hire even a single person, it's not always so simple.

All that said, 900 * (150000 / 12) == 11250000, so I have a hard time imagining it wouldn't have been worth 1M for a fairly well known tech company with loads of funding to avoid this horrific press and karma.

I hate this trend of some people in power pretending to have remorse and be considered as victims or powerless when in fact all of this results of their decisions.

Nothing would have prevented to do that in a better way, with individual or little group meetings. Maybe not firing them "effective immediately" but respecting them not as throwable useless resources...

But probably it is easier for the CEO and it's managing team to do it like that than spending days and hours in individual meetings... But just remember that these 900 persons were not hired in a mass zoom call!

So, I wish that everyone be smart enough to refuse being hired to work in one company that this guy is leading.

Nothing would have prevented tearful management from managing better over the past year. Managing better is hard work. But it is more exciting to chase the next funding round.

"I almost cried", and then I remembered all this sweet cash infusion that I get to play with. F that dude.

> these 900 persons were not hired in a mass zoom call!

By hundreds of people, not directly by CEO.

I don't know if pushing the layoff responsibility to the manager is better.

> Nothing would have prevented to do that in a better way, with individual or little group meetings

Disagree. Your friend is laid off and you have a meeting with CEO next? The rumour and anticipation will wreck everybody. This could be dangerous for company itself in terms of security.

Not saying what CEO did is the best. I don't have a better solution to firing people, but yours is definitely worse.

When O'Reilly axed 10% of their staff in order to get their merger numbers aligned all we got was an email...this was pre-covid.

He actually bumped up his stock and pay options - we can't have the CEO sacrifice now can we ???.

This rubs the wrong way given this context

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ao3zs41aB_M

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