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Comment by wedowhatwedo | Hacker News Reader

Each person being laid off deserves a private meeting with their manager where they are told this. The fact that they hired 900 people they now no longer need is a failing of the CEO by itself. If they work remotely, it can be a zoom meeting.

Being told in a meeting with 900 people by someone you don't know is rude and tells me that anyone in leadership in this company are people I would not like to work for. The fact that he was more concerned about his feelings than the feelings of the 900 is even more evidence that this person has absolutely no empathy and managing people is the wrong job for them.

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If you’re letting go of 900 people, for the average person their manager is also being let go. In a good amount of cases, probably their manager’s manager.

I think it was a good call for the CEO to do it instead of outsourcing to HR or a COO. He didn’t try to hide behind another exec. Anyone being let go - especially at the holidays - is going to be pretty pissed about it, and it was the right thing for the CEO to take the slings and arrows for it instead of an underling.

> I think it was a good call for the CEO to do it instead of outsourcing to HR or a COO.

There was actually a movie about these outsourced "downziser" organizations/consultants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(2009_film)

Office Space, anyone?

Yes, but even there the consultant made a point about making the transition as smooth for the fired person as possible. The whole point was not to stir up negative emotions, which by their very nature are unpredictable.

Sure, but the client still pays the consultant for economic reasons: soften the emotional blow to the employee being let go in order to soften the reputation blow to the company. If the employer does not care for reputation (or, what seems more likely in this case, key persons might actually like that particular type of reputation), why would they pay?

Taking the slings and arrows for it by entirely protecting himself with a one way call?

Nice meme

Doing this hierarchically is already a solved issue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joz-tAsJ6as

Part of the 1:1 meeting basis is to address any concerns and address return of assets or information.

In the Before Times, there might be a group meeting, that would typically be for a department or site. It would be followed by a 1:1 with a manager (whomever is left standing in the chain of command), or (fairly frequently) with an outsourced consultant (see the film Up in the Air for reasonably accurate depiction of this).

Better did ... Worse.

While true, you could do it in waves - task low level managers to inform their directs, then task the senior managers to inform the middle managers, and so on...

That's how you make all your most hireable employees leave ship first. If you want to retain some those are usually the ones you'd want to keep.

Counterpoint : this is going viral. The aftermath of that is going to be hard to measure in simple terms.

"As your manager, I'm sad to tell you this, but you are fired. But so am I! It's not you, it's the company."

Lets think it through.

Even if each person is given 5 minutes of personal time with the person doing the firing, at 8 hours per day assuming no breaks, that's 5 * 900 / 60 / 8 = 9 days. Almost two business weeks. That means that 900 people will have a zoom meeting scheduled two weeks ahead of time, and while they wait they see that everyone who goes into that meeting is fired.

Does this sounds like a better way of doing it, to you?

No, that doesn't sound like a better way, but it does sound like you aren't particularly grasping what they are proposing.

Your algo can easily be parallelized by increasing the number of people firing.

Heard many stories of it being done this way. Extreme anxiety for everyone as people wait to see if they get called in.

My point exactly.

Taking the time to do it with respect for the individuals, rather than treating them all like interchangeable fodder?

Yeah, that seems better to me.

If they have to fire 900 people, you think they only have the bandwidth for 1 person to fire them? 10 People its down to a work day, 20 is half that again..

This was horrendous optics, basically asking to get shared virally and draw more attention to the bad situation the company is in. The CEO made it about himself / the company, that's all people are going to get from Google searches for a time to come. Managers could give them the news en masse as efficiently and infinitely more humanely.

Not to mention the CEO spent more time talking about how this is impacting HIM. When you're laying people off, this isn't about you. Noone cares about you, this is about the people getting laid off. You need to be concerned about their feelings, what you're going to do to help THEM.

I've worked for multiple companies that have had major reductions in force at times. When folks get laid off in a group, it has never been done 1:1. Usually the group getting let go is told all at once separately from the rest of the company. It's done per team or per department, so if you're a software engineer getting cut, you're told at the same time with the other software engineers getting cut, but yes usually the guy that runs the department will be present.

The CEO doesn't really pass the "fit and proper person" test does He

No. At mass layoffs it's better to do it instantly and en masse because otherwise you cause massive anxiety in everyone, including those who will stay. It's also why multiple rounds of layoffs are a bad idea. Just do everything at once and move on.

Usually people still need to do something in the period before they are actually laid off. With these kind of calls it's scorched earth from there onward and I would question everything everyone does which is counterproductive.

Not for these roles, I don't think. You can just lock their laptop and call it a day, which is what they did. This is fungible labour.

Isn't that 'employee privilege'? People who are in business for themselves often lose clients without notice. Employees easily forget how much they are shielded from the market.

Well… yes? Employees trade lower revenue for greater stability

But, the query wasn't about stability. It was about emotional support.

yes, of which you expect more when you enter an employee-employer relationship than when you are independent

I'm not sure that's wise.

I know that the zeitgeist is to say “your employer doesn’t care about you, don’t care about them etc”, but honestly in my experience the employer-employee relationship is much more stable and human than a contractor-client one

It's a buffer against the market. Nice when it works, but you can't count on it fully. Sometimes the outside world leaks through. I don't think anyone wanted to fire 900 people at once in this situation.

>The fact that they hired 900 people they now no longer need is a failing of the CEO by itself

How so? Business circumstances are constantly changing

You don't hire 900 people over one Zoom call. At some point, you have to figure out if you are hiring too many people, so you don't end up in a situation like this.

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