The Better.com CEO says he’s ‘deeply sorry’ for firing workers over Zoom | Hacker News Reader

The Better.com CEO says he’s ‘deeply sorry’ for firing workers over Zoom

nytimes.com

17 pointsgrogu8810 comments

> “You guys know that at least 250 of the people terminated were working an average of 2 hours a day while clocking in 8 hours+ a day in the payroll system?” he wrote.

When you're paying someone to come into an office for 8 hours a day, you're paying for 8 hours of availability for work. Most of the time office workers don't have 8 hours worth of work, sometimes you have 2, sometimes you have 6, and sometimes you do have 8 hours worth of work.

In a typical office setting, in the time a worker doesn't actively have work they just pretend to be busy or sit around. In a work-from-home setting a worker can take that time to grab a snack, watch a video, spend time with their family, or any other number of smaller things.

While the freedom probably has been abused by people, this expectation of a solid 8 hour work day is being shattered and is showing how much more time and freedom workers can have compared to what we have right now and these CEOs are trying to turn it into a way to justify paying workers less or punishing them making use of that freedom.

He did say an average of 2. Assuming he's being truthful, that's a little ridiculous. I would expect the average for an 8 hour worker to be closer to 4-6.

>> “You guys know that at least 250 of the people terminated were working an average of 2 hours a day while clocking in 8 hours+ a day in the payroll system?” he wrote.

Putting on my investor's glasses, I'm wondering why he can't schedule for 8 hours worth of work for his employees. My experience with software is that there's always something to do (and it can very well be training and learning new tech!).

By all accounts this looks like: 1. He is trying to dampen the PR turd-cascade he has created 2. Hoping to assuage the Board from having to make him fall on his sword, so that they don't have to go on a new Exec search and he doesn't join those he terminated so utterly daftly

It's ridiculous that he's "deeply sorry" for this. He could've presented the news better, e.g. not rambling for a couple minutes about how hard this was for him, but other than that I don't see what he did wrong. How else are you supposed to fire remote workers? Ask them to come in to hear they're getting laid off?

The hardest part about getting fired is the not-having-a-job part. The tool used to deliver the message seems pretty insignificant.

I thought slightly less of him for being a bad bearer of bad news and much less of him for kowtowing to social media pressure.

If you need to fire someone, do it 1:1. How would you feel being mass-fired on a call? Do you have questions?

That has its own problems. You create tension and stress across your entire workforce while the calls are going out and people are letting their friends know they've been fired and their friends are wondering if/when they are going to get a call too. That alone seems much worse than a brusque mass layoff call.

That doesn't even begin to address the fact that the company would have to put significantly more time and effort into coordinating, distributing, and executing the calls. Maybe that's okay if your company has unlimited money and you can afford to spend lots of it on niceties. I think it's less okay if the time of your middle management layers is important.

I say this as a person who has been told in a mass meeting that my job no longer exists. I was thinking "I need to find a new job" and absolutely not thinking "I wish I had been told 1 on 1."

I guess he doesn't know yet that he's fired.

Somebody tell him this is awkward.

The only reason he would be fired is because he's terrible at masking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4

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