Twilio CEO announces 11% of employees will be laid off | Hacker News Reader

Twilio CEO announces 11% of employees will be laid off

foxbusiness.com

22 pointslettergram17 comments

> "so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens".

It's like saying they applied an anti-oppression lens when they went for a walk in a park. What did they actually do help fight oppression here, or are they just throwing an unrelated phrase in to get extra points and more sympathy. "Hey, you can't criticize us, we said we applied the lens!".

Right wing sites/blogs/forums are saying that this implies white people, probably white straight men, will be more likely to be laid off because it is supposedly harder for minority group members of various types to replace their job than it is a white male.

Idk if this is true, but that's how the right is reading this.

That's how I'm reading it. I don't really understand if there is another way of reading it? The action we're talking about is terminating employees to the order of 11% of current employees. The possible changes to that action given a certain frame is basically just choosing who is going to be terminated. What other option is there?

I would actually prefer we be frank about this. Racist rightwingers aside, if they think it's better to lay off cishet white males before anyone else and if that is what they're doing, why not just come out and say that? It is either a reprehensible or a laudable act, without anything in between, and if you're doing that, you obviously think the latter. Are they afraid of right wing backlash? I hardly think tiptoeing around it this way is going to stifle that backlash.

What if that's not what they are doing?

What if instead anti oppression means they won't target any ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation for layoffs?

Using ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation for layoffs is already illegal.

It seems to be used constantly for hiring, which seems like it should also be illegal but apparently isn't.

Saying you want to hire a white guy even sounds illegal. But saying you want to hire a minority is applauded.

I can imagine this same rule can slowly slide to allow for firing certain people as long as it protects the current protected class.

There is no sane way to read this from their wording. First and foremost, discriminatory lay offs (i.e. ones targeting race, ethnicity, etc.) are illegal.

So you either perform lay offs "randomly", based on merit (these particular jobs are targeted first) or a mix of the two. If you have to add "Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" it means you filter candidate lists based on racist/oppressive criteria.

Most probably this means that candidate list will be filtered in a way that end result of lay offs will target certain races, ethnicities, etc. more aggressively to make end result "Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression", whatever that means by them. It might mean heavy lean towards white cishet males, might as well mean the opposite. What matters, though, that any way you look at it race/ethnicity/etc. becomes a criteria for lay offs, which is both racist and illegal. But yes, blame it on the "right wing"

Wouldn't it be hard or even impossible to get a new job, when you're labelled a racist and an oppressor?

I know it's indirect, but I doubt any twilio-sized employer would even remotely be associated with those two words.

You seem to have it confused: They’re not firing people whom they think are racist.

They’re firing people in such a way that they won’t be called racist (for having a disproportionate number of PoC in the laid off group for example)

Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837802

> Twilio has grown at an astonishing rate over the past couple years. It was too fast, and without enough focus on our most important company priorities. I take responsibility for those decisions, as well as the difficult decision to do this layoff.

i don’t understand this phrasing and i’ve seen it in all these layoff announcements: if the CEO takes responsibility for the initial failure then why would he not offer his resignation? what responsibility is he actually taking?

I don't think they want people questioning. A majority of people have short attention spans and will remember all the PR they do to spin this as a "positive" thing.

It sounds like you do understand.

It's vacuous mouth noises to please journalists and twitterati, utterly devoid of meaning or content.

The CEOs are protecting the reputations of the people under them at the expense of their own.

They could blame the people who got laid off for not "correctly" implementing the vision. Future employers would potentially not look favorably upon them.

They could blame the market, which just makes the company as a whole look worse as they likely learned nothing if that were the case, and would still potentially reflect poorly upon the people let go.

Instead, the CEO is saying "I made a decision, but it didn't bear out, and for the company to be healthy again we need to make some drastic changes. These people aren't at fault"

Does that mean the CEO needs to resign? Maybe, maybe not. Was the decision obviously bad at the time, or only wrong in hindsight? Would a different CEO be better or worse give the company's current circumstances?

This question always comes up. It's about blame, not about sacrifice or punishment. The CEO is saying that the CEO is to blame, unlike other CEOs who have chosen to blame the employees being laid off. One such example is apparently the better.com CEO calling employees 'dumb dolphins' shortly before laying them off.

Hate that people or losing their jobs. However, the frankness of this message was refreshing. Hopefully everyone lands in equal or better situation.

I was spared in the last recession/downturn and all I can do is hope for the same and keep myself prepared in the event that I need to look for something new.

I can’t change the link, but the source is better imo:

https://www.twilio.com/blog/a-message-from-twilio-ceo-jeff-l...

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