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We expect our companies to be efficient and competitive -- and that is the correct expectation to have in a market economy! Giving people busywork will hurt companies, and thus the overall economy, in the long run. That will make everything worse, including school funding and homelessness and inequality. After all, if you want to redistribute wealth, you have to generate wealth!

It would also mean companies would be less likely to hire people. A lot of those people who got laid off never would have been hired in the first place if it was not going to be easy to get rid of them if market conditions changed.

Everyone who works for a startup should know that the market is very dynamic and companies that scale up might also scale down, and they should have a mercenary mindset about this. People who don't like that should work in different industries. People are expected to be adults about this stuff. And frankly the severance package the people who are laid off from Stripe are getting will add up to more money than most Americans make in a year.

I would never under any circumstances recommend the way Japan runs companies to anyone. Their economy is stagnant for a reason, and being an employee in Japan is terrible. You get lifetime employment at the cost of your own personal life, because the company owns all of your time.

Japan isn't the only other example of difference out there.

Odd that you should have chosen such an extreme example.

I didn't choose Japan as an example. The person I was responding to did.

My bad.

Same question to them then!

Companies should be able to hire / lay off at will. They exists to generate profit for owners. To protect people we have taxes and we should also have UBI. Some countries can definitely afford it.

The problem with that is that in some cases there's really nothing else someone can do. If they are a recruiter, and the company is no longer hiring, keeping that person around doesn't help anyone, including that person.

Honestly the way Stripe is handling this seems pretty good. They are telling you now that you have until March to find a new job. They are essentially doing what you suggest, without making them come to work, by essentially paying them until March.

And some of them will probably get rehired as Stripe opens up new recs. Chances are the former employees will have a fast track into the new positions as they open up.

What you suggest is basically to just drag out the inevitable to the detriment of both the company and the employee.

> keeping that person around doesn't help anyone, including that person.

Seems to me it obviously helps that person, but I generally don't understand corporate-speak so I might be missing something.

It’s better to get generous severance than to have to come in and do bullshit made-up work.

At any time, you could choose not to do it and instead search for other jobs with basically the same result.

no, you'll be worse off if you do that because then you won't get severance. especially if you're not able to quickly land another job.

They generally won't be able to fire you fast enough that it compares unfavorably with severance + you will get unemployment.

ok yeah true i forgot about unemployment

Yeah, no, this is a privileged position. Even if I might opt to take that posture myself, it's not a normal position.

Most people have a need for an income and also, don't hugely differentiate between their work being BS or not. Also, many people who think they are not doing BS work, might very well be doing BS work.

Most people have families, responsibilities, children, parents that need support, mortgage payments, car payments, healthcare needs etc. - and work for the money, not some notion of 'impact'.

They generally want their jobs.

If you keep someone on board with the intention of letting them go later, you do them a disservice by making them think they have a steady job. It stops them from looking for something else and missing possible opportunities.

If you tell them you will fire them, then you do them a disservice wasting their time if you don't expect them to work anyway.

That's why a severance payment makes sense. Pay them what they would have been paid but don't make them work.

You'd rather stay at a dead-end position until a lack of money forces you to be laid off by a broke company that can't afford cushy terms?

The alternative is being fired early, given several months of pay, months of free healthcare, early grants, help if you're an H1B holder, and help from your old company in getting a new job...

There are bad layoffs and there are ok layoffs, I'd say this is an ok one.

Seems like the option of continuing to "work" for your employer while finding another job is net better than that option.

And good luck finding another job if you are a recruiter right now.

> Seems like the option of continuing to "work" for your employer while finding another job is net better than that option.

I guess it depends on the person. My mental health would be 100% better knowing I have guaranteed income for X months and can freely spend my time working on getting a job and decompressing. As opposed to knowing I'm on a sinking ship but still having to half-ass 8 hour days for appearances.

Also recruiters who have been let go now are in a way better place than recruiters who are on ghost ships right now and will be let go deeper in the thick of the brewing storm...

I loathe to hint to you that 90% of jobs are 'dead end jobs'. There is no 'promotion' waiting for you arbitrarily. It's a steep hierarchy and most people don't want to perform to compete.

Moreover, in a downturn, it's rare that people are going to just jump off to a promotion, and rolling the dice is quite risky. Responsibilities, family, mortgages, etc..

I think a lot of the posture here is coming from young people in tech jobs who have a somewhat different situation than others, and, who might not realize how much risk is involved here.

It's almost always better to have the option to keep a job than not. If people don't want to stay they can leave.

I have no idea how you can claim to understand risk... then decline a guaranteed X months of pay for an uncertain number of months of pay that might even be less than X.

And the whole diatribe about dead end jobs, while packed full to the gills with angst, is just misunderstanding: usually dead end job means the job continues without upward mobility. Here it means you get terminated once things go from "bad" to "really bad" for your employer and you have no idea when.

This might sound wild, but maybe the decent thing to do is if the company warns the team months in advance that a purge is coming. Let those who need to leave, leave. Quietly tell those who you really want to remain that they should not fear.

It does sound wild.

Letting people who are likely angry having access to company resources and financials being able to make real damages to Stripe's customers.

Companies want to keep high performers. Voluntary layoffs is a very dumb move.

This is such an adversarial read of things. Some companies do offer employees to quit in exchange for some compensation. It's win-win, the company reduces costs and the employee doesn't work at a place they don't want to be at. The whole "the employee can cause damage to the company" view is ridiculous – guess what, the employee can already do damage to the company while employed there, yet they don't.

Furthermore, imagine if someone unknowingly embarks on a major step in life like buying a home, getting married, pregnant, moving, etc, and boom this hammer drops. You live on your toes if this is how the companies behave.

Companies always behave this way. Companies do what is best for themselves, and sometimes it benefits both companies and employees.

In the case of layoff, the company wouldn't be benefit at all if low performers stay and high performers leave. Actually the company might collapse.

It is not a win for the company to have low performers stay and high performers leave.

> The whole "the employee can cause damage to the company" view is ridiculous – guess what, the employee can already do damage to the company while employed there, yet they don't.

Yeah, because they don't know they will be fired. They aren't angry employees.

Laid off employees are angry.

Let's talk about being obtuse.

Voluntary layoffs has happened before in other companies.

I didn't say it never happened before. I say it is a bad idea.

I have to disagree with your opinion on voluntary layoffs.

Here in the UK an employer has to inform the government and go through a mandatory redundancy process when laying off more than a given number of employees (I think it's 100 off the top of my head). At my last role I was put at risk of redundancy and went through the process. One of the first steps of that process was offering voluntary redundancy which had a higher redundancy package than if you received compulsory redundancy.

If someone was considering leaving, or was close to retirement leaving voluntarily gave them the opportunity to leave early and with a nice payout. Or if you had skills high in demand it gave you the opportunity to get a lump sum and walk into a new job.

This significantly reduced the need for the company to make compulsory redundancies.

Your point doesn't contradict mine though.

It is a bad idea for the company to do voluntary layoff.

Your point focuses entirely on what is good for employees, which is unrealistic. Companies do what is good for themselves, not employees. Sometimes they overlap, but sometimes they don't.

I have one friend at Stripe who, after the rumors started swirling that this was coming, was hoping they were going to get laid off today (they didn't), so now they're stuck in a job they don't want anymore, but don't have the headspace to effectively job hunt right now.

Imagine a world where the company had offered them the opportunity to quit with a buy out package, probably quite a bit healthier of a situation for all involved given this person's abysmal morale in their current role.

I see the "get paid to quit" trend from time to time and I think it's a great idea.

Yeah layoffs impact not just the people that leave but also those that remain. The ones that leave at least have the opportunity to move on.

The people left have to worry both about the layoffs and also need to work harder. Its a bad situation but at least the people laid off can move on.

This is a very good way to destroy a company: every top performer will jump ship in the week (or 15 minutes if it's still an employee's market) she catches wind of the purge.

I've worked at a company that did this. Not fun.

You basically have a bunch of employees who know their job is going to end...waiting for it to end. Mentally, you're checked out. You're not going to produce your best work for your company and it becomes a struggle to stay engaged. That's my experience, anyway.

The better approach for everyone is to _maybe_ give 1-2 weeks warning so everyone can wrap up what they're working on, then give fair severance packages when the day comes.

It's important to understand that growing companies are not laying off because they have 'nothing for staff to do'.

This isn't likely a situation of 'Ford Motorcars had a bad 3 quarters, and sales forecasts are way down, we have to close two plants'.

They are laying off to improve efficiencies on paper, capture some excess value created by those staffers (hey - you built that thing, great, bye, don't need you! For now ...), and likely to bulk up the balance sheet before a transaction, like an IPO etc. - and as an excuse to get rid of what they perceive to be lower performing staff (who may or may not be adding value).

It's a supposed 'optimization' not a 'necessary' thing.

I suggest that in these scenarios, that there could be better alternatives, if we put our heads together and thought about it a bit.

The whole company is an optimisation thing not a necessary thing.

Optimizing for what, and in who's interests?

From the perspective of those who are not shareholders, corporations are just a means of providing some service - even those that are 'necessary'.

It's odd that so many people fight so hard for the 'freedom and rights' of fairly powerful interests, systems which they will never be a part of or benefit from, and which regularly act against their own interests.

There are multiple stakeholders at play, the arbitrary posture of 'optimization for capital' is worse than naive in 2022, we've been through these experiments by now.

There are better ways; we're not even trying.

What’s so bad about optimization efforts? I would prefer normalizing layoffs with 12 weeks severance package to normalizing developers who code 10 hours a week and whose cost the companies inevitably pass on to their consumers.

May as well shoot for both actually

It’s not about the people that get laid off.

It’s about the other 85%. Companies figure that a higher level of fear will increase people’s willingness to work overtime on weekends and nights too. Most people don’t even realize it but that’s whTs going on the employees subconsciously

Or it makes them quit themselves.. I have done that before as the company changed character / culture got hit by layoffs.

People and general positive vibe is what makes me want to put in the good work for my team. Fear culture is for exploitative / loser companies IMO. I wouldn’t want to work for such a company anymore.

Window dressing projects might be a bit much, but in general it is curious that for all the noise Zuckerberg and Pichai have made about productivity, they don't really complain that the headcount is holding back a project or initiative. If I was on the board, I would be much more concerned that the org is not able to use the headcount to grow marketshare/topline/new lines of business more so than anything else.

> they have no urgent material need to let people go

Why doesn't the company reserve the right to optimize/choose to focus on profit?

They do, but it would be novel if for once, they choose decency instead of profit.

That could easily turn out to be suboptimal for "decency" in the long term. If the company does not operate efficiently, it might have to lay off more than 14% of its workforce a year from now.

>"I feel that the whole 'California' project elides the negatives: ..."

What is the "California project" here?

It goes both ways. Keeping under-performers around starts to muddy the culture and push away your high-performers.

I've worked in a system like this. Seeing a guy walk into work to surf the web all day because he was obsolete but 5 years away from retirement and a friend with most management there meant I was stuck at temp employment for lower wage because the higher paying position was technically filled. It was the first job I had after school - it burst my early life ideas about socialism and social justice.

> Stripe is a hugely successful company and they have no urgent material need to let people go

Indirectly, what you are suggesting is that the company string people along for as long as possible and give them busy work. So people would get the money, but not their time.

What Stripe did with their severance package is give employees both the money and their time back. Few people would likely prefer still having to go to a pointless job.

(And of course Stripe had an urgent need to let people go, they wouldn't have the money to pay such significant, if any, severance.)

There is no "zero costs" way to operate an economy. If we increase the long-term responsibilities of a company to their employees - as opposed to giving the same amount of safety net via public means - it will have a significant impact on willingness to hire.

Stripe's severance package, which is as generous or more so than the most advanced democratic socialist countries, is about as good as one can hope or should hope to get from a company.

If longer benefits are desired, the voters of California would need to come together on that and figure out how to finance it. But conflating the LA homeless / drug crisis with the 14-week severance packages for high skilled workers doesn't add up.

(Side notes: the perception of job loss in Japan is drastically different than in the U.S. and the Bank of Japan has been lending money at near zero rates for decades. The result has been a plethora of zombie companies.)

It's a business, not a charity. Their goal is to optimize.