All these companies have vastly overhired. Think of your own peers and colleagues. How many are a) utterly useless or b) competent but don't have anything to do so they spend time working on mostly pointless projects to improve their CV?
To me, it seems quite evident, they need to reduce the spending for any reason, so they reduce the workforce. Nothing to do with useless employees. You can be shit at your job or very good, they will have a metric threshold telling them you need to go. Same at Twitter, Meta, Google, whatever.
Stop putting that on the employee who spent 3 months to get a job just to be told they wasn't useful. That's 'bad' managing all the way down, nothing to do with the employee, at all.
Maybe they fired some after and evaluation process, and than number came out to be 13%. Or maybe they laid of department X and that department just happened to be 13% of the company.
Why are you so sure the 13% was the starting place of all their thought process?
But saying it has nothing to do with employee is also not correct. If someone is signing up for a company that does not manage its finance sustainably, they should expect this. And company would only overpay if they aren't focusing on cost at that moment. So for all the folks who managed to double their CTC in COVID period should be prepared for this case.
I hope my colleagues aren't reading this and looking at me.
Not entirely true, but I think most people can (if they're being honest) get 70% or more correct when guessing who will be laid off.
The only wildcard usually is when entire teams are let go, and sometimes those are predictable, sometimes surprising.
What happens when it's the managers themselves who are useless, overpaid, and can't evaluate the team for actual efficacy?
Honestly its funny reading threads like this with people beating their chest about useless coworkers. Instead of thinking of useless coworkers and colleagues, think about what percent of the entire industry that's working on things with no hard output, no interest in profitability, banking on free money that's drying up...
If you're working somewhere with so many incompetent colleagues you think 13% layoffs is not trimming anyone useful, odds are your entire unit is in trouble.
I feel there's a lot of this in crypto, where you have absolutely amazing developers doing amazing code for no point.
Unfortunately the useless and overpaid managers are often the best at brown nosing.
My problem is that I have an almost crippling sense of impostor syndrome and I undervalue my contributions constantly. I don't feel entirely useless, but I do feel like an under-performer - despite probably being an average developer in my cohort.
My current team has 6 people. 3 are delivering at normal levels, but the other 3 complete one task per week at most. And those are tasks that take a couple of hours at most. This is happening everywhere, and is a clear consequence of overhiring.
I suppose you could make the argument companies are both over-working their employees and over-hiring if you're willing to concede these companies are poorly managed... which I think has a kernel of truth to it.
If 10-20% of the employees in an org pretty much stop working completely, then it's pretty natural that the remaining 80-90% are going to feel overworked making up the slack. Also explains why companies are laying off the dead weight resuming hiring almost immediately (like Tesla).
Anyway, I would say if the Quiet Quitting hypothesis is true it definitely points to a business management failure. If an employee joined your organization highly motivated and a year later feels like going above and beyond is not worth it you did something wrong.
Office Space came out in 1999 so this isn't anything new.
That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
So you've also worked at Google?
I bet the people who hired them get to keep their jobs despite failing to a) hire useful people or b) competent people that can work on useful projects and c) burning cash while d) not turning a profit because e) they are just a gambling mechanism for investors.
It is just that, he never produced anything. I worked with him twice. They moved him between teams and both times he got absurd amount of benefit of doubt (one of the companies was firing people quickly, but not him). Anyway based on what I heard, he did nothing whole his career.
But like, he was definitely not a norm.
He took a VHS camcorder in one day, and recorded the guy flipping a piece of metal over on a table a couple times, then moving the piece of metal to a new table. Repeating this over and over throughout a 10/12 hour day.