If your decisions lead to 11,000 people losing their jobs, and you "take responsibility for that", then you should be 11,001.
Edit: Happy to take the down votes, but also happy to have a dialogue around why this might be a flawed take.
Plenty of CEOs have blamed the economy, the pipeline, the customers, the competition, the weather, etc. He's accepting he made some decisions that over-extended the company and as a result they have to make difficult layoffs. (Which has happened at every company I've been a part of and is happening at many other companies just in the past week.)
What if you want to hang on, and hope to hire more in the future?
In a case like this, I don't think the point should be whether Zuckerberg "would actually feel" a consequence: it should be whether the people getting laid off—as in, the ones who were wronged—can feel it.
If you mean unlimited, this seems like an unreasonable expectation. FB employees receive a 4 month severance package, 4 months should be plenty of time to find a job for a developer/office worker.
That's more than fair.
Very generous I'd say.
It is not the same for a billionaire to loose money as it is for you or me. To take a concrete example. Elon Musk could just close down Twitter right now, and waste away his 44 bn USD he spent on it. After that squander, he would still be the richest man on the planet.
A real consequence would be them loosing everything except 5000 USD
But honestly a business leader that screws up so bad, should probably loose all their wealth, like 100%.
That would incentivize extremely risk-averse decisions by business leaders and lead to society-wide stagnation. The result would be far more suffering overall.
We actually have a reason to believe that the standard risk attracted business is a net-negative for society. These businesses tend to rely on government bailouts when their risky behavior doesn’t work out, or they lay off a large number of people, or they cause massive environmental damage, etc. I much prefer a business that plays it safe and doesn’t risk our environment and our economy while maximizing the profits they give to their shareholders.
Secondly, there is no reason to believe that a CEO is any sort of supreme decision maker of a company. Perhaps a democratized workplace—where the workers have a say in whether the business should engage in a risky behavior—is better at evaluating the risk. If that is the case then a CEO dictator might not want to lead the business into a risky endeavor at since they might get sued if it goes wrong, but workers who have only their jobs to loose might vote to do exactly that.
I find the society-wide stagnation prediction lacking in imagination.
> similar how a shareholder can sue for lost profits.
Only if there's negligence or fraud, which you have about zero chance to prove in this case.
> But honestly a business leader that screws up so bad, should probably loose all their wealth, like 100%.
Would you agree to lose 100% of you money each time you make a mistake? If not, why should he?
This doesn't seem logical. Companies aren't some static things. Especially social media companies, which usually have very short lives. A corrective, appropriate, action, in response to a changing market, could very easily be a reduction in headcount.
All evidence suggests Facebook has no future [1].
> But honestly a business leader that screws up so bad
What's your metric for screwing up? Is it short, medium, or long term? Should short term goals/profits be the only goal of a company?
1. https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/11/teens-abandoned-facebook-p...
As a worker my metric is first and foremost about the worker. A company screws up if it fails to bring profits to the workers. Laying off 11,000 workers certainly falls under a big screw up by that metric. I know companies—such as charity/non-profits exists who have humanitarian goals, or even amusement, as their goals, however I don’t see Facebook there.
But we live in a capitalist society and most companies’ goals are profits for their shareholders. Facebook seems to have screwed that goal up as well. And instead of letting the person who lead the company into this failure pay the price of failing, they take it down on the workers... This seems quite unfair, and is even illegal in many (most?) countries.
I can't extract any meaning from this. Could you be more specific?
Maybe a scenario will help. What if the company becomes not profitable enough (there can be reason's that don't require leadership fault), and it will fail unless workers are let go? Do you let it fail, causing all to lose their jobs, or do you trim the fat, allowing some to continue?
I would assume you would want to look at the whole, more than the individual.
Please note the above happened to a company I worked for, during the last recession, and it was, very objectively, not the fault of the leadership.
I apologize if I interpreted your response incorrectly, but it was, again, very indirect.
The purpose of my question was to help me understand your perspective, and to help you present some meaning to your statement "As a worker my metric is first and foremost about the worker."
Facebook is extremely rich, facebook can afford to break apart their business and give part of it to those 11,000 workers. Heck facebook can even afford to keep those 11,000 workers earning 6 digits while being tasked with doing nothing. In either case, it would be in the interest of the worker. What is not in the interest of a worker is having a leadership that makes bad decisions, wastes the time of the workers, and then lays them off. This kind of behavior should not be rewarded.
> The workers don’t vanish with the business. If the government provides enough relief these workers can organize around a new business
Starting from scratch is rarely an efficient, or possible, solution, especially anything with IP involved.
> after being compensated from the failing business
Were they not compensated for their time during employment? Wouldn't being compensated for the failing business require knowing the future? I'm not asking this negatively, I'm just trying to understand perspective. Have you ever worked for a startup, or been involved in a small/medium business that's not-yet profitable?
I think you would find extreme risk aversion in a system implemented like you describe, if the only option were continuous success or quick failure. Are there any areas of the world that prefer bankruptcy over headcount reduction, where we could look at the statistics?
When someone is accused of a crime, they can plead innocent or guilty. That is step one.
There are more steps after that…
This is still by far the most common case, and in fact it is probably becoming more common because large index funds have recently increased requirements related to ownership share structuring (https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/08/05/sp-and-ftse-russe...).
In this specific case though, the investors knew that Zuck had complete control and they decided to invest regardless, so I do not have any sympathy for their complaints.
Edit: In this instance, the "bug" led to 11,000 people losing their jobs.
This makes the assumption that the current path was the only, and best, path, and that the CEO doesn't see a better path in the distance, or some danger immediately ahead.
Most of the big tech companies were made by people who ignored the crowds yelling at them to keep going straight. And, many of the failed behemoths of today did just that.