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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

What specific consequence would you expect him to bear? It's not like there's any meaningful financial consequence that he would actually feel. He ain't gonna know what food insecurity or the specter of medical bankruptcy feels like. Should he impose some consequence on himself, like he only gets to spend $1 million on leisure over the next year?

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Perhaps hand over his job to someone that may do a better job out of it.

Perhaps instead of Meta paying the severances, Zuck could dip into his massive bank account.

You don't want that, because for market capitalism to work, Meta has to suffer some consequences too.

In theory, by losing 11k jobs, it is.

>What specific consequence would you expect him to bear?

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.

I'm no fan of Zuck, but what did he do in this case but create a company that provided a lot of jobs, then made some bad forecasting decisions that resulted in losing some of those jobs?

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.)

There is always employee turnover in business, this is normal and employees are never guaranteed lifetime employment or the CEO quits too, that's silly. Standard part of all contracts with US companies is an at will clause stating that employees can be terminated at will without reason except for an illegal one. The people losing their jobs should thank Zuck for the time he did employ them, the chance he took on them, and also for the generous severance packages he's giving them during a general economic downturn.

Why? What if your decisions lead to hiring 100k, and -10k in a downturn. Is that a net good or not?

What if you want to hang on, and hope to hire more in the future?

Maybe he could see that these people all receive the same salary they did at Facebook until they can find another job? No idea how the math would work out on that, but that seems to be the kind of "taking responsibility" that would actually be meaningful.

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.

I’m not really sure what you mean. If Facebook keeps paying them indefinitely that’s just…not doing a layoff.

> Maybe he could see that these people all receive the same salary they did at Facebook until they can find another job?

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.

I read 4 months of severance, plus 2 weeks per year of service (likely up to a maximum?), 6 months of health insurance paid, plus job placement services from a 3rd-party vendor.

That's more than fair.

Actually they explicitly said uncapped re years of service.

Very generous I'd say.

Extremely generous compared to typical severance packages

The article says 4 months of severance (+2wks/yrs worked) is being paid and medical is covered for 6mo.

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