Secondments at Zapier
zapier.com
zapier.com
What? Maybe what they were asking was just "do I need to start looking for an another source of income". Why dress it up in weird corpo-speak?
> We also looked at roles that were being cut from our headcount and saw opportunities for our team to contribute in areas where leaders wanted full-time team members but couldn't make those hires due to budget constraints.
Corporate bullshit speak for, we fired people without realising what they were actually contributing and then things started to fall apart, but we can't hire replacements, so we came up with this idea.
As someone in a stupidly rigid organization where managers all fight each other to get the limited headcount by inflating their own roadmap, it actually sounds refreshing.
The role is going away because it's not profitable enough, and unless you find something else for the person to do then that person gets fired (or insert whatever the legally correct term for your area is). You also have unfulfilled roles elsewhere which would add value if they were filled but you don't have spare cash to add new people to fill them.
Instead of firing one person and hiring a different person, try and keep the person and swap their role. They may need training to do this, but while they may need to learn some new tech/etc parts they don't need to learn all the zapier specific stuff. The institutional knowledge can remain.
This can have a benefit of making people feel more comfortable to stay, an attitude of "if your project gets canned we'll try and help you into a different role"
Sure there's a lot of corpo speak here, IMO because the idea seems pretty obvious and they want a nice release here but this looks planned and well executed.
It’s also the best way to earn the trust of leadership and ensure you’re contributing to the company’s goals.
The language may be off-putting to some, but the core idea is almost a tautology.
Source: I work there, and our pay bands are all internally visible. The pay is quite good.
But I also can’t justify this ratio. When times are good they ramp up to support wild hiring.
Even if times are still good you hit some critical mass where the recruiter count just doesn’t make sense.
As much as they can be annoying at times, recruiters do get used and abused.
Certainly most unemployment agencies would consider that constructive dismissal
For the worker, it can be the difference between homelessness and merely tough times; between covered medical insurance and untreated disease; between hopelessness and a wake-up call.
For the company, it can be finding that someone was put into a bad spot and they are now able to shine without having to pay for new talent acquisition.
In terms of economic theory, you’d say that staying within “the firm” (Coase) saves both of them a lot in transaction costs.
In normal terms — the employee spent time and money finding the previous job and spent time learning how to exist inside that company. Instead of immediately needing to discard and repay those costs - they can “hit the ground running” in a role that is more suited to them.
And so on. To overlook all of the advantages here would be very cynical.
IMO, I think a lot of employers that I have worked with really undervalued how expensive it is to hire someone.
Another option is a company like Daily has a transparent, years-of-experience based, pay structure. So if you switch to a new role, it is clear how your compensation will change:
https://www.daily.co/blog/rethinking-levels-promotions-and-s...
Sure, a new role with less responsibility and less pay could work, but that doesn’t mean it’s in the best interest of both parties.
I could see a horizontal change being effective, but not a demotion.
Firing someone is admitting to your second mistake.
(Not being able to exploit the talents of someone you hired. The first mistake is hiring someone who you later have to fire.)
The ramifications of hiring are bigger. Sometimes a firing is because of the individuals lack of performance, but I think this quote is asking the hirer to be mindful of what outcomes (layoffs) come from mistakes of their decision making.
Otherwise, it is a reminder that it is a failure to hire someone that doesn't work out, and a failure to not be able to use someone as most people have some skills and firing someone is a very harsh thing to do both to the ex-employee in their ex co-workers.
It was an existence proof that billionaires do not have to be heartless psychopaths - even though media consistently gives us this impression.
And - predictably - his version of the show did not rate very well, and was fundamentally less entertaining. It was soon cancelled I believe.
(I am not saying that he is a wonderful person— I don’t know him. I just know that he doesn’t outwardly celebrate the cult of cruelty that is popularly believed to be necessary for being a billionaire.)
He was hoisted up in a capsule with different contestants above Angel Falls. Branson encouraged the contestants to abandon their fears and press a button that would release the cables and send the capsule plunging to the water below. Whoever pressed the button was kicked off the show. The drop was high enough to kill them both and Branson said he couldn’t afford to have people around him that were afraid to tell him no.
So, instead of people who trust the proven professionals around them to do their job you get people scared of heights or averse to physical risks (who could be perfectly happy taking massive financial risks)?
Do you really think it shows anything useful?
[Where, when, which channel was this series shown, please?]
It was certainly a “made for TV” / theatrical way of making a point. But the point stuck with me as it was pretty diametrically opposed to the other Apprentice show which rewarded people for following instructions.
Looks like it was Victoria Falls: https://youtu.be/BrA__e6s1kg
Clip starts at 4:38
> you know you're on a TV show where the utmost care is taken by a whole team of professionals
I think that’s kind of the point though, is if you’re saying you’re capable of being President of Virgin (the prize I believe), then there is little to no safety net. You are the professional in charge responsible for everyone else’s safety. If you just assume that Branson’s prepared and thought of everything already then you’re not adding the value he’s looking for. He wants people that are skeptical of every detail and proposition (even his).
But granted it’s not the actual way he’d vet for this quality. It was spiced up for TV. I just found it impactful that he valued that skeptic quality in his team.
But you're not, in that situation. That's sort of the point.
This isn't hiring for prudence, this is hiring for ability to guess Branson's gotcha.
As a control it would have been interesting to have half the contestants in a capsule by themselves and see how many were willing to drop without him there. I bet many would have still pressed the button.
Some people are blinded by winning and take huge, inappropriate risks to try to win. It’s a skill to be able to not play the game when the risks are too high.
Or, it could have just been a test to see who’s brave enough to call bullshit when things get absurd.
This text seems stupid for weeding out a specific type of contestant.
There’s lots of scenarios of people who would or would not press the button. They may as well flip a coin.
My biggest complaint is that it rewards hesitation or inability to decide and isn’t really a forcing function.
Right, so you have to weigh this faith in the system (game shows are safe & billionaires won’t do anything extremely risky) against the facts of nature and a suspicious story being told to you. Probably 99.99% of people would push the button.
In a business setting if Branson approved a deal, and the due diligence (safety team) approved a deal, you could be forgiven for assuming it’s a smart deal. But when it comes to decisions you absolutely have to get right he wants people who ignore the advice of others and make their own independent assessment based on facts.
When you assume another team has done their job and they assume you’ve done yours you can get into a circular logic where no one has done their job and most people march forward (see Madoff documentary). In retrospect the risks were obvious and the story unbelievable. He wants that rare person who calls bullshit (Harry Markopolos) when all the other signals are saying “it’s safe”.
Many of the Madoff victims said the same thing: “It’s Madoff”, “It’s registered with the SEC”. They didn’t think a successful billionaire would do something so dumb that it would cost him and those around him everything.
Yes, you can forgive the victims for thinking the system should have protected them and you can still applaud Markopolos for not buying the bullshit and refusing to push the button.
Yes, Branson’s stunt is an imperfect/theatrical version of this and the challenge is biased in favor of people who are indecisive or afraid of heights. Almost all TV is sensationalized to appeal to an audience that wouldn’t be riveted by contestants pouring over a series of hedge fund returns trying to determine if they’re safe or fraudulent investments. It’s more the symbolism that’s important.
Exhibit A:
“These steady, guaranteed, market beating returns that have no risk are safe because Madoff wouldn’t risk life in prison running a fraud. Plus, it’s registered with the SEC”
is roughly equivalent to:
“This 350’ drop and metal capsule with no parachute are safe because Branson is here. Plus, I’m on a TV show so I’m sure they have a safety crew.”
These examples show just how much we trust others and how easily we can be persuaded into taking huge, unnecessary risk when a prize is dangled in front of us.
There are people who refused to invest in Madoff while their friends or competitors were getting rich. And there are people who would refuse to press that button. They’re incredibly rare, but that’s what you’re looking for when you want someone making billion dollar decisions that affect tons of jobs/livelihoods.
If you bet alongside Branson 100% of the time, you’d do really well in life. But he wouldn’t gain any value.
But to him, you are a tool that helps him get better. You playing the odds and agreeing with him doesn’t help him. You calling bullshit the 0.01% of the time when he’s dead wrong is what he needs. You’re not his next billion dollar idea. You’re his bankruptcy / financial death safety net. He doesn’t want someone making a prisoner’s dilemma (we’ll sink or swim together) / “no one got fired for choosing IBM” (no one got fired for agreeing with Branson) kind of decision. He wants you to say “Knowing what I know, I can’t go along with this.”
So it’s a very theatrical way of seeing if you have the courage to save him from himself, in a way that makes for a good 10 second TV teaser for non-business folks.
Edit: someone linked to a summary of the episode, below, and they did kick the person off for it. Harsh!
So the lesson here is even for a decision that will kill him and everyone around him, he would still rather not entertain debate and challenge from his subordinates?
Written differently the sentence could also be phrased the following:
> Branson said he want's to have people around him that dare to tell him no.
The last part is important. Some people can't recognize/accept that the person is not a great worker. And then each department wonders what idiot is going to show up this week.
Completely unrelated and shifting back closer to the thread topic, great to see this org codify this ideal explicitly. People are not fungible cogs between wildly disparate roles but they are usually somewhat adaptable under ideal conditions. This also positions the org to accelerate out of macro uncertainty properly staffed.
And we also realize a downturn is temporary. We worked hard to build our talent acquisition team, growing from 15 to nearly 40 between October 2021 and June 2022. And that team did amazing work, growing Zapier from 550 to over 800 team members in 2022. Did we really want to lose all of that recruiting talent only to spend all of those resources again hiring new people down the road?
Laying people off en-masse in response to what is 100% going to be a temporary downturn is just so... wasteful. You lose so much accumulated knowledge and experience, and then - as pointed out - have to turn around and spend even more money to recruit new people later. But with those new people you might get back the skills and head-count you had, but you don't get back the experience, tacit knowledge, domain knowledge, acute knowledge of internal processes and tools, etc. So really it's lose-lose-lose in many ways.
Laying people off should really be an absolute last resort, IMO. And by "last resort" I mean, "we do this or the company folds" level stuff. Not "do layoffs or the stock price drops by 0.03% and the investors start squawking."
I've also seen other things that a company puts out that makes it sound delightful (Patreon layoffs, Netflix culture) but talking to people internally gets a very different opinion.
It's a noble thing to do (even if it delays layoffs for some). Good on both companies
Wait, what? We're in a legitimate recession. Are they speaking about a recruiting downturn or an economic downturn here?