Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

I mean I don't understand the big announcement in the first place; with a company that large, reducing staff count by 10K can be done organically, simply by not hiring replacements.

Which makes me think of two things; one, they want to get rid of very specific people, people who wouldn't quit on their own. And two, that they can't just reduce staff count without an announcement, because staff count is one of those metrics that shareholders use to determine whether they're staying, buying or selling stocks.

A quiet reduction of staff? They can't hire people anymore, this is bad, I should sell my stocks!

A round of layoffs? They're cutting costs, which will be good for profits, I should buy more! Or sell because I've lost confidence.

Honestly, the stock market and shareholders are not rational.

View on HN

You're absolutely correct about the second one. It's theatre.

https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-la...

The announcement itself has an "if-by-whiskey" feel to it. On the one hand, they claim to be "aligning cost structure with revenue". On the other hand, they also claim to be investing in "strategic areas for our future". It tries to spin it in a way that appeals to both value and growth investors respectively.

TIL: If-by-whiskey

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey for others

Some low performing employees just wont leave on their own. Sometimes its the higher performers who feel they deserve more compensation and leave. With your proposal the company could end up with only the low performers which is the opposite intent of a layoff

It's not necessarily for performance, more often these layoffs are a way to get rid entire teams and you can't do that through natural attrition.

Maybe some of them can add some expertise to help ReactOS[0]. :-)

(Yes, I know about copyright law and taint, but there is an awful lot to be done which isn't specifically commiting code to the main project. Unit tests, debugging, porting other software, create a startup for embedded "Windows" deployed with ReactOS with free licensing etc.)

0: http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/read.php?19,154431

Commonly called the Dead Sea Effect. You evaporate out your water and you're just left with salt.

How does that analogy work? Traditionally salt is very valuable. It was even used as payment/money at times (worth your salt). You can preserve food with it. It gives food flavor (if you've ever accidentally omitted salt from baked goods, like bread and cookies, you know how terrible things taste without salt).

Have you ever been really, terribly thirsty, and just thought, "I could use some salt?"

No analogy is a perfect match, that's what makes it an analogy. The water here is the precious resource.

There is plenty of salt in the world but not enough water.

Whereas with firing everyone's success is now tied to how well they can lie to higher management.

THE Recipe for success, that is.

It doesn't even make sense. They're going to fire 10k people. The result? A 1.2 BILLION charge. Firing these people costs them 120000$ per person. And with that, their personnel cost won't drop until end of Q3 + let's say 2 months, so let's call it 2024. They could have let each of these employees do nothing until 2025 for the same amount of money!

They will definitely hire 20k people by 2025 too. It just seems to awkward and stupid.

I suspect it’s because they want the reduction focused in specific areas and on the low performers.

Layoffs over a certain size in a location have to be announced legally, WARN act I think is the name.

Usually reductions in staff are well received by Wall Street because operating expenses should be reduced. I think there's a joke about a CEO saying "oh stocks down, time for layoffs!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com