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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this position. You imply that any layoff is a fundamental and serious mistake.

Zoom's revenue grew like 10X over the past two years. They had a legitimate need to hire and grow the business, and now the market has corrected and they don't need as many employees. The hiring and firing decisions are exactly what I would expect from someone optimizing solely for the well-being of the company.

It sucks for the people fired, but that doesn't mean the CEO did a bad job. It means you need to be realistic about what your relationship is to your employer.

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>someone optimizing solely for the well-being of the company

Is this how we're going to forever define an "employer"? I agree with your sentiment broadly, but what a terrible system we've created for ourselves.

What? It is an excellent system. If you do not optimize as such, then the company implodes and dies.

How is this a "terrible system"? What is the replacement system, if so?

Should companies ... what? Provide make work projects? Build things the market will not support?

Or should companies just sell shares, then use the money as a form of welfare. Turn companies into a way for people to donate, so engineers can make 10x what the average employee does?

I think it does mean that the CEO did a bad job. The growth over the last two years was clearly going to be a temporary blip. Hiring theoretically permanent employees in response is simply bad judgement.

There are plenty of companies that exist in very cyclic industries who show the right way to handle this sort of thing. It's not like it's all a big mystery.

I'm confused as to your proposed solution. Should the new employees not been hired, and existing employees overworked due to understaffing? Should they have hired contractors and not paid benefits like healthcare?

The companies I'm aware of that exist in cyclic industries (game dev, retail) tend to either have brutal cyclical layoff periods, leverage a ton of contractors, outsource their work to other firms, or hire seasonal workers.

What in your view is "the right way to handle this sort of thing"?

> What in your view is "the right way to handle this sort of thing"?

Don't lead people to think that their positions are permanent when you know very well that there's a good chance they aren't. The easiest way to to make time-limited contracts. That doesn't mean you can't give them benefits such as health insurance.

Except no position is permanent, even by the most liberal interpretation of full-time.

> The growth over the last two years was clearly going to be a temporary blip.

I'm sorry, but this is the most hindsight is 20/20, armchair CEO thing I've ever heard. Unless you have some sort of magic 8 ball, there was nothing clear about it being temporary, a blip, or any timeline of such.

In fact some people relocated away from tech hubs, a huge bet on a remote first future. (I’m not one of them.)

> Hiring theoretically permanent employees in response is simply bad judgement.

This is not self-evident. Hiring the salaried employees over 2+ years could very well be cheaper than contractors.

If they had under-hired during to boom, then we would not have layoff today but the company would not have grown as much. The incentives are set to hire people when you need them and fire them when you don't anymore. Layoffs are not expensive or damaging to the company; they don't have any reason to avoid them. Zoom's stock went up in response to the firing.

I think this is the key opinion in a nutshell. Some people see layoffs as bad management and other people simply don't

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