(Along with 7,000 people who still need to work for a living.)
Maybe I shouldn’t complain, though; laying off management alongside labor should be normalized.
Maybe I shouldn’t complain, though; laying off management alongside labor should be normalized.
If that includes C-level, I'm all for it. By definition, they have failed.
What's better, to get hired, paid a great salary and gain experience and knowledge for a couple years, and then get laid off with 4 months severance+benefits, or never get hired at all? To be clear, I think there are some fair arguments (not necessarily ones I agree with) for "never get hired at all", but just be clear, that is what you are arguing for.
And a black mark on your record that every HR drone will pick up on like a bloodhound.
True, obviously companies use layoffs to get rid of low performers, but there are just numerous cases where companies are canning entire divisions, e.g. the Alexa-device-focused teams at Amazon or the metaverse team at Disney.
I highly doubt these most recent layoffs will be treated as much of a black mark.
Although he got a $20m exit package which undoubtedly softened the blow.
In fact, it should probably be put into law: any layoff round of over 1000 people should require any direct supervisor to be laid off, recursively up to the CEO.
Care to elaborate?
Edit: Downvoted for expecting to hear more about how management never, ever, makes mistakes.
Nice, real nice
Managers and executives are first in line for bonuses and praise so it follows that they are first in line for the chopping block. See: executive pay rates vs rank-and-file employee pay over the past 40+ years. You want increased reward? You get increased risk.
To understand it, you need to think of it from the businesses perspective. People are capital equipment that consume money and output productivity in a particular area.
There is a cost to hiring (recruiting, onboarding, training) and firing (severance, reallocation of responsibilities) these people, which is why corporations are not run like an Uber-style demand-based gig for the most part. There is "stickiness" to hiring someone.
However, when the required productivity or capital availability changes (external forces, bad forecasting, change in market conditions), as a company you decide whether the pain of changing the labor force is worth it. These may be the result of bad bets or dumb luck, but that doesn't matter. The goal is to adjust the companies' production to its ability to finance those production machines (people).
Imagine you're in the photocopying business, and you lease photocopiers from Xerox. Depending on demand, you may want to increase the number that you lease. Or maybe the market is in a economic downturn, and people are photocopying less. You try run the numbers and decide if paying the penalty for breaking the lease on x machines is worth it vs. paying the monthly fee for them. That's the simple calculus.
You can try to reason your way out of the position with your simple calculus but at the end of the day people are more than just a line item on a budget.
It doesn't matter if that's the intent or not. If you're being laid off, the effect is identical to being punished. And most people will internalize it as failure.
Policy doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to push in directions different from naked market forces.