Meta and Salesforce are looking to re-hire some workers they just laid off
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
It's like when you sell all of your crap in an RPG but then find out no one will sell you back the Really Cool Thing you whoops-dumped in the sale. It's an eff-up, but when you got cheat codes, it really doesn't matter.
Now, if someone takes your cheat codes away . .
Offtopic, but this magical money-generation capability is commonly perceived as a standin for any value-generation capability, from aerodynamics to materials science. Go wander the C-Suite of a major aerospace firm and count the engineering degrees, then go back and count the MBAs. It's every bit as absurd as late-stage Soviet Russia injecting "Socialism" into fields like fluid dynamics.
If this disagrees with anyone's ideology, I preemptively apologize. Go ahead and throw stuff at the monitor.
So mistake made, lesson learned. In a world where money is expensive (fed rate sets the lowerbound), where are the opportunities?
Here's a trick, though: if you don't believe in the future, how do you cash out of the present, or out of anything? Now we move into the shadow realm of metaphor and ideology. This has been a pretty big deal since at least 1972, and more urgently since 2008, when all kinds of super-weird-ass money tricks were spawned.
Put out 3 ideas in the time it takes another company to put out 1, and optimize the ideas that gain traction.
I think the typical rule is to save N months of bills [1] in cash (or something cash-adjacent like a CD or T-Bill), and the rest in an index fund/ETF from something like Vanguard of Fidelity or something like that. This allows you to somewhat "outsource" the problems of inflation to corporations.
[1] the size of N probably depends on the person and cost of living and all that fun stuff, but I think it's usually 6.
Whether or not the future looks bright, this is sound advice for everyone. As an immigrant to the US, one of my biggest culture shocks was how little the average American saves, and how little it's emphasized in the culture. Perhaps it speaks to how much faith the public has in government-provided social programs, despite the popular notion that the US does very little for its poor and elderly. (Are things different in Western Europe?)
Of course, speaking about people in terms of generations is not something I really enjoy doing (especially since it does seem like millennials get a disproportionate level of hate on that front), but I think in the case of Gen-Z a lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of them grew up right around the 2008 financial crash and realized how important saving money is.
[1] https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/gen-z-financial-goals-2...
Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt and stop believing that the ultra rich don't all work together to take more of your money, because they do, they have been forever, and they continue to do so forever.
I will rephrase my comment.
A simpler explanation for Microsoft’s actions is that the Microsoft board of directors and CEO wanted those actions to occur, for their own benefit.
The whole hedge fund manager and Wall St boogeyman is nonsense. Who even is “Wall St”? Lots of people own shares of Microsoft. There are probably a bunch of people who influence Microsoft’s leaders more than some paper pushers in NYC.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/holders/
The ownership of Microsoft is so diffuse, I am just asking for some evidence or even who these “Wall St” and “hedge funds” are that somehow control the hiring/firing decisions of a business that is 100x bigger and more profitable than them.
Some of the companies that own MSFT stock easily have enough muscle to push them around with regulations, PR, or by voting their shares.
Many of these companies' share prices is heavily influenced because a handful of hedge funds own a majority of the shares. For example, look at Pinterest: the general public makes of 11.7% of share owners while institutional investors make up 74% of share owners.
Source: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/with-75-ownership-of-the-sha...
If those hedge funds all decide they're unhappy with the "rich CEO's" decision, they can dump the shares all at once, it will tank the price, and the CEO's are no longer rich. Most of these tech companies also have compensation structure where employee income is also significantly in stock, a price dump could cause mass attrition which can trigger a death spiral.
If you look at activist investors letters to Twitter, Pinterest, Google from hedge funds like Elliott Management, their pressure to cut employees compensation, employee perks, etc....this isn't some conspiracy theory. Wall Street hedge funds absolutely have massive influence on Silicon Valley tech companies because ultimately they do still control the purse strings.
> institutional investors
Hedge funds are a minority of institutional investors. Most of those institutional investors are companies like Vanguard or BlackRock, who in turn just hold shares on behalf of their customers; basically, anyone who contributes to a 401k with a "Vanguard Target Retirement 2060 Fund" or whatever.
> If those hedge funds all decide they're unhappy with the "rich CEO's" decision, they can dump the shares all at once, it will tank the price, and the CEO's are no longer rich.
This is true, but the funds will also lose money (or miss out on gains in the future). Activist investors like Elliott absolutely do exist, but most AUM is managed by non-activist investors. Elliott, for example, had $71B in AUM as of last year; Vanguard alone was over 100x the size in that same year.
What a great testament to the management acumen at these companies.
Whether we actually do something about companies constantly introducing volatility to our social livelihoods, abusing workers, and eroding our buying power is really up to us though.
You have to make it heinously unprofitable, since that's really the only mechanism in capitalism that would course-correct this behavior.
Not saying this to remove accountability, but I know I would personally collapse in that job.
Yeah, you don't need an MBA to know that, but good that's being said
> Salesforce execs, and Benioff in particular, have over the years encouraged workers to view their colleagues and the company itself as "Ohana," a Hawaiian term referring to family.
That's level 8 of drinking your own Koolaid. From Salesforce? I'd consider them only less impersonal than Oracle, and pretty much that's it.
Having a layoff doesn't mean a company will never hire anyone ever again. It's common for people who were laid off from something the company is no longer prioritizing to be able to find a position in an area that the company is now prioritizing.
Right now, I don't even know why software engineers should do anything but keep hopping jobs all the time. There is less value in promotions/raises/loyalty than in constant hopping.
You might not want to hop but the company might want you to hop.
Because if you do, they'll stop hiring you - that only goes one way.
Many employees would love to "commit". When's the last time anyone offered a software engineer a 2 or 3 year contract, with a 6 months salary severance if they're terminated before the end of the contract? Who's afraid of commitment here?
Now, in a recession, there is more of a scarcity mindset on the side of the workers as you are showing.
Nah, it takes a few months at most.
> Now, in a recession, there is more of a scarcity mindset on the side of the workers as you are showing.
Nope, just saying that employees respond to how they expect to be treated.
Also, you avoided most of my main points.
With regard to contracts, it’s a fair point. But what other white collar work has those?
I don't care if you truly feel like family where you work - please stop believing this bullshit. The socialization and fraternization of work is big fat lie that routinely gets employees to act as volunteers.
Your CEO is probably a socio- or psychopath and will say and do whatever benefits them the most. Even if they are not, they ultimately answer to investors/shareholders, not their "family." If you were truly family to them, they would take a pay-cut before sacking you.
Again, the concept "Ohana" at work, as a matter of fact, is NEVER true.
All that to say...I agree!
I preferred Netflix's honesty -- they always said "we're a sports team. We bring on top performers, and we cut low performers. Sometimes we even cut top performers that we just don't need anymore. But if you are a top performer with a skill that we need, you'll always have a job".
Sounds about right to me. "Return but keep looking" is probably the nightmare scenario for the employer. The worker hasn't found a job yet, and is only going to be 50% paying attention when they come back.
(Not judging the employee here. Just the idiot that order the lay off of people the company needed.)
If they want to make shortsighted decisions to hit quarterly goals, they should be reminded of the high price of short term thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff
I think the meaning has fully shifted to imply permanence, for at least a couple decades now. The word that comes to mind for a temporary situation is furlough, although I’ve mainly heard that used in a government context.
Maybe the difference is that most people now change jobs often enough, that the government is the only entity that would promise to re-employ those they temporarily couldn’t pay.
It think of it in the sense that you are talking about though because I grew up with a lot of people in the building trades. They often use "laid off" to mean basically "there's not enough work so I'm not getting hours until there is more" (eg temporary). But I think that is pretty specific to those industries where there is pretty fixed pool of labor and the work is highly seasonal.
Understatement of the year. Who in their right mind would go back without at least better pay?
We change employer to get better pay. Getting re-hired also counts as a new employer for this purpose.
Someone who is looking at their upcoming mortgage payments and their empty savings account.
These companies wanted to cut projects and orgs because they didn’t see a future in them. They needed the ability to make clean cuts, which meant taking out some of the meat with the fat. Otherwise the layoffs get drawn out and messy with internal fighting over headcount.
I bet the employees who got laid off then rehired are pretty happy. Some of them even got a 4 month garden leave of sorts, then return to their old company.
As to a "less devious narrative," I think all we need to do is remove this idea of planned outcome (lower wages for people working in software) in order to strike the "devious" from this theory. It's clear Wall Street wanted tech companies across the board to shed employees, as others have pointed out that's probably enough to get CEOs to lay people off.