Strikes me as harsh given that we know essentially nothing about the company's plans. The laid off employees were given severance and the CEO offered to personally intro people to hiring companies. The CEO stated it was to increase speed and focus (i read as reducing meetings/overhead).
I understand people are upset with layoffs taking place, but how do you think a company should behave when they realize they are wasting time and money?
> Traffic has never been higher and we’re in a great place, financially. It was for strategic reasons.”
Call me old fashioned, but no amount of execs introing me to companies that are hiring forgives them for realizing they don't give a shit about me and my job because they'd rather make more money. They should have thought about that before hiring in the first place. Severance isn't a reward, it's the absolute bare minimum.
No, companies don't give a shit about you, it's egotistical to believe you're that important that you deserve ongoing charity paychecks just because they hired you at some point in the past. Employment is purely, by definition, a transactional relationship. You sell labor. They buy labor. It's why you are free to leave as soon as it makes sense, and it's why they can do the same.
That's not the case here, where the company has explicitly, publicly stated that this is not for financial reasons. At least when a company is looking at it's financials and realizes it isn't in good shape, it has some justification. That's not the case here: they're explicitly saying they're just greedy.
> Employment is purely, by definition, a transactional relationship. You sell labor. They buy labor. It's why you are free to leave as soon as it makes sense, and it's why they can do the same.
This is strictly false. Businesses go into a relationship with an employee with the knowledge that they simply cannot fire someone without cause. Businesses have elastic labor needs: less labor means less output means less revenue, but it also means less expense. The cost of living for an individual is very inelastic: the threshold for shelter, caloric intake, and other human expenses cannot simply shrink, or at least not on a short timeline.
When you weigh "we might not make as much money as we could because the people we hired aren't as strategically useful to us anymore" against "here's a bunch of people holding up their end of the bargain who still have bills to pay" I cannot understand how you COULDN'T stand behind my moral framework. Morality is about people, not profits.