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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

> Meta layoffs result in huge job losses, but the company might now accelerate recruitment

This seems immoral.

It costs a lot of money to hire and onboard people. Especially now since tech wages have gone up over last few years and existing employees are probably cheaper and onboarded.

So it doesn't make sense that Meta would lay people off and rehire others just for fun. They can be greedy or sadistic, not both. Its pretty obvious they use layoffs to get rid of poor performers and divisions they don't want to invest in any more.

The underlying assumptions here are that companies can reliably identify poor performers (I would tend to doubt this, especially at a scale of tens of thousands of employees), that layoffs don't cause negative repercussions among the employees who are kept on (something I know from personal experience to be false) and that skilled employees of a no-longer-in-demand division would be unsuited to the new, hot division (a bugbear of mine is how corporations drive their employees to specialize, then lay them off once they thing they no longer need the specialization).

Companies aren't moral, their purpose is to increase value to their stock holders

Increasing value sounds very moral to me.

Presumably if you are commenting here you work in a tech company, if it is immoral for a company to make money how do you justify working for one?

You noticed the GP said making money is not immoral right?

The morality relates to how you create value and for whom. Not all increases in value are moral.

Companies don’t make decisions, people do.

When you increase headcount you gain both muscle and fat. Every now and then you gotta trim the fat -Management

The only immoral thing here is your countries'/states' labor laws, in my opinion.

In many EU countries they wouldn't be able to fire people "just because we want to", and also, in some countries companies have to offer you other positions if relevant.

People always seem shocked to learn that capitalism is completely and absolutely indifferent to morals, ethics, or human life

They hired any and everyone during the pandemic. I bet they’re going to be a lot more selective this time around.

Companies don't exist to provide employment

We can acknowledge that it is disruptive to employees lives

Facebook ... Moral ... Good one.

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