eBay Lays Off 9%

ebayinc.com

29 points·arberx··10 comments

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Severance package was an actual parcel containing live cockroaches and spiders. F-- would not work there again!

Sorry, but… what?

mindslight is referencing this: https://apnews.com/article/ebay-spiders-cockroaches-steiner-....

9% is nothing. how much did they hire last year?

You're right, they should do 85% like Twitter!

but you never see news like "they hired 25% more staff this year"

Yup. One takeaway I took from the book "Factfulness", is a useful exercise for encountering bad news; ask "would the opposite news have reached me?". The answer is almost certainly, no.

Because they didn't. According to layoffs.fyi Ebay laid off 200-500 people last year as well.

But even if Ebay did go on a hiring kick, is it true that all of those employees had to be laid off? None of them could be retrained?

Why is it that so many companies seems to regularly make the *same* mistake of over-hiring and then "needing" to downsize?

And if Ebay did a layoff last year why not lay off these people a year ago? Did they miscalculate last year? Was this layoff planned more than a year out? What changed in a year that makes Ebays calculations more accurate now?

> Why is it that so many companies seems to regularly make the same mistake of over-hiring and then "needing" to downsize?

Perhaps the issue is with the assumption that it is a mistake. Or rather, that it is the kind of mistake that is readily foreseeable or a mistake where incentives didn’t force you “over hire”.

When there’s rapid growth the be had, why would you not staff up lest you lose share.

[dupe]

More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39111911

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