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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

Also...10,000 fired... Employees previous equivalent quarter:190,711 and now:180,895

Edit: 190,711 employees on March 31, 2023

Layoff is not the same as "fired". Please use the correct terminology in consideration for those who lost their jobs.

Also, the termination dates for those who were laid off in January 2023 would be around April 2023 (the layoff news came earlier due to WARN act), so the employee count as of 2023-03-31 might not include those people. This means a difference of ~10000 can be accounted for by the 2023-01-20 round of layoffs.

this isn’t a fucking HR email thread, fired means layoff in these lands

There's a meaningful difference between the two. You're fired for doing something wrong. You're laid off if the company wants to cut costs.

That is what corporate HR and Executives want you to think.

Layoffs can make it look like the company is having problems so instead of doing that they will create vague KPIs so that employees will not meet them so they can be fired.

That doesn't scale.

AFAICT, Google didn't go to the effort of creating vague objectives for people to fail at. Instead they've blanket cut teams regardless of their success or performance.

What you're observing is that companies lie, not that there aren't differences between the two.

whatever the drones command. end result is the same.

Have some respect. People lost their jobs. They weren't fired because they did something wrong, they were laid off because the company did something wrong.

im also being “laid off” buddy :)

2023-03-31 would have been after the last day for the January layoff group, at least for US workers not in the NY office.

In what world is “laid off” better than “fired”? Either way the company screwed you, doesn’t matter how they justify it

If you've been fired, it typically signals you had very bad performance or committed some fireable offense. If you were laid off, you were ostensibly just on the wrong team at the wrong time.

It's not about how you view your last employer, it's about how your next potential employer will view you.

And HR will do their best to find an excuse to turn "layoff" into "fire" so the company won't need to pay unemployment

Closest comparison is the last quarter were they ended with 182,502

Correct. Edited my comment to clarify number of 190,711 was as of March 2023.

People layed off (about 10,000) in Jan 2023 were still on the books in March 2023. Termination didn't take effect until April.

This happens naturally with turnover if they freeze hiring.

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