Intuit to Cut 10% of Employees in Latest Round of Tech Layoffs
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Sounds like Sasan is copying Elons approach to management
If you are hiring the wrong people your HR\hiring process is broken.
If you are hiring people with lower skill levels than expected, you could make a relatively small investment into upskilling them. Cheaper than fire + severance + rehire.
If you are firing people who are unmotivated you have a culture problem and are just putting a band aid over it while you burn through staff that you have invested in.
People are acting all confused that this is happening when it is very clearly explained by the financial incentives. Its not some giant meritocracy, its people skimming off the top.
One thing I've definitely noticed as a repeating pattern is a lot of candidates who are laid off were making astronomical salaries compared to their years of experience. E.g. I recently interviewed a marketing manager candidate with 4 years of experience who was asking for a salary higher than an engineer with 10 years of experience. In today's current market, I'd expect the engineer to be earning 30-50% more due to higher market salaries in engineering and more yrs experience.
A lot of companies prior to doing lay offs had a lot of junior/mid-level employees earning what (today) would only be offered to a senior.
Companies can't go to their employees and say "Oops, we hired you at a salary that, today, is too high for the role you're in" -- I guess they could try, but that conversation wouldn't go over well with most people.
I also don't really blame companies for being in this situation. They had to offer inflated salaries because the only alternative was to hire no one during the covid boom.
So basically, by firing and re-hiring, you can reset an entire department's salary bands. Which sometimes can be healthy especially if people within the company share salary info with each other, and a newly hired person with 10 yrs experience finding out they earn 30% less than someone with 3 years experience, just because of the timing of when they were hired.
It's kind of a lose-lose situation for everyone involved. (Including the company who in many cases would prefer not to churn the staff just to reset salaries back down to market levels)
That's the problem with how pay scales, job titles and performance evaluation are setup. If there are no standard way to set this for everyone then this will bound to just happen again and be a recurring pain.
But of course that won’t fly at any company. Every employee expects annual pay increases no matter what.
Then don't hire?
The point of full-time is to avoid uncertainty and instability. If you want that flexibility as an employer, then pay the premium of contract developers. This is why you need to have no "right-to-work" legislation for prevent non-cause firing. And no, "I can get cheaper" is not a valid cause.
If you're optimizing for economic growth, telling companies to freeze hiring when wages increase is going to result in slower growth.
If you make employment precarious, then I'm gonna treat each pay cheque as a windfall that will be hoarded into a low-risk savings because I have no security and no idea how many more may come. This shrinks the economy.
So, if you want to grow the economy it's best to reduce future uncertainty and over reacting to current events and smooth out bumps.
...and if you don't want to honor the social contract of a full-time job, then just hire contract workers. Otherwise it's just as sleazy as saying you want a relationship and then ghosting after fucking. It's gross.
People will argue any workers rights and protections at all make countries less competitive.
Honestly though? So be it. Corporations don't have a right to exploit people as they see fit and protecting the weaker party, the employee, is more important.
"We could have infinite growth and make way more money if only we could abuse you more"
I can't recall if I've ever worked anywhere that hired as many people as they 'expected' to. It can't have been many places.
> About 10% of the global workforce will be affected, Chief Executive Officer Sasan Goodarzi said in a letter to employees. He said the move is not meant to cut costs and that the company expects to re-hire the same number of employees, primarily in its engineering, product and sales divisions.
> Shares of the software company fell 1.6% in premarket trading on the news.
https://www.intuit.com/blog/news-social/investing-in-our-fut...
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Also keep in mind "All employees in the US will have 60 days before they leave the company with a last day of September 9, 2024." isn't out of the generosity of their heart. It's to be compliant with federal regulations (WARN ACT [1]).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
when you can't grow the top line, push down the bottom line
And the actual reason to hire in more cities is to find the precious resource of brilliant people. Cost savings is prima facie short term, but the folks who can solve hard problems with beautiful code is worth a lot.
But is this a case of the people being cut don't match the skills necessary or are the roles going to be the same but different teams/locations?
Anyway, although there's still code coming from Intuit, nowadays I think there is a sizable portion of contributions coming from Akuity and Codefresh, among others...
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-makes-direct-file-a-permane...
> About 1,050 of the employees were dismissed due to performance
Was Intuit putting out that message, or Bloomberg?
To the newly unemployed, seems like defamation will make the job search harder.
- employees are being targeted for performance reasons ("not meeting expectations")
- stated reason is "not meant to cut costs"
The average business owner is usually overwhelmed with the backend of running a business by the time they come to me. If a client told me they used accounting software with AI features, the first thing I'd do is fully audit their books and review any filings done using chatbot-affected records.