Like, I get how this might be terrifying if you’ve been coasting for a while but (disclaimer) as a person who tends to work at startups, I have zero sympathy
I have never heard of this approach. I’ve heard of new management coming in with a strong opinion and firing people, or new management spending some time understanding the situation up close.
Also: Corporations don’t have a mandate to serve the public writ large. A corporation imploding itself through dramatic reinvention every 4 years is perfectly fine. A government doing this type of purge every 4 years is obviously fucking insane, though I assume you’re operating under the assumption that the other side can’t/won’t/shouldn’t conduct ideological purges when they get into power?
Most administrations know there are people with varying levels of ideological commitment to their causes and they accept this friction because relative operational stability is a feature of a democratic government, not a bug.
How would you feel if your startup got bought by a new PE firm and they decided if you stayed or went based on "justify your existence in a text message no longer than 200 characters"?
It would be far more humane to do this how corporations do it, which is tell departments "you need to cut by X% - go do it". I've never seen or heard of the new CEO deciding on an individual case-by-case basis, depending on what each person puts into a status update email"
It is likely being used as a filter to identify possible candidates to look into further.
> How would you feel if your startup got bought by a new PE firm and they decided if you stayed or went based on "justify your existence in a text message no longer than 200 characters"?
Who cares how I feel? I wouldn't feel great about it, but it frankly wouldn't shock me. People make questionable decisions all the time based on poor data. Ironically, I might use an AI to help squeeze my response into 200 characters...
> I've never seen or heard of the new CEO deciding on an individual case-by-case basis, depending on what each person puts into a status update email
I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Jobs pulled something like this at some point, based on the anecdotes about him randomly quizzing employees about what they do
How do you know? Do you think past decisions to halt contracts based on simple keyword searches or fire people only to ask them to come back hours later supports the theory that they’ll just “look further”?
If you had more experience in large organizations with political dynamics other than the success of your as-of-yet unproven business (things change when people aren’t worried about going out of business if they play hardball with some other part of the organization - most startup people know they can’t afford to shoot holes in the boat), you’d understand the traction: for example, if you worked at a Fortune 500 and some McKinsey consultant sent out an email demanding you explain what you work on, most people would correctly interpret that as “senior management wants to fire as many of you as possible”.
Speaking as a new dad currently looking for a "lower key" job due to the extreme stress of raising my toddler, I completely get that. I mean, that's the whole stereotype of "government work". But it also smacks of... a lack of initiative.
> devalued by people who have contributed virtually nothing to society
Who exactly are we speaking of, here? The guy who started 3 successful world-changing companies, or...?
> Who exactly are we speaking of, here? The guy who started 3 successful world-changing companies, or...?
The sycophants attracted to the chance to work for the guy who started 3 successful world-changing companies no matter what he's asking them to do.
I like to consider myself a high value employee - my pay check certainly thinks I am.
If whoever was in charge started pulling shit like this, I would quit immediately and start working for the competition.
You might think twice on that if the mega corp had the legal authority to arrest you and put you to death for going to “work for the competition”
This exact crap made the news repeatedly when Musk was pulling it at Twitter. It was considered heavy-handed, authoritarian, and intentionally traumatizing.