Once a company moves on to recurring, large-scale layoffs justified by vague corporate Mumbo-Jumbo, I think it is safe to assume it is a "day 2" company.
For others: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/jeff-bezos-day-1-versus-2-com...
> “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by death. And that’s why it’s always Day 1.”
Sharks don't look back, cause they don't have necks. Necks are for sheep
(Actually don't know if I used day 2 correctly, feels a bit like trying to use skibidi ohio in a sentence)
Sharks eat sheep?
No, great white sharks do not eat sheep. They will eat pigs.
If people are surviving that then who are are the people being ejected? Unprofitable areas or new products which didn't pan out?
By the process of natural selection, the people who survive such rounds of firings are the ones with the political skills to survive them. Some of those guys will be star performers, but most will simply be politicians. Over time, this process will result in an increase in the ratio of politicians to star performers.
But it’s a mistake to assume the remainder is automatically high‑performer‑only. Three patterns I’ve seen:
1) People with options leave first. If you can find a stable, supportive org at similar pay, you go. That’s often your top performers. We've lost some truly amazing people who left because they were simply not willing to tolerate working here anymore. Being absolutely ruthless in getting rid of low performers is honestly not worth it when you also lose the people who truly move the needle on creating new products, etc. If you make a mistake and get rid of some people who were talented high-performers, trust is instantly gone. The remaining high-performers now know that they may also be a target, and so they won't trust you and they'll leave whenever they can. And when you're axing 10k+ people, you're absolutely going to make mistakes.
2) The survivors change. Trust and empathy plummet. Incentives tilt toward optics and defensiveness, and managers start competing on visible ruthlessness. You can keep the lights on, but actually trying to innovate in this environment is too scary and risky.
3) In an atmosphere of fear, people who are willing to be genuinely dishonest and manipulative -- and who are good enough at it to get away with it -- have a serious competitive advantage. I've seen good, compassionate leaders go from a healthy willingness to make tough decisions on occasion to basically acting like complete psychopaths. Needless to say, that's extremely corrosive to meaningful output. While you could argue that skillful dishonesty is an individual advantage regardless of climate, an environment of repeat layoffs strongly incentivizes this behavior by reducing empathy, rewarding "do whatever it takes to win" behavior, etc.
Edit: Did some research with ChatGPT and found the following papers if anyone else is interested in the above concepts.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9537742/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235279297_The_survi...
https://backend.production.deepblue-documents.lib.umich.edu/...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10025906/
https://strategy.sjsu.edu/www.stable/pdf/Staw%2C%20B%2C%20L%...
The most nefarious kind I saw was to use tenure capital towards influencing peers (above and below) into over-engineering complexity to improve longevity (or simply to flex on the basis of tenure) and this is a game-able closed loop. The longer one has been in a position is in a position to stay even longer via influence and no-one questions.
The up-levels explain this as "trust" which probably is slop/laziness or pure lack of time due to how busy the up-levels are managing up the chain (and working towards their own longevity)
The below-levels probably are afraid to question/oppose strongly due to obvious reasons. This becomes worse if the tenured person in question is already a "celebrated hero" or "10x-er".
If you are just an employee - it’s beyond naive to prioritize anything but your own job. Of course I am not advocating back stabbing and throwing others under the bus. Getting ahead in BigTech is always about playing politics and getting on the right projects to show “impact”.
Local TV says it's because too many people caved in to the return-to-work demand.
We are already in it.
Exactly. It's a for-profit company, not a charity or a jobs program.
(most of their money is from AWS, though. I wonder if AI is making that less stock-relevant.)
People mistook ZIRP for genius for 25 years.
And they did kind of successfully roll out a global logistics network, at a time when no one thought anyone could compete with Walmart. And they became leaders in the cloud computing space.
These aren't trivial accomplishments solely enabled by ZIRP.
Not Ironic at all that Dot Com immediately followed.
If you're not working in nursing the flux of retired Baby boomers you're either already rich or on unsteady ground.