CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom just before Christmas wants his job back
cnn.com
cnn.com
I really hope Garg is here reading this. It’s not just a mistake that will continue to haunt him, it’s all he’s ever going to be. It’s how he was introduced in this headline. It’s how he’ll be referred to when he starts his next venture. If newspapers publish his obituary someday, it’ll be in the first few sentences explaining why anyone knows his name.
> It's the whole goddam system that allows this.
It allows me and others the same things and yet we don't do them. This idea that you have to talk about everything at once first is just absolving individual doers of specific deeds, not to mention the idea that anyone would have stolen from a blind beggar, we need to heal blindness first etc.
It sounds more cultured when you talk about "incentives" and even "incentive structures", but sometimes it really isn't more than "why was she wearing a short skirt in the bad part of town?"
I think I expected a harder backlash than any of this, it does work surprisingly well with large companies. That must cause them to avoid overhiring or risk their entire reputation if they dare to consider mass layoffs, not a readily available option that they can play whenever they want.
And you're right, and of course scapegoating a guy isn't the solution, or a really great way forward. At first I wanted to add "it can't hurt", but it actually can, when it's really just projecting all the frustration that should be aimed at making bigger changes at the person we happen to know by name.
But it's of course hard to tell when that is the case, when the anger at an individual case takes away from the other, I mean. I don't think it can be generally assumed, maybe by really hating the guts of this particular person, a few people end up getting introduced to (more of) politics and economics in that otherwise wouldn't have? Different people have different learning styles ^^
This specific infamous mass-layoff-via-Zoom happened back in December 2021, and a lot of noise was made about it at the time.
For reference, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29460985 (453 comments) discusses the initial layoff, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29515050 (97 comments) discusses the CEO temporarily stepping back.
The noise around Zoom firing was ridiculous. We were a largely remote company with most people having never been to the office (I don't think I had, at that moment) so how exactly do you lay off people except remotely? VG didn't do a great job there but the idea of doing it remotely being evil or whatever was ridiculous - should the people be flown in to NY just to get fired?
Overall I find VG a flawed but reasonable dude. He definitely put his ass on the line for the business, was generous with equity - and was a pretty engaged leader. I don't think much about my time at Better but it was fine.
Oh did he risk being homeless? Let's not be hyperbolic here—all he risked was minor embarrassment
No, in the C-suite, it is not. Yes, in other positions, it is.
Some say that money is the unit of caring. If that's true, then nothing expresses an executive's commitment to accountability more than him forfeiting enough of his total compensation to put himself nearly at the bottom of the totem pole.
Maybe we can change that eventually.
Please don't do this. There are many people who put their ass on the line. He is not one of them. He risked almost nothing from a human perspective.
Regardless - yes, my response should be off-putting. The situation we are in is "off-putting", to understate it.
If you are wealthy enough to gamble a bunch of money and a couple of years and still have more money than most people left over if it fails, then no. I don't view that as making any kind of significant sacrifice at all
Seriously. If your "worst case scenario" is still "I could retire comfortably tomorrow without any hardship" then I genuinely feel no sympathy for you if your ventures fail.
Yeah. A long while back, I was talking to the guy who ran a Subway-branded sandwich shop that I frequented, and had been running it for quite a long while. He was complaining to me how absolutely terribly the business was doing... how he'd lost something like 150K last year and this year was shaping up to be at least as bad.
And, like, on the one hand that's a quite a lot of money for an individual to lose. On the other hand I -at the time- would have been immediately tossed out on the street if I lost even a quarter of that amount in a year. Him? He kept the business open, bleeding money for a couple more years before he shut it down to go do something else. He was unhappy about the change in plans, but very clearly not financially threatened by the losses over the previous years.
A monetary loss that would ruin one person might not even be worth bothering to account for to another. The surrounding context always matters.
You can have the fucking common decency to do a 1:1 Zoom call with each person. Or at least each fucking team.
Firing 900 people simultaneously is not only stupid and callous, but lazy. There’s absolutely no excuse for that level of inhumanity.
My phone provider doesn't have an emotional breakdown when I fire them, why should I?
People should never take anything corporations do personally. This is why all the messaging about "we're a family" is BS..
The biggest issue is the lack of safety net and healthcare for people when they are let go.. severance kind of take care of this but it varies greatly.
But hey.. perhaps working in this industry for decades has made me too cynical.
> My phone provider doesn't have an emotional breakdown when I fire them, why should I?
You really can't think of a single reason why an employee would have an emotional breakdown when being fired without it being their fault, or see the difference between a person losing their job vs. a company with thousands+ customers losing a single customer?
How is this different?
Disregarding that, it's not very different. What is the implication you're making? That it's good because it's common?
Not shutting down the company, but shutting down a division. The reasons are almost always the same.
> Disregarding that, it's not very different. What is the implication you're making? That it's good because it's common?
Having been at a company that had several rounds of layoffs over several years, I can assure you there's no way to do a layoff were people won't complain (and the complaints can be quite petty).
In the last round, it was the manager scheduling calls to let people know. He scheduled them over two days (not enough hours in the day to do everyone). We're all in a team meeting (without the manager), and random people are just piping up "Oh wow. I just got a meeting request." Each of them knew they were getting laid off just by the mere fact of getting a calendar invite. So they have to spend the rest of the day waiting to formally hear what they already know when their time comes.
I dunno. Not saying it's worse than what this CEO did, but I can't see it being better either.
That's a good thing. More time to steal shit from the office.
The correct euphemism is “strategic relocation of resources”. Use their own bullshit against them.
I’ll argue that over the top destination weddings are the ones that are stupid. Save the money for the down payment for a home.
My employer is not my family. Why would I even want the 1:1 call? It's awkward and pointless. Nothing that is said there will change the situation and saying the wrong thing can harm the employee.
I would expect a layoff with the same level of care as onboarding. If that’s done 900 people at a time over Zoom, cool. We all know we’re part of a herd.
It just sucks and is completely unnecessary to treat people like garbage on their way out if you have a company culture that otherwise treats people well.
Pathetic
I don't think the issue was the communications medium (Zoom.)
> I don't think much about my time at Better but it was fine.
That's the biggest tell about leadership at any company.
You have their managers do it. Privately. 500 people at once is just lazy and hateful.
The CEO actually doing it himself is surprising. Lots of executives wouldn’t put themselves out there like that.
Between the years of 2018-2025, I led very many professional discussions and educational presentations regarding the theory and application of AI/ML in the org I worked (a ~120 person org lacking in any substantive expertise or awareness of the field).
One of the most important topics within those conversations was demystification. Several times I was asked (in earnest, by adults, in public fora) about “terminator/skynet scenarios”, sometimes intended metaphorically (related to the profession) and sometimes literally.
My response every single time:
I don’t fear “skynet”. My biggest fears surrounding the continued proliferation of AI are the mundane, boring, and nascent uses that completely bastardize the world as we know it. Uses like mortgage/loan approval, healthcare coverage approval, hiring, legal adjudications etc., etc.
Uses where the decision outcomes have a direct, major, intimate impact on people’s lives.
I am generally pro-AI/ML (when applied thoughtfully), but my greatest fears are and have ALWAYS been in knowing just how much easier it enables these kinds of decisions to inevitably be outsourced or made in an otherwise (more) thoughtless, dehumanizing way.
While it’s easy (and at times cathartic) to criticize big corp leaders, the CEO and company described in the article gives me a visceral reaction deeply within the uncanny valley that is actually difficult to describe.
> So when shareholders said, ‘You need to take a back seat,’ I complied.”
Man shocked to learn the evolution of shareholder value did not, in fact value him.
I love SpaceX's strategy for getting us to AGI, the moon, and beyond!
> just as he brought the company to the precipice of success.
I love how success has a precipice.
Luigi Mangione spent months trying to contact someone at United Healthcare to no avail. Only when he pretended to be an investor managing a large number of assets did he hear a response.
On a big pile of money, surrounded by beautiful women.
Need is too strong, especially if it’s just for becoming a billionaire. One can absolutely amble into that situation. Where I tend to agree is if you choose to keep those billions versus transitioning to charity.
There’s a little under 1000 billionaires in the US and the population is estimated at over 349 million. Rounding the billionaires up and the population down to those round numbers and it’s 0.000286532951% of the population getting resources that millions of others are trying to take.
Yes. I think you can be a good person and an early engineer at a start-up that gets acquired for billions when the team is still small.
Can you name an engineer who was at a startup acquired for billions who themselves became a billionaire, and was not one of the founders?
Because there is a, to me, large gap between someone ambling into being a billionaire vs being an employee at a company acquired for billions.
And there’s an equally large gap between claiming someone is just an engineer vs one of the founders with controlling interests who are making the decisions for the company.
I’ll give you Tom Mueller
Luigi Mangione was not a United Healthcare customer.
This seems like an incredibly important detail that keeps being left out of this tidbit as it circulates social media. You’re trying to imply that he had some grievance with his insurance with the company, but he was not insured by them. He was trying to get in contact with anyone so he could murder someone high profile. He called the investor relations line as a way to social engineer that.
Must grievances be only with employers/patrons to be valid?
I explained it in the following sentence: Leaving it out is an underhanded way of implying that he was trying to get ahold of someone about his own medical conditions, which has been the narrative across social media.
> Must grievances be only with employers/patrons to be valid?
A company doesn’t have to field phone calls from non customers who are angry at their industry. If you’re trying to suggest that companies have an obligation to field complaints from angry non-customers, using an example where someone went on to murder an employee of that company isn't making a compelling case.
and
> “(Lewis’) thoughts about cost savings were good. His ideas about innovation were not,” Garg argued. “It’s so much easier when we’re this close for someone to come in and say that they could have done better.”
The user of better for Better, had me chuckling in these parts.
Overall, I think, we can safely say that Better has definitely seen some better times.
> Today, with an imploded refi business and rates closing in on 7%, the AI mortgage company’s market value stands at just $300 million.
Forgive the snipping here, but is the company actually turning around or on the brink of success now? Is there any sign the firings helped them 8 months later?
you can't comment in 2 threads simultaneously but that doesn't make this case the only one that got people upset.
The Schrodinger's ragebait.
time to forget about it again
He is nothing but a tool for the billionaires. Nothing else. What did he risk? Nothing. Public embarrassment at best. He gets a golden parachute like every other C-level asshole and lives the rest of his life without having to worry about anything.
People (you) fired don't get their jobs back because they say "they were doing a great job".