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Comment by xyzelement | Hacker News Reader

Former employee (though not part of that famous round of layoff)

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.

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There's a huge range of options between a terse Zoom call with 900 people on it and flying everyone to NY. And if you're someone who previously said "You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS… SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME" to your employees, you may want to lean towards the more humane options if you don't want to get dragged.

There is nothing inhumane about announcing layoffs over Zoom though. Hell I'd prefer to be laid off in the least personal way possible because I'm a grown-ass adult who doesn't need my company to treat my like a child. Tell me and get it over with.

Just like a mass wedding is fucking stupid, so is a mass layoff.

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.

What does it matter if it's an HR person or the CEO telling me? The job is not coming back either way.

Not who, how.

I don't understand this either. It's a professional environment and all you're doing is a business transaction: you offer them services, they pay you.

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.

This is an incredibly privileged perspective.

> 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?

I don't know. Pre-pandemic, when doing mass layoffs, it wasn't unusual for a company to hold a giant update meeting and let everyone know they're shutting down the division and that everyone's been laid off.

How is this different?

Shutting down is a subset of reasons for mass layoffs. They are not equivalent.

Disregarding that, it's not very different. What is the implication you're making? That it's good because it's common?

> Shutting down is a subset of reasons for mass layoffs.

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.

>So they have to spend the rest of the day waiting to formally hear what they already know when their time comes.

That's a good thing. More time to steal shit from the office.

> steal shit from the office

The correct euphemism is “strategic relocation of resources”. Use their own bullshit against them.

It might surprise you to learn that that would also be considered a dick move.

As I alluded to elsewhere, I've yet to see a layoff where there's no one who doesn't consider how it was done "a dick move." Your preferred way of doing a layoff will be someone else's "dick move" judgement.

Why are mass weddings stupid? They save each person shit ton of cash and end result is the same.

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.

> "You can have the fucking common decency to do a 1:1 Zoom call with each person."

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 have never viewed my employer as family. I have been laid off though. My manager and HR were in the room. They handled it incredibly well, and I have spoken of them very highly for years. I can't imagine I'd feel the same way if the CEO spoke to me during a mass layoff.

I am an adult but I am also a human

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.

Sounds like we're in agreement that a layoff can be done just fine and humanely in a group setting over Zoom.

Oh wow! He actually said that dumb dolphins line in email https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59554585

>put his ass on the line

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.

I find it off-putting that you and another poster think you are in position to evaluate someone else's sacrifice. I pressume that if you had put years and lots of money towards something - you would consider that significant "on a human level".

This is an oversimplification. I didn't make the implication you are accusing me of. Tangentially, please do not presume my feelings based on invented scenarios - it's hostile.

Regardless - yes, my response should be off-putting. The situation we are in is "off-putting", to understate it.

> I pressume that if you had put years and lots of money towards something - you would consider that significant "on a human level".

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.

> Seriously. If your "worst case scenario" is still "I could retire comfortably tomorrow without any hardship"...

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.

I haven't worked for an individual with a failure state anyone would recognize since the mid-90s. There's no sacrifice involved in being addicted to a lifestyle that pays well even if you suck.

That is, unless there's a contingent out there considering hurting him for this. Probably not justified in this case, but maybe we'd get better leadership if it were a tad more common.

Clearly his ass was on the line based on the fact that he was fired and is now likely unemployable.

He was fired 5 years after the zoom layoffs. That information is from the linked article.

If he's fine, that's not "his ass". Otherwise, do you mean "unemployable as a CEO"? If yes, that's irrelevant. If no, why do you think that? You said "clearly", but it's clearly not clear (assuming you've made it to this point in the decision tree).

> so how exactly do you lay off people except remotely?

You have their managers do it. Privately. 500 people at once is just lazy and hateful.

How long does that take (900 people) - how does your entire 10k people company feel for hours and days knowing the layoffs are happening but not their fate? And how many of those said 10k mortgage originators and engineers do something stupid to customer financial data they have access to while under duress of this uncertainty?

> He definitely put his ass on the line for the business

Oh did he risk being homeless? Let's not be hyperbolic here—all he risked was minor embarrassment

There was some dynamic with Softbank which required VG to put a lot of personal money on the line to keep going. I forget the dynamic exactly.

"Minor embarrassment" is what politicians who 'take full responsibility' while not facing any consequences 'suffer'.[1] Getting canned for it is a bit more than that.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-19958739

>Getting canned for it is a bit more than that.

No, in the C-suite, it is not. Yes, in other positions, it is.

What more can he do, other than get canned, to be accountable?

Take a pay cut, push back on investors/board, wait until after Christmas...

One option is to pay back enough of his compensation from that period (and money made off of investments funded by that compensation) to make his total comp over his tenure equal to that of a low-to-mid-level line worker.

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.

Apologise and donate his fortune to homeless charities?

Nothing, of course - that's why he is not accountable. Because of the way things currently work, he was not in a situation to be able to be accountable.

Maybe we can change that eventually.

Well he is almost certainly wealthier than the people he fired so it's quite hard to take this seriously

> VG didn't do a great job there but the idea of doing it remotely being evil or whatever was ridiculous

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.

I’ve been laid off via remote meeting. The folks doing it were unhelpful (couldn’t answer typical questions) / they were some third party company hired to fire people. I didn’t like it… but not much would have made it “better”.

The CEO actually doing it himself is surprising. Lots of executives wouldn’t put themselves out there like that.

Oh, will some one think of the poor CEOs for a change! He puts his ass on the line!

Pathetic

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