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Comment by sailfast | Hacker News Reader

> We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made during your time with us.

Why do companies bother with this horse excrement? Does a sentence like this make anyone feel better?

Most times, I wish they'd just send the honest truth. "Hey, we screwed up. We over-hired and ran out of funds so we had to let you go to make payroll" or "Our M&A strategists overpaid for an over-leveraged company and now we have to figure out how to pay down the debt. Your position was cut as a result."

Obviously corporations owe nothing to nobody (apparently) but I'd love it if the patronizing language stopped.

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There have been a couple of cases of honesty in tech layoffs in the last couple where the employer specifically said that the layoffs were for performance which added insult to injury to the people laid off in that round and damaged their future hiring prospects, e.g. https://www.fastcompany.com/91262263/meta-rebranded-performa.... I'd rather not have the honesty in that case; that's a terrible thing to do to people.

Was that really honesty? I'm sure some who were caught in the layoff were truly underperforming, but everyone has peaks and valleys in their output quality over the years, and tons of performance reviews are purely political (i.e. does your manager like you).

It doesn't read so much like "honesty" to me as it does arrogance and spite (which, to be fair, aligns with everything I've heard about their corporate culture). Fundamentally, responsibility for layoffs is always on the shoulders of corporate leadership; regardless of individual employee performance, each of them was vetted extensively and ultimately hired by Meta; the company could have elected to work with them to bring performance up to a higher standard (if you believe their claim that it wasn't), but instead they chose to amputate them en-masse.

It's not "honest" to punish and blame a huge swath of your workforce in a single stroke for your hiring and management mis-steps, it's cowardly and lazy.

And open themselves up for liability and getting sued by admitting mistakes? In your dreams.

> We over-hired

They didn't. Look at their headcount from 2010 until today.

Yeah it was just one of many potential reasons I listed as a hypothetical - nothing specific to Oracle.

They have the same psychology the leaders of communist states had. It's a constant litany of self-congratulation and tone-deafness that has no connection to reality.

Why single out communist leaders? Seems more related to authoritarian leaders, of which communist leaders were just a small subset.

Heck our current admin can’t do any wrong in their own eyes, every thing is perfect and winning including the morass in the Middle East that was arbitrarily started on whim and resulted in economic chaos. Or the trade war with Canada.

Or Biden, he couldn’t do any wrong in his own eyes and that led to the current situation.

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