This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Why have 2 people do 2 jobs, when you can have 1 frightened employee do 2 jobs or maybe more.
Coming soon: AI, trying to do 10 jobs terribly for nothing!
And then the company blaming the one last employee who is trying to keep the shit LLM from tearing apart everything that the other employees, who were chucked out the airlock, built.
“It was obviously really tough, we parted with a lot of talented people we cared about" - Mark Zuckerberg
"Mark Zuckerberg made more than $28 billion this morning after Meta stock makes record surge" https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/02/business/meta-stock-surge-mark-zuckerberg/index.html
This asshole is such a sociopath. He just did an all hands last year where he straight up told his employees that some of them don't belong there, and then they did the layoffs. He doesn't give a fuck about anyone but himself.
Crocodile tears. Fuck billionaires telling us why layoffs happen. Don't believe anything they say.
It's money, isn't it?
Thank you for posting tl;dr :)
These companies took the benefits and cheap loans to make record profits during the pandemic, and now that the party is over are dumping it on us and the system. They should never have been allowed in the first place and I hope they end up in court over this clear abuse of the system
I have an even more cynical take, in that the layoffs are the one lever that they have to try and get the interest rates to go back down so they can get free money again.
Flood the economy with people who can't afford stuff to get consumer spending down and then rates can lower again.
Is it because they're money-grubbing wankers?
It's because they're money-grubbing wankers, isn't it?
The benefits of being leaner include, having to pay less workers. = making more money.
But what are the consequences of less workers?
More stressed workers, which isn't something they give 2 shits about. :/
exactly. They would rather work individuals to extremes, then pay for more workers.
When they laid off 3/4ths of my team it reduced my stress. I realized that since the company doesn’t give a shit about what we were working on, why should I?
Let the chips fall where they may, I am now remotely working for a company and planning my own business.
Also, I wish I had gotten laid off so I could get the severance.
*fewer
Countable things are fewer.
If I have 50 grams of water and pour 20 grams out. Do I have less water or fewer water?
Less water, fewer grams of water.
So it's just semantics?
Then they have less workforce? I'm not sure that is correct but I am curious what the correct phrasing is if not.
Yep - less workforce (because workforce is a singular object) but fewer workers (because the "number of workers" is a countable object)
There is a tipping point where a company starts losing revenue because of having too little employees to support the needs. The main issue in the past few years is many over-hired.
That’s great, Mark, but what happens when you’ve systematically broken the trust and social contracts between yourself and us normal people so consistently and for so long that we all just decide to come for you with hatchets and pitchforks and AR-15s (because this is indeed America)? Is that the accelerationist future you want?
He's building a bunker... So yes, yes it is what he wants. He thinks he can successfully hide from it.
Be that as it may, he has to be lucky and survive, every time, for the rest of his life. Some random disgruntled vigilante only needs to get lucky once.
Don't need to hear his excuse, the answer is pretty obvious. Companies are really fucking stupid. They saw an increase in demand during COVID and assumed that, rather than being a temporary blip due to lockdowns, this was a permanent change. And so they drastically over-hired during that period, without thought for how it might end up affecting people down the line when they inevitably have to lay them off.
They never assumed any such thing.
The bean counters know things wax and wane. They hired when the needed the staff, they layoff when it makes financial sense to do so.
The end.
And when they have a good year and do a bunch of hiring, they say to shareholders "look at us growing! We hired 1000 extra people, so our business is booming!"
And when it slows down "we made difficult decisions but are now more efficient than ever! We benefited from the previous growth and now we can run lean again" and apparently shareholders eat that shit up.
I know the saying about not attributing to malice what can be attributed to stupidity... but I think we can say pretty confidently that it's not incompetence, it's deliberate and disgusting
Yes they did make the assumption that it would be permanent, they've literally admitted as much. In many cases they didn't even need the extra staff to begin with. They did it because that's what dipshit investors expected them to do.
"Benefits of being leaner" sounds a lot better to investors, than "we bet the farm on virtual reality having some undiscovered practical use, and we haven't been able to find one".
"Mark Zuckerberg has a theory" oh great, he's trying very hard to figure out why the CEO of Meta decided to do layoffs? That's great.
Thanks, Zuck, we were all waiting with bated breath for your statement.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mark Zuckerberg has a theory for why tech layoffs aren't slowing down: Companies are realizing that, while painful, there are benefits to being "leaner."
In an interview with Morning Brew Daily's podcast published Friday, the Meta CEO said companies are still adjusting to the post-pandemic era.
But as people returned to stores and the economy adjusted, sales growth ebbed and ad rates came back to earth.
While a lot of tech companies were reluctant to make cuts at first, they realized it didn't spell the end, Zuckerberg said.
"It was obviously really tough, we parted with a lot of talented people we cared about," Zuckerberg said in the interview, speaking specifically about Meta's past layoffs.
Since Meta cut tens of thousands of its staff starting with Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency," the company has been making a comeback, with its stock at an all-time high.
The original article contains 583 words, the summary contains 144 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
