> As the CEO and founder of Zoom, I am accountable for these mistakes and the actions we take today– and I want to show accountability not just in words but in my own actions. To that end, I am reducing my salary for the coming fiscal year by 98% and foregoing my FY23 corporate bonus. Members of my executive leadership team will reduce their base salaries by 20% for the coming fiscal year while also forfeiting their FY23 corporate bonuses.
It’s nice to see the phrase “I am accountable” followed by a description of what that accountability entails.
Whether or not the steps taken seem fair is a separate conversation, but it seems like a step in the right direction.
When you’re making CEO salary, no amount of salary reduction will have a day to day impact, but this seems strongly symbolic at least.
This is probably the best you can hope for in terms of fairness right now. You'll never see executives put themselves financially in the same situation as the lowest level people they are letting go.
This is actually a pretty big step, but the move will need some benefit to the company for it to become more common-place.
They might roll these bonuses into subsequent bonuses, but that may actually end up being a motivator if these bonuses are truly forfeit until things are improved by the executives.
Seriously? What 'fairness' exactly is it people want when companies do layoffs?
"Hey, we are laying off 3,000 people. Because of that, I am firing myself and the company will no longer have a CEO and will have to find someone else, starting immediately. In addition, I plan to donate all of my life's savings and file for unemployment like everyone else and, if needed, live in my van down by the river. I hope this makes everyone feel vindicated and that the scales of justice remain balanced. God Bless."
A team does terrible for awhile -- should the coach be removed? A company does terrible -- should the CEO be removed? This is what accountability means. Just this year I was hired by a Board Of Directors, of a startup with 150 people, to do an evaluation of the technology and code, and I found epic levels of tech debt and irresponsible decision making. When I gave my report to the Board Of Directors, the Board responded by firing both the CTO and the CEO. This seems normal to me.
I don't know who needs to hear this, but laying people off _does not mean the company is doing terrible_ and this narrative is the reason why you get vastly different opinions about handling this scenario.
All laying people off means is that there are items that the company will not be executing against in the future. It may or may not mean that they're in a bad spot, but very often - and the case with many of the current tech giants laying off that we're seeing - it simply means they grew more than they needed for the road ahead.
Whether or not that's good or bad is a fair question. It was asked on a previous thread whether we as a society should be comfortable with companies gabling with the jobs of their employees, and I think that's a worthwhile question. But it most certainly does not mean that a company is "doing terrible."
It doesn't mean that they're doing terrible as a going concern, but it does mean that they're a terrible company to work for.
If you're hiring in bulk to tie up talent your competitors might want during a boom, and then promptly firing thousands in the bust, you're bad people and should feel bad.
But then, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get an executive to understand the impacts of their decision when their compensation package depends upon them not understanding it.
It's not that Zoom has done terrible for a while, in fact the opposite is true. Yuan is the founder, and the company went from nothing to being pretty huge under his leadership. On the other hand, he signed off on hiring a lot of people because the company grew really fast during the pandemic — too many, as it turns out. What do you make of that? Should the CEO be considered a failure because too many people were hired, or a success because the company's revenue grew by like 1000% in the last three years? Both are really responses to the pandemic, and it may be that neither are really his fault, even if they are on his plate to deal with.
You answered your own question. Yes. Who removes a CEO? The Board. If the Board does their job (correctly), then they will make the right decision to release or retain the right CEO.
If the Board fails to do its job? What, then? Yep, shareholders have to intervene.
Which leads to what happens if the shareholders themselves don't figure out what to do or the right-decision to be made? Well, they lose a bunch of value as the company's value [eventually] plummets.
The board likely signed off on the hiring plan. Layoffs are hard but as other commenters have pointed out are not inherently a sign the company is doing poorly. In many cases a board may choose to reward a ceo for identifying cuts and charting and executing a path forward.
I'm sure you can't speak about it, but now I'm very curious what levels of technical debt it takes for the board to fire a CTO.
I have to assume it goes beyond just not following best practices, and perhaps into deep levels of pointless "not invented here syndrome" or some other massive waste of resources.
> I was hired by a Board Of Directors, of a startup with 150 people, to do an evaluation of the technology and code, and I found epic levels of tech debt and irresponsible decision making
A BOD doesn’t hire someone to do this without there being some suspicion within the board that there is an issue. That board was likely divided on keeping one or both of those individuals and your results were used to sway votes.
This is some sort of blame game? Why stop there? Why don’t we fire the whole chain of management, including the top guy, AND let all these people that were laid of KEEP their jobs instead. It wasn’t their fault after all and we are making decision on the basis of blames, right? Let’s see how that turns out.
"Clearly this failure demonstrates that a centralized system can not work and I have initiated a transition to turn this corporation into a worker-owned cooperative."
I'm kidding, of course. Layoffs rarely represent failure, they're usually just a cost cutting measure to increase profitability and make shareholders happy. They're just framed as failure every time because people take more kindly to "we had to lay 15% of employees off because of the economy" than "we had to lay 15% of employees off to meet our quarterly growth goals".
1. Yuan should immediately terminate himself as CEO, and his salary/bonus should be divvied up among those who were [IMPACTED]. In fact, all 1,300 people should be named co-CEOs and together they shall lead the company to prosperity and avoid such a boneheaded misstep in the future.
2. He should have to give his life savings to those 1,300 people. His family should live in squalor going forward, effective immediately.
3. He should be imprisoned for fraud, for no fewer than 25 years —- or ideally sent to a North Korean prison camp, if such arrangements with DPRK can be secured.
Clearly being laid off is painful. I'm sensing some of that pain in your reply. I have a lot of sympathy for those who have been laid off.
However your solution, as seen from outside that pain, is "worse than the disease".
Firstly it's worth pointing out that most (but not all) layoffs right now are a result of over-hiring during the pandemic. Now, granted, those jobs didn't last forever, but they did last a while and kept a lot of people working during a time when a lot of people couldn't work. It would likely have been very profitable to not make those hires in the first place.
Secondly, you are proposing penalties out of proportion to the mistake. Or put another way you are strongly disincentiving hiring in the first place.
The more penalties there are for failure, the lower the chance that people will try at all. Your suggestion that over-hiring leads to criminal fraud, or personal destitution, has out outcome - no one will ever hire anyone.
In a private company the decision makers are typically the owners. They're taking risks everyday, spending "their money" and working hard to keep everyone employed. It's a weighty responsibility. But life happens and things don't always work out as planned. Management-via-hindsight is easy.
>> In fact, all 1,300 people should be named co-CEOs and together they shall lead the company to prosperity and avoid such a boneheaded misstep in the future.
2. He should have to give his life savings to those 1,300 people. His family should live in squalor going forward, effective immediately.
I mean honestly…you thought the above (emphasis is mine) was serious?
The big thing would be for Mr. Yuan to forgo his equity grant for FY23 and also take his equity grant from FY22 and distribute that as severance for the employees who lives are impacted negatively due to the decisions of executives in the organization.
That truly means "taking ownership" of what happened.
The individuals leaving were not the ones who hired or authorized the hires without the evaluation of long-term viability for the organization. They were just doing their jobs.
They haven't released 2022 financials, but for 2021 base + bonus for Mr. Yuan was about $313,000 and he received ~8400 RSUs (about $670k at today's price), which fully vest on April 8. Additionally, it looks like he received an RSU grant of 612,000 shares on July 8, that vest quarterly over 4 years.
So, for those keeping track, Mr. Yuan is giving up about $300k in cash, but still receiving about $13M in stock. That's a 2.3% level of "accountability".
Yes, I agree that his ownership position gives him direct financial accountability for the performance of the company. He does well when it does well.
That said, the swings tech stock over the last couple years have very little to do with his leadership. Yuan is not responsible for the tech bubble and its deflation. No human on the planet could have made zoom hold its peak stock price.
Keep in mind that his income is probably not what he lives on. He probably gets loans with the stock. That 500 mill bump probably got him a large loan.
He probably doesn't need more stock borrow against if he has billions of dollars of equity already and a seven digit annual compensation. His stock transfers and sales are public information so you can look that up if you want. A cursory search shows that he sold at least 50 million dollars worth, which should cover some daily expenses
He didn't make the money because it's unrealized gains, but your point still stands. The market certainly agrees that this is a good direction for the company, and if the market is correct, he will stand to benefit eventually
So? What's the functional difference between $6 billion and $1 billion (which is roughly what Google says his current net worth is). Unless your net worth is $500M or more, you're closer to being homeless than ever seeing that kind of wealth.
It doesn't make sense to accuse someone of not feeling the economic impact of a downturn at all while downplaying the fact that they actually lost $5billion.
If there's no functional difference between before and after the loss, it damn well does.
Tell me, how did his lifestyle change as a result of losing this $5 billion? What actual pain of loss did he feel, above and beyond seeing some numbers go down?
If you were serious or had devoted any thought into the issue you wouldn't even consider the silliness of framing a $5billion loss as a lifestyle issue.
His point, which you failed to address with your smug response, is the well-understood fact that the utility value of money falls greatly, the more money one has. The utility of 5 billion dollars is essentially zero to someone who already has a billion.
Other than ownership of an NFL/NBA/Premier League/etc sports team, what life satisfaction or happiness improvements are unavailable to a one-billionaire?
You could take all of his comp, then fire him, then bar him from any work for the next 5-10 years and he'd still probably be a millionaire. In terms of quality of life, he will never face the same situation.
But at the end of the day, he won't work for nothing if you took all of his comp, so fair accountability is not really possible in this light.
I feel like this is a weird comment. There has basically never been a CEO taking meaningful accountability for a company failing. Taking a reasonable chunk of one's wealth and giving it to fired employees is actually remarkable, even if it's not as large as it could be
Laying off employees is not 'the company failing'; he reports to investors, not employees. The employees have very little on the line with respect to the company.
Damn, whoever made a comment has probably has never had a job that's genuinely engaged them (and certainly has never been unexpectedly laid off). What a sad reality most people's jobs are :(
Working for someone else's company means you are a tool to generate profit. That does not mean you cannot enjoy it, and your team, and even make some friends. Still it is vital to understand the business itself is not a family. Companies that pretend to be families seek to build stockholm syndrome which will make you unwilling to look for a better deal for your talent.
It also makes it hurt more when you are laid off and the illusion is broken.
You only ever work for yourself. A single employer means you have a single client. It also means you only have one source of income. That is always risky, because work done for others is always temporary. Honestly full time employment is way way -more- risky than being an independent contractor with a few small predictable retainer contracts.
Also key to remember is that no matter how rewarding and interesting the work is you will eventually lose access to that too unless you fought hard enough for it to be open source.
I've been unexpectedly laid off, and I've had at least one job that genuinely engaged me, and I think that laying off employees, or firing employees, or otherwise terminating employees, is not evidence that a company has failed, or that the CEO has failed, or any of those things.
If you want a job where losing that job is tantamount to company failure, start your own business. When it fails (and statistically it probably will), your failure will also lead to your job loss. Congratulations.
If you "have a job", you're accepting being a cog in a machine that's primarily not about you. I make that trade-off, as do most people, but don't mislead yourself about what's going on.
It’s symbolic. He built a juggernaut that went from nothing to industry leader in a few years. Just like Cisco did with WebEx, they can park the company for a few years and print billions until the next disruptor arrives.
Ahh, that confluence where capitalism intersects with socialism.
Did the workers build the company? Did the capital build the company by providing the pay to pay the workers?
Did the workers take any risks? Or did they sign an employment contract, and get paid the same every month regardless of performance? Their only risk, that the contract will end, perhaps unexpectedly [1]?
In the case of small private businesses (which of course the vast majority of businesses are) did the "Capitalist" worry about making payroll this month, get short paid when cash is short, try and predict the future, make tough decisions when things go wrong, and somehow be a human?
Of course the socialists believe the capitalists should keep those people hired forever (or better yet, not hire them to begin with?) - ironically that's what the capitalists want as well. But life happens and hard decisions have to be made.
[1] risk costs money. If you have one employer you are at risk. As much as you can, hedge this risk with liquid savings. This has been good advice for thousands of years. Most workers live so close to poverty that this is unattainable. However folks at (big tech whoever) have the means to do this AND get decent severance, so I'm not crying for them just yet.
We tell ourselves perfect is the enemy of good and then try anyways. But it seems like they get to say, perfect is the enemy of good, so I'll give up before I start. It's this difference in character that creates greater division rather than lessening it.
To be fair, it's only a pair of random internet forum posters who are complaining that this is not enough. There are plenty of people in this discussion arguing otherwise.
Accountability means (from every definition I’ve found!) taking responsibility for one’s actions and their consequences.
Falling on one’s sword has, from what I’ve always read, has been portrayed as someone accepting too much responsibility, to the point they actually avoid dealing with the consequences of their actions and make the situation worse overall by killing themselves.
After all, no need to actually work hard making amends or doing better if you’re dead, eh?
And it can even make the person doing it somewhat of a martyr, even if they created the whole situation to begin with, as it can make it look like those calling for it or pushing for retribution were actually just looking for a scapegoat and the dead one is actually a victim.
E.g. Seppuku in Japan, captains going down with the ship, ect.
The origin of the phrase in the west stems from the roman practice of military ritual suicide following defeat. It was more a matter of honor than seeking victimhood.
A captured general represented an embarrassment to the empire, provides the enemy with a hostage, and would likely be tortured to give up information. Suicide in defeat was honorable as it served the empire and denied the enemy leverage.
Thanks for clarifying. I was having a really tough time understanding your response. I thought you were saying you hadn't heard the dictionary definition that lazide was quoting, and were saying lazide made that definition up and you had a different definition you made up that doesn't match.
Are you referring to 'falling on your sword', or 'accountability' in your response? Some of your examples are not equivalent to falling on their sword. Notably, going down with the ship is the opposite (in some ways), as it is 'fighting to the end to save the ship and it's people'.
If someone (going down the ship wise) doesn't get on a lifeboat when everyone else has already gotten off, then yeah it's probably more about avoiding actual accountability (aka having to stand and take responsibility/long term consequences).
Sometimes folks want blood, and they won't be satisfied until they get it. And often someone either stupidly volunteers (actually), or gets 'volunteered' by their boss.
Also, how is killing yourself quickly and (relatively) painlessly after a military failure NOT the relatively easy way out - instead of say, dying while fighting the enemy to the death (probably horribly disfigured and maimed in the process), or dying in torture while not giving anything up, or dying while trying to save the ship and the other crew, or returning in shame and being a social outcast, or dying after being shamed in trial followed by an execution, etc.
Literally all those other options can seem a whole lot harder than a gladius through the solar plexus at the moment. Also, notably, sometimes folks had 'help' on that last bit, though rarely was it featured prominently in the PR.
Seppuku - similar. Rather than 'living with dishonor' (aka being outcast from a insular and all encompassing society), or having to stand trial and defend yourself and getting shamed then executed anyway, etc. it's killing yourself 'with honor', so your family doesn't get their benefits taken and similarly outcast (as badly). Seppuku generally involves the second beheaded the person before they've had a chance to suffer much too, though there have been famous 'mistakes' made at times.
It also could be ordered by the Daimyo, Shogun, etc. and it was pretty common (from accounts at the time) for folks to be thrown under the bus and ordered to commit it if they didn't succeed at what the lord had ordered them to do or were just being inconvenient to the narrative. Including significant 'help' from seconds. Which is, well, pretty much the example of a scapegoat.
>Falling on one’s sword has, from what I’ve always read, has been portrayed as someone accepting too much responsibility, to the point they actually avoid dealing with the consequences of their actions and make the situation worse overall by killing themselves.
Yes there are differences in my examples. Captains are on boats, and Samurai are in Japan. I'm not trying to say they are identical in every way.
The common factor is that these actions are all seen as honorable positive within the context of the society where they took place.
I get that you might have your own personal take and values on these types of actions. People could have suffered more or made a more utilitarian Choice if their objective was the greater social good.
Yes, I'm sure many people have been made to fall on their sword as patsies. However, I don't think that changes the common understanding of the idiom, or how the practice was viewed in the historical context.
You may see it as the coward's way out to avoid living with shame or fixing your problems, which is fine. I just don't think it is an accurate depiction of how contemporaneous people viewed it. People did not look at a captain going down with the ship or a general falling on their Gladius as a coward dodging their responsibilities. I don't think most people today feel that way either, but obviously there are exceptions with you being one
You got a very different take than what I wrote - especially in the captain going down the ship example.
Unless the Captain saw everyone off in lifeboats and then stayed on the ship (very unlikely), it’s far from what you are describing and I was clear on that.
I also pointed out that the actual reality on the ground is almost never what the mental image or PR is meant to instill, and is often (in reality) a way to take someone out somewhere and pin all the blame on them.
I very much doubt, for instance, in ANY of those examples I gave, they actually did what they were said to have done in the way and for the reasons they were said to have done it.
But there are situations where it definitely is the easier way out to do it that way literally.
Someone who gets into an obstinate fight with a boss over a minor issue, or who does something common and then when it turns out it’s a problem stands up and tries to defend it, and then gets fired, would be a common use of the idiom in my experience.
A Phyrric victory, ‘he picked that hill to die on’, he died tilting at windmills’, etc. could also be used.
> Falling on your sword is literally exactly what accountability used to be.
I wonder if you hold this level of rigour towards your own failings and shortcomings, or if this desire is directed exclusively at everyone besides yourself.
The people being laid off have to go find another highly overpaid job. Somewhat distressing, to be sure, but in the scheme of what you're talking about, not really high stakes at all. Failure in the cases you're comparing it to usually involved death for a large number of people. The stakes are nowhere near the same.
The best you can hope for is for the CEO to have his incentives aligned fully with the company. Given his enormous ownership stake, that's already true. This is a rounding error compared to the billions of book value he lost and the billions he still retains.
Any CEO in his position is accountable by default. They lose a literal fortune when the company doesn't perform. This meme of "but how are you taking accountability" confuses the heck out of me given this context.
The cynic in me suspects that this is going to trickle down - there will be 20% salary reductions for everybody, and this will become a trend just like the layoffs did.
> executives put themselves financially in the same situation as the lowest level people they are letting go
Except, lately anyway, those people were probably already living close to paycheck-to-paycheck, as many low six figure earners are in this horrible economy. Whereas, the CEO and other execs will likely not even miss the money.
> If you are a US-based employee who is impacted, you will receive an email to your Zoom and personal inboxes in the next 30 minutes that reads [IMPACTED] Departing Zoom: What You Need to Know.
This is the way to notify people of a layoff. Immediate binary yes/no.
Although there is no great way to do it, this layoff seems pretty respectful and well done.
At my first company they announced layoffs almost a month out but not who was impacted. A horrible idea that created a very paranoid environment for at least the next year
I found it particularly respectful the way he called them Zoomies as he was laying them off. It was even more classy and respectful when he went out of his way to mislead people about his compensation when the vast vast majority of his comp is RSU and he can easily borrow against them (worth tens of millions of $).
Many people here have worked in tech long enough to know that's how executive salaries often work in big tech companies and that the decrease in actual money flowing in isn't nearly as dramatic as "98%" sounds. I think everyone's just seen enough of these messages at this point that our standards have just been substantially lowered.
It's at least something more than we've seen from the majority of other layoffs. The severance is decent too so it's hard to deny Zoom's handled it better at least relative to how others have
Symbolic gestures mean a lot - especially when you are in a position of leadership. It will not break the bank for him (I would be surprised if the effected employees will be ruined by this either), but it is important for the people making decisions to have a bit of skin in the game.
None of the other CEO's who "took full responsibility" (running tally here: https://www.itakefullresponsibility.fyi) did anything close to this. I have to give a some respect that this man didn't just pass the pain off onto his subordinates.
short of giving shares away to laid off employees there isn't much a founder can do, majority of their net worth is equity. Even for the CEOs their income is mostly tied to stock performance. If the CEO was much worse than the average tech CEO the board would fire them
the biggest reason these companies are getting flak is due to pretending they weren't like other industry "soulless corporations". People naturally don't like hypocrisy, you can't LARP like your employees are family to squeeze productivity out of them and then drop them at the slightest downturn in profit.
the social contract has been broken for the worse between employees and companies, people just need to act accordingly
Goalpost moving. The people who complain that CEO's don't show any accountability, will then complain that whatever consequences the CEO's face (or self impose) are insignificant.
It's also interesting to me that people who got into FAANG and got that onto their resume (which is extremely valuable) - see it as this MASSIVE disservice to have been hired by mistake.
I mean, sure, it would've been better to not get laid off. Obviously!
But do you really think you would've been better off working somewhere else?
Almost everybody that did get laid off was better off working where they did and enjoying the boom for however long it lasted.
Before someone replies - I know there's exceptions. You moved, you bought house because of your job, just got pregnant, etc. I get it. Obviously layoffs don't impact everyone equally.
But I think a strong majority of people that got laid off were better off working where they did for however long it lasted.
How about a few CEO's getting fired for cause by their Boards, because their "I just do whatever the cooler kids are doing" hiring/firing binges show that they really aren't competent to run a company?
In the case of zoom, they had an explosion in users and demand due to their product being a good solution to some of the problems imposed by the pandemic. What is your suggestion? Companies hire when they have a lot of demand, the fire when they don’t. Just like basically any other organism’s response to its situation.
I wonder. Where were all these detractors, when all the hiring was happening, at record salaries, over the last 2 years?
Did they heap praise on this same CEO, when he hired, provided jobs, record salaries, and more?
Even now, after these layoffs, this same CEO resides over a company worth immensely more, with more employees than 2+ years ago, and at excellent salaries.
So where were the praises before the layoffs? Because that's the logical inverse of the current behaviour. If not, then all these complaints are just immensely hypocritical.
That's assuming that hiring a person is the exact inverse of firing someone, which is often not the case. Firing someone has more negative effect than hiring's positive effect when e.g people move, leave previous jobs (possibly), have children, buy houses.
So your assertion is that the employer is responsible for your well being? Not just in a transitory fashion, but beyond?
Yet responsibility is a two way street. And it embues more than one stance.
So you will work with dilligence to help the company, take pay cuts, work overtime when times are tough, work for free, struggle and strive and sacrifice, for just as (in your world) the company should maintain your employment through thick and thin, you should do the inverse, yes?
And by this logic, jumping ship for greater pay is questionable too, for what of your obligations? And leaving if given a pay cut in bad times, is wrong as well?
You see, the transaction you envision is framed by a transactional nature. Most feel little obligation other than the metric; I work, you pay.
(This does not discount joy in work, nor happiness at a job done well. It is merely that this is the exchangeful nature I speak of)
And that is the metric all employer/employee relationships are legally, primarily construed.
If you move for a job, negotiate a moving allowance. Thus, you will not be harmed by that loss and cost. If you take a job, ensure severance is a clear and unencumbered thing, and so on and so forth, so you do not lose in this equation.
And if you are at the start of your career, and incapable of such negotiations, due to lack of clout, then you are fortunate for that hire, and in a sense, continuing your education, as your first job teaches much, and thus should expect such things at the first.
But all said, this is merely how things work. Few hearts bleed for the janitor in such situations, or a construction worker, or an employee at mcdonalds.
Yet for the tech worker, replete with 10x these salaries, with perks, with jobs considered cushy by many, the blood of bleeding hearts flows freely, along with the bleating of complaint filling the air.
Surely there is a more holistic measure of a CEOs performance than just a round of layoffs. Is Eric a bad CEO? If yes then he should be fired. If not then I don’t see how layoffs would justify it.
At least the last time I used MS teams, Zoom had a much better 'upper limit' for participants in a call. Both from a 'hard limit' standpoint as well as an 'after this number the experience degrades'.
To say nothing of dealing with an outage of microsoft services and needing to get on a call to resolve...
A pay cut of sorts is sufficient accountability in my eyes. It is worth noting that most previous tech CEOs financially gained from lay-offs, assuming that these layoffs would make the company more profitable in the long run.
Depends on the industry. With tech like this.. salary/bonus changes are fine. Or wage labor pay increases. Anything and including in all cases no stockholder dividends or buybacks. Price should tank accordingly.
When it comes to industry directly related to life, like health, pharmacy, electric/fuel, housing - those kinds of choices made should result in prison.
(I meant some people will, I personally don't expect anything, and don't really care - none of this is in my power in any way, shape or form.)
Or at least, to give the rough date at which he will resign, so that someone more competent will run the company, avoiding the mistakes that brought it so bad that it has to lay off 15%.
There are mistakes that you can recover from, and you don't fire an exec (or anyone) at the first blunder. But if you have to cut an arm to recover from your mistake, you have to be shown the door, or at least the direction of the door.
Baring that, he can substantially reduce his income in the next few years, so that the company can be more generous with the laid off people. Reducing his salary is a step in this direction, but we don't know how the structure of his compensation - salary might be symbolic.
Also, has he made clear to his board that the situation is so bad that shareholders will also have to chip in, and accept reduced or no return on their investment for a number of years ? Again, sharing the burden.
Again, in the grand scheme of things, this is a least closer to "taking responsibility". Just, not there yet.
I don't understand this position. You imply that any layoff is a fundamental and serious mistake.
Zoom's revenue grew like 10X over the past two years. They had a legitimate need to hire and grow the business, and now the market has corrected and they don't need as many employees. The hiring and firing decisions are exactly what I would expect from someone optimizing solely for the well-being of the company.
It sucks for the people fired, but that doesn't mean the CEO did a bad job. It means you need to be realistic about what your relationship is to your employer.
What? It is an excellent system. If you do not optimize as such, then the company implodes and dies.
How is this a "terrible system"? What is the replacement system, if so?
Should companies ... what? Provide make work projects? Build things the market will not support?
Or should companies just sell shares, then use the money as a form of welfare. Turn companies into a way for people to donate, so engineers can make 10x what the average employee does?
I think it does mean that the CEO did a bad job. The growth over the last two years was clearly going to be a temporary blip. Hiring theoretically permanent employees in response is simply bad judgement.
There are plenty of companies that exist in very cyclic industries who show the right way to handle this sort of thing. It's not like it's all a big mystery.
I'm confused as to your proposed solution. Should the new employees not been hired, and existing employees overworked due to understaffing? Should they have hired contractors and not paid benefits like healthcare?
The companies I'm aware of that exist in cyclic industries (game dev, retail) tend to either have brutal cyclical layoff periods, leverage a ton of contractors, outsource their work to other firms, or hire seasonal workers.
What in your view is "the right way to handle this sort of thing"?
> What in your view is "the right way to handle this sort of thing"?
Don't lead people to think that their positions are permanent when you know very well that there's a good chance they aren't. The easiest way to to make time-limited contracts. That doesn't mean you can't give them benefits such as health insurance.
> The growth over the last two years was clearly going to be a temporary blip.
I'm sorry, but this is the most hindsight is 20/20, armchair CEO thing I've ever heard. Unless you have some sort of magic 8 ball, there was nothing clear about it being temporary, a blip, or any timeline of such.
> Hiring theoretically permanent employees in response is simply bad judgement.
This is not self-evident. Hiring the salaried employees over 2+ years could very well be cheaper than contractors.
If they had under-hired during to boom, then we would not have layoff today but the company would not have grown as much. The incentives are set to hire people when you need them and fire them when you don't anymore. Layoffs are not expensive or damaging to the company; they don't have any reason to avoid them. Zoom's stock went up in response to the firing.
So I totally get your position, and I think many of the big tech companies that are laying off are doing it because “we made an oopsies” or as a me-too tag-along, but zoom seems unique in that their business and it’s place in society truly was transformed in the last few years. They tripled their headcount, because they needed more staff to keep up, and overshooting long-term sustainability by 15% when you grew 300% doesn’t seem so reprehensible.
Disclosure: I was laid off by a big tech company and I think it was BS.
So you want the guy who is doing less bad than others to quit (aka take the heaviest hit), because some small portion of the company needs to be laid off (15%), even though he is giving up far more than 15% of his compensation?
And by quitting, giving up any power or doing that job he is doing less bad than others?
How did that work out for Senator Franken? Or the Democrats in general?
I swear, it’s like folks can’t help but cut their nose off to spite their faces.
Oh, no, I also wish the other CEOs who claim to "take full responsibility for mistakes" do in fact, take some responsibility.
I'm not forcing them to write the words.
If they want to say "we tried, it did not work, the economy got worse than we expected, yet we think we're still in the best position to run the companies, but we have to make hard decisions now", that's their stuff.
I wonder how it would play out for any other employee using this strategy in performance review.
"I take full responsibility for not fulfilling my OKRs, and therefore I will demand that your fire every one else in the team to afford my promotion and raise."
As posited by other commentors, foregoing his salary while making the stock go up (by laying people off) is probably not "throwing away millions in compensation".
The analogy might be a saleperson violating a minor policy to ensure a sale. They would take a fee for violating the position, but their sale bonus would compensate.
Even the most generous and forgiving view of Zoom makes them look completely incompetent and unfit for anything you want secure/private. A less generous view would see Zoom as a deceitful and malicious tool for data collection.
At this point, after so many lies and security issues I honestly can't believe anyone trusts Zoom for anything even remotely sensitive, but I'd think even the most trusting people would agree the company has a history of terrible actions/choices and the CEO is the person who is ultimately responsible.
I hope the employees who were laid off find satisfying work with a much better employer.
Somebody up top commented that he is getting 10M in stocks and giving up on 300k in salary. If that is the case this is a clitch in his earning. A real impact would be to reduce his stock by 20%. Like this it is simply virtue signalling. I mean supposedly CEO pay is meant to be tied to company performance, then make it so in a meaningful way.
Eh, they’ll get flak by someone no matter what they do. It’s a matter of degrees, and general expectations, and where they chart their course relative to that.
Zoom has little control over the overall societal state of ‘social contract’, they can just pick where they are relative to it and then reap the effects of that.
If they never laid off anyone, in this environment that has effects too, and it will look different than if this was the 50’s or 60’s or whatever idealized situation we might imagine.
> short of giving shares away to laid off employees there isn't much a founder can do
is it realistic to ask a company not to hire if they think they're just going to lay people off 12-18 months later or is that too perfect of a science?
obviously you don't want to ask companies not to try to grow/be conservative because then we'll have too much unemployment... i think?
it's just so "convenient" the timing of all of these layoffs. it's like because one company did it, the climate is "ok, it's acceptable, let's do it now while we can squeeze it in with everybody else doing it so we don't look so bad/get singled out"
i get it, monetary rates/fiscal policy changed. but the fed has been signaling this change for months, going slow. how long has zoom known they need to layoff 15% of people? they've probably been carrying this "weight"/burden for a while?
The most ethical way to do it would have been to tell your candidates "We're hiring for excess capacity, so this would be a contract to hire position."
Then candidates might have made different decisions, like "Maybe this job isn't worth relocating my family internationally for."
It's pretty Machiavellian to present the role as otherwise, when HR had strong suspicions it'd be first on the chopping block.
Does a company have to telegraph the nature of the position this? No. Of course not! And it's not even in their best interest to do it.
But does it make them ethically shitty to optimize their offer attractiveness at the expense of people's lives? In my book, yes.
<< When you’re making CEO salary, no amount of salary reduction will have a day to day impact, but this seems strongly symbolic at least.
Even symbolic gesture is more than I have come to expect these days. While it may not be what is demanded, I welcome it as a welcome change.
That said, I disagree with the categorical phrasing. Clearly some reduction would make an impact ( I think we agree that 100% would; if so, at this point it only becomes a question of what is reasonable ).
I guess my point was that it would be very surprising if someone making that amount of money did not have finances structured such that they could stop working tomorrow and be fine through the end of their lives.
To your point, if one has a habit of spending lavishly, it seems fair that the source of funding has to come from somewhere that isn’t this year’s paycheck, but it seems like the end result would be a faster-than-planned depletion of resources rather than impacting day to day living. And he’s presumably back to making normal salary within a year.
I don't really disagree with that point with possibly one exception: board forced CEO's hand.
Still, day to day living expenses are in the eye of the beholder. Once you get to that point, you do miss little comforts in life like being able to eat endangered penguin pate or rent a sub party at mariana trench. It is harder to justify that expense when you just had your salary adjusted. Not impossible. Just harder.
<< And he’s presumably back to making normal salary within a year.
I am tempted to set myself a reminder to check, but I don't think you are wrong by saying that.
Which is what makes it galling to see other CEOs, also receiving most of the compensation in stock, 'taking responsibility' by....leaving their personal bottom lines unchanged.
Unlike Steve Jobs though, the Zoom CEO won't be able to back-date his options to collect a cool $20 mill in capital gains [0]
I know it was a Gulfstream, but I referred to it as a “Learjet,” because that’s a more well-known term, and it really doesn’t matter to most of us mensch. It’s like calling a Fuji copy machine a “Xerox” machine.
I really want to agree. On an emotional level, I do agree. It’s important that the entire organization feel they rise or fall together, as a team, and this should impact leadership more heavily than the rank and file.
But on the other, as you note, it’s just a symbolic thing. As such, a large part of me feels, do we really benefit as a society for those increasing even more the extent to which virtue signaling is institutionalized?
So I agree in spirit, but worry that this is an under appreciated long term risk to business culture specifically, and society more generally. “Symbolic” on some level really just translates to “BS” and we have more than enough of that already.
If find "let [people] go" much worse euphemism. I was shocked the first time I heard it, like if it was just the fate and the people deciding were not involved in this situation. In France, the local euphemism is to say that someone has been thanked ("remercié").
Look up how much he has cashed out by selling shares since 2021. I just eyeballed it and it looks he's sold at least $2-300M easy. He probably has incentive packages. I've never seen a CEO carve out incentive/future awards as a pay reduction but it would be more meaningful
No, to me this is much worse than doing nothing, and makes me dislike Zoom even more.
Doing this and saying nothing might have had a similar degree of sanctimoniousness. I guess I think that if he thought this was a good idea he should have waited a few days to do it quietly, instead of pretending to understand the struggles of the employees in his own personal financial life.
However, if it helps some employees process it maybe it's worth it even if it rubs some the wrong way, like it would me.
That's so much better than "I'm fully accountable, but no-one will actually hold me accountable, but every other CEO is saying they're accountable without actually being held to account, so I'm only saying this to emulate other CEOs, which is also how I reached the decision to layoff a bunch of employees."
I agree! I have a habit of ignoring claims of accountability because so often, the "accountability" seems to be nothing more than saying "I accept the accountability". Empty talk. It's nice to see at least a gesture towards making it mean something.
At least they are taking some hit to themselves? I know a lot of folks are going to complain about equity. But equity is already down. This is a nice gesture, much much better than other layoff peers.
Looking at SEC filings, he received a grant of 612,499 shares of stock on July 8, vesting quarterly over 4 years. That means ~153k shares will vest in 2023. Zoom stock is up $4 based on the announcement, making his RSUs worth over $600k more. He gave up just over $300k in cash compensation to do so. That's an ROI of 100% in one day.
It would have gone up anyway just based on the workforce cuts, no? Also, I think it's better to look at the price over time rather than assume the pop from an announcement is the new baseline.
It's not that I think the guy is a saint or anything, but many CEOs conduct layoffs and write about how sad they are without making any financial sacrifice. So even a limited gesture of giving up ~30% of his potential gains this year is unusual by prevailing norms.
"You" who? He's the largest shareholder both by share count and, even more so, via his super-voting shares.
As another commenter noted, the layoffs made shareholders money. Assuming the board is largely made up of equity holders, a clawback would punish exactly the sort of behavior and performance they want.
Equity confers different responsibilities, rights and, yes, paydays than labor. Acting like every hit the latter takes should somehow mean a haircut to the former ignores that.
That would be counterproductive. The fact he made these measures is what made the stock price go up. The goal isn't to just punish someone for the sake of punishing them, the goal is to improve the value of the company, which the CEO just did by taking these steps.
Only if he sells right now, otherwise he literally hasn't made any money, just his current potential-money (like potential-energy) has increased. It remains to be seen what will happen in the future. He is also exposed to all sorts of other things, like he could lose a billion dollars of the course of a year because the Fed decides to hike interest rates 4%.
Didn't look super deeply, but from an SEC filing dated 2018 - he was making a base pay of $300k/year. Some research online indicated his most recent bonuses were nearly the million mark.
So he goes from making over $1mil USD to $6,000/year. If the above is correct.
The salary alone should be enough to keep a couple people around. Yes, that doesn't make a big dent in ~1300 people laid off. But I imagine for those being laid off it's slightly less shitty (still super shitty) knowing that the CEO isn't still making 7 or 8 figures, like at most companies.
This sucks but something like COVID should normalize the idea in the minds of workers that all workers are disposable regardless of education or skill. If you don't own 51% of the company, you are disposable.
Zoom had a use for you during COVID, now they don't: bye-bye. You were used, they got what they needed and now it is time to go. That's how workers are treated and people should understand that. You are not George from Engineering, you are employee #3223 and you cost $x per year. Past maybe 20 - 25 people, you are nothing but a number and quickly after you no longer create more value than you are paid, you are out.
Unlike others cough Facebook cough Google cough, Zoom actually a reason to scale during COVID; they were relatively new, they had crazy demand, and the access to money to do it. Zoom was given a blank check and leadership would've been worse for _not_ taking it.
That happened, now it is waning and it is time to 'right size' (barf) and continue what they were doing before.
Good on him for cutting his own salary and comp even if I don't think he is as dumb as Zuckerberg or others for their company's paper growth.
> You were used, they got what they needed and now it is time to go. That's how workers are treated and people should understand that.
I can't tell if all of this is due to the age of people who have joined the workforce over the last decade, when we were in a constant uphill swing.
Markets go through cycles, boom and bust. We happen to be in part of the cycle where interest rates are rising, inflation is high, profits margins are tightening and companies are laying off.
"You were used" is a bit much. You go to work to earn a paycheck. I'm not sure how many people bought into the whole "we're a family" stuff, but obviously these are for-profit corporations and they are beholden only to their shareholders. There was never the illusion otherwise, unless you truly believed that now that you're in, you're in.
I'm older so I've been through a number of these cycles, including having been laid off. Perhaps the decade+ of constant upward tragectory had people disillusioned that this was "normal". It wasn't, and now companies are downsizing.
I'd generally agree. I think my sentiment was a counter-point to the whole "we are a family", "we care about you" that companies put out to employees.
Employees especially need to understand that's fine and good, but companies exist to make money. They _can_ care about you but only to the extent that it makes them money through your continuing loyalty. Your manager as a human can care about you, your manager as a boss cannot.
I don't think many top-level managers is fooling themselves into thinking this behavior is anything but company loyalty.
I am not quite entirely jaded, but I would certainly have choice words for my 24 year old self being overjoyed about my company buying me dinner at the office. It's a fun gesture but you need to understand as an employee what your company's priorities are and not get fooled into it being anything but a monetary transaction.
But yes, to summarize, my language was a bit more coarse and pointed than the situation probably calls for.
> I can't tell if all of this is due to the age of people who have joined the workforce over the last decade, when we were in a constant uphill swing.
I've lived through four recessions now and worked through two. My first working recession was while I was putting myself through college. We used to average one per decade, but now we're bordering on two. To understand the magnitude, my first working recession was a complete life reset for me. It's hard to look at businesses that are cash rich, posting record profits, and then doing layoffs as a result.
>"You were used" is a bit much. You go to work to earn a paycheck. I'm not sure how many people bought into the whole "we're a family" stuff, but obviously these are for-profit corporations and they are beholden only to their shareholders. There was never the illusion otherwise, unless you truly believed that now that you're in, you're in.
There is a lot of corporate ink spilled trying to convince people of exactly this. The counter to this kind of treatment is a strong union. Hopefully this goes a ways toward convincing people they need that level of protection.
If people are always "protected" how do you deal with low performing companies?
If Zoom becomes unusable because it is crashing all the time and everyone switches to another service where do you think the money is going to come from to pay these "protected" employees? Fire the CEO, sure, but where is the money coming from for the thousands of other employees?
> If people are always "protected" how do you deal with low performing companies?
mentor them? help them find a better position? change managers? lots of things you can do before firing... also i think the word "protection" the previous commenter means is 'protection from random/mass firings/layoffs without cause' not firing for being lazy/sabotage etc
Even in areas with good strong unions, there isn’t some kind of company wide protection. If the company doesn’t fit in the market, it goes away. I’m not weaving some fantasy tale, these systems exist in other countries that still have free markets and profitable companies.
> You go to work to earn a paycheck. I'm not sure how many people bought into the whole "we're a family" stuff, but obviously these are for-profit corporations and they are beholden only to their shareholders.
That's "You were used" with extra steps. Why are you trying to rebrand this?
> There was never the illusion otherwise, unless you truly believed that now that you're in, you're in.
Just because people knew it was happening doesn't mean it's consensual or okay. Workers know that a system beholden only to shareholders isn't good for them, but they can't exactly go work elsewhere.
> That's "You were used" with extra steps. Why are you trying to rebrand this?
Of course you were "used". You were used to get work done in exchange for a paycheck.
That's how work ... works. I am confused by the outrage ... did engineers think signing on to a company meant they were set for life? That once they were onboarded they were sheltered from future storms?
The tides turn, and right now the tide is going out. Eventually, this process will reverse and the cycle begins anew.
> "You were used" implies you didn't get anything in return.
It doesn't imply that you didn't get anything, it implies that you didn't get enough.
> But if you got paid, maybe you came out ahead on the deal?
Workers almost never come out ahead on the deal. Company sees 100% revenue growth (as a result of worker's labor), worker gets a 3% raise. Company sees 10% revenue loss, worker gets laid off. It's the same story every cycle: the people at the top reap benefits while the people at the bottom pay the losses.
It's only in the business echo chamber that anyone is even saying what you're saying. Everyone else knows that layoffs are bad for workers.
If the company saw 10% revenue loss, and the employee got 2 years' pay, then I would argue the employee definitely came out with the better end of that deal.
Of course layoffs are bad for workers.
I'm just taking the controversial position that on the other hand, jobs are good for workers.
So let me get this straight: jobs are good for workers, so when a worker loses their job, that's... somehow also good? Sure, they were depending on that job to feed their kids and pay their mortgage and now both those things are at risk. But the real story here is that they had a job for two whole years and should be grateful to have been generously paid a miniscule fraction of what their work gained the company for so long.
Is there any case where you'd ever admit that corporations can harm workers, or is it really just impossible for corporations to do any harm within your worldview?
Facebook had $40.7 billion cash on hand in 2022[1] and laid off 11,000 workers in the same year[2]. That's literally $3.7 million cash on hand per worker laid off, or $370K/year over the next 10 years, if the recession lasts that long. Meta could definitely weather this recession without laying off these workers.
But let me guess, they don't have any responsibility to workers. The only people companies are responsible to are shareholders, amirite? It doesn't matter who gets harmed, we just have to follow these arbitrary rules!
> If you feel your work is so incredibly valuable you can either start a company yourself or become a gold-ticket consultant.
> Either way you'll quickly learn that turning your hard work into revenue on your own with any decent amount of efficiency is not that simple.
I work as a consultant in part because it makes turning my work into revenue easier. :D
But, that's overly-glib--I'm aware that my career is somewhat of an outlier here. The more important point to be made is that "value", in the capitalist sense of "the value of something is what people are willing to pay for it", has nothing to do with actual value. The pandemic highlighted this when it became apparent that all our "essential" workers also happen to be our least paid. The very basics of human survival would cease to be available without these people: food, water, etc.--do you really think the software which allows you to post pictures of your brunch for your friends is more valuable than not starving to death?
The reason for the disconnect between pay and value is that pay is determined by the people at the top, who obviously have an incentive to decide their own work is valuable and therefore they deserve the most pay. Unsurprisingly, the people with the power to enforce their opinions on what is most valuable, have decided that "deciding what is most valuable" is the most valuable skill of all! The narrative that a CEO is more valuable than a farm hand exists because it's propagated by those who have the most to gain from it.
I won't accuse you of being one of those people, but at the very least you've bought into a story which isn't true.
The thing is, if you feel you're being paid too little for your work there are basically 3 reasons:
1 - you are wrong because you're not that good
2 - you are right, but the overhead necessary for the company to survive does not allow them to pay you as much
3 - you are right and they are exploiting you
The way to prove case 1 wrong is to start your own business or consultancy and earn more money than you did before. But to prove 2 or 3 you would have to create a very similar company and prove it can successfully operate while earning the employees much more money, which would be very difficult.
If, as you say, "there are basically 3 reasons", then disproving 1 should be sufficient to prove that 2 or 3 is true. You're just trying to place an unreasonable burden of proof on possibilities you disagree with.
There is no difference between possibilities 2 and 3. If the overhead necessary for a company to survive doesn't allow them to pay their workers, the company shouldn't survive. Mysteriously, companies that underpay their workers always have money to pay their execs and shareholders--you're just expecting workers to pay the overhead instead of the people at the top. All this is, is a shitty excuse for exploiting workers.
As for proving 1 incorrect: whenever essential workers unionize--analogous to starting their own consultancy--money suddenly materializes to pay them more. As it turns out, essential workers are essential, and the only reason they get paid less is that the people at the top can pay them less and keep more money for themselves.
Just because it can be terminated at will doesn't mean people wake up every morning going to work thinking "hmm... wonder if I'll be let go today, or hey maybe I'll quit!"
Similarly most non-marriage romantic relationship can be trivially ended "at will", but people get plenty upset when those end early than one party had anticipated.
More important though is the inherent asymmetry: it hurts employees much more to be terminated from an employer than the employer hurts when employees leave. You know, unless those employees organize and all leave at the same time. And we know well that companies put a fair bit of energy keeping that from happening.
Historically the way to resolve this asymmetry was an implicit understanding that you won't arbitrarily get terminated unless the employer has no other choice. This implicit assumption has been weakening over time.
I mean, I definitely end a fair number of days thinking "I may quit" at various points in my career. I'm happy for the ability to do that.
I'm not arguing that layoffs don't suck for those involved, but if offered a contract where I couldn't be laid off or quit for N years, I probably wouldn't take it. Layoffs already have some legal protection in most places that require severance and other things that quitting or firing for cause don't.
For all the companies like Zoom and Shopify claiming they thought the COVID gravy train would never end, there was never a chance of that. But they hired as if that was the reality because because of the asymmetry: Your output is .000001% of what the company needs to function.
Meanwhile even if you're saving 50% of your pay and living on the other 50%, that's many orders of magnitude more need
-
So yes, either side can walk away tomorrow morning, but who's more likely to be hurt? Definitely not the company, so there's no real punishment for overhiring knowing you'll need to fire.
If anything you get rewarded by the market: If company A hires in a sustainable way that can weather headwinds (believe it or not, this used to be somewhat common) and company B goes full "feast or famine", the market rewards B for their growth, then rewards B when they lay off a bunch of people. Meanwhile A is punished for limiting growth, and not really rewarded for not having fired people, since valuations are bad at capturing nuanced ideas like "B just fired their best minds, while A has cultivated an effective workforce" (just check out Zoom's ticker today)
"90+ percent of all internet arguments are over semantics."
I honestly wish HN would adopt a "no semantics arguments" rule. These debates over what one person thinks a word means vs what another person thinks they mean are just uninteresting and really never lead anywhere, especially when all sides pretty much agree on the underlying issue.
A couple days ago I made a comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34656626 , where I even started off by saying "well, perhaps word X isn't exactly the right word", and still the original commenter felt compelled to reply in 6 different comments why he was so sure his definition of that word was the right one and it was important that everyone else agree with him. :shrug:
I sometimes wonder if Americans are uniquely prone to focusing on words rather than the underlying concepts that the words, somewhat imperfectly, attempt to describe.
Once you learn a second language, you have to confront this reality. But many Americans only ever use English, and it's maybe easier to never have to think about this then?
But isn't this discussion literally about the idiomatic concepts involved? The whole argument of semantics is a "literally vs. figuratively" discussion. Workers were "used" in the way I use a tool to do a job, but potentially not "used" in a colloquial English way that someone tricks someone into doing something for them.
If anything, this is because Americans on HN think too much about the concepts underlying words and don't just take everything literally as defined.
I think you are both right to a certain extent. As the comment thread demonstrates, some people think the literal definition of used is exploitative. This begs the question of why people thank the literal definition is different. I think a reasonable hypothesis is that American English speakers communicate less with non-native speakers who have learned a textbook definition.
That makes sense - if you learn words and phrases from their common use vs. from instruction, you're more likely to know both the literal and colloquial version of the words.
That said, taking everything as textbook literal isn't viable in most languages. English isn't even close to the top of the heap of languages that use idioms and contextual clues to change the meaning of words and phrases. In the context of a thread where people are likely upset about layoffs, taking the use of the word "used" to have more of a negative than neutral connotation makes sense.
It's not as if we're looking at a textbook example with "Jack used their employee James" and you have to guess what definition of "used" is intended. No one is arguing that OP meant that Zoom literally picked up their employees and wielded them in combat, even though that could be a viable context-less definition for "used".
Words and language are how humans communicate information so I think it is worthwhile to talk about. That said, I think everyone would benefit from being more Curious and less dogmatic. It is ultimately subjective. I can choose to use the word up to refer to down. It would certainly cause some confusion, but at the end of the day nobody can force me to change. The best that they can do is point out that they use a different definition and why that makes sense to them.
That's all I was trying to do here, and in this other more interesting thread
And in fact almost certainly what happened was the employees got paid to work on a bunch of new exploratory, speculative work that now all needs to get canned.
There's an AMAZING managing podcast that I never get tired of recommending called Managers Tools [1], where in one of their episodes they talk about hiring/firing: They correctly mention that, as a manager, you should be able/willing to FIRE people when you are asking to HIRE. If you say you need more headcount and thus more money for it, be ready to shrink it when you don't need it anymore. Nothing is forever.
That's what a lot of people fail to internalize: If a company is able to grow, then it must equally be able to shrink. Otherwise, you hire contractors or third parties.
Even if you own 51% of the company you're disposable. The company itself is disposable. The CFO at a lot of Zoom's customers is asking why are we paying so much for Zoom when Microsoft will give us Teams for "free". It doesn't matter if Zoom is better, it's still disposable.
> You are not George from Engineering, you are employee #3223 and you cost $x per year.
I used to work for a company with nearly 300,000 employees. Our user names in Active Directory were randomly generated. So our user names were just gibberish, like "ughwyrt"
I always thought that was a bad PR move on their part, but whatever
> You were used, they got what they needed and now it is time to go.
Workers get paid along the way, not sure that constitutes being "used". I think worker rights aren't great in the United States, but characterising US tech workers who are paid extremely well as having been used is a bit much.
> If you don't own 51% of the company, you are disposable.
If you own 51% of the company, not only are you disposable, but unlike any employee on earth, you can actually lose money by working.
You can also work and make $0 for your efforts, and that's not the worst outcome.
And there are no worker's rights or Marxist organizations ready to organize a riot for you. There are no shareholder unions either, just increasingly absent regulators, comically incompetent courts, and lengthy legal processes.
There are several points that I don’t see being made in these discussions.
1. Layoffs would be less painful is major aspects of your life (read: health insurance or your visa) wasn’t tied to employment. Yes the layoffs would still hurt but it wouldn’t be such a catastrophe for the actual workers. This is a discussion for another thread but it’s at least worth mentioning here.
2. Unions could certainly provide some protection and security for affected workers. There’s obviously a lot of pluses and minuses about “US” unions but workers guilds, the AMA and bar associations show that there’s other ways for professionals to protect their employment while still providing training, certification, and quality workers.
3. The bigger issue seems to be lack of employee ownership in the company. Yes you can purchase stock on the market or through equity grants but they are an optional expense. If these laid off employees were earning actual vested stock from their start date they’d at least leave the company with some tangible asset and be in the same boat as these executives. If laying off workers is a good financial move for the company then at least they will get a softer landing. Employees will also have the same incentives as executives to boost stock prices and could flex their power to punish poorly performing executives. That last reason is likely why employees have to buy their way in instead of just getting stock as part of their comp. Obviously it isn’t as simple as giving away stock and hoping everything works out alright but you’d cut down on a lot of these discussions about executives not feeling the pain.
I'm on board with #1. #3 is tough because you'd have to offer lower salaries to make up for the expense of essentially pre-paying a severance package.
#2, however, is way off base. The AMA played a significant role in our current health system's mess. It recently backed off of some of its previous bad decisions (i.e. in 2019 it lobbied to remove the caps on medicare-funded residency slots that it had originally gotten put in place), but it still spends a ton lobbying on "scope of practice" laws that keep doctors overburdened and limited in supply.
Becoming a doctor in the US requires far more years of education than many other countries, drastically driving up salary requirements (how else do they pay for all of that schooling?), limiting supply and providing only comparable care.
The AMA managed to avoid what the bars failed- we didn't experience a glut of doctors like we did lawyers. Unfortunately, we're experiencing the flip side to that coin- doctor shortages may be good for doctors, but it is profoundly bad for everyone else.
> To that end, I am reducing my salary for the coming fiscal year by 98% and foregoing my FY23 corporate bonus. Members of my executive leadership team will reduce their base salaries by 20% for the coming fiscal year while also forfeiting their FY23 corporate bonuses.
Eric is probably already wealthy and can withstand a 98% cut to his base, but I definitely respect him more for doing that than the nothing other execs have done (at least publicly).
> We have made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15% and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues.
Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2022 was 6,787, a 53.48% increase from 2021.
Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2021 was 4,422, a 74.64% increase from 2020.
Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2020 was 2,532, a 48.77% increase from 2019.
Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2019 was 1,702, a INF% increase from 2018.
Probably not the most up to date/accurate info.
If 1300 is 15% of their workforce, they are up to 8.6k employees, headed back down to 7366, still all time high.
Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever?
What % of their 7000-8000 employees (ignoring any contractors I guess) are engineers? 60%?
4200 engineers to work on an app that at its core is... video conferencing?
> Zoom has 300 million users in meetings daily. 89% of zoom users use it for work meetings. 73.41 million downloads of the Zoom app were recorded worldwide in the first quarter of 2022.
What new features have they rolled out past 12 months that justify needing 4,000 engineers/project managers/product managers/QA team/dev ops/whatever fulltime?
I'd really like to learn the truth to why this statement is wrong: "The average person has more business sense than the CEO of Zoom and its entire board of executives who allowed rampant hiring because I could've guessed during COVID, despite the surge in demand given all of the work-from-home during lockdowns, my company most likely won't grow forever, therefore I won't triple my staff over the next 3 years and then need to just end up laying them off"
Like there's no way it's just that simple. Google says the CEO is worth between $4bn and $25bn. He has to be smarter than the average bear. What am I missing?
"The average person has more business sense than the CEO of Zoom and its entire board of executives who allowed rampant hiring because I could've guessed during COVID, despite the surge in demand given all of the work-from-home during lockdowns, my company most likely won't grow forever, therefore I won't triple my staff over the next 3 years and then need to just end up laying them off"
I don't mean this to be snarky but this is like saying its stupid for a department store to hire in the lead-up to Christmas. They are going to have to lay many or most of them off after. Couldn't they see that Christmas wouldn't last forever?
Think of it this way - if there is a huge market/demand expansion, and you don't meet that need/demand, someone else will. Even if you think that much of that expansion is temporary, you will have fallen behind competitors in technology and market share. When the boom ends, they lay people off and you don't have to, but you are still behind now.
I think there's a valid discussion to be had about whether we as an industry should expect massive hiring binges to be temporary and necessarily followed years later by layoffs, but these weren't billed as temporary jobs, so I think some shame is warranted. People probably relocated for these jobs, expecting them to be stable. I don't really want to become complacent to working in an industry where major players just lay off thousands of people periodically.
I think an argument can be made that all jobs are temporary jobs. If you're increasing headcount during a period of high growth then there is often hope that the growth continues enough to support those numbers when things taper off but it's not as easy as people seem to be saying.
It looks like they grew somewhere around 300% since the start of COVID, a rif of 15% doesn't seem too far off estimates to me.
Agree with all of this. It's a lesson to all of us that when looking at a prospective job, we should be cognizant of whether that company has had massive increases in number of employees lately, and whether that company is one of the ones that has a tendency to do massive hiring followed by massive layoffs.
> I think there's a valid discussion to be had about whether we as an industry should expect massive hiring binges to be temporary and necessarily followed years later by layoffs
Devil's advocate but at the end of the day, if you're an engineer and Zoom wants to offer you a low-six figure job ($100k-$300k/yr total comp I'm sure is within the normal range for most people), as an employee are you "grateful" and just shut up and take it and don't think twice from the perspective of, who cares if I get laid off in 18 months?
Like the company doesn't owe it to you to keep you employed, so the question becomes, do they owe it to you to at least give you a heads up that your full time job isn't really that permanent? No company really gives any salaried employee any guarantee like that. Who are we as employees to say "hey, I think I deserved more communication in your intentions with me/my job"?
They definitely don't literally owe us anything, but I think it becomes a question of company reputation. It's definitely going to make me think twice about jumping on any all-time-high hiring surges in the future at certain companies. As for "who are we as employees to say...", I think the answer is that to a large degree, we're the limited resource that gets to say what kind of hiring/firing practices we're willing to put up with. That's a bit diminished at this precise moment, but it's not gone. If you can command a $300k salary, you're in demand enough to be able to filter out companies that will treat you as seasonal work.
Lots of companies in lots of industries can be very cyclical. Try working for an aerospace company--or one of their many subcontractors--if they lose a big contract.
> I don't mean this to be snarky but this is like saying its stupid for a department store to hire in the lead-up to Christmas.
You aren't wrong, I'd say the only subtle difference there is, when you are hired for a Christmas seasonal job, you're informed that it's seasonal and are expected to be laid off, right?
Yeah, a lot of layoffs make a lot more sense when you re-evaluate the assumption that these CEOs are hiring people with the intent of keeping them indefinitely. For many, I'd bet this was the plan all along
I don't even think it requires that in a strict sense. No one knows how long the cycle time is or if you are will reach a new long-term mean or not.
Another important point is its not the case that all the hiring is LIFO. In fact we know that many old-time googlers were let go. I am sure many of the more recent hires have stuck around.
To the extent it doesn’t overly impact institutional knowledge, etc. hiring/firing should be FIFO, if you want to minimize costs. Hire new people, train them up, fire (some) experienced people that cost more.
Whether that’s a “good” property of the system or not, I suppose depends at some level on how you feel about capitalism. Should a business owner be allowed to fire an employee to maximize their company’s value, and eventually their own income?
Speaking from inside Academia, Zoom remains an important part of communication. We never used Zoom or any form of video chat before COVID, but even after COVID, Zoom is here to stay now. We meet in Zoom because it has unmatched quality and stability for video-conferencing / screen sharing compared to Skype etc. Office hour have Zoom sessions, etc.
I think google meet is way cleaner feeling and I would pick it over zoom or teams. We do continue to use Zoom for very large 200+ meetings with the idea being that Zoom handles those better than Meet. Not sure if that information is outdated at this point.
I love meet but I have to reluctantly admit that zoom behaves better when you have a very low and/or irregular bandwidth. It reacts very well to temporary packet losses, by replaying the audio a little faster until it catches up with realtime, and video syncs up with audio quite well.
No idea about Zoom scaling but I can say with confidence that Meet works perfectly fine with >200 these days. (I work at Google, use Meet 8+h per day in meetings small and large.)
We use Meet for most purposes because it's "free" given that we use Google Workplace for other things. Just use Bluejeans these days for the largest meetings.
Which is why it's good when there's a big outage and you need a ton of engineers in a call to debug it - Zoom is the only one I've seen that doesn't fall over.
Speaking from inside tech, we were using Zoom before the pandemic, its usage exploded during the pandemic, and our usage of it has never come back down.
Never really used Meet, but for Teams I'll say "which one?" Microsoft provided a free Teams business license during the pandemic, but that ends in April - at which point you need either a $4/month license managed through the M365 admin portal or you switch to a Personal account through live.com and use that for Teams. Haven't tried in a while, but that always seemed troublesome when I tried it early on.
Zoom may not be perfect, but it's a lot more accessible for a lot of non technical people. They're also pushing things like phone service as well, competing with VoIP providers including Microsoft, cable companies, phone carriers and third party companies.
> Zoom may not be perfect, but it's a lot more accessible for a lot of non technical people
It uses dark patterns to get people to install Zoom when the web client works fine. I recall the software itself also doing a lot of shady stuff, but that was some time ago.
> Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever?
It's easy to feel superior with hindsight, but possibly, yeah. Maybe it's not the right bet but it's not totally crazy to think that companies shifting to working from home might continue to work from home after trying it out.
I can certainly think of some "they should have known" examples but this isn't one of them. Nobody knew one way or the other. Heck my company is now majority remote so I'd say we still don't know.
Zoom is actually a company where it wasn't unreasonable to think there was really a "new normal" and Zoom was well-positioned to capitalize on that shift. As it turned out, things reset to be more like pre-pandemic than many thought--especially outside the tech bubble--and Google and Microsoft were probably better able to capitalize on an overall increase in videoconferencing as part of their office suites.
> Zoom is actually a company where it wasn't unreasonable to think there was really a "new normal" and Zoom was well-positioned to capitalize on that shift.
I agree from the perspective of, how much travel related to business is non-essential (could be solved over Zoom/equivalent but instead isn't)?
Face to face with clients, seminars
Maybe I'm missing data on the intangibles of in-person meeting vs digital meeting
I don't know about data but there are definitely intangibles relating to building relationships over food/drink/activities that aren't really replaced by a more transactional video call intended to communicate information.
That's not really a surprise to most people but there was still a pretty broad assumption that the practicalities of reducing travel in favor of video would win out to a significant degree. And that mostly hasn't happened.
It's probably also the case that a lot of people in companies, including execs, complain about business travel but actually really like the change of scenery so they find excuses to do it.
> I don't know about data but there are definitely intangibles relating to building relationships over food/drink/activities that aren't really replaced by a more transactional video call intended to communicate information.
100% agree. It's just fun to think about just how much, for example, "waste" happens with this. Think of the impact to the climate from all of the planes traveling, etc.
At the very least, it was (or should have been) very clear to everybody that the future was uncertain. Permanently hiring people is a thing you do when you're certain.
Why did they not hire on time-limited contracts until they could be more sure of how things would shake out? If it turned out that the growth was permanent, you offer permanent jobs to the contractors. If it turned out it was temporary, you haven't made a promise to anyone that you could keep.
There are very few certainties in business. In the US, it's generally not even legal to just hire everyone as a contractor--and many people wouldn't even take a 12-month contract job, perhaps with no benefits.
> 4200 engineers to work on an app that at its core is... video conferencing?
Low latency video in general is an extremely hard problem to get right. Video conferencing is that, and more.
Is the number of employees likely overinflated? Clearly as they just had layoffs. But let's not pretend the problem space is some super easy thing that can be handled by one engineer in their basement.
Latency isn't the problem. The problem is having anywhere between 2 and 1000 participants in a room, with different quality/bandwidth of connections, and transmitting those streams back out to everyone else in the room.
We use Janus Gateway with our product, and it works fine up to 15 or 20 users, but there is no way that I would ever recommend it (or anything other than Zoom) for a large number of users in the same room.
Having said that, I think they have already solved all those problems now, so I don't really see the need for a huge number of engineers at Zoom, other than what is required to keep the whole shebang running.
> Latency isn't the problem. The problem is having anywhere between 2 and 1000 participants in a room, with different quality/bandwidth of connections, and transmitting those streams back out to everyone else in the room.
And don't forget they're often doing it with end-to-end encryption involved, and they've somehow done it without impacting the user experience much. In a vacuum, I'd expect that to introduce non-trivial latency / performance issues that would lead to "just turn off end-to-end encryption for this call so it'll work," but it really hasn't. They really deserve some praise for this.
Janus gateway and webrtc in general has encryption as well, so I wouldn't say that is a major engineering problem. It just requires a certain amount of hardware to be thrown at it.
I don't just mean encryption--I mean end-to-end encryption.
That means you can't throw hardware at it. You're limited to the hardware end users are using. Every client needs to be able to meet the needs of every other client, when each could be on a flaky cellular connection, or on a Raspberry Pi, or on a high-end PC with dedicated bandwidth. And how much CPU / memory / bandwidth / latency you have will often change during the call.
You can't just have the client send out the best video / audio it can and transcode it to meet other clients' capabilities server-side because of the end-to-end encryption. Getting it to work as seamlessly as Zoom does is an accomplishment.
No recording and no whiteboard, which for most people in my business (tutoring) would be a complete deal breaker.
How well does E2EE actually work in terms of video quality and coping with poor connections? I can't find any info on that. Bear in mind that you have to enable E2EE, so the vast majority of sessions will NOT have it enabled. I'm guessing it will just be in small sessions with good internet connections.
I don't use Zoom very often, but I had a meeting on it a few days ago and it wasn't great. When I logged into the meeting it had to download the new .exe at 10Mbps, even though I have a 500Mbps connection, then it spent another minute installing it. Not terribly impressed with that, either having to use a .exe in 2023, or the painfully slow connection to their servers.
At some point you reach diminishing returns and can call that aspect of your product finished.
Given the changes from Mac OS 12 to Mac OS 13 of the photos app (and other parts of the OS), there is no way Apple has as big of a team on Photos as they once did. Companies have a terrible problem perpetually funding teams, despite the impact of the team's work naturally diminishing as things get to a "good enough" state.
What's a better guess for all in number related to engineering staff? Engineers, QA (if any), resource managers, product managers to work with engineers to develop new features/ideas, project managers to manage "sprints" or "agile" or "waterfall" or "kanban" or whatever
For a company that focuses on enterprise sales as hard as Zoom does, I think a super rough ballpark is that all-in engineering staff are not more than 50% of headcount.
Zoom includes network, compute, video, voice, recording, recording-storage, transcription, mobile clients, telecom/phone-in, meeting controls, webinar controls, in app messaging, presumably global data centers, calendars, whiteboards, 3rd party app integrations for calendars and schedule, zoom-rooms/hardware, "zoom apps" - 3rd party application integration, bot integration, and a whole enterprise VOIP business on top of it all.
It's a good question, honestly. My go-to answer is just "scale" -- the number of people required to go from "1,000 video calls that are pretty good" to "1,000,000 video calls that are close to perfect" is probably insane, for a lot of reasons that I won't even speculate on.
The best case I can make is that their reasoning might have been like this:
(1) Permanent or not, right now the pandemic is clearly generating huge interest in videoconferencing.
(2) Our big competitors (Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, etc.) can afford to speculatively invest heavily into their products just in case it does take off, remote work really is the future, etc.
(3) For us, things are unlikely to ever go back to how they were before the pandemic. If we do nothing, we risk getting left behind. If we invest heavily too, although it may turn out badly, at least we're giving ourselves a fighting chance. We are betting the company on something; it's just a matter of choosing what to bet it on.
It's hard to evaluate the risk of getting left behind. Network effects (don't want to ask all your friends who have Zoom set up already to switch technologies) might be a big enough moat that they never even needed to worry. Or maybe not.
if you took the Zoom product right when the pandemic hit and lockdowns started, and just did the bare minimum necessary to make it stable, performant, and scalable to handle HUGE influx in demand
would that have been good enough? with focus on, other than improving latency/audio quality/video quality and supporting small meetings all the way up to 500 person meetings, did you need to double engineering staff to achieve this, or could you have gotten away with less and the rest of the engineers got stuck working on random useless features just because it was cheap to borrow money and finance their salary at the time?
> Basic (free or free with credit card): 100 participants. Pro: 100 participants. Business: 300 participants. Enterprise: 500 participants.
I think the relevant question is if the company would be in a better position today if they did the minimum vs loading up on staff and then laying them off.
How much did it actually cost them to pay the extra employees?
How much market share is worth paying ~1500 employees for two years?
If Zoom fails, will it be because of this cost, or because they couldn't do more.
I've thought about this a lot as well and don't have a good answer. My best guess is that this comes about via group dynamics (so and so is hiring and we should too!) and external investor pressure (you should grow faster says investor!) that forces the hand of executives who know deep down it's gonna go south eventually.
Also we have to understand that sometimes the callous decision to do this deliberately (better to hire fast and grow faster now and then lay off the bottoms X%) is made.
In my experience in tech its hard for me to see how that makes sense considering the resources + time it takes for a new engineer to become productive but perhaps in FAANG level companies the onboarding process is good enough for that to work at scale i.e. getting 0.5x of a new engineer for 6 months is still better than the costs to train and pay em for that time.
This is tragic for those involved, but I really don't understand how there were 6700+ people working on Zoom.
I feel like the CEO should be under review by the board for allowing this to happen and there should be further investigations into how they even arrived at this point because this is just bananas.
99% chance the board was also pushing for massive hiring to focus on growth during the pandemic and the zero-interest rate era, and 99% chance they're pushing for layoffs and focus on operating profits now that we're in the expensive money era.
The board will review the CEO and say "yes this is exactly what we wanted you to do, thank you."
How long is it expected for the expensive money era to end? aka, don't we have SOME insight into the fact that the fed will probably be done hiking around the 5.00%-5.25% range soon, and then either hold it there for maybe 6 months before doing cuts?
how long can the Fed really keep rates at 5% despite the pressure of... wall street? the economy's well being (despite it being too dependent on cheap capital)? how much higher can they go above 5%? i thought the consensus was "not much" / "the fed says one thing and nobody really believes they'll be strong enough to do it"
Nobody has a crystal ball. The last time inflation was this big of a problem in the west (~1980) rates touched over 20% and stayed above 10% for multiple years. What makes you so sure that 5% is the limit, or that there will be cuts after 6 months?
> The CME FedWatch Tool is a tool used by traders and investors to track the probability of interest rate changes by the Federal Reserve (Fed). It uses Fed funds futures prices traded at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) to calculate the market's expectations for the future direction of interest rates.
> The data represented by the CME FedWatch Tool represents the market's perception and expectation of future Fed decisions on interest rates. It is not a prediction made by the Fed, nor is it an official statement by the Fed on future interest rate plans.
> It is difficult to assess the accuracy of the CME FedWatch Tool overall as it can be influenced by many factors including market speculation, economic data releases, and changes in global events. Some market participants may find it to be a useful tool to understand market sentiment, while others may consider it to be speculative at best. Ultimately, the accuracy of the tool can only be determined in hindsight, after the Fed has actually made its interest rate decisions.
I believe the Fed also releases what they call a dotplot
This is a big discussion in the financial news at present. Essentially the central banks keep saying that they will keep rates high for a while, and the market doesn't believe them.
Personally, I never bet against people who run the money printers, but you do you.
How is it difficult to understand? It's not 6700 engineers, it's all the support staff. I can easily budget 1k people just to support all compliance activities and sales in order to be able to sell to governments.
> the CEO should be under review by the board for allowing this to happen
Unfortunately, "all the other CEOs were doing it too" will probably hold up extremely well as a justification – in the unlikely case it ever comes to that.
"Unnecessary or wasteful" is as subjective and context/environment-dependent a judgement as it gets.
Other than that, the sometimes toxic dynamics of sudden windfalls in funding have also been discussed here at length: Paradoxically, not spending investors' money can sometimes be considered worse than wasting it on moonshot projects (or even outright on fancy office furniture and eye-catching employee perks).
I work for a startup that raised a bunch of money and hasn't spent most of it. It might have seemed bad last year, but I'm sure their investors have come round to the idea now ;)
This is one of the layoffs where I go... yeah you really did over hire WTF were you thinking. How do you even effectively onboard that many people as a percentage of existing staff?
I've never worked in customer support, but if they're customer support people wouldn't they just get something like a binder with questions and answers, and some flowcharts?
Back in the long long ago, I worked in a call center and we doubled the staff. It was a lot of of work, training, equipment, leadership, realignment of L2... it was still a lot.
>Like there's no way it's just that simple. Google says the CEO is worth between $4bn and $25bn. He has to be smarter than the average bear. What am I missing?
>I'd really like to learn the truth to why this statement is wrong:
I can steel man that.
The pandemic was a once in a lifetime moment for the the adoption of video meetings. Market share captured during those couple years will largely define the players for decades to come. It would be financially responsible not make every effort to seize the opportunity. If this means massive temporary staffing, so be it.
Right. And, if I had stood up in June 2020 and made the prediction that 50% of business travel would be replaced by video conferencing because companies would realize that their T&E spend was bloated and unnecessary to a significant degree--you might have disagreed but you probably wouldn't have laughed me out of the room.
Instead, air travel is pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels in spite of economic headwinds.
Yet Video conferencing is still an 10 billion dollar market and growing, and Zoom is a, if not the leading player. It is projected to hit 19 billion by 2027.
Fair enough. What we've seen since pre-pandemic but accelerated by it is that companies have mostly decided that video conferencing vs. voice-only is basically free in the grand scheme of things and it's useful for a great many circumstances. It hasn't mostly replaced in-person though and, for events, it feels like there's a great deal of virtual fatigue at this point. In fact, the main event observation I'd make is that people going to events in-person seem more inclined to socialize/network rather than parachuting in to give a talk relative to pre-pandemic.
> Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever?
Thinking of Covid as forever seems surprisingly common- all the people who full-on moved houses. The people still indefinitely isolating and masking. People expecting the pandemic emergency working arrangements to continue forever
> What % of their 7000-8000 employees (ignoring any contractors I guess) are engineers? 60%?
>
> 4200 engineers to work on an app that at its core is... video conferencing?
If you think 4200 is an absurd number of engineers, why did you use that number as your estimate? Maybe it's 90% sales and customer support.
He is taking a 98% paycut on salary and foregoing his bonus, but I wonder what his equity based comp is as a % of his total comp. My guess is he is mostly compensated in equity.
It’s not how much he owns, it’s that executive comp is often heavily weighted to equity not salary: dropping your salary by 98% only matters if that salary represents a significant amount of your actual income.
You’re missing the point entirely; if you’re a founder CEO who owns a large chunk of the company, then your existing ownership dwarfs all of your salary, bonus, and equity compensation. You get “paid”
in share price increases, not cash or stock. Surrendering any part of your compensation is just a gimmick.
With the proportion of the business he owns the majority of his comp will be in growing the stock price. He'll be taking a massive hit without the salary decrease from market conditions.
My thought exactly. How about resetting unvested equity to zero or some similar “I got all these grants while apparently mismanaging the company so maybe I should not have”
If you're firing 15% of your employees it's mismanagement. Either you didn't need the additional staff, or you had an opportunity that needed that staff and you failed to deliver on it and are now discarding those people like garbage.
But apparently we're ok with the binary of "management screwed up" -> "individual employees no longer have a job or health insurance".
I find it remarkable that after the pandemic bump, zoom stock value is basically back at where it started. Peaking at almost a x10 price increase pre-pandemic to pandemic-top, investors are now stating "zoom is worth almost as much to us as it was pre-pandemic". Meaning that in a business sense, they seem to have captured near zero value of the entire pandemic-boom in their stock price?
How quickly times can change. A few years ago a CS degree and software job seemed like the most secure and easy way to a guaranteed high paying job while everything else was harder. Now it seems every software company is laying people off while the overall job market outside of tech is stronger than ever.
I think the pendulum has swung back the other way on bootcamps, they're seen with the same kind of awful ROI as a college degree in a non-marketable discipline.
I'd worry more about the Youtube influencers you mention. They've littered my YT front page with all kinds of promises that just remind me of previous gold rushes...dropshipping, crypto, and now AI.
I don't have anything against bootcamp but I see common pattern:
1. They are in it for money
2. They are in it for the lifestyle
3. They suffer big on by imposter syndrome
The programmers I've worked with over the years were just passionate about programming and thats why they entered the field. They spend years refining the craft. But, now it has drastically changed. The next generation what it "now". Everything "now". They want to buy a home "now". They want new shows "now".
Bootcamps are great for people with non-CS STEM backgrounds. I'm happy to have engineers of other disciplines come into the field. But I do think companies should try to raise the bar of who they hire. Other engineering disciplines have government licenses to get. It would be nice if companies required Software Engineers to do the same.
Seems like there's always been a boom and bust in the tech world though? In all markets of course, but i am old enough to remember the first dotcom bubble?
Yeah, maybe this will have the same impact as well and we see a decline in people getting CS degrees and going into other (much-needed) professions.
I know some older people who started off in software and after the dotcom bust switched to a trade for more reliable work.
And I know I'm a big hypocrite for saying this but I really feel like a lot of places need less software developers building social media or video chat code and more nurses/teachers/trades-people/etc .
New grads will probably be fine, most of them. But IMO we have indeed produced too many programmers. But its the older ICs, 40+, that are going to get cast out, not the new grads. Older ones are the expensive ones with families and other inconvenient stuff employers dislike. First to go will be the ones that went full remote.
Overtime if we continue to overproduce CS grads the defacto age limit will drop lower and lower. So maybe in a decade or two there won't be many ICs over 30 (obviously some will survive).
At least that is how it seems to this unemployed near-50 programmer. My job leads started to dry up at around 41 or 42. Now its crickets. LinkedIn telling me I appeared in 2 search this week, if I get that message at all.
This is my fear too but does this apply to programming jobs at "non-tech" companies? Past few years it was very difficult for these businesses to hire software engineers because they couldn't compete with faang and hot tech startups. Now that those places are laying off and freezing hiring the time has come for non-tech companies to finally get people?
I would expect down-tier companies to still be hiring and at higher age thresholds, but in general too many programmers still applies. There will be openings but they will be low pay, probably <= median income. A Pareto principle situation where 80% of the comp is earned by 20% of the programmers (those at big tech), which we already sort of have and will probably get worse.
Of course this is just my generally pessimistic viewpoint. Could be wrong, I'd note however that I used to be more optimistic. 10 years or so ago, I did not expect the industry and my personal career to be in the sorry state they are in now. If I had been _less_ optimistic I would have made better choices, purely to mitigate risk. So I'm paying for that misplaced optimism now.
Oversaturation to some degree. The same thing happened in the legal field. Becoming a lawyer used to be a one way ticket to the upper middle class. Not so much anymore. The same thing is happening with CS and SWE degrees. They're still great degrees, and probably still worth the money. But much less so than they were even a few years ago.
Law and CS/programming are a bit different though. Law seems to tend towards a bimodal salary distribution where you have the top 10 school grads who clerked for a federal appeals court/SCOTUS/etc. and work at a white shoe law firm in a big city--and you have the public defenders/real estate lawyers in shopping malls/etc. It's not really that black and white--you have people who do well enough as corporate counsels and the like--but that's a common pattern.
Isn't it the same with programming? It seems to me there is one tier -- FAANG, certain well-funded startups, and finance -- that pay $400k++, and everyone else tops out at $180k or so.
Maybe it’s just me, but nowadays I'm reluctant of the "We are a big family" shenanigans. If I read "Zoomies", I'm pretty sure that won't help the people that are being laid off today.
I feel like Zoom is the Coca-Cola to Google and Microsoft's Pepsi. Zoom is the "OG" product (in the post-March-2020 remote working world), and probably most people's personal favorite. But their competitors have caught up, and they are getting a significant portion of corporate contracts now. And unlike with soda, I don't think there is a lot of direct-to-consumer opportunity in this field.
> I feel like Zoom is the Coca-Cola to Google and Microsoft's Pepsi.
I'm not sure I buy this, Microsoft and Google were into video conferencing well before Zoom existed. Zoom was well positioned to eat Microsoft's lunch with their product when the pandemic hit. But MS is catching up a bit, and the WFH pressure is easing a bit. This seems like a normal contraction after a Zoom boom.
Zoom is trying to compete by launching Zoom email, calendar, and group chat. Probably a lot of the headcount increases are due to moving fast and trying to get to market as fast as possible.
That ... does not sound like it would work. Zoom is a success because the founder and the founding team came with decades of video conference experience and really just re-implememted webex/cisco products without any bullshit. What do any of these people know about hosting email?
We are at the point where every org is going to pay for zoom anyhow like they pay for both ms office and gsuite for the same set of workers. People send meeting links on zoom to clients and collaborators at other orgs. Its the standard now. Try sending a teams link and your clients will say “well we dont use teams can you send a zoom link?”
I work in a customer facing role for enterprise software. I have to join plenty of customer Teams and WebEx links whether I like it or not. We use Zoom internally.
Zoom has become an indispensable source of connection for businesses
I haven't been to an online meeting that wasn't MS Teams or Google Meet in three months. Sadly, Slack, Zoom, and other similar nice-to-have corporate tools seem bound to get eaten by the integrated productivity suites.
F* Zoom for acquiring Keybase.io and essentially neglecting it. Much negative credit to Keybase for selling to Zoom, as if a more responsible buyer couldn't have been identified. Sorry for the rant.
Keybase was such a great project that didn't deserve its fate. If Zoom really just acquired Keybase to effectively kill it and then later laid off the engineers... that would be horrible.
Laymen question : do you know how the magic number of "12-15%" gets decided ? Either is just everyone copying each other to please their boards (reasonable hypothetical), or there is one investor that make the same demand everywhere, or there is some regulation behind it, or there is some math ?
I mean, it seems like the stock price would go up too if they laid off 20 or 25, or maybe 50%, and maybe some bold CEO is going to get a huge bonus by taking the full responsibility of firing everyone except the accounting department ?
I mean, it seems like the stock price would go
up too if they laid off 20
We laid off 20% on Jan 31st, and our stock price...
...or, uh, I should say their stock price, because I was one of the 20%...
...did go up.
If you lay off too many, it starts to look like panic and/or it starts to look like you were running your business in an clueless way, with tons of dead weight and/or bad hires.
10-20% seems "safe" to me. It doesn't spook investors too much. Generally, if you look at almost any team, at least 1 in 5 are not performing amazingly. IMO this happens even in well run companies and is often purely a fit issue and is not necessarily an indictment of either employer or employee. It also means you're not necessarily destroying any particular team
(Example: you have a talented front end engineer, but they've been pressed into more of a "full stack" role and they're forced to do a bunch of backend work that is far from their strengths. No, I'm not describing myself. Not a front end guy.)
This wave of 10-20% cuts feels like an opportunistic version of the notorious "stack ranking" that Microsoft used to do.
I'm not defending any of this. I'm not really criticizing it either. It's just my strong impression of what it is. I'm f'ing numb to this industry at this point, honestly.
Did every tech company CEO have the same brain fart that the 2020-2021 artificial growth created by COVID was going to last a decade or more? I don't think so -- because if they did they'd all be pretty stupid, and I don't think they're that stupid. But I guess it's a convenient excuse and sounds better than "we always knew we'd have to get rid of you when the music stopped".
During Pandemic, their demand went up like crazy. Lot of businesses/schools were forced to use zoom. Now as many orgs are getting back out of virtual, the demand must be down at least somewhat. For example, my kids school district was 100% on zoom during Pandemic. Now we are back to in person (thankfully)
If you're hired for the Christmas rush, you know it's temporary. These poor people probably didn't realize they were just a temporary hire.
Would they have joined if Zoom had disclosed on hiring them, "We're experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime growth spurt because of COVID. If and when that ends, we may have to lay you off." ??
“If ___ we may have to lay you off” is always true, I wouldn’t believe anyone who promised that can’t happen. Unlike Christmas, Zoom couldn’t know when or if demand might subside, and their goal was that it wouldn’t.
We shouldn’t punish employers for leaning into strong markets, because unemployment is much worse when they’re reluctant to ever hire even at the best of times.
Is layoffs in the neighborhood of 15% right now because it's an amount that large companies think is safe to trim, in terms of work to be done or their capacity to get work done?
Or is it a psychological number that's high but not too high for some party?
Generally, (disregarding the Zoom news) How is everyone holding up? Have you been effected, or know friends effected? How are they holding up? Are they finding jobs?
> We have made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15% and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues.
By "necessary", do they mean "we'd go out of business if we didn't do this" or "we'd still be profitable if we didn't do this, just not as profitable as we want to be"?
This comment should be pinned to the top. It's the only reason for all these tech layoffs: owners/shareholders don't want their profit margin to drop during a self-inflicted crisis and someone must pay.
Here’s a free feature zoom could implement in only a few months with hundreds of workers — tell me which meeting I’m attending.
Here’s another which would be impossible for them to implement correctly — let me see my screen when I’m presenting and don’t cover it with stupid controls, or maybe if you can’t do that, let me see the useful controls too
i've viewed zoom as largely a joke company given their e2e encryption talk in the past, but this is a solid letter and way to go about laying off that many workers.
when first reading this i realized that i had just assumed that zoom had already done layoffs as they were one of the big profiteers of the pandemic.
the way they're handling this however gives me a lot of respect for the company.
A good point. TIL gross profit only counts the cost of producing the product, but not payroll, taxes etc.
That same link does show a $900M traditional profit on $4B of revenue, so roughly a 20% profit margin. It is a decrease year over year, but still remarkably good.
At an estimated 12k employees, it's also around $360k in revenue per employee, which is pretty decent (though not top-10 for the tech industry).
> We regret to inform you that the Keybase.pub web hosting service will be shutting down on March 1, 2023. Although the service was a great showcase for the kinds of cool things that could be built with Keybase, the usage of this product never took off.
IANAL and this may be minor nit, but I think when the WARN act is applicable, the laid-off employees are still _technically_ employed for 90 days (the pre-notice duration) and any additional severance benefits happen after that.
In other words, when the WARN act applies I don't think it's sufficient to give 90 days of severance. Those employees must remain on the payroll during the notice period.
I think it's common to tell these laid-off employees "you're on the payroll but not expected to report to work during the next 90 days", so it's kinda a distinction without a difference, but it does or at least could have an impact on things like benefits, bonus payouts and vesting.
First off, the ACT is for 60 days not 90. Second, the active quite clear on what happens if you don't provide the notice. In that case, you have to pay the employees in 60 days of severance.
This means that you can give the full notice and no severance whatsoever. Alternatively, you can give no notice but a minimum of 60 days worth of pay.
You're right. I don't know where I got 90 from but the period is 60 days.
Curiously, based on the DOL guide at [1], which to be fair isn't text of the actual law but it is an official government publication meant to explain it, _technically_ it is _not_ acceptable to give 60 days of severance in lieu of notice, but since the penalty for violating the act is a 60 days pay and benefits to all impacted employees, it works out the same either way.
> Can I pay my workers their salary and benefits for 60 days in lieu of notice?
>
> Neither the Act nor the regulations recognize the concept of pay in lieu of notice. WARN requires notice, making no provision for any alternative. Failure to give notice does a significant disservice to workers and under-mines other services that are part of the purpose of the WARN Act. However, since WARN provides that the maximum employer liability for damages, including back pay and benefits, is for the period of violation up to 60 days, providing your employees with full pay and benefits for the 60-day period effectively precludes any relief
I agree. Salesforce, Meta, Alphabet? Those were already giant companies that saw a bump in traffic due to covid. Zoom was a relatively small company that became a cultural phenomenon and no doubt had to onboard a completely unexpected number of new customers. It's one company where I could see tripling the workforce as reasonable if not aiming low.
I'm not sure how you get that conclusion. "taking over the universe" seems like successful leadership to me. I'm sure those 1300 people helped them do it. If they are no longer needed, letting them go also seems like successful leadership.
I don't pay the workers that built my house after the job is done.
> This means that $1,000,000 in $100 bills weighs around 10 kilograms (22.046 pounds). However, if you wanted your million in single dollar bills, that same amount of money would weigh a metric ton (2,204.623 pounds).
TLDR: We have made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15% and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues.
Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you.
can we please stop with all the pet name bs? a large corporation is not a "big family". it's simply degrading. you're a number -- you get hired when money is plentiful and the company is expanding, and you get fired when the economy contracts and/or shareholders demand even more profits. period.
- Comments about how this is a good thing and bravo to the CEO for actually taking accountability
- Replies saying how it's never enough and the CEO should be fired for doing something as stupid as hiring people during an economic boom
- Comments off ^^^ talking about how much net worth the CEO has based on stock that he hasn't liquidated, and how much he made off this temporary stock bump from cutting "cruft"
- Comments questioning why <Company> needs # employees to do <overly-reductive description of their product>
- Comments pointing out that they still have more employees than pre-covid
- Comments assuming that every person laid off was an engineer because why would a tech company hire anything else.
- Comments off of ^^^ talking about how it's a rough time to be job hunting despite the massive labor shortages in many sectors including tech
- Comments about how stupid the demonym for the employees was/is
> Comments about how stupid the demonym for the employees was/is
I'm so done with these. I sort of agree but jesus christ they are so pervasive. Maybe I had bad timing but today on the discussion about layoffs at Zoom fully more than 5 of the top 10 comments were about it. We get it! I hate it too! It's boring to talk about though, for the twentieth time in 2023.
Just fucking stop with this already. Quit pretending like your employees are so aligned with the company that some kind of special terminology is needed, or even logical.
The recent tech layoffs have clearly demonstrated, again (again, as in we've seen this play out a few times in the 2000's), that employees are basically assets that are scaled up and down as needed, like all the rest of corporate infrastructure these days.
Also, when your company is something that more or less is a B2B or B2C app (like zoom) and 1,500 employees is a number that you can lay off and still keep operating, you should have recognized this massive over staffing a LONG time ago and made more gradual corrections to get to a logical and supportable number. Note, this could be slowing down hiring, or charging a lot more for your product, but given the lingering freemium pricing, it's mostly going to be hiring less and not charging more.
These layoff emails are almost parody at this point.
> Just fucking stop with this already. Quit pretending like your employees are so aligned with the company that some kind of special terminology is needed, or even logical.
I cannot judge how Zoom works internally but a lot of companies (ours included) has a term to refer to employees. They are usually not born out of some leader making up a ridiculous term, but out of some sort of chaotic process where the origin of that term is often not found.
> a lot of companies (ours included) has a term to refer to employees
Why? Employee is a perfectly suitable and applicable term. You're not "associates" or anything else that implies there is some kind relationship that is anything other than work for hire.
Granted, if you have some kind of internal way to refer to yourselves or your teams, that's great. But like politics or religion, it should probably be a thing that is internal only and not referred to in the outside world/public comms.
Terms like "Zoomies" are just childish. If some chain of events led you to be calling yourselves "The Ruby Death Squad", and you use that publicly, then I might change my perspective.
> Why? Employee is a perfectly suitable and applicable term.
Because a lot of communication in companies is on the same level. People eventually send emails to "hey demonym" rather than "hey coworkers". I think these sort of things develop pretty naturally and unforced.
FWIW, we all do that to an extent. Pick a label and make it good or bad, but something you can use as a yard stick. You are on the money, but oddly fall into the same trap by using label 'millenials' in a tribalistic manner ( the term has been largely made up to describe a giant cohort, and as most giant population terms, it shares the same flaws ).
I do not think you are wrong in general. I am not sure, however, if it applies to that particular group only or even in general.
Qualitatively I think there's something different about the way that people under-40 tend to think about identity, particularly the people working in tech that we're discussing here. We used to have thirtysomethings and yuppies and other groups like that. But it hadn't infested everything the same way that Zoomies and Googlers and Pythonistas/Rubyists/Rustaceans has.
Some of them are legitimate, but even then there should be a form of respect where the term isn't used (though I observe they avoided the "hard-r" Zoomer because of the connotations).
And especially shouldn't be used in a case where you're laying off some of them.
Which is why I wouldn't use the term in general, at least from the top-down. It's inherently a "we're all in this together" term which especially isn't applicable when you aren't.
I think the idea is to try to create a kind of 'esprit de corps' specific to a particular organization - the idea that there is a bond and that working there is "special", out of the ordinary. It's good psychology, but rings hollow if a competent person is let go because of an economic downturn.
Yes, I think that is definitely the point, but so far pretty much all of them have proven to be a fraud.
If the CEO emails out "Zoomies, I fucked up and now I am cutting my paycheck to $1, and selling my personal stock, to help cover your salaries until we get this figured out", then it maybe means something. But "Zoomies, UR fired, wait to see if you win the email lottery, K thx" is not creating any esprit de corps.
What is the word for "name for employees of a company"? It's not "demonyms" but I've seen a whole lot of these names in the layoff notices. I think there is room for a small "employeenames.fyi" site with a table.
I find it kind of funny, kind of disappointing how in every one of these threads a bunch of the highly voted comments are complaining about some aspect of the layoff, like the goalposts keep moving.
The way the layoffs were communicated, the fact that they were staggered, the fact that they weren’t staggered, that the ceo/founder doesn’t take responsibility, that they do but they don’t take action to punish themselves/their team, that the packages weren’t good enough, or as in this case, that the company (that they don’t even work for) has a name for their employees.
Layoffs are life changing. Not everyone who is laid off is an in-demand engineer. “Tech jobs” obscure the fact that most roles are non- or light-technical jobs that are common at many companies (HR, sales, support, etc).
People keep talking about this as if it is preACA. With COBRA you can keep your health insurance for a while and you can get similar plans from the exchanges. It shouldn’t be a huge deal considering the severance frequently also includes some lump some to cover it.
The existence of the ACA is no panacea. Many physicians and clinics purposely refuse to honor any ACA plan (for political reasons, in at least some cases of which I unfortunately know from personal experience). And everyone who’s been on COBRA for any length of time knows it is God-awful expensive since you’re now paying for the whole piece.
It’s good to put a number out for people who don’t know: I estimate ~500/month for the employer portion for an individual coverage. Whether that’s considered “God awful” or “peanuts” is dependent on one’s situation but most probably for the average tech employee in California it shouldn’t be the end of the world compared to their other expenditures.
Sure, I also prefer disassociation of health care from employment but I think it’s important not to scare people away from layoffs or discourage exploration of other opportunities because they’d be scared of losing health coverage.
Many jobs have very similar health care offerings and access to the same doctors. Changing your commute and your total compensation will have more life impact than the healthcare insurance provider change.
Without additional context on which parties the "shouldn't" applies to, and why it shouldn't, the comment doesn't add to the conversation. Seems like a reason to downvote to me.
It has a very high likelihood of being life-changing for people on work visas.
It is also life-changing for anyone who genuinely believed in their job, whether out of passion or naïveté. Work is (unfortunately) a major pillar of people's lives in modern society and having that pillar collapse on you unexpectedly can be traumatic especially for younger adults early in their careers.
Also, there's a big difference between changing jobs on your own accord vs. being fired/laid off against your own desire.
This is a should-be vs is-actually confusion. While you're working to create the future you hope to see, you still need to exist in the world as it actually is.
> On September 1, 2020, Yuan's net worth was estimated to be US$16.4 billion, a figure 360% higher than his net worth at the beginning of the year. In March 2021, Yuan transferred $6 billion worth of Zoom shares to a grantor retained annuity trust, for which Yuan is a trustee.
Ah yes, cringe: the act of doing something you don’t like with sincerity.
You mean you actually like your job and your company and aren’t a cold cynic who thinks that being emotionally detached from the thing you do for the majority of your waking hours and deciding that anything cute and fun is childish makes you somehow superior — haha criiiiiinge.
I don't think so? My current employer has a #xoogler Slack channel, so named because that's what people will look for. You can say it's uncool if you like, but that's the word people use.
I think in the case of FAANG (or whatever the acronym is these days), if you worked for one of the big guys in the past it's worth making it obvious if you're looking for work. If not only to stand out from other applicants, also to set an expectations for higher desired salary.
...the international brotherhood of Teamsters was founded in 1903. The term teamster pre-existed, since the 1840s, referring to people (men usually) who drove teams of horses. And in 1903, it still referred to those people, since motor-powered trucks did not yet exist on a large scale and teams of horses were still used to deliver most goods.
You are probably aware, but, ... "brotherhood" was a self-chosen term, intended to imply mutual support and protection among the members, _against_ the employers. In contrast the demonyms that companies choose are chosen BY the employers, and there is no mutual support intended. In fact many large companies (Amazon, Google) actively resist labor union efforts.
In summary, your comment is sort of off-base for a couple reasons.
Not fun for those laid off, but this is a great life lesson for all those people who have given "loyalty" to their employer.
We - the people who you often view as cynical and negative - live by the following rules:
- People at work are not your friends. You can have friendly relationships, but they ain't your real friends. You will only know if they can become your real friends once you don't work at the same company anymore.
- NEVER accept less pay for your work than the market rate. If they don't pay 100% you never work 100%. Take a second job and do only 50% or less for a company that doesn't pay you market rate.
- Don't work as a full time employee if you can make twice as much as a contractor. Employees have supposedly the benefit of "job security". LOL. Contractors get paid more because they need to factor in dry spells. Also there are tax benefits for companies to use contractors. The software industry is so robust and even despite all the layoffs the demand for devs is higher than the supply. There is no reason to take on full employment if you can contract with the same level of job security for much more money and much less internal politics.
- Shares don't mean anything if the company never IPOs. Fuck shares. Ask for hard cash. If you want to have shares and become a millionaire over night then start your own startup. Why suck up to some stranger who gives zero shit about you. You didn't invest money into the startup, you didn't found it, you are a nobody to them. You do a job for them and they fool you to take on company shares so they can massively underpay you. If you want to earn little and have lots of shares then start a startup yourself. In every other case tell them to get fucked and ask for hard cash.
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but not with the particulars. Yes, employees and contractors both have to deal with job uncertainty, but not to the same degree. An employee is unlikely to be laid off with anywhere near the frequency that a contractor's gig ends and for a lot of people, the tradeoff of the extra stability is worth potentially less earnings. Similarly, while shares are often worth nothing, sometimes they aren't, and the payoff can be big. It depends on what risks you are willing to take. Maybe I've been lucky, but I've actually managed to get value from options/RSUs that exceeded what I'd likely have earned more often than not. Finally, I think it's a terrible idea to take a second job if you don't like your pay. Doing a shit job for two companies may make you some money but is no way to live. If you are being underpaid, go find a job that pays. If you can't find one that pays better, maybe you aren't being underpaid.
That said, I agree with your essential point that loyalty is not owed to your employer. It's a tool an employee can sometimes use for career purposes, but that's it. Your employment is a business arrangement and needs to be treated as such. Employers will talk as though they see it otherwise, but when times get tough, those pretenses are revealed for what they are. I really wish we could dispense with this "we're a big family with a mission" crap as it makes the whole thing more painful than it needs to be.
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Why do people in HN get so upset that companies hire and fire employees? It sucks as an individual to have to deal with a layoff, but it’s the dynamic of an economy. Optimal growth comes from over and under dampening, not from steady state.
Being "laid off" is a novel concept that primarily exists with the formation of corporations. Prior to that most people who lost jobs knew that the job was temporary going into it. Or lost due to factors such as disability (which, admittedly, would be far worse than a modern layoff).
This more modern concept of losing a job is typically very stressful, as most people's wealth support is fairly precarious. Given that there are often alternatives for a corporation there's the fact that the stress is inflicted when it need not be.
So yeah, people get upset. Just like people get upset about things like cancel culture, lack of healthcare, what have you.
It used to be that getting kicked out of the tribe was a last resort for the most serious of crimes. Now petite expulsions happen all of the time and we're supposed to just be okay with it?
Yep, The amount of 'intelligent' people who are so out of touch with reality of economics, supply/demand, interest rates is mind-boggling.
How did an entire generation become so entitled? Yep, these are the same people who jump companies if the other company offers $10k extra TC. So, it's not that they are saints when it comes to loyalty or money.
Hello, typically misinformed internet person. The "entire generation" as currently understood are the least-mobile generation of employees ever recorded. A 30-year-old Millenial was only half as likely in 2020 to have switched jobs in the prior year than a 30-year-old Boomer was in 1990. Millenials of all ages had all-time-lowest probability of multiple employers in a year, compared with Gen X, Boomers, and Silent.
To be completely fair, it is one of those situations where the damage is done and layoffs are probably one of the best options for the company from a completely financial point of view. He messed up and as such, there are consequences.
With that said, seems like admittance of this level of error at a leadership level should be grounds to lose your job and be replaced, so the CEO should also be replaced in this process. I realize there are stability issues where you need to bring someone else in and catch them up to speed before doing this since the role likely requires a lot of contextual awareness but none the less, that process should be (but almost certainly isn't) underway at most these organizations.
If anyone not in the c-suite made these levels of errors and clearly admitted to them, they'd be gone yesterday.
The employees can actually go build their own company and make their own poor decisions.
The amount of entitlement among HNers is mind-boggling.
Newsflash: I fired my grass-cutter and snow-remover this year.
According to the dumb logic presented on all social media, I should have fired myself for not seeing inflation and having to cut costs on a few things.
I think an executive who REALLY means it should forgot EQUITY GRANT and distribute that as compensation to the departing individuals.
For some orgs it can mean millions more in severance for the individuals whose lives are impacted because of the decisions of those company executives.
The “How We Got Here” paragraph is a great example of opaque nonsense.
> We didn’t take as much time as we should have to thoroughly analyze our teams or assess if we were growing sustainably, toward the highest priorities.
This is… a completely meaningless sentence. All of these ridiculous layoff emails are so condescending (the PagerDuty CEO quoting Martin Luther King Jr. in one of them was a fantastic example of how full of themselves these tech C-level people are)
It would be refreshing for one of them to come out and just say “We never planned on employing you longer than we were on the train of sweet sweet covid relief money. We absolutely could afford to keep you, but we plan on doing stock buybacks/buying a company yacht for me and my dog.
Fuck you, got mine!
Sincerely,
Guy Who Genuinely Believes Saying “Disruptive” Is An Immeasurably Valuable Skill
It’s nice to see the phrase “I am accountable” followed by a description of what that accountability entails.
Whether or not the steps taken seem fair is a separate conversation, but it seems like a step in the right direction.
When you’re making CEO salary, no amount of salary reduction will have a day to day impact, but this seems strongly symbolic at least.