this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Yep, and in many cases people got let go, then rehired 2 days later when things got cleared up, and kept their severance. The layoffs were mostly rushed. One guy was going to be a speaker at an event for the company, and as everyone sat down waiting for him to hop on stage, they hadn't realized he was let go. Absolute waste just to make the numbers look good on paper, but a huge loss of investment.
Imagine youre a senior engineer with 2000 stock units with accelerated vesting (was about 32$ at the time), severance at least in canada was over 20 weeks of pay lump sum given the collective dismissal + vacations. They were dropping 100k(before tx) to engineers to make them go away, and hire them back the week after.
Worst company I've ever worked for, but I did make a pretty penny that week. Luckily I got hired a month later somewhere else.
So was this just a purely "everyone's doing it, so the customers (shareholders) expect it, so we'll follow suit" type thing? Do mass layoffs inspire confidence in the stock so it goes up? It's hard to understand from a rational position that throwing away money makes money for the investors.
It's not rational, it's virtue signalling for the owning class. It's saying "we are pious believers in the neoliberal order and we are happy to treat our employees like shit".
It's a mix of that, but also they have to make good on all these "AI investments" that "boost productivity" and allow employees to do more. I'm a principal engineer so it was part of my job to assess how much these tools actually boost productivity and they don't at all. They change where the mental power goes, but it's not really faster and is more mistake prone. If I had to make a comparison, it's a bit like a concorde plane, it's technically faster airspeed, but then you spend all your time trying to make a thing that can shove air out of the way faster than it wants to move (supersonic) and that's just a lot more effort in other areas. Notice concord planes are nowhere to be seen despite existing for decades and being objectively faster. Not worth, but in the AI craze who cares.
They also took advantage of taxpayer funds to boost their profits during the pandemic, and that money is gone now, so if you aren't cutting a big part of your staff, either you didn't take advantage of the pandemic, or you did and you have dead weight. It's important to note that most big tech companies made record profits during that time.
If you were a tech company and you weren't killing off a chunk of your staff, it was a signal something was wrong with your business in some way. It's entirely a speculative stock market thing, which is all that matters these days. They can invent other reasons why they aren't meeting targets.
TLDR; those losses are on another spreadsheet