101
Have a bad year, cut people. Have a good year, cut people. I'm starting to see a pattern here.
My company has been absolutely destroying the workforce. I lost three of my five developers; the fourth one just quit, completely demoralized. The layoffs were not performance-based; instead, those with the least redundancy owed were let go. And all the while the company is bragging on LinkedIn about cash flow, earning margins, etc, vastly exceeding projections. If I didn't have such a large redundancy package waiting for me, I'd quit as well.
Sales down 1.2%? Still profitable on the order of billions? Better cut 7% of the workforce.
Sales down 1.2%? Still profitable on the order of billions? Better cut 7% of the workforce.
My companies on paper "profit" (EBITDA) is 8% but I know for a fact that a lot of the billions of "cost" funnelled into capex is being embezzled.
Because I work in a technical industry servicing secret squirrel stuff it's basically auditors can't audit and the government is very hands off (even if they could understand what we sell, which for the most part they don't. Shit most of us don't understand it either).
Basically licence to do whatever you want.
But because we didn't hit the declared 11% target they cut the workforce by 10%. They'd didn't even do an analysis. Basically the CTO just cut people based on their title.
Fuckers
Apparently being expected to make 11% and actually making 8 is seen as a 3% loss …
They are only making 5.5% margins, and beer sales are in decline. Would you rather they employ people to do nothing then shut down the company and throw the other 81,000 out of work?
Get that boot out of your mouth
They're cutting workforce to manipulate their stock price. I'd rather the corporate shitlords that are putting people's livihoods at risk for a margin call get their teeth caved in with a brick.
Who's getting employed to do nothing? What are you basing this on?
They still made a $1.9B profit. That's $23k for all 81,000 employees. Even if profit went to zero in future years, they have enough revenue to pay employees plus a bonus each year from the profit of just this year.
What is your reasoning for thinking the company might shut down if it kept 6,000 jobs on staff? If those 6,000 people make an average of $100k, then this profit only drops down to $1.3B.
Should companies hire people they don't need?
Yes, there should be unemployment benefits, help with retraining, etc., yes, well-off individuals and companies should be taxed to fund these initiatives - but hiring people to dig useless holes is not a sound social policy, it's just stupid.
Define need. Companies will happily cut staff they need to save costs. Staff that remain then get the workload dumped upon them. Now everyone is running around half-assing everything at peak stress to try and keep the ship afloat, doing jobs they're not good at and don't enjoy poorly because someone didn't understand someone else's contribution.
Either the people were redundant (or at least were producing less than they cost) and the company can save costs by firing them, or they were important and productive and it will cost the company money to fire them.
Of course executives can and do make decisions that are bad for the company. In this case, though, that's quite unlikely, at least on aggregate. Demand for alcoholic beverages is declining, and it's not easy for a company like Heineken to pivot to non-alcoholic products (demand for non-alcoholic beer is increasing, but not by enough to offset the decrease elsewhere). Moreover, continued automation means fewer people can do the same work.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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