And now, fast forward to 2023, they are laying me off, along with another 99 people.
In a way I’m relieved because I was planning to change jobs due to burnout (burnout that my manager referred to during my layoff meeting as being “a little bit stressed”).
However, due to the same said burnout, I couldn’t do much job searching and needed a long vacation.
I got laid off while on vacation, a vacation I took late because of the deadlines set by the company, also a vacation which I spent recovering from burnout (and doing other fun things, don’t get me wrong.)
Mainly I blame their obsession with “growth hacking”. Now this company is a TV company and have canceled a large list of programs viewers like because they aren’t making enough revenue.
And everyone does it with a smile on their face, under the guise of ‘efficiency’.
How does one increase efficiency by reducing the number of workers and not really coming up with any tools so that less workers could do the same job?
The negotiations with the union ended in disagreement about my team’s layoffs but I got the boot anyway.
So what did I get myself burnt out for? Absolutely nothing worth it. I should have just quit-quitted. This didn’t come easy to me because I place a lot of importance on product ownership. I’m early in my career and wanted to build cool stuff that people use and enjoy.
I use to work in HR for a medium sized, publicly traded company. Here’s how it works:
Wall Street banks set quarterly profit targets for companies. If the companies hit the target, stock goes up, if they don’t it goes down.
If stock goes down too much, C-suite is usually fired. This is what motivates them.
There is usually a few weeks between when the company calculates it’s quarterly numbers and when they are legally obligated to report them.
If the profits aren’t up to the Wall Street calculation, the C-suite panics and 95% of the time will go on a firing spree so when the numbers do become public they can claim they analyzed the company and magically found it was overstaffed, and already took care of the “problem”. This is an attempt to save their own jobs.
In truth they did the firings in such a hurry nothing was seriously looked at, no significant problems were discovered, and the employees let go were closer to random than carefully selected based on performance and need. This happens every quarter all across America. It’s rare the Wall Street targets are scrutinized. Often the companies were actually profitable too, just not as profitable as Wall Street wanted them to be.
The human factor is entirely removed at this point. Most people who were fired were perfectly good at their job, and their job was just as relevant as any other. Some analyst on a spreadsheet just calculated how many people from each team would be fired to appease shareholder feelings. It was sad to watch people take it so personally and blame themselves when it had nothing to do with them or their performance. Just a corporate wheel turning around. Many would also be rehired within months too.
This is good insight, thank you.
It seems to me this is all a stalling tactic for unprofitable companies. Is that correct?
Not necessarily. I witnessed this firsthand at a company that was actually VERY profitable, just not as profitable as Wall Street had expected.
When a company underperforms, the first place C-suite looks to cut is headcount.
Hundreds of thousands of real people get anxiety, constant stress, malnutrition, some probably die. All because assholes in suits are playing their game. Rest of society just accepts that “this is how the world works” and “capitalism is not flawless but it’s the best we’ve come up with”. Another year in paradise. Thank god for being alive.
The Jack Welch playbook!
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/01/1101505691/short-term-profits-and-long-term-consequences-did-jack-welch-break-capitalism
No, it was doomed from the get go. Jack Welch is a symptom of a broken system, not the cause of it.
That being said, fuck that guy.
You know people get all sorts of existential dread thinking about an AI maximizing for paperclip production, but what scares me the most is jerks maximing for money and how they will not stop at anything. And they’re not even AIs yet. Mr. Burns embodied.
Who do you think had a hand training the computer models on expected performance levels
The profit expectations the company itself sets also play a big part of it as well I think. When a company says they’ll be really profitable, but it’s only very profitable, everybody loses their shit.