I am annoyed at how much coverage of these recurring "Big Gorilla lays off around 10.000 people" is basically just a rehash of the company press release, with not a single journalist asking how it's possible that all of these big tech companies made the same exact mistake of hiring too many people, while simultaneously showing record profits.
Like, if a 'rigorous review' finds 12.000 redundancies, why does nobody question leadership about how this was allowed to happen?
Not one critical note.
Amazon: 18.000
Alphabet/Google: 12.000
Meta/Facebook: 11.000
Microsoft: 10.000
Salesforce: 8.000
And there's probably more that I am forgetting right now. All very similar percentages of the total workforce, clearly the kind of "you must cut this many" move that's been passed down from on high, and yet pretty much all reporters are nodding along with "post-pandemic spending shift, and weakening global economy" đ
I know I saw a thing on here about how it's essentially a viral thing, with one company starting it, and others then following suit, simply because it's a thing now, but I don't remember where.
It's not my job, though, while it is for these journalists and reporters. Do your fucking job, make them afraid of the coverage that might follow these sorts of vaguely-worded press releases.
This looks like it's indeed that article. Thank you, various people who linked it in the replies đ
Copycat behaviour, layoffs kill people due to the stress imposed, doesn't really improve anything, etc.
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/
As layoffs in the tech sector mount, Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer is worried. Research â by him, and others â has shown that the stress layoffs create takes a devastating toll on behavioral and physical health and increases mortality and morbidity substantially. Layoffs literally kill people, he said.
Also, for the various people going âwell, actually, news is hard now because journalists canât get paid because everyone wants to get their news for free so they all fucked off to substackâ; sure, has nothing to do with clickbait headlines, optimising for outrage, clinging to journalism as the truth class, platforming of nazis, TERFs and every other bigot in the name of âneutralityâ, bothsidesism, etc.
I pay for news, thank you very much.
But I wonât pay for âjournalismâ that kicks down instead of punching up, or newspapers that let pretty much anyone onto their opinion pages, or editors that pretend they are somehow âneutralâ when they greenlight yet another transphobic article.
Case in point: The Guardian is profitable, probably because of that nonsense. They are not getting my cash.
By the way, another thing thatâs weird in all this; the fact that the conversation about mass layoffs at tech companies didnât really take off until Alphabet did it, and Google was affected?
Like, there was some conversation around it, but nothing like the past 24 hours. Something something critical mass, perhaps. Who knows.
This doesn't mean that journalism is hopeless, by the way; @themarkup is doing great work so far, although I want to see how they'll respond to their instance admin's refusal to take action on transphobic speech.
The Guardian has its moments, such as its continuing reporting on the Uber Files, like this article from yesterday;
It's not all bad, but it definitely needs a lot of work to get to a point where they stop 'printing' garbage regularly.
@sindarina I have been wondering whether the net effect of these layoffs, in a couple years, will be a massive shift of employment to lower-wage regions.
After all, everyone's working remote anyway. Living in the SF Bay area doesn't actually make you a better programmer, but it does make you a much more expensive one. Even for American workers, salaries will be lower because of the glut of recently fired. (But the cost of severance then recruiting & retraining will probably eat most of that!)
@sindarina Precisely the same story when everybody moved work to India and then China.
This is even doubly strange as if they would be embracing remote work, they could hire across the globe, including parts of the US where living is cheaper than SF.
One can only wonder what happened to leadership.
@sindarina
With the infrastructure bill, chips bill, and anti-inflation bills passed and all the investments for the next several years included, what's driving layoffs now?
Pure politics?
@pinsk @sindarina the article is probably https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/
Also Google literally hired 12k people in the last couple of months. "Oops we over hired" in the last few months? And you can't just ... slow down hiring? Ridiculous. Stock buybacks from last year alone could have paid for all the laid off employees for the next 7 years, assuming that each employee cost $1M to retain.
As layoffs in the tech sector mount, Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer is worried. Research â by him, and others â has shown that the stress layoffs create takes a devastating toll on behavioral and physical health and increases mortality and morbidity substantially. Layoffs literally kill people, he said.
As layoffs in the tech sector mount, Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer is worried. Research â by him, and others â has shown that the stress layoffs create takes a devastating toll on behavioral and physical health and increases mortality and morbidity substantially. Layoffs literally kill people, he said.
@sindarina I used to work in a tech company where every year they would just fire 5-10% of the people. And managers were ask to rate their teams on a curve, one had to best, most had to be medium, and one had to be designated to be fired.
They skipped that public ranking. But I believe the higher up #management might still believe, that regular firings might somehow help their profits.
It's essentially shooting a hostage, which is what the rich do all day, every day.
@sindarina There was an article on Hacker News last week about this that pointed to an article out of Stanford
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/
The long short of it is that corp boards see the "right direction" of governance as cutting costs and head count because every one else is doing it and you don't want to not look like you have your ear to the reality and what Wall street expects. It is all peer pressure and group think.
As layoffs in the tech sector mount, Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer is worried. Research â by him, and others â has shown that the stress layoffs create takes a devastating toll on behavioral and physical health and increases mortality and morbidity substantially. Layoffs literally kill people, he said.
@sindarina What? Accountability for upper management? Bwahahahaha
As long as it looks good on the balance sheet, as long as the actuaries say it'll save the shareholders half a penny, that's all that matters - long-term consequences be damned.
I want thousands of laid off monopoly tech company nerds to build replacements for the companies they were fired from.
Remake all the apps you built, so they dont report anything back to the company.
Build privacy apps, that control Roomba, that take pictures, that record audio, with not single searchable data point.
Build the #linuxphone
#google #googleemployees #firedtechworkers #newtechjobs #replaceyouremployer #privacy #boing #techjob #jeevesproject #jeeves
Long thought the same. Indeed.
Looking for this at the bottom of "news" web pages now:
This one weird tech giant isn't laying anyone off, it's hiring! Reporters hate it!
This has been the case with the media and politicians for... well probably forever. I recall wondering why no-one called shenanigans on companies that did this back in the 80s as well.
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