What can companies do instead of layoffs? Stanford prof Jeffrey Pfeffer lists the options:

- execs take pay cuts, and ask employees to do the same: "instead of giving 100% of the pain to 10% of people, give 100% of the people 10% of the pain"
- use economic stringency as an opportunity, picking up new talent amidst layoffs

@natematias

It helps if you think of it in terms of class warfare:

PRE-FLIGHT:
layoffs are a cavalry charge

POST-FLIGHT:
layoffs are a strategic bombing campaign

This is all happening because during the 2020 presidential campaign, somebody said "tax the rich" and the rich were like "well, you're going to pay for that soon."

@natematias I always ask myself, “Would a different set of goals make this apparently irrational action, rational?”

What if the goal of layoffs is to increase management power at the expense of workers?

@natematias It seems like most CEOs and CEO-wannabes are image-obsessed sociopathic frat boys in a tie, hoping no one notices that they're faking it all.

They've been brainwashed by MBA courses and working for other sociopaths into thinking that money is the only thing that matters and that people are disposable. Then they start comparing notes and try to one-up each other, as frat boys do.

@natematias In addition to those aspects described, you have to consider throughput. You're losing 480,000 labor hours for the 12,000 people fired. If a company thinks it can be more flexible because of that, they're making a mistake.

That means either dropping existing projects altogether, or forcing more work on remaining employees. These employees are also presumably the "high performers", so you're piling on more work on them, potentially creating new bottlenecks in a company's processes.

It's one thing to trim away projects and products that are going no where. Google notoriously has done it's fair share of that over the years. But ideally you try to redistribute some employees to other teams to help improve their throughput when needed. But because you "hired too many people" is kinda disingenuous since management wasn't looking at efficiency or throughput capabilities of their own teams, but just deciding "we need more" and throwing more bodies at a problem.

@natematias

The cruelty is the point. They're fucking psychopaths.

@natematias

thank you for sharing. we need to use network effects at scale for good to dismantle unjust and deadly policies and entities. #Network

example: tell five people to help five people today #FiveByFive

@natematias

I agree with Prof. Pfeffer that there is a social contagion to layoffs but despite his statement that there are people that understand the science as he laid out, there are far too many upper management, board members, and Harvard MBAs that still think they are effective despite all evidence to the contrary because in the short term they do cut costs and can boost a failing stock price and that is what most publicly traded companies focus on, short term metrics.