I absolutely do not understand how randomly culling ~6% at Spotify does anything to their lack of profitability.
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-01-23/an-update-on-january-2023-organizational-changes/
@mitsuhiko I'm 100% sure a lot of the layoffs are just seizing the opportunity to cull the herd corps wanted to do anyways, but were afraid of the optics. Especially the Google ones smell of getting rid of perceived rest-and-vesters.
@hynek @mitsuhiko Agreed. It's a perfect time to cull any area you wanted to 6+ months ago under the cover of "the economy" and everyone else doing it.
@frank @hynek @mitsuhiko this is veering dangerously close to the lane of victim-blaming. In any layoff some low performers are going to be let go of course, but if that’s the issue, that’s what firings are for, not layoffs. Many people with stellar performance reviews and solid work were let go. Like… would you say that it’d be out of character for Google to terminate a useful and beloved project in a shortsighted way?
@glyph @frank @mitsuhiko that seems very orthogonal to the point that we were making that corps are being craven opportunists.
@hynek @frank @mitsuhiko the phrase "getting rid of rest-and-vesters" implies that the people being made redundant are to blame, because they were idling in useless jobs simply to maximize their equity.
@glyph @frank @mitsuhiko it would be, if that sentence were in any of the posts
@hynek @frank @mitsuhiko perhaps the word 'perceived' isn't doing as much work for me as you think it ought to :)
@glyph @frank @mitsuhiko I’m open to widen my vocabulary. But pls keep it under 20 characters and within active usage in the 21st century by more than 3 people. ;)
@hynek @frank @mitsuhiko I promise not to use my human-thesaurus superpowers here; it's less about specific word choice and more about contextualization. Was your point that you feel like the perception was *inaccurate*, and management wanted to do some unjustified firings for which the layoff give them cover?
@glyph @frank @mitsuhiko I wasn’t trying to pass any judgment whatsoever about the perception. Aside from settling old grudges, I just can’t come up with another reason to fire several people with almost 20 years of tenure unless they think the employee is resting&vesting.
@hynek @glyph @frank @mitsuhiko I have no idea what the metrics used were, but if you have a model of per employee profitability where you feel that the standard deviation is low, or where you don't feel you can accurately identify outliers, but you feel that your spending on personnel is too high, it makes sense to either fire people semi-randomly or to fire various people with high compensation.
It doesn't even mean that you feel that high compensation for that person isn't justified.
@hynek @glyph @frank @mitsuhiko Also, I believe corporations by their nature are sociopathic, so this is not the explanation I believe or prefer, but if big corporations were the sort of loyal, employee-focused entities that people seem to want them to be (especially at a time like this), it would kinda make sense for them to fire people randomly or even weight the algorithm in favor of people most likely to land on their feet.
"Bob has been working here for 20 years and he's a superstar in the field, if we let him go we can afford to keep 5 newer, less-established employees, plus everyone who is not Bob who gets fired is now in the pool of, 'Yeah they laid me off but they also laid off Bob, so you shouldn't worry that by hiring me you are hiring an underperformer.'"
@hynek @glyph @frank @mitsuhiko I only bring this up because despite it not being strong enough to really budge my priors on the sociopathy of large organizations, it should be acknowledged that this behavior is consistent with what a compassionate entity might do.
@glyph @hynek @frank @mitsuhiko I don't think I know the right way to run a $XXXB company, so I'm not sure whether the layoffs are required, useful, beneficial in the long term, etc. It's possible that they are not compassionate because they are doing a layoff at all. It's also possible that the layoff was necessary **and** all the super high value people who got laid off were the casualties of some cutthroat executive game of thrones. But I also think that the way the layoffs were effected is consistent with a world where the company is compassionate but the layoffs were necessary (or at least a trade-off worth making).
I don't need or expect my companies to be compassionate or loyal to me, and I don't really believe that it is in the nature of large organizations to really care about individuals, so I don't have a dog in the fight, but I can't help but notice that it seems impossible for big companies to make hard decisions without pretty intense criticism.
I've also seen a lot of criticism in the past that FAANG companies are bloated monsters that are very inefficient with shareholder money, not innovative enough, etc. Probably not the same people complaining about layoffs, but I can't help but feel that we might be encouraging a but of learned helplessness from companies when no one tries to interpret their actions as charitably as possible.
@pganssle @hynek @frank @mitsuhiko How does a more charitable interpretation of motives provide increased agency for anyone? To be clear, not a rhetorical question, I genuinely don't know what you're getting at here.
@glyph I mean that from the point of view of a person running a corporation, the outcome of their decisions is always massive criticism. At some point they will learn that nothing they do satisfies the public and they will stop trying.
I think maybe a norm of thoughtfulness and charity would make legitimate concerns more actionable to decision-makers. Obviously all of "the public" won't adopt this change, but I don't think it hurts to model this behavior.
(And to be clear, your own writings are often very nuanced and thoughtful and I believe that we'd be on the right track if more people were like you, so this is not a personal criticism of you)
@pganssle Thanks, I put a lot of effort into nuance and I appreciate it being noticed :).
However, I think that you are making a bunch of assumptions from interpersonal communication that don't really apply in this context. For example, when you say they will "stop trying", that implies that the *initial* goal of a CEO is to avoid criticism from the general public, or at least reduce its volume. I don't really see any evidence that this informs their decision-making process.
It also makes the implicit assumption that the *audience* for such criticism is the CEOs themselves, rather than policymakers. *Personally*, I don't care if Sundar has some deep, personal, spiritual experience and realizes that actually layoffs are bad and he shouldn't do more. What I want is for the power to make this sort of unilateral massive economic decision to be taken away from him (and others in similar positions) entirely. There should be a transparent process.
@pganssle @hynek @frank @mitsuhiko only a compassionate entity under some hard constraints that don't really exist, though. the imagined scarcity here only makes sense if you assume the company has no cash reserves, or that pacifying activist investors in a decisive minority is a necessity. like the compassionate thing to do is: don't do the layoff