Mark Zuckerberg: Tech layoffs in 2024 have been a natural response to pandemic-era over hiring::Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes companies are still readjusting to pandemic-era hiring tactics amid a flurry of layoffs across the industry.
I don’t suppose the people responsible for the over hiring have seen any consequences?
They had to hire a consultant to come up with ways to force people to quit because laws prevented even bigger mass firings.
Such a horrible life… /s
There are always economic ebbs and flows. Tech is weird and unpredictable because the space has only been around 20-years in its current form, and 20-years is a liberal estimate. Maybe I’d argue 10-years?
Now comes the pandemic, something we humans haven’t dealt with for 100-years, back we had just learned airplanes. A huge chunk of our workforce went home to work, with the associated strain on the tech sector. For example:
It was clear to me that Zoom had hired shitloads of new people. The tech support quality dropped through the floor overnight. After a couple of years, once people got used to Zoom and tech support issues cooled out, they laid a bunch of people off.
I suppose that’s evil capitalism and greed, right? Have you ever sat around a call center where the calls weren’t coming in? It sucks. Everyone’s looking at everyone else like, “Why do we even have jobs and how can we have a future here?” It’s demoralizing and scary. I’d rather get laid off and move on than sit in fear of my job. There are plenty of other issues with having too many bodies doing too little work, but that’s another story.
There’s been some great comments on lemmy, far better than mine, that went into the economic aspects in broad and understandable detail.
So anyway, how exactly would you like to punish these people, whoever they may be, for not reacting properly to an unprecedented set of events?
Cherry picking zoom makes for a terrible example. They were a uniquely positioned startup. Most of these companies were just jumping on the hiring bandwagon because that’s what investors expected them to do, and now they’re also laying people off because that’s what investors want. It has fuck all to do with any kind of economic reality.
These execs are the ones who should be getting fired but our economy isn’t run by rational actors, it’s run by investors who only give a fuck about the next quarter’s profits.
So anyway, how exactly would you like to punish these people, whoever they may be, for not reacting properly to an unprecedented set of events?
The idea behind the higher pay of CEOs and the appreciation of shares is that the shareholders and CEOs bear exactly this risk. I wouldn’t prohibit layoffs for the reasons you mentioned. I would mandate very generous severance packages and prohibitions on raising workload on other employees.
very generous severance packages
Zuckerberg has done that - 16 weeks severance for every year you’ve worked there. If you’re a ten year employee, your severance package is three years pay.
Even if you were only hired a year ago, you’re going to have months at full pay to find another job.
prohibitions on raising workload on other employees
Pretty sure Facebook is one of those workplaces where you just work “all day”. It’s not really possible to increase someone’s workload. And with a severance package as generous as the one they’re doing, I can’t imagine why anyone would fire someone who is actually needed.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. You can absolutely increase someone’s workload, always. It doesn’t mean shit will get done, but you can absolutely give them more responsibilites.
And lol at your last sentence. Meta had to hire back some of the people they laid off. It’s hilarious that you think layoffs have anything to do with performance. They don’t. The performance angle is a lie that the vain tell themselves because they think everyone else is lazy. It could never happen to them, except it will, because these layoffs were about cost only.
You can’t fire someone just because they made a mistake. Especially this kind of mistake - it’s easy to look back in hindsight but back then, looking into the future, it was impossible to know how covid would affect the economy.
I also think Mark is wrong. This isn’t just about covid - it’s also about climate change, and Russia’s war. Two more things that in hindsight have had very clear consequences but where it’s nearly impossible to predict he future.
We know climate change is bad, we know pandemics are bad, we certainly know war is bad… but how bad will they be? You can only work with rough estimates.
What?
Bullshit. People get fired for making mistakes all the time, and this was a colossal fuckup. Instead of firing the people who fucked up they’re punishing employees.
And lol at the pathetic war and climate change excuses. My company tried to pull the same bs explanation. There’s always some war going on, Ukraine was invaded during the pandemic and that didn’t stop these companies from going on a hiring spree back then.
Wake up, it’s all a lie for PR. The only thing they give a shit about is servicing investor demands, and investors are a mob who don’t know anything about running any individual business.
These execs will never admit that they were so stupid that they actually thought the pandemic demand level would be permanent, or that they were such a shill that they did know but overhired anyway because that’s what investors yelled at them to do.
@L4s This is why Union are needed, especially in the IT space.
eat a bag of dicks, Zucc
Gawd forbid the shareholders don’t see the line go up or the executives take pay cuts.
they “trust” me
the dumb fucks
I find it funny that the natural response here is to immediately vilify Zuck and call all these CEOs morons for over hiring in the first place, which is 100% correct.
But I’ll be damned, it’s the first time I’ve seen someone of that stature actually acknowledge wtf happened. So I’m inclined to give the least bit of credit to him. Still a dogshit human being, but yeah…
Because it wasn’t overhiring though.
They finally had enough workers to split the workload fairly over them without them getting overworked.
Now that the pandemic is over, they can go back to hiring just enough people to make everyone overworked again without the company collapsing.
It really depends on where you worked I guess. My company was understaffed and worked us to the bone before, during, and after the pandemic.
I’d like to have that number of people working to keep the workloads lower, but costs are costs and they gotta cut from keeping going under.
And God forbid the CEOs take a paycut and make up the pay of 20 people themselves.
/s, just in case.
You should have added “but will anyone think of the shareholders?” in there.
“Pandemic era over hiring” THAT YOU DID? What a fkin piece of shit. He over hires to please stock holders and fires them to please stock holders. There’s absolutely no consideration for the lives of these workers.
It’s so fkin true that under capitalism, the hands of the worker become indistinguishable from those of a machine.
You gotta give this guy some credit, hear me out.
Even as rich as he is, he still finds the time every single two weeks to visit some po-dunk community, miles off the main highway, not even a Walmart within two hours, simply to find good ol’ American salt of the Earth type people that don’t even recognize him.
Once he arrives at that destination, it’s not off to the most expensive kept-secret B&B, it’s not off to the most expensive trail boss for exotic hunting, no no, it’s to the cheapest fucking cost cutters barber that side of Oklabama to get that godawful Data-from-Star-Trek:TNG haircut.
Or at least I hope that’s the story behind his hair, because there can be no other plausible reason for it.
He’s not wrong, still an asshole though.
He is wrong, and lying.
