this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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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.
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.
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.
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.