What I don't understand is the organisations they are laying off are also hiring. For eg. I saw Miro firing bunch of people last week and then hiring new people. I feel this is like bait and switch. CEOs take responsibility of the layoff but it feels like they dont really care. If employers are not loyal then why should the employees be.
I wonder what hidden benefits there are in these layoffs. Sure, companies lose skilled staff and nominally taken a hit in overall corporate output.
On the flipside, people work twice as hard, eager to show their worth. That may be the cynic intent behind these industry-wide layoff. Scare the crap out of everyone and make them do the extra mile.
My issue with analyses like this is they argue that layoffs are a bad idea and it's just companies shooting themselves in a foot. That's what people want to hear, so it gets a lot of clicks and citations. But, this also means that all the big companies (and that's a lot of them) that just announced layoffs made a obviously bad move. Are they all stupid? I find it hard to believe.
It's more plausible, that yeah, layoffs are trust destroying and life ruining, but they make shareholders rich, so they are a rational choice expected from CEOs.
OK, so now we're going to fire any CEO that lays off more than X% of the staff? The likely effect will be slower hiring, and less jobs in our economy. Is that desirable?
The thing that doesn't make sense to me here is that layoffs are supposed to be about having too many employees rather than about having low-quality employees. Why are they hiring at all? Shouldn't they have just laid off fewer people if they need more than they have now?
does this imply the lay-offs were a product of collusion at the executive level across the entire sector? If anyone could find evidence of that it would be extremely news-worthy.
If I might adorn my hat of tin-foil for a second; at a big corp I used to work at, I heard execs predicting this outcome back in early 2022 in combination with being incredibly relaxed about the employment market being extremely hot at the time.
The logic of spreading out layoffs over the corse of an entire year escapes me. Particularly when it's the first year of a new CEO. What are they thinking?
I was at a company that had a few rounds of layoffs. great way to destroy a culture. Everybody hunkers down, looks out for themselves, and teamwork dies.
How come CEOs never get fired during layoffs? Laying off this much of the workforce is an indicator they have done their job poorly (I.e. failed to adequately forecast industry trends and demand). Any normal plebeian would be out the door in two minutes if they did something similar.
I'm not really sure what the point of the layoffs here are. Are they realizing that they had no idea how to effectively put 11.000 people to work? What are they trying to achieve?
Yeah, a lot of layoffs make a lot more sense when you re-evaluate the assumption that these CEOs are hiring people with the intent of keeping them indefinitely. For many, I'd bet this was the plan all along
So I've become pretty cynical about companies announcing layoffs. In the short term, it'll boost the stock and make the CEO look good as a result. The net effect will be:
- A certain number of people who leave or retire won't be replaced
- Some workers will get relocated geographically and/or within the company's business units such that they'll be counted as a layoff and a new hire
- New hiring won't stop
- The company will use layoffs as a means of getting rid of a number of workers that would otherwise be legally problematic to get rid of (eg older or pregnant workers)
- Some smaller teams, projects or divisions will be sold off to other companies
Hiring is near constant. Layoffs happen in bursts. Combine this with natural attrition and not much has changed. Overall staffing levels will continue trending downward slightly with increased automation. Business as usual.
Could be blind, but could also be that laying off when everyone else is laying off protects a company from being the odd one out and distributes the blame.
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