Do 'Layoffs By Email' Show What Employers Really Think of Their Workers? (nytimes.com) 208
When Google laid off 6% of its workforce — some of whom had worked for the company for decades — employees "got the news in their inbox," writes Gawker's founding editor in a scathing opinion piece in the New York Times:
That sting is becoming an all-too-common sensation. In the last few years, tens of thousands of people have been laid off by email at tech and digital media companies including Twitter, Amazon, Meta and Vox. The backlash from affected employees has been swift.... It's not just tech and media. Companies in a range of industries claim this is the only efficient way to do a lot of layoffs. Informing workers personally is too complicated, they say — and too risky, as people might use their access to internal systems to perform acts of sabotage. (These layoff emails are often sent to employees' personal email; by the time they check it, they've been locked out of all their employer's own platforms.)
As someone who's managed people in newsrooms and digital start-ups and has hired and fired people in various capacities for the last 21 years, I think this approach is not just cruel but unnecessary. It's reasonable to terminate access to company systems, but delivering the news with no personal human contact serves only one purpose: letting managers off the hook. It ensures they will not have to face the shock and devastation that people feel when they lose their livelihoods. It also ensures the managers won't have to weather any direct criticism about the poor leadership that brought everyone to that point.... Future hiring prospects will be reading all about it on Twitter or Glassdoor. In a tight labor market, a company's cruelty can leave a lasting stain on its reputation....
The expectation that an employee give at least two weeks notice and help with transition is rooted in a sense that workers owe their employers something more than just their labor: stability, continuity, maybe even gratitude for the compensation they've earned. But when it's the company that chooses to end the relationship, there is often no such requirement. The same people whose labor helped build the company get suddenly recoded as potential criminals who might steal anything that's not nailed down....
Approval of unions is already at 71 percent. Dehumanizing workers like this is accelerating the trend. Once unthinkable, unionization at large tech companies now seems all but inevitable. Treating employees as if they're disposable units who can simply be unsubscribed to ultimately endangers a company's own interests. It seems mistreated workers know their value, even if employers — as they are increasingly prone to demonstrate — do not.
As someone who's managed people in newsrooms and digital start-ups and has hired and fired people in various capacities for the last 21 years, I think this approach is not just cruel but unnecessary. It's reasonable to terminate access to company systems, but delivering the news with no personal human contact serves only one purpose: letting managers off the hook. It ensures they will not have to face the shock and devastation that people feel when they lose their livelihoods. It also ensures the managers won't have to weather any direct criticism about the poor leadership that brought everyone to that point.... Future hiring prospects will be reading all about it on Twitter or Glassdoor. In a tight labor market, a company's cruelty can leave a lasting stain on its reputation....
The expectation that an employee give at least two weeks notice and help with transition is rooted in a sense that workers owe their employers something more than just their labor: stability, continuity, maybe even gratitude for the compensation they've earned. But when it's the company that chooses to end the relationship, there is often no such requirement. The same people whose labor helped build the company get suddenly recoded as potential criminals who might steal anything that's not nailed down....
Approval of unions is already at 71 percent. Dehumanizing workers like this is accelerating the trend. Once unthinkable, unionization at large tech companies now seems all but inevitable. Treating employees as if they're disposable units who can simply be unsubscribed to ultimately endangers a company's own interests. It seems mistreated workers know their value, even if employers — as they are increasingly prone to demonstrate — do not.
and what if the manager needs the that worker? (Score:3)
and what if the manager needs the that worker?
Some HR person gets rid of the some needed on an project and the manager is blind sided?
Re:and what if the manager needs the that worker? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Managers often don't get a choice. Layoffs usually are top-down, meaning someone higher up makes the numbers and then maybe the director chooses the names and then the manager is left to be the one giving bad news.
Once we had to create a ranked list of our workers by an incoming team after being acquired. Some asked if this was going to be used to lay people off or something like that. No, of course not, they said. Liars.
So they get rid of 10% of the team, then give you 10% more work to go with it.
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And that in turn means the employee gives 10% less of a fuck.
If all fucks are gone, so is the employee.
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Once while I was a team lead, my manager asked me to make a list of our best to worst employees, worded like he wanted to know who needed the most coaching, who needed the most focus going forward... Didn't think anything of it, as the company bragged about never having done layoffs frequently. Turns out I had created the list of people to lay off when the layoffs came a week or two later - the managers had been instructed to select 10% of their team members to lay off, but they got to choose who. I'
Re:and what if the manager needs the that worker? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, which is why making the manager sit down and fire each one personally won't make anything better.
Oh, i don't know. It may have made it better for me in 2009, since my manager told me he didn't really want to let me go, then gave me a lead to a company that was hiring, and called them to recommend me. I've worked at that place since then.
Re:and what if the manager needs the that worker? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you missed the point of the piece, which is that it *would* make a difference and not cost very much.
This is similar to studies that show that doctors that admit and apologize for errors are actually *less* likely to be sued for malpractice. While this is strongly counterintuitive, if you think about it, it makes sense. People *know* they've had a negative outcome. And being human, their feelings towards you shape their subsequent actions. If you treat their feelings with (understandable) callousness, their personal pain gets redirected toward you in the form of fury. Instead of seeing everyone caught up in unfortunate but unavoidable circumstances, if you don't share some of that pain they will see you as *inflicting* it upon them.
If you want to be realist, start with this: the feelings of the people you deal with make a difference to you. This makes many things a lot more complicated than you'd like them to be, but that's just the way things are, and it's only rational to conduct yourselves accordingly. That means making an effort to acknowledge and honor other peoples' feelings, even though it makes *you* uncomfortable. It's not realism to expect others to be "realists" and not hold yourself to the same standard.
Re:and what if the manager needs the that worker? (Score:5, Interesting)
Lol, one place I was at they canned the only person who knew how to do payroll and benefits. HR was super cliquey and she wasn't in the party clique so they cut her.
So later that day the CEO is doing 1:1s with survivors to see where everyone is at and I told him what she does for the company. Pikachu shock face. Quickly rehired.
Re:and what if the manager needs the that worker? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem they had was that the customers were only with us because of one guy, and he quit the day they announced the takeover.
I quit about a month later because we had nothing to do, and the new production manager was an arsehole relative of the new owners.
Hilarious really, they probably wasted $20 million.
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In the dotcom boom, a place I worked at had recently bought another company. I don't know the details exactly, but everyone quit except a couple of idiots. The UK country manager was told to keep one of them on so that the acquisition wasn't a complete failure.
For the next 2 or3 years, that one cant-be-sacked guy just milked it. He was sales/account management, and pretty much all of his accounts called up to say "never send him here again". At one point he started selling a competitors product in a sales p
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Similar here. They fired half the department that was responsible for SAP, thinking that hey, we can dump that work on the rest.
The rest thought "fuck that" and quit as well. The rehire option was quickly out the window when they noticed that they should now do twice the work.
Guess how that cost-cutting worked when they had to hire external people to do our SAP work. Li'l hint: It's never cheap to get emergency people who know that you're totally hosed if they say no.
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Yeah so many layoff lists determined by the wrong people. Perhaps that points to a larger problem at those places as to why they did huge layoffs in the first place, heh.
We were lucky the benefits gal came back but I know she had 2 young kids etc and was just not a power play angry fuck you type. If it was my call she's the only one in that group I would've kept. Most of the others were internal recruiters. Like wtf, we just cut the company in half and kept the in house recruiters? Clown show.
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What they did was pretty crappy, but at least they did the 1:1s afterwards - which turned out the be to their benefit because it saved them from a nasty problem (hopefully giving the payroll lady a big rejoining bonus and a salary bump).
Lets be honest, most shops do all the same things, without the 1:1s. They seem to know best, don't need anyone to tell them anything and you're all just to get on and do the work of two people now - even if all the knowledge of how to do that just walked out the door in tear
Re:and what if the manager needs the that worker? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: and what if the manager needs the that worker? (Score:2)
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Happens all the time. I've seen projects with no teams, managers with no projects and no teams, teams who lost their teamlead but had to finish a project without any chance to get the resources needed (but then again, there was also nobody responsible for the project, so I guess that cancels out), all constellations are absolutely possible and have been observed in the wild.
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Re:and what if the manager needs the that worker? (Score:5, Informative)
...It was just like when Melon Husk fired the person with access to the badge readers at Twitter HQ.
Just for those who don't know, that was a post on a parody account. Didn't actually happen.
https://www.thefocus.news/tech... [thefocus.news]
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Can we stick to factual information and discussion on /. please.
Lets leave the fake news to other crappy websites.
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Maybe it didn't. But you have to admit it to at least plausible that he would do that.
And if you want to discuss that possibility go do it on The Onion. The world is full enough of misinformation without people spreading it on Slashdot too.
This is the other side of the coin (Score:3, Insightful)
In a world awash with people willing to sue over the slightest thing, or even worse act out without thinking about consequence... in that same world where so many workers are now remote, what other way is there to do a large layoff other than by locking down all accounts at once and issuing emails to all involved?
You can't risk any access to any systems anymore, not even email.
All you can do is to make the final communications, which have to be remote for most people, as humane as possible.
This is the other side of the coin where tech workers can by and large mostly work remote. As our hiring is increasingly remote, so too is our firing...
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I really don't like that approach; but I also see lots of issues with the alternatives. So I'm not sure what the solution is.
Also this is one of the many reasons I'm glad I'm not in a management position.
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i'm not sure if getting to look at a manager's poker face while he delivers these news and most likely some assortment of bullshit excuses has any real value.
an email is fine, if you want to be humane then just give a honest straightforward explanation and some proportional but generous compensation or at least a month's worth of salary, so as to lessen the impact of job-seeking on the employee's daily life.
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A number of companies are moving employees to a division that is a "pre-layoff" section. They lose all access to everything but email, and are still technically working for the company and paid, but don't have any responsibilities. This lasts for 4-8 weeks before they are really laid off. This transition ensures surprises are mitigated, as well as keeps employees from tearing shit up.
Re:This is the other side of the coin (Score:5, Insightful)
Giving them the opportunity to say goodbye to their friends via email and chat would not be abused by the vast majority of them. For the ones that do attempt to do so, it should be pretty easy to catch--and then you fire them with cause, cancelling their severence packages and blacklisting them.
Blocking internal email and chat can't reduce the company's risk that much. The workers lives' you're upending deserve at least to be treated humanely. If you do, they might come back some day in the future, and it'd really lessen the impact on morale.
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There are environments where compliance is a big thing. Even though the actual risk is near zero, because word of mouth, and the fact that major actions can result in some criminal actions, a lot of companies have compliance guidelines to disable accounts when someone is terminated immediately. It sucks, but that is the norm in a lot of industries.
Moving the user to an OU where they still have access, maybe get a paycheck or two doing nothing, ensures these are met... and gives the employee the ability to
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Not nice but some people could see it coming.
But, firing someone (or whole teams) that are working in your office by mail is scandalous at best.
Obligatory Office Space Reference (Score:5, Funny)
Bill Lumbergh: Who’s he?
Bob Porter: You know, squirrely looking guy, mumbles a lot.
Bill Lumbergh: Oh, yeah.
Bob Slydell: Yeah, we can’t actually find a record of him being a current employee here.
Bob Porter: I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago and no one ever told him, but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, he still gets a paycheck.
Bob Slydell: So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.
Bill Lumbergh: Grrrrreat.
Dom Portwood: So um, Milton has been let go?
Bob Slydell: Well just a second there, professor. We uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So he won’t be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it will just work itself out naturally.
Bob Porter: We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem solved from your end.
In person isn't guarantee of more humane cut (Score:5, Interesting)
During dot bomb era one of my flash in the pan startups took all the cut people (about 60) to a hotel conference room where the director of hr told them they were cut because they were dead weight and sucked and the company is better off without them and the company is going to be super successful now that they're gone.
Said in person.
Sometimes email vetted by the lawyers is the better way to go.
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Indeed. It's a horrible move, no doubt, but many executive officers are such narcissists/sociopaths that this awful procedure is better.
There are ways to do much, much worse. The CEO could pull a Vishal Garg [slashdot.org], for example.
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I should be so lucky to get Vishal Garg'ed. I got laid off by a phone call.
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You didn't mention if the hotel is still standing.
Hey, these days I'm trying harder not to jump to conclusions.
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She was really stupid on top of being evil but no one attacked her.
What did happen is when people came back to the office there was lots of yelling and crying etc and people stealing shit. My buddy n I decided the emotional level was off the charts so we went to early lunch. Came back through the side fire door. As we opened the door, this (former) PM gal was headed our way to the parking lot carrying a sizable office laser printer with a big cat got the canary smirk. Shrug. I held the door for her an
Poor example (Score:5, Insightful)
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I quit a job that had a 90-day notice in the contract, but it didn't actually have any penalties. However, the employer had a policy that any salaried employee who left with less than a 30-day notice was not eligible for rehire, ever. So I stayed for a month. They weren't bad, and I didn't want to screw them. I just got a better offer. Never know when I might need a job there again.
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The excerpt ignores that many of these folks work from home a lot, by the time they would have been able to call everyone, one by one, the word would be out and people not on the list or towards the bottom would be freaking out not knowing. At least this way a simultaneous email goes out saying "you're still employed. " The two week notice comment is nonsensical in this context. Google gave them all way more than two weeks severance pay. Also the two weeks notice for quitting isn't a legal requirement in the USA. Unless you have a contract, you can walk anytime.
But ... but ... outrage! Google!
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they need to "tear the band-aid off" as fast as possible, before rumors and panic spread through the company.
Rumors and panic still spread through the company after the fact. I'd argue it's even worse, because this approach generates the kind of continuous stress that goes away very, VERY slowly, if ever.
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Yup. Any sort of layoff is, for me, a trigger to get my resume fully up-to-date that very weekend, even if I wasn't among those laid off and even if it's outside of my normal resume update schedule. First world problems and all that, but layoffs *are* stressful even for the employees who remain for any number of reasons. And once the layoffs start who can even guess if they'll be on the chopping block when the next quarter's financials and executive bonuses come out? When they throw in other such shenan
You're reading too much into it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You're reading too much into it (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't matter how many feel-goods you get out of it: it's an employer-employee relationship
Never forget this. Ever. This has been the way so many people have been convinced that unions aren't helpful. "Open door policies", "we're all family here"... No. You'd get a lawyer if you needed one and not just a "trust me bro" from someone who t-boned your car and you suffered an injury. You have one recourse to apply pressure on your employer. Yes, there's lot to be desired from it, but it's the one you get in the US. That's a union. Outside of that, the cards are always stacked against you in a relationship where your boss' last bowl movement is thought more of than you.
That one thing you get, you better go get it. No one is going to come and help you, no one is going to ensure your pay is fair, no one is going to protect you on a job. If you don't have a union, you are at the whim of whatever laws these asshats in DC or your State are passing, and boy oh boy do I have news for you. If their lobbyist crew told your politician to take out your knee caps, your elected official would take out you and your family's knee caps for good measure.
It's us versus them and if you don't have a union, it's YOU versus all of them. You don't have to think too hard on who is going to win. The 1870 through to the 1900s we showed them how well we can fight back. We're getting awfully close to having to remind those asshats who actually makes this nation.
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Unions have their problems, but not compared to lack of unions.
The thing is, a "company union" often isn't any better than no union.
And don't believe a company when they say they can't afford to pay you more unless they open their books for inspection. It can be true, but they've got every incentive to lie.
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Unions have their problems, but not compared to lack of unions.
That really depends on the union and the company. At worst, a union gives you another power hierarchy of people you have to pay that don't care about you.
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True but on average by the numbers employees belonging to unions are generally happier and better off than those who are not when evenly compared.
If you have a citation on that it would be cool to see.
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Unions Increase Job Satisfaction in the United States [nber.org]
Unionized workers becoming more satisfied than non-union [bostonherald.com]
Also I will just go anecdote-andy here but in my jobI interact with a lot of people from IATSE, IBEW and Teamsters and all of them are stridently pro-union, like you would have to pry membership forcibly from them. Even when they have complaints the positives far outweight the negatives to them.
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That's a major difference and I have personally seen the difference in respect by management.
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Don't pretend that unions offer any protection, if a company has to let go of employees, it has to let go of employees - union or no. A union s only going to make the situation worse because the overhead of the union and union dues means you got less money saved before you got laid off...
Union workers make an average of 17% more salary than non-union workers. I don't know of any union that takes more than 17% of your salary in dues - it's usually around 1% or 2%. And that's leaving aside other negotiated benefits like payed sick leave, vacation, and healthcare. Also a high rate of unionization tends to drive up wages even at non-union shops since they have to compete for workers with the union outfits.
Except in really degenerate cases, even a mediocre union is generally better than no un
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Don't pretend that unions offer any protection, if a company has to let go of employees, it has to let go of employees - union or no
And I'll tell you this. The other avenue is that in every case, it's going to be you versus a team of corp speak. Isn't anything anyone can do if a company is folding, but in the run up to that point, if it's just you asking for a pay raise along the way. You are easy to ignore, you mean nothing, it just being you means they don't have to listen to you. But if it's everyone versus them, well they either go ahead and fold now or give you some money.
It's always going to be a different, more serious conver
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Dilbert taught me to work every day like it's your last.
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Expendable, absolutely. Replaceable, not necessarily. I worked at a tech company that provided the same products (with only very small variations) as at least half a dozen companies. What differentiated us was our tech support, which frankly was rare in this field - mostly it was just buy the product and read the manual, and if you have problems read the manual again and play with it until you figure it out - but I personally really went out to solve customer problems. When I got in a hullabaloo with th
Sorry, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Those people aren't being professional. Just sayin'.
I got laid off in 2017, with about 30 other people, after the company lost the parent contract to the ones on which we were working. We all got plenty of notice and they tried to find us positions on other contracts, but most of those involved relocating and some, including me, couldn't. We all kept working until the end date. That said, we worked for a large defense contractor and had security clearances, so maybe the situation, and people, were different than elsewhere. I had been there for 16 years and got a butt-load of severance pay/benefits. It was all rather amicable. /ymmv
Tap Dat (Score:2)
A 'tap on the shoulder' is the notification method preferred by 9/10 employees.
Re: Tap Dat (Score:2)
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best is when your competitor tells you.. (Score:4, Interesting)
had an experience where our company decided to file for bankruptcy and their method of notifying us? a file on the desktop when you sign in to the system.
Best yet, is our competitor was outside trying to poach staff before you even know that you're out of a job.
Huge life lesson about "loyalty" (was young and stupider back then)
Put your mask on first, then help others ... (Score:3)
The expectation that an employee give at least two weeks notice and help with transition is rooted in a sense that workers owe their employers something more than just their labor: stability, continuity, maybe even gratitude for the compensation they've earned. But when it's the company that chooses to end the relationship, there is often no such requirement.
Assuming it's not your company... it's a pay for work relationship and that's it. When one of those stops, so does the other. Don't romanticize it. Companies will always put their bottom line over you and you should keep yours in mind over theirs. No matter what they've said, you're expendable to the company. Assuming there's no wrong doing, two-weeks (or whatever) notice by either side depends on how professional each side is and/or wants to be remembered.
sounds great (Score:3)
an email gives me time to look up employment law and perhaps force my employer to pay me for a few additional days. In California you're not fired until they hand you your final paycheck [shouselaw.com]
Re: sounds great (Score:2)
6 months of severance pay (Score:2)
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As a general rule, I would agree with you that six months of salary and health care would be preferable. However, if the CEO was Margot Robbie and my manager was Gal Godot, I'd have to give that immediate termination option a lot more thought.
how else? (Score:4, Informative)
Besides which in person is actually worse for a lot of people.
Re:how else? (Score:4, Interesting)
Would be nothing worse then sitting and waiting for a couple of days to see if you were one of the unlucky ones
Or a few weeks, or a few months...
That's the lousy situation Google employees in the UK and Europe are in. Because of labor laws that disallow a quick layoff, none of them know yet if they're getting the axe, and they don't even know when they'll know, because legal and HR have to work through the process in each country, and timelines depend on government cooperation that is unpredictable.
After talking to some people in this situation (I work for Google; my team was unscathed), I have decided I strongly prefer the brutal but quick process allowed by US law. US employees who got the axe found out immediately (well, as quickly as possible, so many working from home complicates and slows things) and now know they have several months to figure out their next move. US employees who didn't get the axe knew that immediately, too. But my colleagues in Europe are on pins and needles. Heck, some might quit just to end the suspense, and all of them are currently not only personally stressed out by the situation, but also distracted and unproductive.
As for email notification... as compared to what alternative? In person? Most of the company only comes in 2-3 days per week, and not on consistent schedules, and many not at all. By phone or video conference would be an option, I suppose, but that's going to take time unless you do it groups at a time. If it takes hours or days, the last-notified and the retained employees will spend that time wondering. If you do it in groups, scheduling will be a challenge, plus not everyone wants others to see how they react in real time.
Honestly, I think an email blast is the kindest approach. Everyone learns at once, more or less, depending on when they check their email. Yes, it'd be nice to have a gentle human interaction for each laid-off employee, on an individualized basis, with an empathetic and understanding manager. But that's not feasible in our hybrid work, flexible hours world. Given that it's not, e-mail gets the information out as quickly and as clearly as possible.
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The added benefit for the original company is they need to lay off less as they've quit already.
On the negative side for them, it's the best that are gone first.
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Good. It's good. Have the managers tell the employees they are fired. See them deal with employees breaking down.
The dehumanization of employees is real, because it's easy for managers to say "ok fuck it, let's cut the workforce by 10%". Have them actually see what that really means.
In some asian countries they force people found driving without a seatbelt or helmet go ride with EMTs and scrape people off the pavement to get a dose of what the consequences for those actions are. Everyone is super tough unti
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You grill people for weeks, interview them three, four and more times, let them jump through more hoops than the fuckers at American Idle to hire them. I guess taking 2 minutes to tell them "you're fired" isn't asking too much.
How about the other direction? (Score:2)
I wanted to get fired. But I wanted to demand it of my bos, in person. Back then, I was able to do so. Here's how it went.
Me: "Will you fire me?"
Boss: "No!"
Dang. I cannot see conducting that conversation in email.
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In a mail convo, you could automate it to ask it daily at 8am until he's pissed enough to say "Yes, dammit, just to shut you up!"
Fucking PAYWALLS (Score:4, Informative)
In the name of god STOP, STOP, STOP linking to articles behind bloody paywalls.
It's getting ridiculous on this site.
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Maybe a refresher is in order:
The first rule of Slashdot: You do not read TFA.
The second rule of Slashdot: You DO NOT read TFA.
Re: Fucking PAYWALLS (Score:2)
This link should get you through the paywall.
Re: Fucking PAYWALLS (Score:2)
This should get you through the paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/0... [nytimes.com]
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How the hell would the NYT be in general interesting when I'm an ocean away?
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Maybe someone should do an essay on why Slashdot doesn't really care for its users by constantly linking to paywalled articles.
If it was in the New York Times, they would probably post it.
In the end it makes no difference (Score:2)
I've had to deliver the message, it sucks delivering it, and it sucks receiving it. Managers are given a script to follow and you are best off following it. There is no benefit to dragging it out, being a whipping boy, trying to be super sympathetic. If I could have saved their job we wouldn't be having this conversation.
If this is a mass layoff the script is along the lines of "The company has made some difficult decisions to reduce staffing and your job is one of the ones that has been eliminated, effec
It's painful both ways. (Score:4, Insightful)
While not excusing layoffs-by-email in any way, I think I have an understanding why it's done. Having had to lay off people years ago before I retired,I found it very painful on both sides of the table. Obviously painful for most employees, but painful for the manager also because of the effect you are having on the lives of the people being laid off.
I had people, both male and female, crying, not too unexpected because the layoffs were completely unexpected. I was only told about them and who was leaving the day before. What was worse, it wasn't anything they had done wrong; it was because the projects they were working on were cancelled. It was the worst day during my employment. I understand that mine was short term pain compared to the long term pain the layoffs were causing to most, but it was still painful and took some days to get over.
Even worse, a female manager I knew had to lay off two thirds of her staff, and was laid off herself the next day. That was just cruel.
Email is just fine (Score:2)
Just lazy, apathetic, and insincere (Score:3)
If a company knows how to lock out and secure their physical and computing systems before sending an email, then that same company also knows how to secure their systems before doing a phone call, so security is a bogus concern.
Email or text is easier than phone calls, and that's great for lazy companies. It also avoids confrontation and feedback, and avoiding that is great for apathetic companies. But we do need to give the companies credit for sending out emails. They could simply lock out the employees and allow the ID badge not working to give the implicit layoff notice.
It's also tone-deaf for a CEO to give a single "heartfelt" sentence of thanks to the 10,000 employees that is said for convenience in an obviously insincere attempt to appear sympathetic. It would be better and more believable to skip the obvious lie and just be silent. In a way, mass-mailed form letters of thanks would be slightly more personable. That's how bad the CEO thanks appear, i.e., bad optics that are even worse than form letters.
TRIPLE AUTHENICATION (Score:4, Funny)
Message you have a New message. OK
Enter your Google Authenticator 6 Digit Number. OK
We sent a Text with your 6 Digit Code to your Cell Phone, please Enter it. OK
YOUR FIRED!
Email or face to face, does it matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
How would a remote worker like to travel to the office just to be told he was fired? I would think anyone would rather save the trip.
The most important thing is how much severance you will get. If the company pays enough, who cares if it is email or text or whatever? If the severance is minimal, doing it face to face won't help.
A job is a job, your company is not your family, anyone foolish enough to believe any "we are a family" BS from HR is just setting themselves up to be emotionally crushed when they get laid off.
Re: (Score:2)
No, no it doesn't. It doesn't matter to me if I find out I lost my job via email, via teams, via an all hands meeting, or face to face from my boss. I am out of a job. Any emotion applied to the situation is secondary. My employer will be labelled a **** regardless of the method of firing as I go through the stages of grief.
There is no "humane" way of doing this as the method doesn't impact the end results or the feelings of the matter in the slightest.
The case for remote layoff (Score:2)
According to Google, Google has 156,500. 6% of that is 9,390 laid off people. If you're doing it all at once, doing it in person for every one is infeasible. I don't really get the objection anyway. There's nothing they're going to do personally that isn't done equally well remotely. If you were on good terms with your coworkers and boss, stay connected. If you weren't, it's probably just as well it wasn't done in person.
The risk of IP theft is real, too. If almost 10,000 people are being laid off, I guaran
Depends on what you want leaving employees to do (Score:2)
If I thought an employer treated me fairly, I might stay on for a few weeks to finish any ongoing tasks and transfer my knowledge to coworkers. If my potential job change is due to getting a better comp or ability to work from home / from another location, I would try to negotiate that with my current employer first in good faith.
But I guess today's big tech companies would prefer that I quit by sending them an e-mail at 2am in the middle of my oncall shift. Oh well.
Forget layoffs by email (Score:2)
How about cubicles and open office spaces? While executives all have spacious private offices?
Re:Forget layoffs by email (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny anecdote: There was a study done by some business school years (decades) ago. They surveyed a bunch of managers and executives about their staff size, budgets and related stuff and ranked them based on their value to their companies. And they asked them about their cash/stock compensation. Then, they asked them about their other benefits. Including stuff like reserved parking spaces, executive washrooms or dining rooms, larger offices and other goodies. Assuming straight across values, they calculated the compensation values of these extra perks in lieu of cash compensation. And they came up with numbers like: A reserved parking space was worth $20K per year. Then, they calculated what it should cost a company to provide these perks. Like having the maintenance guy paint some V.P's name on the parking space. And they came to the conclusion that these companies are making out like bandits and their management are a bunch of morons.
So when you see your boss sitting in that nice private office, just laugh. And realize that he or she might have passed up a couple of hundred grand a year. Managers are the leaders in "Ooooh! Shiny!"
Ruh roh! (Score:2)
"The same people whose labor helped build the company get suddenly recoded as potential criminals who might steal anything that's not nailed down.."
That employee planted the logic bomb long before you even thought of sacking him, sport.
Fired By Message (Score:2)
Mr. Kim: You are fired. Oh.
Korben Dallas: Well, at least I won lunch.
Mr. Kim: Good philosophy, see good in bad, I like.
Muslims and email (Score:3)
1. You cannot divorce your wife via text message or email. You have to man up and do it face to face.
2. You are not allowed to use a Quran verse as a ring tone. If you do, you are not allowed to pick up a call until the verse has played to its end.
So they would say that firing via email was cowardice and not legal.
Re: (Score:3)
1. You cannot divorce your wife via text message or email. You have to man up and visit the Saudi embassy.
And we all know how that goes.
I'm sure this will improve worker loyalty /s (Score:2)
No. Same answer as 99% of "questions" here. (Score:2)
Firstly, they are not going to call 12,000 employees, a largely remote, into the office in order to let them go. Can you imagine how long that would take?
Also, if I were being fired, then the last thing I would want is to travel all the way into the office solely to be told that I'm no longer an employee.
"All but inevitible" (Score:3)
Sorry but I don't think people who are making $400,000 / year (with 50% of that in stock options that a union employee won't get) and the best health care plans money can buy, are going to be in a big rush to throw that all away by unionizing.
Also, as has been posted, the people who have been laid off are being snapped up of the job market already. The demand for skilled knowledge workers vastly outstrips the supply. https://fortune.com/2023/01/26... [fortune.com]
There is no actual benefit to the majority of big tech to a union. They would be giving up far too much for a modicum of job protection. Asking big tech workers to unionize is akin to asking for the upper management of Ford to unionize. These are not floor workers, they are knowledge workers who command high, high salary packages.
These companies are so stupid (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
what's idiotic is letting businesses lay people off and shift the burden onto the tax payer for the inevitable unemployment claims. change the mechanics of these actions to make it less favorable to cut and run when you hired beyond what you can reasonably sustain.
Re: (Score:3)
this is how it works in Argentina. Companies need to have a "rainy day" fund for firing people. Severance is the same for all companies, because it's the law.
Basically:
* severance is N full salaries where N is the number of years worked at a company. 12 year employee? 12 full salaries as severance
* employees must receive a prior notice (roughly equivalent to their vacation days: 2 weeks 10 years)
* if no prior notice is given, severance is 2x the original amount
* IF there is a justification for firing the em
Re: (Score:2)
Still pissed that you got that 5 inch pianist instead of what you wanted?
Re: (Score:2)
Hey! I resemble that remark.