I’m in Canada and my bank sent out the annual layoff season email about how there is support for me (in the form of a high interest loan).
It’s good to know they have your back(pocket).
I got a huge severance package after only 1 year at my company. That’s because of labor laws im Canada. It equates to over a year in salary.
My US counterparts didn’t get that, not sure if that 35% applies to the US, but if it does it’s much more expensive everywhere else. And yeah, all this so it looks good on paper.
Labor laws vary by province and I don’t know of any labor law that makes it an obligation to pay over a year of salary after a year of employment, the most probable reason you got that is the employment directives/your employment contract you had with your previous employer.
It sounds like the company has cash and they’re trying to keep up morale. Over a year of severance for employees with less than a year of employment isn’t required by Canadian law that I know of^(not that I’m super knowledgeable about labour law).
90 days is pretty standard in the US, at least with bigger companies that have to abide by the WARN Act
Yeah… that’s probably sometimes true. But I also work in a tech company and holy fuck do we have a lot of dead weight.
That’s a management problem. Managers should be getting poor performers up to speed (or firing them). Dealing with it through layoffs juices the stock and makes investors think the company is LeAn
I agree with you but boy, here in America, employees are disposable assets, not potentially highly useful and reliable experts worth any kind of actually useful investment in or training.
I know. And that’s not how it should be. I’ve had the privilege/luck of working in orgs where my management actually gave a shit and tried to do the best by their employees. If someone is struggling we do our best to get them back to performing or find them a position that works. I don’t think we’ve ever had to fire anyone.
Cutting an arbitrary 10% of people (or a few underperforming products) is absolute bullshit. It’s unfair to the employees because it doesn’t give them a chance to improve, and it’s unfair to customers because stuff they rely on disappears.
I think thats a (shocker) overly simplistic approach to the dynamic. Layoffs are never a good look - and we’ve had an unprecedented boom time in tech for the last 20 years.
Companies were hiring just so competitors couldn’t. That doesn’t really happen anymore outside of AI.
We had what felt like make-work jobs, some nice guy or gal that no one wanted to fire who was “involved” but literally not responsible for anything.
Broad layoffs in the industry gave everyone cover to make unpopular decisions because everyone is doing it.
I don’t think - at least the ones I saw directly - it was the wrong choice.
Everything you described is still mismanagement.
Layoffs are considered a good look by big shareholders, though. Most of the time when the layoffs hit, the stock price goes up. Just look at Unity for a recent example. (I’m convinced they don’t think it’s good for the company and they just like seeing people suffer but i have no evidence for that.)
Layoffs aren’t a good look for a lot of shareholders unless the org is bloated. There are a variety of metrics to compare companies against each other in terms of head count efficiency.
Company values are basically just a view of future revenues minus expenses plus/minus sentiment. If you lower the company expenses, all else being equal, the share price should go up. Those shares are worth more.
But it also might say we’re not growing as fast as we thought we would or our business is challenged in other ways which will negatively affect sentiment.
Shareholders don’t like layoffs. They would much prefer you a) hired the right people the first time, b) hired the right number of people, or failing that c) grew into the number of people that you hired.
No one loves a declining business, and many businesses doing layoffs are - either outright declining or declining growth.
Sooo… good strategy then, if you’re a capitalist sociopath…
Unfortunately cuts don’t usually target the dead weight. I’ve worked in IT consulting for a while now, and cuts to consultants is always the first step. Just across the board, companies slash their consulting budgets blindly. Most of the time, we are leaving behind company critical systems to be supported by the “dead weight” people that couldn’t tell their ass from a hole in the ground.
I’m currently on an integrated team, meaning half our developers are consultants and half are regular employees. The consultants consistently put out significantly higher quality work in a fraction of the time. But as of Jan 1, we cut almost all of them. And as of June, we’re cutting the rest. What’s going to be left behind is half the number of people that will put out less than a quarter of the results than before.
But the reality is that consultants are easy to cut. You don’t have to call them layoffs or pay them severance.
That’s because the better people leave to become consultants. People aren’t going into consulting to make less money.
And does the dead weight get cut during layoff season? Or does it affect people who are capable but won’t take bullshit from management?
I’ve seen both, sometimes middle management gets gutted and things are reorganized, sometimes it’s more focused on the grunts.
You can only generalize it so far
I actually think we did a pretty good job - but our “layoff” was a mini one. Fractions of a percent. But of the people I knew, wasn’t worried about any of them. Felt bad for the people, they were all nice, but none of em were good at their jobs.
Quite a few sr directors and VPs were let go, or allowed to leave….
For me it finally did. A long time team member who in the past year probably had negative productivity was let go. Sucks for that person, but a big relief for everybody else.
Now this is Sweden where unions and labor laws are strong, so usually it’s difficult to fire long time employees like that.
I inherited a team when a manager left a nonprofit that I worked at. This was in the Netherlands, and in my earlier management training here we were basically told that the list of valid reasons to fire someone does not include poor performance.
Of the team, like 4 people were pretty good, a couple excellent, and two were basically dead weight. One even worse, because he was a constant source of negativity. I spent ages working on ways to figure out how to help, cajole, and otherwise magically somehow improve these two bad workers ability to contribute to our company.
Eventually in frustration I went to HR, and was like, “look at all this shit I’ve tried, what else can I do?” The head of HR was like, “Why did you waste so much time. We’ll fire them.” I was shocked, because I didn’t think that was possible! It turns out that there is always a way to fire someone. You have to give them severance pay, but better pay someone to leave than have them ruining morale for everyone.
I talked to one of the people I fired a couple of years later. He thanked me. He was working for Greenpeace at the time, and basically said that he felt trapped at a good paying job, and getting fired gave him motivation. I also ran into the negative guy, and he remains a worthless shit.
Anyway the point is that management should not rely on layoffs to sort out staff issues. Sort out your problems when you have them.
Broadly from what I saw, it was pretty much all the people that didn’t do anything useful.
In fact a lot of them were the guys who didn’t give anyone shit, because they didn’t do shit.
I’m in tech and there’s a lot of dead weight in my company, but our layoffs don’t really target those people. We just lost several of the best engineers in my department for stupid reasons (introducing a new c-suite position), and it caused problems immediately.
I didn’t realize it at the time but I was part of this horrible trend. I was doing support for a large software company that’s big in system administration circles.
I was laid off just prior to the end of the year. December 15, if I recall correctly (somewhere around there regardless). Shortly after me, will into layoff season, my entire support center was decommissioned and all of my co-workers joined me in unemployment. Within a few months the center went from hundreds of employees to zero.
They took the companies name off the building a year later. This was a bit less than 10 years ago and I’m still bitter; especially since the CEO visited the center about a month before he laid off the entire center, directly in the wake of laying off the front line customer support team in my center and outsourcing their jobs to low cost geographies; he had the gall to lecture is about how the layoff of the CS team didn’t and shouldn’t imply anything about the support team. Blah blah blah, different business unit, different operating criteria, yadda yadda yadda… All bullshit to try to get us to work harder right up until the bitter end.
They gave everyone two months pay as severance with no consideration to how long you had worked there. Many people were shown the door after the better part of a decade, with no additional consideration than what people who were there less than a year recieved. I still don’t like that CEO, and he’s doing rounds in the tech circles with people singing his praises. Makes me sick.
I don’t understand why we can’t name and shame these days. They shamed you. They have tarnished your rep by making you redundant. They showed no professional courtesy. Fuck them. Name and shame.
These cunts continue to do the rounds because no one ever outright calls these cunts out.
I don’t understand why we can’t name and shame these days
Power. Respect for authorities.
You need to be hired somewhere else. The new company you apply at don’t know what actually happened, it’s all hearsay and bad employees may make shit up to get more pity or make them look less bad if they were fired for legit reasons. In the confusion they’ll want to defend their interest, and some may just be bad people to begin with.
And then there might be repercussions because they have more means than you do.
This is the unfortunate truth, I think you can debate how likely you are to encounter this kind of backlash for an anonymous comment on a random Lemmy post, but if you did it more publicly on like LinkedIn or something then definitely.
I’m not so angry about it. It was almost downright traumatic at the time, suddenly being unemployed but bluntly, I wasn’t a good fit for the job and I was thinking about quitting after the holidays anyways.
The biggest difference for me was that if I had quit of my own accord, I would have lined up a new job before I did, so the down time between jobs would have been minimal.
The CEO visiting and spouting the crap he did was probably the worst offense in my mind. I can’t say that he lied specifically, more like, intentionally misled the workers into a false sense of security. I never bought it and it was one of the minor factors in my decision to leave (even though I hadn’t fully committed to that decision yet). The biggest factor to depart for me was that the workload was very high and it was designed like a call center. About halfway through my employment there, which only lasted about a year, they changed cubicles (keeping in mind this happened maybe 6-10 months before the center had no workers), to increase worker density. They crammed us in and loaded us with more work than was reasonable. Most were at some stage of drowning, some were treading water, and only a handful were actually thriving in that environment. I was solidly on the “I’m drowning” side.
The reason why is easy to see. I’m a very detail oriented person, so I usually take a little more time to complete things than most of my counterparts. I also struggle with continually changing contexts that I’m working under. So being customer facing to a company with literally tens or hundreds of thousands of customers, the context was always different.
I didn’t handle all that very well. I would have been far better as an escalation resource, but at the time, I lacked the skillet to get that kind of position. That place taught me a lot… And the lessons learned are things I’ll never forget.
I’m now much happier in a senior support role for a much smaller company. It’s still customer facing (think managed service provider), but the scale is much less than what I experienced at that job. I’m not bitter and I don’t have prejudice towards the company, only that CEO who no longer works there. He’s now at a company that makes hardware, with a blue logo and a name that comes to mind when you say “CPU”. But you didn’t hear that from me.
3rd Quarter Report: “Wow, they’ve cut operating costs by nearly a third!”
1st Quarter Report: “Wow, they’ve taken their profits and hired thousands of new employees!”
But we cut costs by 5% for the quarterly report and got a nice bonus for that. That’s all that counts, after all.
Line goes up!!
For my company, layoff season is traditionally Q4. I assume they do that so they can load all the expense in the year ending as a “one time” charge that they then subtract from the adjusted earnings, as if it never happened. And then do it again every year.
Unfortunately, starting last year in Q2, we seem to have moved to rolling layoffs. There’s a high likelihood that my team will be reorganized twice in 9 months (while still implementing the last round). That will also be the 3rd round of layoffs in 9 months. My boss thinks I’m safe in the next round, but I’m doubtful.
I’ve been in your shoes. I hope you are interviewing. Your boss will not tell you the truth, but what you need to hear.
We got 3 rounds in the last 12 months. At this rate I’m expecting another by March.
Layoff the C-Suites
Not supported in the UK
It’s on Spotify, if that helps. https://open.spotify.com/episode/0JDqELjP3ylelBkXl7sgSY?si=3Yv0sl5PRo6Xu2f_lfqjMw
'Tis the season to be layed off. Falalalalaaaa Falalalaaaa! 🎵 🎶 🎵 🎶
