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
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
