Re:Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
by danans on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @01:15PM
(#23249329)
> But the point is everyone is expendable.
In the extremum, everyone is expendable, but not everyone is equally expendable, as your own anecdote bears out.
When you expend enough people, especially increasingly less expendable people who carry your basic institutional knowledge and skills, you do so by inflicting damage on your company or organization.
The economic winds may dictate that, as they did frequently in the 2008 economic crisis, but it's not like there is no institutional cost to expending people. This is the basically why countries like Germany and the UK are paying employers to keep idled people on payroll.
But the point is everyone is expendable. I worked for a company around 2009. They laid a lot of people off that had more seniority than I did. I wondered why they kept me around.
Three months later I found out. The founder had written a bespoke development tool chain in C++ using MVC and assembly. The board push him out and the CTO told me that I was now responsible for maintaining the tool chain because I was the only one who knew C++ and assembly.