Sweet dreams.
Did you find it easier or harder than when you didn’t manage people?
Have you ever laid someone off or fired them? Was it so easy?
I've heard this sentiment from people who have laid those off and it always falls flat to me.
Laying off 1 or 100 people compared to being laid off - especially when the person doing the firing, usually a Director or above, is making 3-4x at least what the line employees are - is like comparing pricking your finger with a needle to cutting it off with a dull knife.
It should be difficult if you're not a sociopath, but they're so incomparable it's not even a statement worth making or considering.
I’m arguing against the idea that if you’re a manager or have money, that moments like this are easy or that there’s no empathy. i’m not saying that anyone should feel bad for directors, CEOs, or whoever, but they shouldn’t paint a ridiculous straw man either.
You could even argue that in Zuck’s position, money is a non-factor. He has more than enough money. What he doesn’t have is a beloved and future-proof company, and these layoffs only push him further from that.
Laying off 13,000 is a statistic.
(Based on a badly misquoted Stalin.)
If this sort of thing bothered Zuck, he would not lay people off.
If it was a small startup (been there done that) then yeah, when you see people day-to-day, and get to know them and their lives outside of work? Really hard to fire people, knowing how it will affect the other people in their lives.
A multi-national, multi-billion dollar company with 80,000+ employees? I'm not so sure.
He didn't pay a fine, it isn't any sort of punishment. He tanked the value of the asset that is the primary component of his wealth. That money is gone whether he "takes responsibility" or not.
Fairly sure that none of the FB employees are paid so low where they have to stop asking their spouses to go on a $20 lunch with friends.
Not saying they shouldn't have saved for a rainy day. This is a scary time to be laid off.
Hey now, if he only has $38B that means he can't afford to buy Twitter until Elon finishes destroying it.
But that's not taking responsibility.
As an analogy, if you crash into another car with your car, you can't just say "It's my fault, I take the blame" and then walk away without paying for the repairs. Accepting blame is a nice first step, but taking responsibility means restoring the victim to how they were before the action happened.
But I’ll tell you this from experience: lasting people off because you chose to grow too fast is really, really hard. I’ve done it, though in my case it was a lot fewer people and I actually knew and loved them all. If I had to lay off 11,000 people I’d lose a lot of sleep over it.
I can’t imagine life is fun for him at the moment. But, just like every affected employee, he will get through it.