Would you like this guy to commit hara-kiri?

(I meant some people will, I personally don't expect anything, and don't really care - none of this is in my power in any way, shape or form.)

Or at least, to give the rough date at which he will resign, so that someone more competent will run the company, avoiding the mistakes that brought it so bad that it has to lay off 15%.

There are mistakes that you can recover from, and you don't fire an exec (or anyone) at the first blunder. But if you have to cut an arm to recover from your mistake, you have to be shown the door, or at least the direction of the door.

Baring that, he can substantially reduce his income in the next few years, so that the company can be more generous with the laid off people. Reducing his salary is a step in this direction, but we don't know how the structure of his compensation - salary might be symbolic.

Also, has he made clear to his board that the situation is so bad that shareholders will also have to chip in, and accept reduced or no return on their investment for a number of years ? Again, sharing the burden.

Again, in the grand scheme of things, this is a least closer to "taking responsibility". Just, not there yet.

Disclosure: I was laid off by a big tech company and I think it was BS.

Zoom's revenue grew like 10X over the past two years. They had a legitimate need to hire and grow the business, and now the market has corrected and they don't need as many employees. The hiring and firing decisions are exactly what I would expect from someone optimizing solely for the well-being of the company.

It sucks for the people fired, but that doesn't mean the CEO did a bad job. It means you need to be realistic about what your relationship is to your employer.

There are plenty of companies that exist in very cyclic industries who show the right way to handle this sort of thing. It's not like it's all a big mystery.

This is not self-evident. Hiring the salaried employees over 2+ years could very well be cheaper than contractors.

If they had under-hired during to boom, then we would not have layoff today but the company would not have grown as much. The incentives are set to hire people when you need them and fire them when you don't anymore. Layoffs are not expensive or damaging to the company; they don't have any reason to avoid them. Zoom's stock went up in response to the firing.

The companies I'm aware of that exist in cyclic industries (game dev, retail) tend to either have brutal cyclical layoff periods, leverage a ton of contractors, outsource their work to other firms, or hire seasonal workers.

What in your view is "the right way to handle this sort of thing"?

Don't lead people to think that their positions are permanent when you know very well that there's a good chance they aren't. The easiest way to to make time-limited contracts. That doesn't mean you can't give them benefits such as health insurance.

I'm sorry, but this is the most hindsight is 20/20, armchair CEO thing I've ever heard. Unless you have some sort of magic 8 ball, there was nothing clear about it being temporary, a blip, or any timeline of such.

Is this how we're going to forever define an "employer"? I agree with your sentiment broadly, but what a terrible system we've created for ourselves.

How is this a "terrible system"? What is the replacement system, if so?

Should companies ... what? Provide make work projects? Build things the market will not support?

Or should companies just sell shares, then use the money as a form of welfare. Turn companies into a way for people to donate, so engineers can make 10x what the average employee does?

And by quitting, giving up any power or doing that job he is doing less bad than others?

How did that work out for Senator Franken? Or the Democrats in general?

I swear, it’s like folks can’t help but cut their nose off to spite their faces.

I'm not forcing them to write the words.

If they want to say "we tried, it did not work, the economy got worse than we expected, yet we think we're still in the best position to run the companies, but we have to make hard decisions now", that's their stuff.

I wonder how it would play out for any other employee using this strategy in performance review.

"I take full responsibility for not fulfilling my OKRs, and therefore I will demand that your fire every one else in the team to afford my promotion and raise."

I’ve yet to see any line employee willing to take a major pay-cut because they screwed something up.

The analogy might be a saleperson violating a minor policy to ensure a sale. They would take a fee for violating the position, but their sale bonus would compensate.

Their first "blunder" would have been lying about their security and sending encryption keys and private data to china (https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...)

Even the most generous and forgiving view of Zoom makes them look completely incompetent and unfit for anything you want secure/private. A less generous view would see Zoom as a deceitful and malicious tool for data collection.

At this point, after so many lies and security issues I honestly can't believe anyone trusts Zoom for anything even remotely sensitive, but I'd think even the most trusting people would agree the company has a history of terrible actions/choices and the CEO is the person who is ultimately responsible.

I hope the employees who were laid off find satisfying work with a much better employer.

Did they heap praise on this same CEO, when he hired, provided jobs, record salaries, and more?

Even now, after these layoffs, this same CEO resides over a company worth immensely more, with more employees than 2+ years ago, and at excellent salaries.

So where were the praises before the layoffs? Because that's the logical inverse of the current behaviour. If not, then all these complaints are just immensely hypocritical.

Yet responsibility is a two way street. And it embues more than one stance.

So you will work with dilligence to help the company, take pay cuts, work overtime when times are tough, work for free, struggle and strive and sacrifice, for just as (in your world) the company should maintain your employment through thick and thin, you should do the inverse, yes?

And by this logic, jumping ship for greater pay is questionable too, for what of your obligations? And leaving if given a pay cut in bad times, is wrong as well?

You see, the transaction you envision is framed by a transactional nature. Most feel little obligation other than the metric; I work, you pay.

(This does not discount joy in work, nor happiness at a job done well. It is merely that this is the exchangeful nature I speak of)

And that is the metric all employer/employee relationships are legally, primarily construed.

If you move for a job, negotiate a moving allowance. Thus, you will not be harmed by that loss and cost. If you take a job, ensure severance is a clear and unencumbered thing, and so on and so forth, so you do not lose in this equation.

And if you are at the start of your career, and incapable of such negotiations, due to lack of clout, then you are fortunate for that hire, and in a sense, continuing your education, as your first job teaches much, and thus should expect such things at the first.

But all said, this is merely how things work. Few hearts bleed for the janitor in such situations, or a construction worker, or an employee at mcdonalds.

Yet for the tech worker, replete with 10x these salaries, with perks, with jobs considered cushy by many, the blood of bleeding hearts flows freely, along with the bleating of complaint filling the air.

I have little sympathy.

But seriously, once MS Teams rolled out video conferencing, I wondered how long Zoom will manage to stay around at all.

At least the last time I used MS teams, Zoom had a much better 'upper limit' for participants in a call. Both from a 'hard limit' standpoint as well as an 'after this number the experience degrades'.

To say nothing of dealing with an outage of microsoft services and needing to get on a call to resolve...

That's probably because M$ switched away from bsd to windows again.

When it comes to industry directly related to life, like health, pharmacy, electric/fuel, housing - those kinds of choices made should result in prison.

I mean, sure, it would've been better to not get laid off. Obviously!

But do you really think you would've been better off working somewhere else?

Almost everybody that did get laid off was better off working where they did and enjoying the boom for however long it lasted.

Before someone replies - I know there's exceptions. You moved, you bought house because of your job, just got pregnant, etc. I get it. Obviously layoffs don't impact everyone equally.

But I think a strong majority of people that got laid off were better off working where they did for however long it lasted.

is it realistic to ask a company not to hire if they think they're just going to lay people off 12-18 months later or is that too perfect of a science?

obviously you don't want to ask companies not to try to grow/be conservative because then we'll have too much unemployment... i think?

it's just so "convenient" the timing of all of these layoffs. it's like because one company did it, the climate is "ok, it's acceptable, let's do it now while we can squeeze it in with everybody else doing it so we don't look so bad/get singled out"

i get it, monetary rates/fiscal policy changed. but the fed has been signaling this change for months, going slow. how long has zoom known they need to layoff 15% of people? they've probably been carrying this "weight"/burden for a while?

Then candidates might have made different decisions, like "Maybe this job isn't worth relocating my family internationally for."

It's pretty Machiavellian to present the role as otherwise, when HR had strong suspicions it'd be first on the chopping block.

Does a company have to do this? No. Of course not! And it's not even in their best interest to do it.

But does it make them ethically shitty to optimize their offer attractiveness at the expense of people's lives? In my book, yes.

It also ignores that contract positions are a huge liability in California.

Zoom has little control over the overall societal state of ‘social contract’, they can just pick where they are relative to it and then reap the effects of that.

If they never laid off anyone, in this environment that has effects too, and it will look different than if this was the 50’s or 60’s or whatever idealized situation we might imagine.