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.
(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.