It’s nice to see the phrase “I am accountable” followed by a description of what that accountability entails.

Whether or not the steps taken seem fair is a separate conversation, but it seems like a step in the right direction.

When you’re making CEO salary, no amount of salary reduction will have a day to day impact, but this seems strongly symbolic at least.

This is actually a pretty big step, but the move will need some benefit to the company for it to become more common-place.

They might roll these bonuses into subsequent bonuses, but that may actually end up being a motivator if these bonuses are truly forfeit until things are improved by the executives.

"Hey, we are laying off 3,000 people. Because of that, I am firing myself and the company will no longer have a CEO and will have to find someone else, starting immediately. In addition, I plan to donate all of my life's savings and file for unemployment like everyone else and, if needed, live in my van down by the river. I hope this makes everyone feel vindicated and that the scales of justice remain balanced. God Bless."

A team does terrible for awhile -- should the coach be removed? A company does terrible -- should the CEO be removed? This is what accountability means. Just this year I was hired by a Board Of Directors, of a startup with 150 people, to do an evaluation of the technology and code, and I found epic levels of tech debt and irresponsible decision making. When I gave my report to the Board Of Directors, the Board responded by firing both the CTO and the CEO. This seems normal to me.

All laying people off means is that there are items that the company will not be executing against in the future. It may or may not mean that they're in a bad spot, but very often - and the case with many of the current tech giants laying off that we're seeing - it simply means they grew more than they needed for the road ahead.

Whether or not that's good or bad is a fair question. It was asked on a previous thread whether we as a society should be comfortable with companies gabling with the jobs of their employees, and I think that's a worthwhile question. But it most certainly does not mean that a company is "doing terrible."

If you're hiring in bulk to tie up talent your competitors might want during a boom, and then promptly firing thousands in the bust, you're bad people and should feel bad.

But then, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get an executive to understand the impacts of their decision when their compensation package depends upon them not understanding it.

If the Board fails to do its job? What, then? Yep, shareholders have to intervene.

Which leads to what happens if the shareholders themselves don't figure out what to do or the right-decision to be made? Well, they lose a bunch of value as the company's value [eventually] plummets.

I have to assume it goes beyond just not following best practices, and perhaps into deep levels of pointless "not invented here syndrome" or some other massive waste of resources.

A BOD doesn’t hire someone to do this without there being some suspicion within the board that there is an issue. That board was likely divided on keeping one or both of those individuals and your results were used to sway votes.

I'm kidding, of course. Layoffs rarely represent failure, they're usually just a cost cutting measure to increase profitability and make shareholders happy. They're just framed as failure every time because people take more kindly to "we had to lay 15% of employees off because of the economy" than "we had to lay 15% of employees off to meet our quarterly growth goals".

However your solution, as seen from outside that pain, is "worse than the disease".

Firstly it's worth pointing out that most (but not all) layoffs right now are a result of over-hiring during the pandemic. Now, granted, those jobs didn't last forever, but they did last a while and kept a lot of people working during a time when a lot of people couldn't work. It would likely have been very profitable to not make those hires in the first place.

Secondly, you are proposing penalties out of proportion to the mistake. Or put another way you are strongly disincentiving hiring in the first place.

The more penalties there are for failure, the lower the chance that people will try at all. Your suggestion that over-hiring leads to criminal fraud, or personal destitution, has out outcome - no one will ever hire anyone.

In a private company the decision makers are typically the owners. They're taking risks everyday, spending "their money" and working hard to keep everyone employed. It's a weighty responsibility. But life happens and things don't always work out as planned. Management-via-hindsight is easy.

The comment literal dripped sarcasm

I mean honestly…you thought the above (emphasis is mine) was serious?

That truly means "taking ownership" of what happened.

The individuals leaving were not the ones who hired or authorized the hires without the evaluation of long-term viability for the organization. They were just doing their jobs.

So, for those keeping track, Mr. Yuan is giving up about $300k in cash, but still receiving about $13M in stock. That's a 2.3% level of "accountability".

That said, the swings tech stock over the last couple years have very little to do with his leadership. Yuan is not responsible for the tech bubble and its deflation. No human on the planet could have made zoom hold its peak stock price.

It doesn't make sense to accuse someone of not feeling the economic impact of a downturn at all while downplaying the fact that they actually lost $5billion.

Tell me, how did his lifestyle change as a result of losing this $5 billion? What actual pain of loss did he feel, above and beyond seeing some numbers go down?

If you were serious or had devoted any thought into the issue you wouldn't even consider the silliness of framing a $5billion loss as a lifestyle issue.

But at the end of the day, he won't work for nothing if you took all of his comp, so fair accountability is not really possible in this light.

It also makes it hurt more when you are laid off and the illusion is broken.

You only ever work for yourself. A single employer means you have a single client. It also means you only have one source of income. That is always risky, because work done for others is always temporary. Honestly full time employment is way way -more- risky than being an independent contractor with a few small predictable retainer contracts.

Also key to remember is that no matter how rewarding and interesting the work is you will eventually lose access to that too unless you fought hard enough for it to be open source.

If you want a job where losing that job is tantamount to company failure, start your own business. When it fails (and statistically it probably will), your failure will also lead to your job loss. Congratulations.

If you "have a job", you're accepting being a cog in a machine that's primarily not about you. I make that trade-off, as do most people, but don't mislead yourself about what's going on.

Did the workers build the company? Did the capital build the company by providing the pay to pay the workers?

Did the workers take any risks? Or did they sign an employment contract, and get paid the same every month regardless of performance? Their only risk, that the contract will end, perhaps unexpectedly [1]?

In the case of small private businesses (which of course the vast majority of businesses are) did the "Capitalist" worry about making payroll this month, get short paid when cash is short, try and predict the future, make tough decisions when things go wrong, and somehow be a human?

Of course the socialists believe the capitalists should keep those people hired forever (or better yet, not hire them to begin with?) - ironically that's what the capitalists want as well. But life happens and hard decisions have to be made.

[1] risk costs money. If you have one employer you are at risk. As much as you can, hedge this risk with liquid savings. This has been good advice for thousands of years. Most workers live so close to poverty that this is unattainable. However folks at (big tech whoever) have the means to do this AND get decent severance, so I'm not crying for them just yet.

To be fair, it's only a pair of random internet forum posters who are complaining that this is not enough. There are plenty of people in this discussion arguing otherwise.

People lost their livelihoods, and in the US, their access to affordable healthcare until they figure out a new solution or get a new job.

There is a difference.

…and the stakes are even higher today if you count the number of people impacted by poor decisions.

Accountability means (from every definition I’ve found!) taking responsibility for one’s actions and their consequences.

Falling on one’s sword has, from what I’ve always read, has been portrayed as someone accepting too much responsibility, to the point they actually avoid dealing with the consequences of their actions and make the situation worse overall by killing themselves.

After all, no need to actually work hard making amends or doing better if you’re dead, eh?

And it can even make the person doing it somewhat of a martyr, even if they created the whole situation to begin with, as it can make it look like those calling for it or pushing for retribution were actually just looking for a scapegoat and the dead one is actually a victim.

My connotation has always been ritual suicide.

E.g. Seppuku in Japan, captains going down with the ship, ect.

The origin of the phrase in the west stems from the roman practice of military ritual suicide following defeat. It was more a matter of honor than seeking victimhood.

A captured general represented an embarrassment to the empire, provides the enemy with a hostage, and would likely be tortured to give up information. Suicide in defeat was honorable as it served the empire and denied the enemy leverage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Ancient_Roman_militar...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorinus_(died_53_BC)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43830420

That said, I think it is a huge stretch to translate this history to the context of CEO accountability.

If someone (going down the ship wise) doesn't get on a lifeboat when everyone else has already gotten off, then yeah it's probably more about avoiding actual accountability (aka having to stand and take responsibility/long term consequences).

Regarding Victimhood/Martyrdom, there are many apocryphal accounts and personal anecdotes one can throw out. You'll get stories anyone in senior leadership when a CEO gets pushed out, to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%ABshingura] (specifically Lord Asano), to Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnaeus_Domitius_Corbulo], and many others.

Sometimes folks want blood, and they won't be satisfied until they get it. And often someone either stupidly volunteers (actually), or gets 'volunteered' by their boss.

Also, how is killing yourself quickly and (relatively) painlessly after a military failure NOT the relatively easy way out - instead of say, dying while fighting the enemy to the death (probably horribly disfigured and maimed in the process), or dying in torture while not giving anything up, or dying while trying to save the ship and the other crew, or returning in shame and being a social outcast, or dying after being shamed in trial followed by an execution, etc.

Literally all those other options can seem a whole lot harder than a gladius through the solar plexus at the moment. Also, notably, sometimes folks had 'help' on that last bit, though rarely was it featured prominently in the PR.

Seppuku - similar. Rather than 'living with dishonor' (aka being outcast from a insular and all encompassing society), or having to stand trial and defend yourself and getting shamed then executed anyway, etc. it's killing yourself 'with honor', so your family doesn't get their benefits taken and similarly outcast (as badly). Seppuku generally involves the second beheaded the person before they've had a chance to suffer much too, though there have been famous 'mistakes' made at times.

It also could be ordered by the Daimyo, Shogun, etc. and it was pretty common (from accounts at the time) for folks to be thrown under the bus and ordered to commit it if they didn't succeed at what the lord had ordered them to do or were just being inconvenient to the narrative. Including significant 'help' from seconds. Which is, well, pretty much the example of a scapegoat.

>Falling on one’s sword has, from what I’ve always read, has been portrayed as someone accepting too much responsibility, to the point they actually avoid dealing with the consequences of their actions and make the situation worse overall by killing themselves.

Yes there are differences in my examples. Captains are on boats, and Samurai are in Japan. I'm not trying to say they are identical in every way.

The common factor is that these actions are all seen as honorable positive within the context of the society where they took place.

I get that you might have your own personal take and values on these types of actions. People could have suffered more or made a more utilitarian Choice if their objective was the greater social good.

Yes, I'm sure many people have been made to fall on their sword as patsies. However, I don't think that changes the common understanding of the idiom, or how the practice was viewed in the historical context.

You may see it as the coward's way out to avoid living with shame or fixing your problems, which is fine. I just don't think it is an accurate depiction of how contemporaneous people viewed it. People did not look at a captain going down with the ship or a general falling on their Gladius as a coward dodging their responsibilities. I don't think most people today feel that way either, but obviously there are exceptions with you being one

Unless the Captain saw everyone off in lifeboats and then stayed on the ship (very unlikely), it’s far from what you are describing and I was clear on that.

I also pointed out that the actual reality on the ground is almost never what the mental image or PR is meant to instill, and is often (in reality) a way to take someone out somewhere and pin all the blame on them.

I very much doubt, for instance, in ANY of those examples I gave, they actually did what they were said to have done in the way and for the reasons they were said to have done it.

But there are situations where it definitely is the easier way out to do it that way literally.

Someone who gets into an obstinate fight with a boss over a minor issue, or who does something common and then when it turns out it’s a problem stands up and tries to defend it, and then gets fired, would be a common use of the idiom in my experience.

A Phyrric victory, ‘he picked that hill to die on’, he died tilting at windmills’, etc. could also be used.

I wonder if you hold this level of rigour towards your own failings and shortcomings, or if this desire is directed exclusively at everyone besides yourself.

Any CEO in his position is accountable by default. They lose a literal fortune when the company doesn't perform. This meme of "but how are you taking accountability" confuses the heck out of me given this context.

The cynic in me suspects that this is going to trickle down - there will be 20% salary reductions for everybody, and this will become a trend just like the layoffs did.

Except, lately anyway, those people were probably already living close to paycheck-to-paycheck, as many low six figure earners are in this horrible economy. Whereas, the CEO and other execs will likely not even miss the money.

This is the way to notify people of a layoff. Immediate binary yes/no.

Although there is no great way to do it, this layoff seems pretty respectful and well done.

- invite everyone 2 weeks before to a townhall named [REQUIRED] An update on your employment

- read the names of the fired people from a fancy envelope

- when someone is called, their corp access is revoked in real time and they are kicked off the call

Having been through it, let me tell you that's a gut wrenching n minutes to wait, though.

*EDIT: Ah. "Negative acknowledgement." In other words, someone hears from them regardless of whether they're impacted or not, i.e. [NOT IMPACTED].

It's at least something more than we've seen from the majority of other layoffs. The severance is decent too so it's hard to deny Zoom's handled it better at least relative to how others have

No, it's robotic, and pathetic.

They'll soon be writing these lovely messages to their employees, as well as you're fired emails with ChatGPT.

Which way do you feel its the best way to be notified you're being fired?

I'm sure there is no good way of getting the news.

the biggest reason these companies are getting flak is due to pretending they weren't like other industry "soulless corporations". People naturally don't like hypocrisy, you can't LARP like your employees are family to squeeze productivity out of them and then drop them at the slightest downturn in profit.

the social contract has been broken for the worse between employees and companies, people just need to act accordingly

Would you like this guy to commit hara-kiri?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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’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.

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.

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 telegraph the nature of the position 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.

Even symbolic gesture is more than I have come to expect these days. While it may not be what is demanded, I welcome it as a welcome change.

That said, I disagree with the categorical phrasing. Clearly some reduction would make an impact ( I think we agree that 100% would; if so, at this point it only becomes a question of what is reasonable ).

To your point, if one has a habit of spending lavishly, it seems fair that the source of funding has to come from somewhere that isn’t this year’s paycheck, but it seems like the end result would be a faster-than-planned depletion of resources rather than impacting day to day living. And he’s presumably back to making normal salary within a year.

Still, day to day living expenses are in the eye of the beholder. Once you get to that point, you do miss little comforts in life like being able to eat endangered penguin pate or rent a sub party at mariana trench. It is harder to justify that expense when you just had your salary adjusted. Not impossible. Just harder.

<< And he’s presumably back to making normal salary within a year.

I am tempted to set myself a reminder to check, but I don't think you are wrong by saying that.

If I remember correctly, Steve Jobs had a $1 salary.

And a Learjet.

A lot of these folks don't make most of their money from salary. If his main income is from stocks, then he may actually be doing fairly well.

Unlike Steve Jobs though, the Zoom CEO won't be able to back-date his options to collect a cool $20 mill in capital gains [0]

[0]: https://www.cultofmac.com/443542/steve-jobs-apple-stock-back...

Fairly standard type of literary trick.

But on the other, as you note, it’s just a symbolic thing. As such, a large part of me feels, do we really benefit as a society for those increasing even more the extent to which virtue signaling is institutionalized?

So I agree in spirit, but worry that this is an under appreciated long term risk to business culture specifically, and society more generally. “Symbolic” on some level really just translates to “BS” and we have more than enough of that already.

Doing this and saying nothing might have had a similar degree of sanctimoniousness. I guess I think that if he thought this was a good idea he should have waited a few days to do it quietly, instead of pretending to understand the struggles of the employees in his own personal financial life.

However, if it helps some employees process it maybe it's worth it even if it rubs some the wrong way, like it would me.

wouldn't be surprised if is a white lie or straight lie.

with corpo-speak it's often more about what isn't said then what is.

No big corp CEO will ever be accountable for anything.

The equity grant that they receive is often millions more than the salary and the company performance bonus.

I think forgoing the equity and instead adding it to the severance pool would be truly owning up to the decisions made by executive management.

It's not that I think the guy is a saint or anything, but many CEOs conduct layoffs and write about how sad they are without making any financial sacrifice. So even a limited gesture of giving up ~30% of his potential gains this year is unusual by prevailing norms.

As another commenter noted, the layoffs made shareholders money. Assuming the board is largely made up of equity holders, a clawback would punish exactly the sort of behavior and performance they want.

Equity confers different responsibilities, rights and, yes, paydays than labor. Acting like every hit the latter takes should somehow mean a haircut to the former ignores that.

Don't really think it diminishes my point.

So he goes from making over $1mil USD to $6,000/year. If the above is correct.

The salary alone should be enough to keep a couple people around. Yes, that doesn't make a big dent in ~1300 people laid off. But I imagine for those being laid off it's slightly less shitty (still super shitty) knowing that the CEO isn't still making 7 or 8 figures, like at most companies.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1585521/000119312519...

Zoom had a use for you during COVID, now they don't: bye-bye. You were used, they got what they needed and now it is time to go. That's how workers are treated and people should understand that. You are not George from Engineering, you are employee #3223 and you cost $x per year. Past maybe 20 - 25 people, you are nothing but a number and quickly after you no longer create more value than you are paid, you are out.

Unlike others cough Facebook cough Google cough, Zoom actually a reason to scale during COVID; they were relatively new, they had crazy demand, and the access to money to do it. Zoom was given a blank check and leadership would've been worse for _not_ taking it.

That happened, now it is waning and it is time to 'right size' (barf) and continue what they were doing before.

Good on him for cutting his own salary and comp even if I don't think he is as dumb as Zuckerberg or others for their company's paper growth.

I can't tell if all of this is due to the age of people who have joined the workforce over the last decade, when we were in a constant uphill swing.

Markets go through cycles, boom and bust. We happen to be in part of the cycle where interest rates are rising, inflation is high, profits margins are tightening and companies are laying off.

"You were used" is a bit much. You go to work to earn a paycheck. I'm not sure how many people bought into the whole "we're a family" stuff, but obviously these are for-profit corporations and they are beholden only to their shareholders. There was never the illusion otherwise, unless you truly believed that now that you're in, you're in.

I'm older so I've been through a number of these cycles, including having been laid off. Perhaps the decade+ of constant upward tragectory had people disillusioned that this was "normal". It wasn't, and now companies are downsizing.

I'd generally agree. I think my sentiment was a counter-point to the whole "we are a family", "we care about you" that companies put out to employees.

Employees especially need to understand that's fine and good, but companies exist to make money. They _can_ care about you but only to the extent that it makes them money through your continuing loyalty. Your manager as a human can care about you, your manager as a boss cannot.

I don't think many top-level managers is fooling themselves into thinking this behavior is anything but company loyalty.

I am not quite entirely jaded, but I would certainly have choice words for my 24 year old self being overjoyed about my company buying me dinner at the office. It's a fun gesture but you need to understand as an employee what your company's priorities are and not get fooled into it being anything but a monetary transaction.

But yes, to summarize, my language was a bit more coarse and pointed than the situation probably calls for.

I've lived through four recessions now and worked through two. My first working recession was while I was putting myself through college. We used to average one per decade, but now we're bordering on two. To understand the magnitude, my first working recession was a complete life reset for me. It's hard to look at businesses that are cash rich, posting record profits, and then doing layoffs as a result.

Recession timelines: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Un...

There is a lot of corporate ink spilled trying to convince people of exactly this. The counter to this kind of treatment is a strong union. Hopefully this goes a ways toward convincing people they need that level of protection.

If Zoom becomes unusable because it is crashing all the time and everyone switches to another service where do you think the money is going to come from to pay these "protected" employees? Fire the CEO, sure, but where is the money coming from for the thousands of other employees?

mentor them? help them find a better position? change managers? lots of things you can do before firing... also i think the word "protection" the previous commenter means is 'protection from random/mass firings/layoffs without cause' not firing for being lazy/sabotage etc

None of those help if you just need less people on payroll.

That's "You were used" with extra steps. Why are you trying to rebrand this?

> There was never the illusion otherwise, unless you truly believed that now that you're in, you're in.

Just because people knew it was happening doesn't mean it's consensual or okay. Workers know that a system beholden only to shareholders isn't good for them, but they can't exactly go work elsewhere.

Of course you were "used". You were used to get work done in exchange for a paycheck.

That's how work ... works. I am confused by the outrage ... did engineers think signing on to a company meant they were set for life? That once they were onboarded they were sheltered from future storms?

The tides turn, and right now the tide is going out. Eventually, this process will reverse and the cycle begins anew.

It doesn't imply that you didn't get anything, it implies that you didn't get enough.

> But if you got paid, maybe you came out ahead on the deal?

Workers almost never come out ahead on the deal. Company sees 100% revenue growth (as a result of worker's labor), worker gets a 3% raise. Company sees 10% revenue loss, worker gets laid off. It's the same story every cycle: the people at the top reap benefits while the people at the bottom pay the losses.

It's only in the business echo chamber that anyone is even saying what you're saying. Everyone else knows that layoffs are bad for workers.

Of course layoffs are bad for workers.

I'm just taking the controversial position that on the other hand, jobs are good for workers.

Is there any case where you'd ever admit that corporations can harm workers, or is it really just impossible for corporations to do any harm within your worldview?

Facebook had $40.7 billion cash on hand in 2022[1] and laid off 11,000 workers in the same year[2]. That's literally $3.7 million cash on hand per worker laid off, or $370K/year over the next 10 years, if the recession lasts that long. Meta could definitely weather this recession without laying off these workers.

But let me guess, they don't have any responsibility to workers. The only people companies are responsible to are shareholders, amirite? It doesn't matter who gets harmed, we just have to follow these arbitrary rules!

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/09/tech/meta-facebook-layoffs/in...

Either way you'll quickly learn that turning your hard work into revenue on your own with any decent amount of efficiency is not that simple.

> Either way you'll quickly learn that turning your hard work into revenue on your own with any decent amount of efficiency is not that simple.

I work as a consultant in part because it makes turning my work into revenue easier. :D

But, that's overly-glib--I'm aware that my career is somewhat of an outlier here. The more important point to be made is that "value", in the capitalist sense of "the value of something is what people are willing to pay for it", has nothing to do with actual value. The pandemic highlighted this when it became apparent that all our "essential" workers also happen to be our least paid. The very basics of human survival would cease to be available without these people: food, water, etc.--do you really think the software which allows you to post pictures of your brunch for your friends is more valuable than not starving to death?

The reason for the disconnect between pay and value is that pay is determined by the people at the top, who obviously have an incentive to decide their own work is valuable and therefore they deserve the most pay. Unsurprisingly, the people with the power to enforce their opinions on what is most valuable, have decided that "deciding what is most valuable" is the most valuable skill of all! The narrative that a CEO is more valuable than a farm hand exists because it's propagated by those who have the most to gain from it.

I won't accuse you of being one of those people, but at the very least you've bought into a story which isn't true.

To be clear, the people at the top, don't have

1 - you are wrong because you're not that good

2 - you are right, but the overhead necessary for the company to survive does not allow them to pay you as much

3 - you are right and they are exploiting you

The way to prove case 1 wrong is to start your own business or consultancy and earn more money than you did before. But to prove 2 or 3 you would have to create a very similar company and prove it can successfully operate while earning the employees much more money, which would be very difficult.

There is no difference between possibilities 2 and 3. If the overhead necessary for a company to survive doesn't allow them to pay their workers, the company shouldn't survive. Mysteriously, companies that underpay their workers always have money to pay their execs and shareholders--you're just expecting workers to pay the overhead instead of the people at the top. All this is, is a shitty excuse for exploiting workers.

As for proving 1 incorrect: whenever essential workers unionize--analogous to starting their own consultancy--money suddenly materializes to pay them more. As it turns out, essential workers are essential, and the only reason they get paid less is that the people at the top can pay them less and keep more money for themselves.

Not even close for many corporations.

Both sides got what they needed. The company got work done, and the employee got paid.

Calling either side "used" makes no sense to me. Employment is always a temporary relationship that can be ended by either side at will.

Similarly most non-marriage romantic relationship can be trivially ended "at will", but people get plenty upset when those end early than one party had anticipated.

More important though is the inherent asymmetry: it hurts employees much more to be terminated from an employer than the employer hurts when employees leave. You know, unless those employees organize and all leave at the same time. And we know well that companies put a fair bit of energy keeping that from happening.

Historically the way to resolve this asymmetry was an implicit understanding that you won't arbitrarily get terminated unless the employer has no other choice. This implicit assumption has been weakening over time.

I'm not arguing that layoffs don't suck for those involved, but if offered a contract where I couldn't be laid off or quit for N years, I probably wouldn't take it. Layoffs already have some legal protection in most places that require severance and other things that quitting or firing for cause don't.

For all the companies like Zoom and Shopify claiming they thought the COVID gravy train would never end, there was never a chance of that. But they hired as if that was the reality because because of the asymmetry: Your output is .000001% of what the company needs to function.

Meanwhile even if you're saving 50% of your pay and living on the other 50%, that's many orders of magnitude more need

-

So yes, either side can walk away tomorrow morning, but who's more likely to be hurt? Definitely not the company, so there's no real punishment for overhiring knowing you'll need to fire.

If anything you get rewarded by the market: If company A hires in a sustainable way that can weather headwinds (believe it or not, this used to be somewhat common) and company B goes full "feast or famine", the market rewards B for their growth, then rewards B when they lay off a bunch of people. Meanwhile A is punished for limiting growth, and not really rewarded for not having fired people, since valuations are bad at capturing nuanced ideas like "B just fired their best minds, while A has cultivated an effective workforce" (just check out Zoom's ticker today)

I use a worker to build my house, but that doesn't mean I am abusing them. They are using me too. no hard feelings.

One of the primary definitions of that word describes a scenario where one person exploits another person for their own gain.

Any time the word is used to describe the nature of one’s relationship with another person, that definition is going to come to mind.

I can’t agree that there is no implication of injustice.

It all comes down to social expectations of if the nature of the transaction.

"I used Bob the contractor to build my house" has no implication of injustice.

"My ex-wife used me for money" has significant implications.

Used has no negative implication if used to describe a honest and mutually beneficial transaction.

I honestly wish HN would adopt a "no semantics arguments" rule. These debates over what one person thinks a word means vs what another person thinks they mean are just uninteresting and really never lead anywhere, especially when all sides pretty much agree on the underlying issue.

A couple days ago I made a comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34656626 , where I even started off by saying "well, perhaps word X isn't exactly the right word", and still the original commenter felt compelled to reply in 6 different comments why he was so sure his definition of that word was the right one and it was important that everyone else agree with him. :shrug:

Once you learn a second language, you have to confront this reality. But many Americans only ever use English, and it's maybe easier to never have to think about this then?

If anything, this is because Americans on HN think too much about the concepts underlying words and don't just take everything literally as defined.

That said, taking everything as textbook literal isn't viable in most languages. English isn't even close to the top of the heap of languages that use idioms and contextual clues to change the meaning of words and phrases. In the context of a thread where people are likely upset about layoffs, taking the use of the word "used" to have more of a negative than neutral connotation makes sense.

It's not as if we're looking at a textbook example with "Jack used their employee James" and you have to guess what definition of "used" is intended. No one is arguing that OP meant that Zoom literally picked up their employees and wielded them in combat, even though that could be a viable context-less definition for "used".

That's all I was trying to do here, and in this other more interesting thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34697045

That's what a lot of people fail to internalize: If a company is able to grow, then it must equally be able to shrink. Otherwise, you hire contractors or third parties.

[1] https://www.manager-tools.com/podcasts

No one is confused about this.

The disagreement is whether this is how it should be.

I used to work for a company with nearly 300,000 employees. Our user names in Active Directory were randomly generated. So our user names were just gibberish, like "ughwyrt"

I always thought that was a bad PR move on their part, but whatever

I don't know who you're talking about but it should have only taken common sense to know you're disposable as an employee.

Workers get paid along the way, not sure that constitutes being "used". I think worker rights aren't great in the United States, but characterising US tech workers who are paid extremely well as having been used is a bit much.

If you own 51% of the company, not only are you disposable, but unlike any employee on earth, you can actually lose money by working.

You can also work and make $0 for your efforts, and that's not the worst outcome.

And there are no worker's rights or Marxist organizations ready to organize a riot for you. There are no shareholder unions either, just increasingly absent regulators, comically incompetent courts, and lengthy legal processes.

1. Layoffs would be less painful is major aspects of your life (read: health insurance or your visa) wasn’t tied to employment. Yes the layoffs would still hurt but it wouldn’t be such a catastrophe for the actual workers. This is a discussion for another thread but it’s at least worth mentioning here.

2. Unions could certainly provide some protection and security for affected workers. There’s obviously a lot of pluses and minuses about “US” unions but workers guilds, the AMA and bar associations show that there’s other ways for professionals to protect their employment while still providing training, certification, and quality workers.

3. The bigger issue seems to be lack of employee ownership in the company. Yes you can purchase stock on the market or through equity grants but they are an optional expense. If these laid off employees were earning actual vested stock from their start date they’d at least leave the company with some tangible asset and be in the same boat as these executives. If laying off workers is a good financial move for the company then at least they will get a softer landing. Employees will also have the same incentives as executives to boost stock prices and could flex their power to punish poorly performing executives. That last reason is likely why employees have to buy their way in instead of just getting stock as part of their comp. Obviously it isn’t as simple as giving away stock and hoping everything works out alright but you’d cut down on a lot of these discussions about executives not feeling the pain.

#2, however, is way off base. The AMA played a significant role in our current health system's mess. It recently backed off of some of its previous bad decisions (i.e. in 2019 it lobbied to remove the caps on medicare-funded residency slots that it had originally gotten put in place), but it still spends a ton lobbying on "scope of practice" laws that keep doctors overburdened and limited in supply.

Becoming a doctor in the US requires far more years of education than many other countries, drastically driving up salary requirements (how else do they pay for all of that schooling?), limiting supply and providing only comparable care.

The AMA managed to avoid what the bars failed- we didn't experience a glut of doctors like we did lawyers. Unfortunately, we're experiencing the flip side to that coin- doctor shortages may be good for doctors, but it is profoundly bad for everyone else.

It's worked out well for the doctors in the USA though so you can't blame them.

Eric is probably already wealthy and can withstand a 98% cut to his base, but I definitely respect him more for doing that than the nothing other execs have done (at least publicly).

I don't think I would fault him even if he didn't take any pay cut. Founders and professional CEO are different beasts.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ZM/zoom-video-comm...

Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2022 was 6,787, a 53.48% increase from 2021.

Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2021 was 4,422, a 74.64% increase from 2020.

Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2020 was 2,532, a 48.77% increase from 2019.

Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2019 was 1,702, a INF% increase from 2018.

Probably not the most up to date/accurate info.

If 1300 is 15% of their workforce, they are up to 8.6k employees, headed back down to 7366, still all time high.

Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever?

What % of their 7000-8000 employees (ignoring any contractors I guess) are engineers? 60%?

4200 engineers to work on an app that at its core is... video conferencing?

> Zoom has 300 million users in meetings daily. 89% of zoom users use it for work meetings. 73.41 million downloads of the Zoom app were recorded worldwide in the first quarter of 2022.

https://www.google.com/search?q=zoom+daily+active+users

What new features have they rolled out past 12 months that justify needing 4,000 engineers/project managers/product managers/QA team/dev ops/whatever fulltime?

I'd really like to learn the truth to why this statement is wrong: "The average person has more business sense than the CEO of Zoom and its entire board of executives who allowed rampant hiring because I could've guessed during COVID, despite the surge in demand given all of the work-from-home during lockdowns, my company most likely won't grow forever, therefore I won't triple my staff over the next 3 years and then need to just end up laying them off"

Like there's no way it's just that simple. Google says the CEO is worth between $4bn and $25bn. He has to be smarter than the average bear. What am I missing?

I don't mean this to be snarky but this is like saying its stupid for a department store to hire in the lead-up to Christmas. They are going to have to lay many or most of them off after. Couldn't they see that Christmas wouldn't last forever?

Think of it this way - if there is a huge market/demand expansion, and you don't meet that need/demand, someone else will. Even if you think that much of that expansion is temporary, you will have fallen behind competitors in technology and market share. When the boom ends, they lay people off and you don't have to, but you are still behind now.

It looks like they grew somewhere around 300% since the start of COVID, a rif of 15% doesn't seem too far off estimates to me.

Devil's advocate but at the end of the day, if you're an engineer and Zoom wants to offer you a low-six figure job ($100k-$300k/yr total comp I'm sure is within the normal range for most people), as an employee are you "grateful" and just shut up and take it and don't think twice from the perspective of, who cares if I get laid off in 18 months?

Like the company doesn't owe it to you to keep you employed, so the question becomes, do they owe it to you to at least give you a heads up that your full time job isn't really that permanent? No company really gives any salaried employee any guarantee like that. Who are we as employees to say "hey, I think I deserved more communication in your intentions with me/my job"?