Comment by gtowey

21 hours ago

Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes.

So the answer is, when an executive is held accountable for disrupting this many people's lives. When they claw back bonuses they have probably received for hitting or setting those previous hiring targets.

Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes.

Why must a mistake have been made, as opposed to just changes in the market? Doesn't this presuppose that people are entitled to keep their job as long as they want to, and if the company no longer needs them, it's a violation of that right?

And even if it's because the leaders of the company misjudged something, I'm unclear how that means that employees who were laid off have had some great injustice visited upon them.

I got laid off from Block a little over a year ago, and I wasn't salty about it at all. They paid me millions of dollars over the years I was there, they gave me great severance, and I don't view myself as entitled to be able to sell my labor to them, just as I don't view them as being entitled to buy my labor. I wouldn't have felt bad ending my employment if it was best for me, why should they feel bad for doing the same?

  • > Why must a mistake have been made, as opposed to just changes in the market?

    If you're high up at a company like Meta, you likely have a compensation package worth millions a year.

    The question is what are they being paid for if not to be "better" at steering the ship than others? They always tell us they are brilliant leaders who bring more value to the company than others could or would.

    So if they're just following the market like everyone else, and having to react with large reversals, then to me, it starts to poke some pretty large holes in this idea that they are somehow the best of the best. It starts to look like their only real skills are self-promotion and career advancement. Not because they're better at operating the company, but because they're better at office politics.

    This is nothing new of course, this is the way most organizational structures have worked since the dawn of time. The people with power are given deference and privilege commensurate with being elite, but really they're just average at doing their actual job and kind of guessing their way through it. I'm not saying Meta is special or uniquely culpable for this mistake here. I'm saying it's a sad fact of life and maybe, just maybe, if we all start saying out loud this truth, that this is something we could change as a society.