Remote workers face a lonely wave of layoffs | Hacker News Reader

Remote workers face a lonely wave of layoffs

nytimes.com

29 pointsmooreds12 comments

> “All corporations say ‘People are our most important asset,’ but they don’t really seem to believe that.”

“Calling someone ‘talent’ is quite different from calling them a person,” she added. “People aren’t a resource that can be depleted over time.”

Getting voted off the island, always bruising to the ego.

Any wonder so many people want to work for themselves.

Amazon also announced a while ago they had adopted a new motto, which was something like aiming to be the world's best employer.

And on the very first moment their growth wasn't as fast as hoped for, they automatically fire a small army of employees by email and cut off their access.

Id argue that people are literally a finite resource by virtue of being organic matter. Its just unkind to point such out from my understanding.

  Step 6: require new hires to go to the office
  Step 7: require all employees go to the office

https://archive.is/n6GbO

Its amazing how these corporations act as if all that they did during this period won't be remembered by the tech sector or the general Internet market. Solely the accounts of the event like the linked article will stay forever on the Internet and taint the names of the corporations who spent people like spare change during the downturn. And the names of their execs.

Of course, investors don't give a damn about that. If these corporations that laid out so many people, tainted their names at the cost of losing goodwill and even causing the laid off people to create many startups that will compete with them and eat their lunch end up destroying themselves like this, the investors will just jump to whatever is the hottest thing at that moment. Talk about capitalism creating all the wrong incentives.

Why are you saying these are the wrong incentives? If these corporations are failing and making bad decisions that result in more competition, which eventually brings them down, isn’t that “creative destruction” at work. Or are you saying that “creative destruction” itself is a bad mechanism that should be managed? Something else?

> Why are you saying these are the wrong incentives? If these corporations are failing and making bad decisions that result in more competition

These execs who make these decisions know the consequences. But they are forced to do those due to shareholder pressure to keep the stock prices !rising!. Not even stable - the current economic culture wants the stocks rising, and rising fast. Its a 'growth at all costs' culture.

> which eventually brings them down, isn’t that “creative destruction”

That is not the good thing that people think it to be. The optimal route would be to have these corporations keep their core activity and excel at it so that other parts of the economy could build other things on those foundations. Instead the current economic system betrays itself by destroying what is already successful for profit, causing a period of instability in the market and in that given sector, creating problems for the users and hampering the progress of technology. Its 'great' for shareholders, its bad for society.

Actually its bad for the shareholders too. They hoard a lot of wealth, but that wealth comes at the expense of the technological progress that could have happened without that destructive profit maximization - like reversing aging, medical advances, flying cars and so on...

> that should be managed

It should be managed. Destroying entire large organizations that render a fundamental service to the market and the society is not a good thing. Those organizations should also be regulated since they became the frameworks for a lot of things in the society. Technological development and progress should not be 3 steps forward, then 2 steps back. It should be a step forward at every given moment.

I mean can the government tax megacorporations for laying off people -- industry seems like riding a broken rollercoaster you get to the top but some people can fall off when it dips to the bottom

That could maybe mitigate things. But then again they would try to find a way around it. As long as the perverse incentive of maximizing profits for the sake of unattached, non-stakeholder shareholders exists, it will keep pushing for such destruction.

>Its amazing how these corporations act as if all that they did during this period won't be remembered by the tech sector or the general Internet market.

Because they won't be remembered. Google has just transitioned to standard company behavior. There will be more layoffs or standard RIFs (happens every year) and people will still want to work there and apply for jobs.

tl;dr: getting laid off stinks, and getting laid off in a remote environment stinks even more.

However, I found it a bit ironic that the last layoff anecdote in this article took place in person.

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