I mentioned it in another thread but this is employers resetting employee expectations. Lay off a percentage and work the rest harder, make people RTO, etc.
There is little to no evidence of this. There is a lot of evidence of layoffs, particularly across-the-board ones, costing shareholders [1]. Companies that manage little to no laying off outperform their competitors and are rewarded in the capital markets.
[1] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-layoffs-cost...
The layoffs might prop up the margin in the short term, but I think there becomes long term lasting damage that would show as underperformance.
That is to say: not at all.
HN in 2024: "Companies should not reduce their headcount."
In 2018 people were advocating against bloat. Now they’re advocating against poor treatment of employees. Both are valid. In 2018, people were right, and the price of bloat is being paid by employees now.
Companies can start new products instead of laying people off. Companies constantly start new things, and can internally allocate resources. Google has open positions for hire right now; they just laid off 1K people.
Apart from avoiding layoffs, hiring less quickly also lets you be more intentional about quality and culture. How can you expect any real continuity in your culture if like 30%–50% of your engineers are new in any given year?
If you don't think it should be legal to lay people off, then make layoffs illegal. Doing it through some weird requirement to spite management is just going to result in bizarre distortive effects in their behavior.
I think stuff like this comes from a low level caveman jealousy instinct, where management is seen as a person to envy, while shareholders are ignored as some kind of far off impersonal force.
Caveman jealous instinct? Eek. How management performs is between the management and the managed. Profit is not law, it’s not a god given right. Profit is a side affect from employees generating it. If you lay people off in a poor way, you can be chastised the same way a child gets chastised for cutting in line. Our society has an obligation to ensure everyone behaves in a pro-societal manner. Not a profitable manner. We shouldn’t need government laws to tell people to treat others well.
Oh and FWIW most companies that perform layoffs tend to not see positive outcomes for the shareholders, so you’d think they’d respond if they actually acted uniformly and rationally about shareholder value.
Neither is continued employment at a job that doesn't generate value
Many of these companies transitioned to remote work at the same time they did massive hiring sprees. Many of these new hires were getting their first taste of remote work in companies that were doing their first trial of remote work, all while a massive influx of new employees and initiatives introduced more chaos.
Predictably, a lot of this chaos happening all at once wasn’t a good environment for those new employees, especially those learning how to work remote for the first time.
There’s definitely a resetting going on. Many companies are reversing everything all at once in an attempt to get back to some of the stability they had before COVID.
I think we’ll see more remote work opportunities, but companies learned their lesson that throwing everyone into remote all at once doesn’t work. Remote isn’t for everyone.
I think it’s probably much simpler: money isn’t cheap anymore and everyone overhired for a long time.
The truth is, as usual, messier: constrained executives are confronted with targets they don’t know how to meet, and so start shoving round pegs into square holes.
I know nothing about economics but I wonder if it’s time to ease up on the interest rates. Inflation might not be due to too much money in the system but rather supply simply drying up as China economy circles the drain. Maybe it’s a good idea to let money be cheap again so people could quickly set up alternative non-China suppliers to relieve the supply pressure. But then again I know anything about economics so add salt as required.