"About 10% of the global workforce will be affected ... the move is not meant to cut costs and that the company expects to re-hire the same number of employees,"
Sounds like Sasan is copying Elons approach to management
Sounds like Sasan is copying Elons approach to management
If you are hiring the wrong people your HR\hiring process is broken.
If you are hiring people with lower skill levels than expected, you could make a relatively small investment into upskilling them. Cheaper than fire + severance + rehire.
If you are firing people who are unmotivated you have a culture problem and are just putting a band aid over it while you burn through staff that you have invested in.
One thing I've definitely noticed as a repeating pattern is a lot of candidates who are laid off were making astronomical salaries compared to their years of experience. E.g. I recently interviewed a marketing manager candidate with 4 years of experience who was asking for a salary higher than an engineer with 10 years of experience. In today's current market, I'd expect the engineer to be earning 30-50% more due to higher market salaries in engineering and more yrs experience.
A lot of companies prior to doing lay offs had a lot of junior/mid-level employees earning what (today) would only be offered to a senior.
Companies can't go to their employees and say "Oops, we hired you at a salary that, today, is too high for the role you're in" -- I guess they could try, but that conversation wouldn't go over well with most people.
I also don't really blame companies for being in this situation. They had to offer inflated salaries because the only alternative was to hire no one during the covid boom.
So basically, by firing and re-hiring, you can reset an entire department's salary bands. Which sometimes can be healthy especially if people within the company share salary info with each other, and a newly hired person with 10 yrs experience finding out they earn 30% less than someone with 3 years experience, just because of the timing of when they were hired.
It's kind of a lose-lose situation for everyone involved. (Including the company who in many cases would prefer not to churn the staff just to reset salaries back down to market levels)
Then don't hire?
The point of full-time is to avoid uncertainty and instability. If you want that flexibility as an employer, then pay the premium of contract developers. This is why you need to have no "right-to-work" legislation for prevent non-cause firing. And no, "I can get cheaper" is not a valid cause.
If you're optimizing for economic growth, telling companies to freeze hiring when wages increase is going to result in slower growth.
If you make employment precarious, then I'm gonna treat each pay cheque as a windfall that will be hoarded into a low-risk savings because I have no security and no idea how many more may come. This shrinks the economy.
So, if you want to grow the economy it's best to reduce future uncertainty and over reacting to current events and smooth out bumps.
...and if you don't want to honor the social contract of a full-time job, then just hire contract workers. Otherwise it's just as sleazy as saying you want a relationship and then ghosting after fucking. It's gross.
That's the problem with how pay scales, job titles and performance evaluation are setup. If there are no standard way to set this for everyone then this will bound to just happen again and be a recurring pain.
But of course that won’t fly at any company. Every employee expects annual pay increases no matter what.
People are acting all confused that this is happening when it is very clearly explained by the financial incentives. Its not some giant meritocracy, its people skimming off the top.
People will argue any workers rights and protections at all make countries less competitive.
Honestly though? So be it. Corporations don't have a right to exploit people as they see fit and protecting the weaker party, the employee, is more important.
"We could have infinite growth and make way more money if only we could abuse you more"
I can't recall if I've ever worked anywhere that hired as many people as they 'expected' to. It can't have been many places.