Amazon layoffs

[publicduende]

What's the deal with all those "Day in the life" TikTok videos then, or the fact that thousands of people can be fired with no apparent impact on production?

It's more of a supply and demand problem. Foreseeing a recession for much of 2023, most companies are planning to reduce their production (supply) knowing that the demand will likely not be there.

Layoffs are always unpopular but let's look at the situation the other way around. It's better for a company, any company, boost the production (= hire as much staff as they think they need) to face a booming demand and then let them go a year or two later, if the cycle inverts, rather than not hiring them at all. Compared to not being hired at all, at least we have 12,000 more people who will have had Google on their CVs for a few years.

It's capitalism, baby...

What's odious, surely for a non-US citizen, is the fact that hires are not numbers: they are men and women with skills, with dreams and ambitions, with families and bills. The overly brutal "US style" redundancy - here's your box, pack and leave within 30 minutes...and by the way, your login is blocked - is something that we almost never see in Europe. This is why, as Mr Pichai corporate statement doesn't fail to mention, the redundancy process would take quite a bit longer to complete in non-US territories.

You guys (Americans) were pioneer in workers' rights movements, union action, the whole shebangs. Then what happened? Unbridled capitalism happened...the delusion that, just because you're in the most special country on Earth, your career will be one of constantly higher success and constantly more money. This is proving wrong and most US workers/employees are among those, in the civilised world, who will bear the consequences of waking up and smelling the coffee more than most others.

[Cornfed]

What's the deal with all those "Day in the life" TikTok videos then, or the fact that thousands of people can be fired with no apparent impact on production?

It's more of a supply and demand problem. Foreseeing a recession for much of 2023, most companies are planning to reduce their production (supply) knowing that the demand will likely not be there.

Layoffs are always unpopular but let's look at the situation the other way around. It's better for a company, any company, boost the production (= hire as much staff as they think they need) to face a booming demand and then let them go a year or two later, if the cycle inverts, rather than not hiring them at all. Compared to not being hired at all, at least we have 12,000 more people who will have had Google on their CVs for a few years.

It's capitalism, baby...

What gives you the idea this is the case, as opposed to most of the employees being useless parasites to begin with, as the TikTok videos suggest?

[publicduende]

What gives you the idea this is the case, as opposed to most of the employees being useless parasites to begin with, as the TikTok videos suggest?

Well, by extension, every employee who is not directly working on something innovative, or in driving sales 100-fold, may qualify as a "useless parasite".

The utility function of each staff member for every business is inversely proportional to the size of the company. Page abd Brin probably did more for Google in its first 2 years of life than their 250K+ employees in the following two decades. Same for the Founders of Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.

Save a few notable exceptions, once the innovative energy has expressed itself via the first one or two generation of products and/or services, it's literally as if every new office, every new team, every new year adds less and less to the business in terms of sheer innovation and life-changing potential. Businesses scale quantitatively, very very rarely qualitatively, That's why most leviathans of the past including IBM, HP and Microsoft have been lagging and struggling for decades, behind some of the better startups. Many companies who were the s*it in previous eras quickly fell into nothingness. Ever heard or Remington Rand, Olivetti, Honeywell? Where are they now?

So yes, you're probably right: every generation of employees adds less and less to the qualitative edge (if there is any) of a business. Yet, we're still talking about people who have a couple of decent neurons, studied/worked hard and want a 6 figure salary.

[Natural_Born_Cynic]

it's time to get all those useless eaters out of the workforce and do a Squid Game on them.

[Cornfed]

it's time to get all those useless eaters out of the workforce and do a Squid Game on them.

Yeah, ideally all the skanks would be lured to the appropriate country under the guise of hiring them for some mythical tech project and then sold into some form of brutal slavery. I would suggest harvesting their organs, but they are probably all vaxxed and thus toxic.

[Natural_Born_Cynic]

it's time to get all those useless eaters out of the workforce and do a Squid Game on them.

Yeah, ideally all the skanks would be lured to the appropriate country under the guise of hiring them for some mythical tech project and then sold into some form of brutal slavery. I would suggest harvesting their organs, but they are probably all vaxxed and thus toxic.

Amen to that. I am tired of seeing those HR skanks, and other useless skanks parading around the office with their soy latte, doing nothing and getting paid while the real coders solve all the problems and code 12-16 hours a day in the background and getting paid the same.
Obviously all those coolies that Big Tech have hired have not added additional value to the company. Big Tech has so much money that they hire coolies, and women to make themselves look good and politically correct. However, currently we are in a recession so there is no use for all the decorations and corporate welfare babies.

[kangarunner]

it's time to get all those useless eaters out of the workforce and do a Squid Game on them.

Yeah, ideally all the skanks would be lured to the appropriate country under the guise of hiring them for some mythical tech project and then sold into some form of brutal slavery. I would suggest harvesting their organs, but they are probably all vaxxed and thus toxic.

This is just nasty. How do you get through life with these sort of thoughts in your mind?

[publicduende]

That's why 100 people at a startup seem to have more innovation and ability to produce something useful than the same company when it grows to 100,000 people.

Can't agree more. It's human nature, though, that the same founders who might have mortgaged their homes and cars, slept on office hammocks and took massive efforts and risks to build the core innovation of their businesses, can't wait for that innovation to scale up: the product or service is good and they want to sell it to millions, not thousands.

That's when the "useless" people come into the picture. Profits soar, investment pours in and they hire hordes of account managers (salesman) and less and less talented software engineer to maintain the core offering, or grow satellite components on top of it.

Of course growth is not a religion but becomes a cult on the thousands startups, "unicorns" as they call them, which have been submerged with VC and they need to show impossible "growth figures" to please them and keep the stocks at their lofty valuations.

The better companies, those who can, at least, know that at some point growth will undermine the quality and the existence itself of their businesses. The better companies, when they get at that stage, tend to fragment governance (sometimes even ownership) in order to retain that "100 people" quality that makes everybody feel important and keeps innovation among their core values.

[Cornfed]

Here is a funny one where a Google skank does a TikTok video documenting how useless she is and then another one about getting laid off. She complains that the layoffs were not performance based. Yeah right, like she excelled in anything other than being lazy and self-indulgent.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/onli ... 91ab72bd80

[Natural_Born_Cynic]

Well at least she gets to ride the C*ck carousel of nerds and coolies. They get turned on by skanks wearing tight legging parading around the office with their soy lattes.

[publicduende]

A couple of videos that will surely make @Cornfed feel vindicated.





Someone who works for Google and makes a video on "a day of their life" without spending one second mentioning what they actually do for a f*cking living, other than stealing candy and semi-organic drinks in fancy meeting rooms, probably wouldn't have a lot to defend themselves when the redundancy hammer falls.

Poetic justice at its max, in the second video. Collective catharsis of going through hundreds of posts of fresh Google lay-off-ees, crying and, literally curling up back into her baby self and filling up the calory tank with some Disney-themed processed fat & sugars.

This is America, guys...

[Natural_Born_Cynic]

A couple of videos that will surely make @Cornfed feel vindicated.





Someone who works for Google and makes a video on "a day of their life" without spending one second mentioning what they actually do for a f*cking living, other than stealing candy and semi-organic drinks in fancy meeting rooms, probably wouldn't have a lot to defend themselves when the redundancy hammer falls.

Poetic justice at its max, in the second video. Collective catharsis of going through hundreds of posts of fresh Google lay-off-ees, crying and, literally curling up back into her baby self and filling up the calory tank with some Disney-themed processed fat & sugars.

This is America, guys...

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! OH THE HUMANITY!!!!!!! BO HUH HUH HUH HUH HUH!! BAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I THINK I AM GOING TO COMMIT "CARBOCIDE" RIGHT NOW!!!! HASHTAG "SUICIDE BY CARBOHYDRATES"

[Natural_Born_Cynic]

[Cornfed]

It's so sad that in a sane world these skanks could have been awesome wives, mothers and community builders in many cases. Such a waste. Now they will just be vermin for the rest of their lives.

[Natural_Born_Cynic]

It's so sad that in a sane world these skanks could have been awesome wives, mothers and community builders in many cases. Such a waste. Now they will just be vermin for the rest of their lives.

It's not a sane world anymore. Everything has been inverted.