my god we have so many layoffs this year.
American Capitalism 101. Sacrifice future growth for immediate profits.
👿
The usual self-cannibalism game.
Most of their profits are paid out to shareholders, like last year, and the year before that. Nobody should expect anything better from any capitalist corporation.
Me, after firing the Cisco CEO: We just made $53 million in revenue!
Meta is doing the exact same thing:
Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant will reportedly hand out roughly 8,000 pink slips on Wednesday, May 20, eliminating about 10% of its global workforce. Notably, though, these cuts will arrive on the heels of one of the most lucrative quarters in the company’s history: $56.31 billion in revenue and $26.8 billion in net income for the first three months of 2026…
https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/meta-layoffs-8000-workers-zuckerberg-ai-spending
Slashing 10% of your workforce annually is something Jack Welch thought of when he was CEO of General Electric; essentially it shifts that 10% of staff overhead cost straight to profits per year.
The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10% according to internal key performance indicator (KPI) metrics. What this effectively does is two fold:
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Anyone who’s focusing on delivering stuff the company needs long term isn’t always or sometimes never will produce nice neat KPIs that can be measured along with the rest of the company. This means these people are under constant pressure and can often get swept up in the firings.
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It makes KPIs, a measuring tool, the target which as any statistician will tell you that when you make the measurement a target it ceases to be a good measuring tool. Because everyone is automatically incentivised to deliver KPIs NOT the actual company deliverables that generate the added value and therefore the profit.
This means after 5 to 10 years of this cycle all that’s left of the company’s institutional knowledge is how to deliver for KPIs and the sycophants who best adapt to this reality. You get a hollowing out of the company.
If this AI fuelled trend keeps up then companies like Cisco and Meta will eventually implode at some point.
The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10%
But that would be turnover rate, not cuts. Cuts have no replacement.
I remember the grocery store I worked at started posting the rate for each cashier of items scanned per minute logged into a register. They didn’t say anything about it, but I now realize they were probably leading into using that data as justification for something.
My dumbass 16 year old self thought “I’m going to get that number so high it breaks the system.” I would lock my station after the previous customer, and take a little time to face all of the UPC codes and look up produce codes and make a general strategy. Then, I would unlock the register, scan like a madman, then lock it and casually start bagging. The customers would get concerned they needed to hurry up based on my fervor, so I would tell them “Take all the time you need, see that show yesterday?”
Next time they posted the rankings, my number was 20x as high as second place. After a few weeks of getting my number a little higher each time, my boss’ boss came by and told me to knock it off since I was polluting their metrics. Next week no new rankings.
I like to think I inadvertently helped prevent KPI nonsense.
That’s quite funny, would love to see it in action.
The grocery store I worked for, over 20 years ago, did something similar, with similar results. All it did was incentivize locking and unlocking the register as optimally as possible. They also tracked how often and when in the transaction you scanned the customer’s loyalty card. It was to the point that basically cashiers who wanted to optimize their numbers wouldn’t unlock the register until the customer had their loyalty card in hand.
This is the same grocery store chain that almost failed completely due to a impossible sales requirements in their meat department leading to redating meat and bleaching chicken to increase its shelf life. The company claims they never asked any of their meat departments to do anything like that, they just set impossible standards and held people accountable unless they were able to find a way to cheat.
I think we are already seeing that with Microsoft. Another 2-3 rounds of AI and they forget how to build windows.
Are you telling me they ever knew how to build Windows?
4x pain + 1 glass
Or, alternatively:
It also fosters a culture of non-cooperation with colleagues (because they are now your competition), where workers and teams try to sabotage each other, or at least not help, and throw each other under the bus. So there’s mutual mistrust too. And no one wants to take a risk and innovate, leading to further stagnation.
But that will be a problem for the next guy.
Today’s fires are for next quarter’s employees to fix.
The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10% according to internal key performance indicator (KPI) metrics
The thing is, that’s not what layoffs are supposed to be. That’s effectively firing someone for cause. Maybe in America the difference doesn’t matter, but in the civilised world, at least in theory, it does. But in reality they can somehow get away with this and call it “layoffs”.
If a company does layoffs, they should not be allowed to hire any staff in the same or similar roles for 12 months.
If a company does layoffs, they should not be allowed to hire any staff in the same or similar roles for 12 months.
Either that, or the laid-off workers should get right of first refusal for the positions. (Along with some additional incentive for the company not to game it.)
With Meta it very much looks like overhiring. What are those 8000 workers even doing, designing CSS for each individual ad on Facebook?
This blows my mind when I try to think about it. And this is only 10% of a supposed 80,000 globally. Facebook owns a bunch of companies though so I’m assuming they’re being counted too. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, etc
Implementing additional forms of wankery in the “Metaverse”.
God willing
I actually think a few % a year is healthy (1% feels right to me). I work at a company where we never lay anyone off and it’s led to a bunch of deadweight in the company that make work harder for everyone else. You gotta have some mechanism to let low performers go.
10% is way too high though
You gotta have some mechanism to let low performers go.
That’s called “firing for cause.”
Of course, that actually has accountability attached to it. Misusing layoffs for that purpose is an end-run around that accountability, which is why sociopathic corporations prefer it.
It should be case by case. Simple as that.
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I was about to say, two layoff posts on my feed back to back. Not a good sign.
Cisco can take their campus fabrics/DNA and shove it up their arse. They stopped trying a long time ago and IOS is still a pain to use.
Despicable
The stock market is a weird thing - prices seem to be tied to whether a company can make more this quarter than last quarter, and not tethered to whether a company makes a profit. I figure that they made record revenue and now need a strategy to make even more profit next quarter, which they hope to achieve by reducing expenses via layoffs.
I don’t like it, but the economy is more tethered to speculation than reality.
One of the biggest (official) recession indicators, is whether or not the public thinks we’re in a recession.
Yes that always irks me. We can have 15 “markers of a recession”, but as long as nobody says it’s name, it can’t be true. The media has the Voldemort approach to economics.
it’s not weird. it’s literally how capitalism works. it feels weird because it actually feels fucking wrong and disgusting but we are propagandized into thinking this is ok.
Nah, not even the basic “its capitalism” excuse works anymore for that idiocracy. Capitalism may force companies to increase earnings, which is already stupid enough in itself, but the timeframe that’s measured in got reduced so much in the last few years that even short term goals are impossible without cutting costs.
Ten years ago monthly earnings were at most an indicator, what mattered most were fiscal years. It slowly evolved to quarterly earnings and now we are at a point were a single “bad” (as in, not as much profit as last month) can plunge your stock prices by 10+%.
Yes capitalism always fucked over the working class, bit it wasn’t made to force big, profitable companies to self destruct for 0.5% higher monthly profits.
It’s a pyramid scheme. You participate long enough to be able to move your money to a more stable platform and live off the measly interest that provides.
Line go up dog, just give in and roll around in the slop with the rest of us.
…/shrug
Stock prices are tied to what they did last quarter….
I know someone who worked a weekend event to show case a product and they did extremely well going nearly 15k in sales. They made $50 for the few hours it took to generate that. The amount of effort to prepare for this, drive there, waste weekend hours working is not worth $50. Especially with how much gas is. I don’t understand why people don’t just say no.
I worked in customer support/sales for the largest ISP in my country. We were always understaffed because it was a shit job, so the turnover was high. We were forced to sign overtime, weekends and holidays included. I’ll never forget this middle management asshole who enthusiastically attempted to convince me it’s totally worth it. He does it, too, and he’s always happy to see higher paycheck. At the end of the month that overtime amounted to ~€15-20 for me. Yeah, fun times. I was thrilled to kiss that job and its abusive management goodbye.
$50 sounds like a ridiculous commission under any circumstances. There are more numbers that we need before we can really judge the situation though. It’s not like $50 went to your friend and $14,950 went to their boss’s pocket. Surely there’s a cost to manufacture whatever it is being sold. Still, there’s no way that 0.3% is a reasonable sales commission.
They don’t get paid commission. Since people continue to work for companies like this and are OK being paid so little, nothing will change.
Yeah, I was gonna say, that sounds more being paid an hourly rate (at sub-livable wage, BTW) and $0 commission.
In some countries, this is illegal.
What countries? This is capitalism baby, only way to stop it is to have a union strong enough to fuck Up that record profit if the CEO even jokes a out layoffs.
This is capitalism baby
Other countries handle capitalism different.
Japan. Layoffs are extremely difficult to pull off there. You have to show poor performance by the individual involved, and the standards for that are very rigorous. The government knows that unemployed people immediately become their problem, so they just demand that if a corporation wants to employ someone, they have to be willing to enter into that in an open ended arrangement. So unions aren’t the only way.
America’s trick for this is to let the unemployed become their own problem! 👏
Wrong. The unemployed are just temporarily displaced slaves waiting to become homeless so they can be put in prison for poorcrime.
Exactly
Can’t be expecting the peasants to share in the success of their hard work! Better to fire them and rehire them for cheaper when they are desperate.
It’s an interesting case for leftists because there is no means of production to be seized. Nothing needed to create websites or apps is hard to get or proprietary. If anything, the means of production is capital itself, because only by paying people can you direct a lot of them to spend time on any particular thing. I wonder if communism has already addressed this case somewhere. I’m hardly educated on the topic.
Operating Facebook is rent-seeking, in a way. Any company could make another Facebook, but without people on it, there’s no point going on it.
this is going to sound really harsh, but hear me out.
stop working for assholes
Easier said than done lol. First of all, we are in a recession (we really are, if you factor out the fake AI growth), so having any job at all feels increasingly like a privilege. Second of all, I am pretty sure that there are more dickhead companies than good ones that care about their employees. Bonus points for difficulty if you just graduated from college/university and try to find an entry-level job. Those are basically non-existent these days.
Good for you if you have the privilege to choose
we’d be unemployed if we did this.
