Stock buybacks can often be an effort to avoid dilution due to RSUs. The buyback programs of basically every large tech company are substantially inflated by this.
You just have to tighten your belt, wear multiple hats, or insert_other_wardrobe-related_ platitudes.
Sorry to hear. Of course, I’m sure you’ll be expected to be operating at 100% of previous productivity.
Luckily I’m a customer not an employee - but it is super unsettling as we near a number of large go-lives
Ooh, I see, thanks for the clarification! I was thinking you were managing a team/account at Salesforce that had been drastically reduced.
I can see how that would be super unsettling as a client. Yikes. Best of luck to you, my friend.
Hey, if it breaks, they’ll happily sell you an upgrade to the new version!
Wow that’s an awesome simplification. Thanks.
Given how much these companies spend in recruiting and onboarding, layoffs are absolutely a leadership failure.
We lost Mondelez US to Salesforce and that project alone was 10 million for Salesforce just to implement. I don’t know what the heck they are doing.
Only if you have a crystal ball. Any business can be affected by greater forces (e.g., the economy) that can’t be fully forecasted. Refusing to stubbornly react to changes in your business because of sunk costs is falling for the sunk cost fallacy. That doesn’t mean some layoffs are due to leadership failures, but categorically saying “layoffs are leadership failures” is way oversimplifying things.
Wow, goddamn tech companies pretty much just doing FOMO layoffs at this point.
As a remora attached to the MotherShip, I’m not sweating too much (especially since I’m an Azure guy, and Azure is the MotherShip’s primary focus ATM), but jeezus one never knows :(
Salesforce layoffs are just bizarre - they are a super profitable company with high demand for their product, and the need to do a lot of development to get rid of legacy code holding them back.
I feel like we could just make an “index fund” for executives. No need to pay a CEO millions of dollars a year to make decisions, instead you just have an automated system that hires/fires X% of your workforce according to what every other company is doing.
Well now there’s an idea. I can invent an automated system that performs hundreds or thousands of micro-hirings and micro-firings per second.
I’m referring to the big tech companies being discussed in this thread. These layoffs are a failure of leadership and vision, for the most part. My opinion, of course.
Useful aphorism: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”
Some guy on the internet: “Actually, that’s just not true. You can make some horses drink. Maybe not all of them, but to say that about all horses is an oversimplification.”
That’s Reddit in a nutshell.
Some dude on the internet: that job ain’t hard. I could totally do it, and do it better to boot. I would have predicted every economic boom and bust in the last 100 years.
To be clear: I think John’s observation is substantially off-base, not just a “once in one hundred years” type of exception. Layoffs happen in a number of industries and with companies and businesses ranging from tiny to huge. They are not clearly “failures of leadership,” without having to look at the specifics of the circumstances.
If small restaurant owner has to lay someone off because business slows, is that per se “a failure of leadership”? If not (e.g., because we recognize that outside forces might have been unpredictable) we are somehow willing to say that a more complex system is more predictable?
Generalizations are, well, generalizations. Sometimes they’re wrong. Usually they’re right. Nobody really looks at a company laying off thousands of people and says wow, what an amazing success by that management team, with the possible exception of the people directly profiting from it. Do they?
I don’t think layoffs are always a failure of leadership, but I’d say layoffs as a result of CEOs needing to hit investor metrics versus actual productivity issues are a failure of the system.