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This is a terrible opinion piece. Layoffs do work. Cutting hours does not work. I am always amazed how few people understand how a business operates. They think

This is a terrible opinion piece. Layoffs do work. Cutting hours does not work. I am always amazed how few people understand how a business operates. They think its a community organized event where there is unlimited revenue. There are a few basic accounting principles employees need to understand. It all revolves around Assets = Liabilities + Owner’s Equity. If you think otherwise, take a "Cost Accounting" course. This is a pure numbers game. Everyone wants to wrap a psycho analysis into something that has ZERO relevancy. If a company is bleeding revenue, it cannot sustain the overhead of employees. They have to go. Cutting hours does nothing for those on a salary, and those that are hourly, benefit costs are far more expensive than their wage. If a company has stagnant growth, that means leadership has made bad decisions, and things have to change. Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement. There is not a "Employee's Feelings" column on the ledger. Everyone can be replaced. No one is special, unless you're a majority shareholder.

ryandrake 2y ago
I mean, everything you said is true, but only because we have deliberately set up the system as such. Shareholder Primacy is a choice we have made as a society. It's not some natural law or something carved by god into stone tablets. It's not hard to imagine alternatives, but obviously the shareholding class is going to work hard to ensure that only their preferred rules have traction. Whether or not alternatives are workable given human nature is another thread altogether.
- astrange 2y ago
  Shareholders don't have "primacy", eg they're last in bankruptcy. If you're asking for them to never get anything, then they're not going to participate, and this is supposedly a forum about startups. In tech the employees also tend to be shareholders which I think is healthier.
- Out_of_Characte 2y ago
  >only because we have deliberately set up the system as such. No one can sell at a loss all the time. That's just stupidity. Either I get a return on money invested later or I get a return on my balance sheet now in the form of profit. Shareholders primacy is because they can only be cut trough a buyout.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deviantbit 2y ago
  No, it's not a choice we made as a society. It was a choice the shareholders made. You didn't make that choice, you were not part of it.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    That's a good point! I never got the chance to vote on whether or not shareholders should get all the votes.
    - throwaway3572 2y ago
      Why should you get a vote? You don’t get a vote on what groceries I buy. What entitles you to a vote on this purchase decision? (In this case “all the votes” means when making decisions on actions a particular corporation is considering, not any vote on anything)
      - heeen2 2y ago
        Lots of places take vote on what you can buy, eg weed, alcohol, which additives are allowed and so on
        throwaway3572 2y ago
        The creation and transacting of corporate shares is also highly regulated. But it doesn’t address the question of why a third party should get a vote that helps decide a particular corporate action. Votes that limit the possible actions of all corporations equally are a different thing.
        int_19h 2y ago
        OP was talking about the overall social arrangement. One possibility would be to give employees (of all corporations!) some collective power over the company, as a fundamental requirement of incorporation.
        2y ago
- wilg 2y ago
  Nobody is stopping anyone from running a non-profit tech company, or a PBC or co-op or various other structures. It's not even true that a US company has to prioritize "shareholder value" or whatever over anything else. You can kinda just do whatever you want. So the interesting question to me is, why don't more people try to operate companies/workplaces in the way they think would be more ethical and better for business?
davidw 2y ago
Math wise, yes, you're correct, but layoffs can also hurt morale, especially if not done well. And in a competitive environment, the most talented people might be next to leave after a layoff, as they see things aren't going well and have the easiest time finding alternatives. I've seen that happen myself. And some of those people you're laying off did revenue generating activities, so, as above, yes, it may be necessary to reduce costs, but it has to be done carefully.
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
At least for public companies, accounting is FAR from the end all be all. Most of the time, company valuations are completely divorced from valuations. And much of what public companies do these days is try to game their stock price. Government employment is 95% the time completely divorced from reality. That being said, private companies employee a lot of people and this is very relevant.
- no_wizard 2y ago
  > Government employment is 95% the time completely divorced from reality This is a pretty big claim to make without any evidence to support it. The government, whether it be state, local, county federal etc. does in have a different pace and certainly like with any big organizations can have issues such as waste, but to say it’s completely divorced from reality, especially in context of somehow private (as in not government or NGO) companies don’t also act completely divorced from reality is a really big claim
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    Private companies generally need to be efficient and make money or go out of business. VC funded startups are a VERY small percentage of jobs compared to ALL private company employees. But, sure, there is much shenanigans there. Public companies can play tons of games as well - but the vast majority of people employed at public companies are at relatively efficient and profitable companies. Government services are under no obligation to be efficient. Often people vote for them to be LESS efficient, hoping that they'll get similar benefits from their private employers. Though, hope is a bad strategy, and it rarely works for non-government employees. But there's enough state employees that you don't have to win over that many private employees to win votes for things that make the services less efficient (like ever juicier retirement benefits).
    - guappa 2y ago
      > Private companies generally need to be efficient and make money or go out of business. It seems you've never worked at a private company and just believe the invisible hand fairy tale?
yodsanklai 2y ago
> If a company is bleeding revenue Not what happened with some of the recent layoffs. Some big tech companies generate huge revenues, laid off 5-10% of people (sometimes with false pretext of performance), and do keep hiring at the same time or soon after. This happens not to reduce cost but to stress out remaining employees.
- deviantbit 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    What’s actually happened is that activist investors have bought their way onto the boards of highly profitable companies with insufficient poison pills and made them fire some percentage of workers under the guise of making the stock price go up. Does worker happiness matter at all, or is it OK to have a net miserable company where the bottom line is slightly higher profit than it would otherwise have been if the environment were a pleasant place to work? Because that’s the tradeoff here; rabid billionaire investors are unhappy because numbers aren’t as high as they could be.
    - deviantbit 2y ago
      Activist investors are a problem. Most recent activist investors have been centered around climate and DEI. Exxon had activist investors try to get on the board. There was a lawsuit over it, I believe it was Arjuna Capital. Whoever is funding these activist investors, probably a nation/state, is doing it on purpose. Natasha Lamb has to be the dumbest investors to ever live, next to Cathie Wood, IMO. You could invest in an S&P index fund and perform better at 264% for the past 11 years, compared to her 132% realized, and taking far less risk. I get everyone has their idealistic views of how the world should work, but capitalism dominates every other society, providing better living standards, and security. It is unfortunate we have had leftists in the Democratic party take control of it, and pushing some very strange agendas, that doesn't reflect reality. These strange agendas have been exploited by other nations, like China. Some activist investors have brought better function management and boards. Carl Icahn is a great example. But he has also brought his fair share of problems.
BobbyTables2 2y ago
Many larger do companies behave as if revenue is unlimited. Too many times, I’ve seen layoffs followed by acquisitions of 10x the cost reduction from the layoffs — often even in the same quarter. And when parent company has a track record of driving acquisitions into the ground from mismanagement, where is the profit?
callc 2y ago
> Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement. There is not a "Employee's Feelings" column on the ledger. Sure they do. Just in the sense that employees feelings need to be controlled and made to fear any collective action or sense of agency.
voxl 2y ago
Your horribly simplistic take has already received a lot of backlash, but whatever I'm angry enough to add onto the pile: 1. Big tech companies doing layoffs are not hurting on revenue, so your basic assumption is wrong. 2. "Cutting hours" needs to be steelmaned if you're not going to anything but a charlatan. That means you have to interpret it as taking a paycut, as in a salary cut. This has actually been done before in worker-focused companies to survive covid, and in one instance I'm aware of the company gave workers back pay after surviving covid. You also ignore all the intangibles that are no easy to measure, because of course the business acumen of "make number go up this quarter" is too short sighted to care about institutional knowledge or long term strategy.
danans 2y ago
> If a company has stagnant growth, that means leadership has made bad decisions, and things have to change. There is a bigger picture. Developed economies across the globe are experiencing stagnant growth, and the trickle down economics they have engaged in has failed to fix that. Knowing this, the wealthiest, through their proxies in corporate leadership and government, are cutting back their biggest cost - employees - to maximize their near term returns, which will then be put into relatively fixed-supply assets, rather than risking capital on new ventures, and the employees that traditionally requires. Corporations are betting that "growth" going forward is going to come from AI-enabled efficiency and productivity gains, not more employees making more product or innovating on product/service development and delivery. While it's too early to say whether they are right, many signs point in that direction.
tdb7893 2y ago
A good friend of mine has a PhD in labor economics and is now a senior management consultant for a big firm and I've been told that in general just cutting people is bad for businesses and most businesses will be worse off by just cutting people, especially without changing any of the underlying systems that got the company to the position it's in. Next time I'll have to ask him about the studies on it but there definitely isn't a consensus that general layoffs help businesses in the medium/long term. He was saying the times they seem to work best is in the context of a broader restructuring, (which in my experience is not common for companies).
- deviantbit 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Retric 2y ago
    No, just cutting people across the company tends to be bad. Restructuring aka cutting programs and the people working on them has fewer downsides.
    - deviantbit 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - Retric 2y ago
        Sure the general consensus of experts is just like my opinion man. Numbers never lie, until they do.
        deviantbit 2y ago
        [flagged]
    - deviantbit 2y ago
      [flagged]
eikenberry 2y ago
> If a company is bleeding revenue, it cannot sustain the overhead of employees. They have to go. No, they don't. During the dotcom bubble my company gave us 2 choices, layoffs or 20% pay cut. We took the latter. Everyone stayed and we had our pay back to previous levels in a couple years and the company remained profitable. You can, in fact, treat people as people and still run a company. > Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement. This is only true of companies of a certain (large) size, when all semblance of employees being people have been abstracted away. In companies of more reasonable sizes you must take employee moral into account or you will lose critical employees which could kill the company.
- deviantbit 2y ago
  Which dot com was that?
  - eikenberry 2y ago
    The first one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
    - deviantbit 2y ago
      Don't you love people make claims and the can't substantiate the claim? They just down vote your comment.
    - deviantbit 2y ago
      Which company?
- wilg 2y ago
  Surely there are some situations where a pay cut is insufficient because you would like to reorganize the company, for example to wind down an unprofitable initiative or division and there's not a reasonable way to maintain the same headcount?
stalfosknight 2y ago
Why can’t the outrageously overpaid leadership who made the mistakes be the ones who are punished instead of the individual contributors who are just trying to survive?
theptip 2y ago
Unsurprisingly, both the OP and this are oversimplified statements. The more nuanced point is to note that simply reducing the world to accounting equations omits all of the human detail. Morale is a meaningful thing, or if you prefer, knowledge, expertise, Metis; these are damaged in layoffs, especially repeated rounds. And furthermore, the recent tech layoffs were not generally about fixing unsustainable businesses, they were about juicing profit margins for already profitable ones. On the other hand, of course the OP title is wrong and layoffs can work. There are many examples even within tech where cutting deep is the only way of surviving. Complex systems are complex.
culi 2y ago
The article cited actual statistics and data comparing companies that enacted layoffs vs those that didn't. It showed very clear evidence, even within the same industry, that those that enacted layoffs fared MUCH worse Also many of these layoffs are NOT coming when companies are "bleeding revenue". E.g. Meta and Twitter enacted massive layoffs after posting their most profitable quarters yet
- conductr 2y ago
  That’s what should be expected. A company in a stronger position can more confidently avoid laying off people and “ride out” the painful market conditions. Not every company’s revenue is composed of similar risk items even within similar industries. Some companies are already knee deep in some new strategy and need everyone on board to roll it out. The other company is just a bunch of variable labor that can be culled when volume shrinks. It also means they’re not investing in the future and going to get beat by a more strategic competitor. So many other riffs to take on this, but short term minded financials are absolutely improved by layoffs and that’s usually all the action is trying to effect.
  - culi 2y ago
    Okay but you are saying the exact opposite of what the comment I replied to is saying.
sgustard 2y ago
Layoffs are like closing factories that don't produce, cutting products that don't sell, closing deserted retail locations, and so on. Likely bad business decisions got you there in the first place. Maybe market conditions changed. Maybe your whole company is going to fail no matter what you do. But blanket statements about what does or doesn't "work" are not very instructive.
TZubiri 2y ago
Also cutting hours sounds terribly out of touch with the gig economy dilemma, I'd rather be let go than put on half my salary?
kypro 2y ago
Also I'd argue that a lack of layoffs at a company probably causes stagnation and inefficiency. I don't thin the only good argument for layoffs is that a company has no choice because of cash flows. I see this in the public sector where you often find people who have been working at the same dept for a decade or more. These people feel very safe and know they don't really need to try that hard. They also know nothing about how things function elsewhere so they'll put up with using spreadsheets and fax machines because that's just how they've always done things. It seems rather obvious to me that a good economy is one where employers feel some nervousness about losing good employees, so offer pay rises and perks; And where employees feel some nervousness about layoffs so work hard and try to be as productive as they reasonably can be. If a company is not cutting a few percentage of their least productive workers each year they're probably doing something wrong imo. I think it's far to argue big tech companies built up a lot of these under productive workers over the years.
pickledoyster 2y ago
>take a "Cost Accounting" course do you (or anyone else) have a good course to recommend?

ryandrake 2y ago

I mean, everything you said is true, but only because we have deliberately set up the system as such. Shareholder Primacy is a choice we have made as a society. It's not some natural law or something carved by god into stone tablets. It's not hard to imagine alternatives, but obviously the shareholding class is going to work hard to ensure that only their preferred rules have traction. Whether or not alternatives are workable given human nature is another thread altogether.

astrange 2y ago
Shareholders don't have "primacy", eg they're last in bankruptcy. If you're asking for them to never get anything, then they're not going to participate, and this is supposedly a forum about startups. In tech the employees also tend to be shareholders which I think is healthier.
Out_of_Characte 2y ago
>only because we have deliberately set up the system as such. No one can sell at a loss all the time. That's just stupidity. Either I get a return on money invested later or I get a return on my balance sheet now in the form of profit. Shareholders primacy is because they can only be cut trough a buyout.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deviantbit 2y ago
No, it's not a choice we made as a society. It was a choice the shareholders made. You didn't make that choice, you were not part of it.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  That's a good point! I never got the chance to vote on whether or not shareholders should get all the votes.
  - throwaway3572 2y ago
    Why should you get a vote? You don’t get a vote on what groceries I buy. What entitles you to a vote on this purchase decision? (In this case “all the votes” means when making decisions on actions a particular corporation is considering, not any vote on anything)
    - heeen2 2y ago
      Lots of places take vote on what you can buy, eg weed, alcohol, which additives are allowed and so on
      - throwaway3572 2y ago
        The creation and transacting of corporate shares is also highly regulated. But it doesn’t address the question of why a third party should get a vote that helps decide a particular corporate action. Votes that limit the possible actions of all corporations equally are a different thing.
        int_19h 2y ago
        OP was talking about the overall social arrangement. One possibility would be to give employees (of all corporations!) some collective power over the company, as a fundamental requirement of incorporation.
        2y ago
wilg 2y ago
Nobody is stopping anyone from running a non-profit tech company, or a PBC or co-op or various other structures. It's not even true that a US company has to prioritize "shareholder value" or whatever over anything else. You can kinda just do whatever you want. So the interesting question to me is, why don't more people try to operate companies/workplaces in the way they think would be more ethical and better for business?

davidw 2y ago

Math wise, yes, you're correct, but layoffs can also hurt morale, especially if not done well. And in a competitive environment, the most talented people might be next to leave after a layoff, as they see things aren't going well and have the easiest time finding alternatives. I've seen that happen myself. And some of those people you're laying off did revenue generating activities, so, as above, yes, it may be necessary to reduce costs, but it has to be done carefully.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

At least for public companies, accounting is FAR from the end all be all. Most of the time, company valuations are completely divorced from valuations. And much of what public companies do these days is try to game their stock price. Government employment is 95% the time completely divorced from reality. That being said, private companies employee a lot of people and this is very relevant.

no_wizard 2y ago
> Government employment is 95% the time completely divorced from reality This is a pretty big claim to make without any evidence to support it. The government, whether it be state, local, county federal etc. does in have a different pace and certainly like with any big organizations can have issues such as waste, but to say it’s completely divorced from reality, especially in context of somehow private (as in not government or NGO) companies don’t also act completely divorced from reality is a really big claim
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  Private companies generally need to be efficient and make money or go out of business. VC funded startups are a VERY small percentage of jobs compared to ALL private company employees. But, sure, there is much shenanigans there. Public companies can play tons of games as well - but the vast majority of people employed at public companies are at relatively efficient and profitable companies. Government services are under no obligation to be efficient. Often people vote for them to be LESS efficient, hoping that they'll get similar benefits from their private employers. Though, hope is a bad strategy, and it rarely works for non-government employees. But there's enough state employees that you don't have to win over that many private employees to win votes for things that make the services less efficient (like ever juicier retirement benefits).
  - guappa 2y ago
    > Private companies generally need to be efficient and make money or go out of business. It seems you've never worked at a private company and just believe the invisible hand fairy tale?

yodsanklai 2y ago

> If a company is bleeding revenue Not what happened with some of the recent layoffs. Some big tech companies generate huge revenues, laid off 5-10% of people (sometimes with false pretext of performance), and do keep hiring at the same time or soon after. This happens not to reduce cost but to stress out remaining employees.

deviantbit 2y ago
[flagged]
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  What’s actually happened is that activist investors have bought their way onto the boards of highly profitable companies with insufficient poison pills and made them fire some percentage of workers under the guise of making the stock price go up. Does worker happiness matter at all, or is it OK to have a net miserable company where the bottom line is slightly higher profit than it would otherwise have been if the environment were a pleasant place to work? Because that’s the tradeoff here; rabid billionaire investors are unhappy because numbers aren’t as high as they could be.
  - deviantbit 2y ago
    Activist investors are a problem. Most recent activist investors have been centered around climate and DEI. Exxon had activist investors try to get on the board. There was a lawsuit over it, I believe it was Arjuna Capital. Whoever is funding these activist investors, probably a nation/state, is doing it on purpose. Natasha Lamb has to be the dumbest investors to ever live, next to Cathie Wood, IMO. You could invest in an S&P index fund and perform better at 264% for the past 11 years, compared to her 132% realized, and taking far less risk. I get everyone has their idealistic views of how the world should work, but capitalism dominates every other society, providing better living standards, and security. It is unfortunate we have had leftists in the Democratic party take control of it, and pushing some very strange agendas, that doesn't reflect reality. These strange agendas have been exploited by other nations, like China. Some activist investors have brought better function management and boards. Carl Icahn is a great example. But he has also brought his fair share of problems.

BobbyTables2 2y ago

Many larger do companies behave as if revenue is unlimited. Too many times, I’ve seen layoffs followed by acquisitions of 10x the cost reduction from the layoffs — often even in the same quarter. And when parent company has a track record of driving acquisitions into the ground from mismanagement, where is the profit?

callc 2y ago

> Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement. There is not a "Employee's Feelings" column on the ledger. Sure they do. Just in the sense that employees feelings need to be controlled and made to fear any collective action or sense of agency.

voxl 2y ago

Your horribly simplistic take has already received a lot of backlash, but whatever I'm angry enough to add onto the pile: 1. Big tech companies doing layoffs are not hurting on revenue, so your basic assumption is wrong. 2. "Cutting hours" needs to be steelmaned if you're not going to anything but a charlatan. That means you have to interpret it as taking a paycut, as in a salary cut. This has actually been done before in worker-focused companies to survive covid, and in one instance I'm aware of the company gave workers back pay after surviving covid. You also ignore all the intangibles that are no easy to measure, because of course the business acumen of "make number go up this quarter" is too short sighted to care about institutional knowledge or long term strategy.

danans 2y ago

> If a company has stagnant growth, that means leadership has made bad decisions, and things have to change. There is a bigger picture. Developed economies across the globe are experiencing stagnant growth, and the trickle down economics they have engaged in has failed to fix that. Knowing this, the wealthiest, through their proxies in corporate leadership and government, are cutting back their biggest cost - employees - to maximize their near term returns, which will then be put into relatively fixed-supply assets, rather than risking capital on new ventures, and the employees that traditionally requires. Corporations are betting that "growth" going forward is going to come from AI-enabled efficiency and productivity gains, not more employees making more product or innovating on product/service development and delivery. While it's too early to say whether they are right, many signs point in that direction.

tdb7893 2y ago

A good friend of mine has a PhD in labor economics and is now a senior management consultant for a big firm and I've been told that in general just cutting people is bad for businesses and most businesses will be worse off by just cutting people, especially without changing any of the underlying systems that got the company to the position it's in. Next time I'll have to ask him about the studies on it but there definitely isn't a consensus that general layoffs help businesses in the medium/long term. He was saying the times they seem to work best is in the context of a broader restructuring, (which in my experience is not common for companies).

deviantbit 2y ago
[flagged]
- Retric 2y ago
  No, just cutting people across the company tends to be bad. Restructuring aka cutting programs and the people working on them has fewer downsides.
  - deviantbit 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Retric 2y ago
      Sure the general consensus of experts is just like my opinion man. Numbers never lie, until they do.
      - deviantbit 2y ago
        [flagged]
  - deviantbit 2y ago
    [flagged]

eikenberry 2y ago

> If a company is bleeding revenue, it cannot sustain the overhead of employees. They have to go. No, they don't. During the dotcom bubble my company gave us 2 choices, layoffs or 20% pay cut. We took the latter. Everyone stayed and we had our pay back to previous levels in a couple years and the company remained profitable. You can, in fact, treat people as people and still run a company. > Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement. This is only true of companies of a certain (large) size, when all semblance of employees being people have been abstracted away. In companies of more reasonable sizes you must take employee moral into account or you will lose critical employees which could kill the company.

deviantbit 2y ago
Which dot com was that?
- eikenberry 2y ago
  The first one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
  - deviantbit 2y ago
    Don't you love people make claims and the can't substantiate the claim? They just down vote your comment.
  - deviantbit 2y ago
    Which company?
wilg 2y ago
Surely there are some situations where a pay cut is insufficient because you would like to reorganize the company, for example to wind down an unprofitable initiative or division and there's not a reasonable way to maintain the same headcount?

stalfosknight 2y ago

Why can’t the outrageously overpaid leadership who made the mistakes be the ones who are punished instead of the individual contributors who are just trying to survive?

theptip 2y ago

Unsurprisingly, both the OP and this are oversimplified statements. The more nuanced point is to note that simply reducing the world to accounting equations omits all of the human detail. Morale is a meaningful thing, or if you prefer, knowledge, expertise, Metis; these are damaged in layoffs, especially repeated rounds. And furthermore, the recent tech layoffs were not generally about fixing unsustainable businesses, they were about juicing profit margins for already profitable ones. On the other hand, of course the OP title is wrong and layoffs can work. There are many examples even within tech where cutting deep is the only way of surviving. Complex systems are complex.

culi 2y ago

The article cited actual statistics and data comparing companies that enacted layoffs vs those that didn't. It showed very clear evidence, even within the same industry, that those that enacted layoffs fared MUCH worse Also many of these layoffs are NOT coming when companies are "bleeding revenue". E.g. Meta and Twitter enacted massive layoffs after posting their most profitable quarters yet

conductr 2y ago
That’s what should be expected. A company in a stronger position can more confidently avoid laying off people and “ride out” the painful market conditions. Not every company’s revenue is composed of similar risk items even within similar industries. Some companies are already knee deep in some new strategy and need everyone on board to roll it out. The other company is just a bunch of variable labor that can be culled when volume shrinks. It also means they’re not investing in the future and going to get beat by a more strategic competitor. So many other riffs to take on this, but short term minded financials are absolutely improved by layoffs and that’s usually all the action is trying to effect.
- culi 2y ago
  Okay but you are saying the exact opposite of what the comment I replied to is saying.

sgustard 2y ago

Layoffs are like closing factories that don't produce, cutting products that don't sell, closing deserted retail locations, and so on. Likely bad business decisions got you there in the first place. Maybe market conditions changed. Maybe your whole company is going to fail no matter what you do. But blanket statements about what does or doesn't "work" are not very instructive.

TZubiri 2y ago

Also cutting hours sounds terribly out of touch with the gig economy dilemma, I'd rather be let go than put on half my salary?

kypro 2y ago

Also I'd argue that a lack of layoffs at a company probably causes stagnation and inefficiency. I don't thin the only good argument for layoffs is that a company has no choice because of cash flows. I see this in the public sector where you often find people who have been working at the same dept for a decade or more. These people feel very safe and know they don't really need to try that hard. They also know nothing about how things function elsewhere so they'll put up with using spreadsheets and fax machines because that's just how they've always done things. It seems rather obvious to me that a good economy is one where employers feel some nervousness about losing good employees, so offer pay rises and perks; And where employees feel some nervousness about layoffs so work hard and try to be as productive as they reasonably can be. If a company is not cutting a few percentage of their least productive workers each year they're probably doing something wrong imo. I think it's far to argue big tech companies built up a lot of these under productive workers over the years.

pickledoyster 2y ago

>take a "Cost Accounting" course do you (or anyone else) have a good course to recommend?