The only possible positive thing out of this cringy article is that the severance is decent (for a US company). 4 months of pay and healthcare coverage through Year end. Everything else could have just been a couple of sentences.

Companies need to stop doing this melodrama every time they decide to fire people. Everyone knows the goal is to make money and keep a company profitable for their shareholders. Why these melodramatic posts ? People would prefer honesty. Just say "We need to increase our profits or reduce costs or both and hence we have to lay people off. Here is what we are providing as a severance". That's it.

It’s because, and I say this as a person who has made these calls, some leaders do feel a genuine responsibility for the people that work for them. Perhaps too, the ones that don’t, want people to think that they do. But as a founder and CEO by far the most emotionally taxing thing I have ever had to do is cut staff for the good of the company. You want to treat people the way you would want to be treated if you were in their shoes, but it doesn’t change the realities of the operation.

This case is clearly AI enabled “right sizing”, and it is inevitable for companies that aren’t seeing explosive growth. It seems like they are handing it well, better than most. Good for them.

Because part of being a CEO is having social skills, and doing what you suggested is extremely socially inept.

Explaining why layoffs needed to happen, expressing remorse about it, and giving a good severance package is what serious adults with empathy for their employees do.

It's also a good way to maintain at least a neutral relationship with everyone you're laying off. Compare that to a company that coldly fires you with minimal severance, and delivers that message via some low-level lackey (not the CEO) – you, as the former employee, want nothing to do with that company ever again.

If we are going to be honest we should be completely honest. "We want to increase our profits and hence we choose to lay people off."

I tend to agree. But the devil's advocate in me says that then they'd be accused of not having empathy. That sort of thing might work in Europe — but for a US company, I think you have to pay some lip service to emotions.

There is no way to fire a lot of people in a way everyone likes, only ways which suck more than others for different people. Whether you think they are dramatic is not one of the sucks they are very concerned with as you're one if the ones who will forget this layoff in a few hours

You can have cutesy names for employees and a culture with mission statements/purpose, etc. but when it comes down to it, if you're doing layoffs no collection of words is going to appease those that are let go and no collection of words is going to appease those left behind. "Teammates" is probably less cutesy than other companies but still evokes some sort of "we're all in this together" vs. straight up employees when in fact they aren't all in it together, at least not the execs.

There was an interview with Jay Leno I saw recently and he was talking about his NBC deal where he was going to be getting $30mil/year but they had to cut staff to do that so he decided to cut his own pay/raise to keep staff. That type of move by someone at the top is rare or never happens with CEOs. I think Nintendo might be the only case I can think of where I heard something like that happening. That type of move evokes an "all in it together" type of team vs. a clear delineation of CEO/executives and employees.

The melodrama is performative because they have to maintain the mask/facade that they are "teammates".

Exactly. I would be insulted if I was part of this layoff, brutal honesty would be much better

> First, the people who work at Patreon are special, beautiful humans, through and through. The energy that our team has for Patreon’s mission is a force of nature. So many wonderful humans are going to lose their jobs today in an especially painful moment and market. I am the person responsible for that decision, and I take that with the utmost seriousness.

Reminds me of Ozymandias speech when he says to Dr. Manhattan, that he has personally exprienced the pain of millions of New Yorkers he is about to decimate in the Nuclear attack.

In both the Watchmen graphic novel and the 2009 film adaptation, Ozymandias (Adrian Veidt) claims that he deeply feels and absorbs the psychic pain and deaths of the millions of people he kills. He views this immense personal suffering as his own tragic sacrifice for the greater good of humanity.

Apparently this is an unpopular opinion on HN, but a job isn't an output that companies produce, it's an agreement to compensate an employee in exchange for services, and just as the CEO shouldn't take it personally when one leaves to go work elsewhere, nobody needs to act like it's some kind of invidious social contract violation when the company no longer needs some of those services. In other words: resignation and termination are ordinary exercises of each's right to reallocate its resources.

(I am making a normative claim, not a descriptive one; I am aware that that both CEOs and laid-off employees do in fact take it personally at times.)

> Companies need to stop doing this melodrama every time they decide to fire people. Everyone knows the goal is to make money and keep a company profitable for their shareholders. Why these melodramatic posts ?

People expect it and get very angry if such posts do not appear contrite. I share your cynicism and would prefer they just say it like it is, but that doesn't work for most people.

What if he actually cares, and this is him being honest?

I know it's not usually true, but this is Jack Conte, not Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe he's one of the few CEOs who still has a human brain. I know I would feel legitimately horrible and sympathetic if I had to lay off a bunch of people.

> People would prefer honesty.

Coarsely, people prefer things that don't hurt their feelings or that don't scare them. Sometimes that's candor; sometimes it is indirectness. Complicating matters further, different people will have different preferences in the same situations.

Appearances still matter, and IMO it will be really ugly if we all decide they don't.

It sounds like you don't know Jack Conte. This isn't a melodramatic AI written tome... The guy is heartbroken

Of course the public relations is all spin. Corporations do not have feelings. Individual managers may feel one way or the other. It is likely those feelings are highly rationalized by how the change affects them individually. Will they make more money? Will they take on added duties without an increase in money?

Some may wax la philosophie politique at times, but we tend to do that in the abstract when things are at an arms length.

At the end of the day, people made a choice between a corporation and a narrow group of stakeholders over employees and the downstream community influence of their buying power, likely a large group and certainly a different group.

You could argue in the long run it is better for society for companies to make these decisions, and many times that may actually be the case. But, in this one instance, when you place it all on the scales, they were not doing it to save a company or make its products and services more competitive in the market. There was nothing "existential" about it. They wanted to go from one profit level to a higher profit level for a certain group, and that is just what they did.

Most of the time I'm convinced its just an attempt to garner sympathy from the general public/outsiders. While obviously not true for all but the vast majority of these executives and C-levels could not name any of the people they are getting rid of in the first place.

Most of the time it's an attempt to stifle negative opinions of those reading the layoff announcements. But in the modern day it's getting old because we see a new layoff every day now.

Everybody knows we aren't a family, and we're doing this to get paid not for some contrived company mission.

I'm convinced with most of these layoff announcements people would take it better if they literally just said we're getting rid of N people for X,Y,Z reasons and called it at that without the presumptuous bullshit.

> Why these melodramatic posts ?

Morale. It’s important that the remaining employees are psychologically secure. They’re trying to make sure they know the company isn’t in jeopardy and that management has them in mind.

Some research supports this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228120426_Survivors...

In my /opinion/ a personal address, one on one assurances from a trusted manager, this might be more effective, but HR also needs to be careful that the messaging is consistent so this kind of post is probably seen as the best alternative

I just got laid off after sitting through a company town hall meeting explaining why the reason we’re all being laid off (replaced with Cognizant + Anthropic colab) is totally awesome and great for the company’s future.

I do not understand why I’m supposed to care.

Because they have to get back to work after. It's a shit leader attitude to admit you just traded humans for profits - you have to keep pretending. On the other end, employees keep pretending they are passionate about X, Y or Z and not just there for the dough. It's a delicate balance.