| ▲ | xyzelement an hour ago |
| Former employee (though not part of that famous round of layoff) The noise around Zoom firing was ridiculous. We were a largely remote company with most people having never been to the office (I don't think I had, at that moment) so how exactly do you lay off people except remotely? VG didn't do a great job there but the idea of doing it remotely being evil or whatever was ridiculous - should the people be flown in to NY just to get fired? Overall I find VG a flawed but reasonable dude. He definitely put his ass on the line for the business, was generous with equity - and was a pretty engaged leader. I don't think much about my time at Better but it was fine. |
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| ▲ | healsdata an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| There's a huge range of options between a terse Zoom call with 900 people on it and flying everyone to NY. And if you're someone who previously said "You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS… SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME" to your employees, you may want to lean towards the more humane options if you don't want to get dragged. |
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| ▲ | Petersipoi 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | There is nothing inhumane about announcing layoffs over Zoom though. Hell I'd prefer to be laid off in the least personal way possible because I'm a grown-ass adult who doesn't need my company to treat my like a child. Tell me and get it over with. | | |
| ▲ | garciasn 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Just like a mass wedding is fucking stupid, so is a mass layoff. You can have the fucking common decency to do a 1:1 Zoom call with each person. Or at least each fucking team. Firing 900 people simultaneously is not only stupid and callous, but lazy. There’s absolutely no excuse for that level of inhumanity. | | |
| ▲ | Pedro_Ribeiro 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | What does it matter if it's an HR person or the CEO telling me? The job is not coming back either way. | | | |
| ▲ | BeetleB 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't know. Pre-pandemic, when doing mass layoffs, it wasn't unusual for a company to hold a giant update meeting and let everyone know they're shutting down the division and that everyone's been laid off. How is this different? | | |
| ▲ | happytoexplain 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Shutting down is a subset of reasons for mass layoffs. They are not equivalent. Disregarding that, it's not very different. What is the implication you're making? That it's good because it's common? | |
| ▲ | Quekid5 14 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | It might surprise you to learn that that would also be considered a dick move. |
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| ▲ | e40 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > so how exactly do you lay off people except remotely? You have their managers do it. Privately. 500 people at once is just lazy and hateful. |
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| ▲ | xyzelement 5 minutes ago | parent [-] | | How long does that take (900 people) - how does your entire 10k people company feel for hours and days knowing the layoffs are happening but not their fate? And how many of those said 10k mortgage originators and engineers do something stupid to customer financial data they have access to while under duress of this uncertainty? |
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| ▲ | happytoexplain an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >put his ass on the line Please don't do this. There are many people who put their ass on the line. He is not one of them. He risked almost nothing from a human perspective. |
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| ▲ | semiquaver 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Clearly his ass was on the line based on the fact that he was fired and is now likely unemployable. | | |
| ▲ | pigbearpig 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | He was fired 5 years after the zoom layoffs. That information is from the linked article. | |
| ▲ | happytoexplain 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | If he's fine, that's not "his ass". Otherwise, do you mean "unemployable as a CEO"? If yes, that's irrelevant. If no, why do you think that? You said "clearly", but it's clearly not clear (assuming you've made it to this point in the decision tree). |
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| ▲ | xyzelement an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I find it off-putting that you and another poster think you are in position to evaluate someone else's sacrifice. I pressume that if you had put years and lots of money towards something - you would consider that significant "on a human level". | | |
| ▲ | gopher_space 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I haven't worked for an individual with a failure state anyone would recognize since the mid-90s. There's no sacrifice involved in being addicted to a lifestyle that pays well even if you suck. | |
| ▲ | bluefirebrand an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I pressume that if you had put years and lots of money towards something - you would consider that significant "on a human level". If you are wealthy enough to gamble a bunch of money and a couple of years and still have more money than most people left over if it fails, then no. I don't view that as making any kind of significant sacrifice at all Seriously. If your "worst case scenario" is still "I could retire comfortably tomorrow without any hardship" then I genuinely feel no sympathy for you if your ventures fail. | | |
| ▲ | simoncion 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Seriously. If your "worst case scenario" is still "I could retire comfortably tomorrow without any hardship"... Yeah. A long while back, I was talking to the guy who ran a Subway-branded sandwich shop that I frequented, and had been running it for quite a long while. He was complaining to me how absolutely terribly the business was doing... how he'd lost something like 150K last year and this year was shaping up to be at least as bad. And, like, on the one hand that's a quite a lot of money for an individual to lose. On the other hand I -at the time- would have been immediately tossed out on the street if I lost even a quarter of that amount in a year. Him? He kept the business open, bleeding money for a couple more years before he shut it down to go do something else. He was unhappy about the change in plans, but very clearly not financially threatened by the losses over the previous years. A monetary loss that would ruin one person might not even be worth bothering to account for to another. The surrounding context always matters. |
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| ▲ | happytoexplain an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is an oversimplification. I didn't make the implication you are accusing me of. Tangentially, please do not presume my feelings based on invented scenarios - it's hostile. Regardless - yes, my response should be off-putting. The situation we are in is "off-putting", to understate it. |
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| ▲ | __MatrixMan__ an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | That is, unless there's a contingent out there considering hurting him for this. Probably not justified in this case, but maybe we'd get better leadership if it were a tad more common. |
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| ▲ | jroseattle 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > VG didn't do a great job there but the idea of doing it remotely being evil or whatever was ridiculous I don't think the issue was the communications medium (Zoom.) > I don't think much about my time at Better but it was fine. That's the biggest tell about leadership at any company. |
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| ▲ | throwaway27448 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > He definitely put his ass on the line for the business Oh did he risk being homeless? Let's not be hyperbolic here—all he risked was minor embarrassment |
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| ▲ | nickff an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | "Minor embarrassment" is what politicians who 'take full responsibility' while not facing any consequences 'suffer'.[1] Getting canned for it is a bit more than that. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-19958739 | | |
| ▲ | happytoexplain an hour ago | parent [-] | | >Getting canned for it is a bit more than that. No, in the C-suite, it is not. Yes, in other positions, it is. | | |
| ▲ | SaltyBackendGuy an hour ago | parent [-] | | What more can he do, other than get canned, to be accountable? | | |
| ▲ | happytoexplain 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Nothing, of course - that's why he is not accountable. Because of the way things currently work, he was not in a situation to be able to be accountable. Maybe we can change that eventually. | |
| ▲ | xboxnolifes 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Take a pay cut, push back on investors/board, wait until after Christmas... | |
| ▲ | sgt101 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Apologise and donate his fortune to homeless charities? | |
| ▲ | simoncion 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | One option is to pay back enough of his compensation from that period (and money made off of investments funded by that compensation) to make his total comp over his tenure equal to that of a low-to-mid-level line worker. Some say that money is the unit of caring. If that's true, then nothing expresses an executive's commitment to accountability more than him forfeiting enough of his total compensation to put himself nearly at the bottom of the totem pole. |
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| ▲ | xyzelement an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | There was some dynamic with Softbank which required VG to put a lot of personal money on the line to keep going. I forget the dynamic exactly. |
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| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | lbrito 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Oh, will some one think of the poor CEOs for a change! He puts his ass on the line! Pathetic |
