When I was an underboss in a firm that was going down, I just told people. Informally, in person. I wasn't supposed to, but they were putting two and two together themselves, and it would have been wrong to leave them with an inaccurate idea of how the firm was doing.
Don't hire me if you need me to lie to your staff.
This is literally my only request from management. If you know I'm going to lose my job don't wait until my last day to tell me. Give me some time to set up other options.
You should always have other options. You shouldn’t wait until you’re about to be laid off. I can honestly say there isn’t a single day since 2008 (I’ve been working a lot longer) that if the company I was working for laid me off that I wouldn’t be prepared to look for another job the same day.
That means an updated resume, career document of accomplishments and talking points, an active network and “fuck you money” in the bank. If you live in any major city in the US, and are a software developer with experience, you should be making in the upper quintile of income for your area. There is usually no excuse not to have savings.
A developer in SF is not in the upper quintile.. they can't even afford a starter house. Big cities add huge costs that start making sense with home ownership but will leave a renter worse off.
Yes because I’m sure two year old data is grossly out of date and the median income has gone up greatly enough so that a software engineer in SF is no longer in the top quintile.
That just doesn't make any sense. You can't even rent an apartment for less than $3,000 in SF, let along think about buying the average $2M house. What is the discrepancy? Maybe these folks all ended up buying their houses 30 years ago?
The number doesn't jive for me either. You would have to go through how the median income number is formulated. It may not be how you think. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen this with broad statistics.
It’s so tough though - with large layoffs, you want to avoid revenge actions from people who are being let go. Immediate termination / cutoff of access is really the only way to do it. But I agree, it’s not humane. Don’t ever buy companies that talk about being a family. They want you to treat them like family but they will turn around and do what they deem necessary to self-preserve.
If you think your employees will take revenge action after being let go, you need to do a lot better job at hiring people.
I can't imagine many professionals would do something damaging to their employer on the way out. Facing legal troubles right when you are looking for a new job seems very shortsighted.
Also, if you treat the people you are letting go as humans, they will be less likely to retaliate. Ironically, trying to prevent retaliation by treating them like they will retaliate is more likely to cause them to do so.
Delusional. 99% of professionals can come across as nice and respectful in interviews, and have no criminal record. How could you possibly anticipate "a willingness to take revenge".
I’m assuming people you are laying off have worked with you long enough to get an idea of their character. If you are firing someone for cause, that is one thing; you are firing them because they aren’t what they originally seemed, so it makes sense to take precautions.
However, if you are laying someone off simply because the business if struggling, you presumably think they are trustworthy enough to employ. If you trusted them enough to give them the power before letting them go, you obviously trust them. If you are worried getting laid off will make them abuse that trust and use their access to cause damage, how could you trust them before you laid them off?
In Europe, we have layoff terms measured in months. Revenge action is nevertheless very rare.
If your personel has an exit period of a few months, they can take their time to process what happened, grieve, and find a new job, without losing the house or healthcare. There simply isn't that much of a reason for revenge.
True and false. There is a basic package that's good enough to get you trough life. This is one extra reason why being let go is less likely to cause stress for you and damage for your boss.
But bigger organisations give extra insurance. This covers e.g. avprivate or 2 person hospital room instead of multi person rooms. Or private care without waitung lists
Also, as healthcare is getting more expensive, the core package gets smaller. E.g. dental care was a victim in my country, preventative care is still covered but restorative probably not.
The best way for a company to handle layoffs in the case where immediate termination is needed for security reasons is for the company to pay 2-6 additional weeks of salary beyond the termination date -- that way the employee has time to find new work without having a sudden, unexpected gap in income.
This is how ie banking works. Nobody smart/experienced enough even pretends its about more than next paycheck.
Sounds soulless, and for some it is, but there is no place for drama when the day comes.
Being good hearted will eventually backfire - that one employee who feels its very unfair to him, with right access can do so much damage to already faltering company it can even bring it down.
So its a precaution, because 1 (or 5) percent of people are vengeful assholes, and you often find out only when right buttons are pressed.
Severance package is always generous, ie my bank gives in such case 1 salary for every year worked, on top of mandatory 3 ones mandated by Swiss laws.
This can create its own chaos. Having been through layoffs where the news got out early and others where management mostly kept a lid on it, the outcome wasn’t better when some people knew early.
Those who were connected to the right bosses knew more than others. There were a couple leaders who already had new jobs lined up when the news became public while others were stuck scrambling. There was a lot of anger and resentment compared to other layoffs I’d been through.
On the other hand, there were layoffs more of the form of directors making “objective” decisions without the bottom two layers of management knowing much of anything beyond that layoffs were probably going to happen. There was more shock. People had a bad time still but there wasn’t the same toxicity to it.
Why should one need to read an unrelated page posted by a 3rd party in order to infer what someone meant?
It is not-improbable that the GP intended a mafia reference for how the layoffs were handled. Your choosing to infer instead of learning produces incorrect results. i.e. It's best not to assume.
Take the hit. I worked for a series B startup employing around 100 people at the start of the pandemic. Because of the pandemic the business was entirely shut down for 6 months. And was barely operational for longer still. Not a single person was let go.
Now, this requires you to run your business responsibly from the start. If you’re already on the edge of your runway you either cut back or die. But if you have the cash in the bank you’re a better person for spending it on the employees than doubling down on your war chest.
What? If you're cutting, you're not doing it for excess fuck-you cash, it's clearly a runway planning scenario. Giving the example of a company that basically shut down while paying their employees to do nothing isn't helping make your point.
Your missing his point. He used this as an opportunity to increase loyalty, keep a trained functioning team together at decent wages which were able to outperform other companies who laided off, rehired months later at greater costs, no loyalty and starting from ground zero.
The pandemic had "paycheck protection program" or PPP and a second round of this called PPP2 also. This program payed out billions to employers to keep employees, rather than let them go on unemployment, which would have been less productive to the country and maybe even cost the government more in those $600 per week in unemployment, per person. I seriously doubt any startup could otherwise have kept their employees thanks to their 'war chest.' Normally startups don't have a war chest at all.
This startup had a 2 year runway after factoring in their office lease. Dropping the lease (since no one was coming in anyway) would have extended that. But you're right about PPP. They got PPP money a few months after the pandemic started.
How about an email from the executives who made the mistake of driving the company into the ground, who are humanely (or even humanly) resigning, so that you could be paid your salary that they'd promised you?
All the stock that the executives dumped could easily pay the salaries of all the people they screwed. And by resigning, they would open up some nice corner offices for all the people who they hired while fully knowing they were going to need to fire a lot of people soon.
>Coinbase insiders dump nearly $5 billion in COIN stock shortly after listing
>After an edict to remain "mission focused," Coinbase executives have succeeded in making themselves a fortune.
>Insider activity reports for Coinbase’s COIN stock indicate that multiple early investors and executives sold billions in equity shortly after COIN’s direct listing. While the filings initially indicated that multiple executives sold a high percentage of their stake in the company, a representative for Coinbase told Cointelegraph that the sellers maintain strong ownership positions.
>Data from Capital Market Laboratories and confirmed by filings on Coinbase’s Investor Relations website shows a total of 12,965,079 shares were sold by insiders, worth over $4.6 billion at COIN’s $344.38 per share Friday close.
>Notable transactions include Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas selling some 255,500 shares at a price of $388.73 (though her Form 4 states that she retains options), while CEO Brian Armstrong sold 749,999 shares in three transactions at various prices, netting a total of $291,827,966.
>According to his Form 4 disclosure, after the sale Armstrong retains 300,001 shares worth over $1 billion. In a filing prior to the direct listing however, he was reported to have 36,851,833 shares, indicating that he sold just over 2% of his stake in the company.
I'm always surprised by how high SBC is for executives these days at some of these firms. When I was starting out after college, was at successful start-up. Two differences (1) The CEO and Founders made money but nothing like today, maybe $50-75M and they just held the stock for years and (2) The secretaries from the early days actually made $2-3M when the firm went public. Not sure that happens today.
Exit interviews are an opportunity for the formerly employed to air and address their grievances too. I think it precludes a (generally) necessary transfer of information when an email is sent en lieu of a substantive discussion.
As someone who’s been on both sides of the proverbial desk, I’ve come away frustrated but enlightened in some way almost every time.
there's literally zero upside for the employee to say the truth - or anything at all - in an exit interview and basically unlimited downside. maybe you got lucky?
It's not just about the method of communication, it's also about being made whole. These people should be getting severance. Also in America your healthcare is almost inextricably tied to your employer.
Perhaps this is a moment where those that would get a severance at all with a job loss acknowledge that workers rights matter, for everyone. You think that a majority of the restaurant workers during the lockdowns got severances? Perhaps it's time we separate healthcare from our workplace. If it wasn't crypto, maybe I'd be more sympathetic. Bad bets made all around in this case.
According to the article, they likely are getting severance.
Those affected will gain access to the company’s “generous severance philosophy” and “a talent hub to allow them to opt-in to receive additional support services.” (The details surrounding the severance package are unclear, but some affected workers on Blind alleged they would receive two months worth of base pay; a representative from Coinbase did not provide further comment.)
