Just going to have to agree to disagree on that.
I thought I read somewhere the a lot of employees have a vest date in the near future. I wonder if that just so happens to coincide with the 3,700 lay off date.
Edit: I’m wrong.
An issue is that you got about 100k tech bros currently working for companies that aren’t solvent now and in some cases already specified their restructuring.
In the industrial biotech market in tbe Bay Area there is a bad cascade going on. One player (Zymergen) got a huge investment and has now stumbled badly. A couple of years ago, scientists and engineers were moving job to job to get better gigs. Now the labor market is flooding at the exact time when investment dollars might dry up.
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I thought about this a bunch in the last um few minutes and you’re very right. Problem is we (non idiots)'ve talked about this exact thing a lot for the last 5 or even 10 years, just waiting, for years, for the “bad tech companies” to fail.
Will they though? Really? Will AirBNB, DoorDash, Uber, etc etc really fail? Go out of business? Lay off thousands of techbros?
If they were going to, why didn’t they 2 years ago during covid?
Money printer went Brrrr at an unprecedented rate to save everything and then some during COVID. Money printer is rapidly going in reverse right now.
TJ Miller is a total lunatic, but has/had some sort of brain abnormality that is at least partially responsible.
I think even Elon gets that software engineer bros enjoy working from home, the problem is that all the middle-manager bros and upper-manager bros have jobs that largely revolve around milling about the office pestering the engineers and so in a remote work environment it becomes harder for any of them to explain why they are necessary. There’s also the matter of status. You can’t sit down at the head of the table in the boardroom and do real alpha male businessbro bullshit remotely. Imagine doing a scene from Mad Men via Zoom. It’s silly.
In principle, remote work should be amazing for tech/software companies and it’s absurd that we have inefficient hubs like San Francisco or Silicon Valley in 2022. Instead of paying people a Bay Area salary, give the weird nerds who work for you a fraction of that pay but with the option to live in a cave and avoid all the hassle and personal interactions that come along with in-person work (basically this is my situation now; loving it). Should be a win-win.
That’s my knockoff-Dilbert hot take for the day, I hope you guys enjoy it.
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Would any 7,000 person company even have the cash to pay severance for half their workforce on the same day?
Yes, most companies have cash on hand to pay a month severance, even ignoring that they’d have to pay it anyways!
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They’re all going to be fired for cause.
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That should go well legally.
I know, lol me.
3,700 high paid software engineers get one month severance?
In Canada, it would be 6-12 months salary depending on years worked.
Coincidentally, 6 months’ salary for a Canadian software engineer is about equal to 1 month’s salary in the US.
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There is no law in the United States guaranteeing severance to laid off workers!
Australia gets one month for every year worked. Because redundancies are fairly frequent, getting one or two over your career can make a fair difference.
I guess I should have assumed but wow.
There is the WARN act though. I think he’s either got to give them 60 days notice or keep paying them for 60 days, so it kind of de facto gives them severance. Caveat: I am not an expert in the WARN act.
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