Comment on Mark Zuckerberg: Tech layoffs in 2024 have been a natural response to pandemic-era over hiring
shalafi@lemmy.world 10 months agoThere are always economic ebbs and flows. Tech is weird and unpredictable because the space has only been around 20-years in its current form, and 20-years is a liberal estimate. Maybe I’d argue 10-years?
Now comes the pandemic, something we humans haven’t dealt with for 100-years, back we had just learned airplanes. A huge chunk of our workforce went home to work, with the associated strain on the tech sector. For example:
It was clear to me that Zoom had hired shitloads of new people. The tech support quality dropped through the floor overnight. After a couple of years, once people got used to Zoom and tech support issues cooled out, they laid a bunch of people off.
I suppose that’s evil capitalism and greed, right? Have you ever sat around a call center where the calls weren’t coming in? It sucks. Everyone’s looking at everyone else like, “Why do we even have jobs and how can we have a future here?” It’s demoralizing and scary. I’d rather get laid off and move on than sit in fear of my job. There are plenty of other issues with having too many bodies doing too little work, but that’s another story.
There’s been some great comments on lemmy, far better than mine, that went into the economic aspects in broad and understandable detail.
So anyway, how exactly would you like to punish these people, whoever they may be, for not reacting properly to an unprecedented set of events?
maynarkh@feddit.nl 10 months ago
The idea behind the higher pay of CEOs and the appreciation of shares is that the shareholders and CEOs bear exactly this risk. I wouldn’t prohibit layoffs for the reasons you mentioned. I would mandate very generous severance packages and prohibitions on raising workload on other employees.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Zuckerberg has done that - 16 weeks severance for every year you’ve worked there. If you’re a ten year employee, your severance package is three years pay.
I’m pretty sure facebook is one of those companies where employees basically just work all day long. There’s no scope to increase the workload.