Could you explain why it's hard? I've never seen anyone run into any kind of difficulty letting go an at-will employee. The manager can do so at any time, for any reason or no reason at all.

There’s no correlation. They hired expecting a certain type of growth. They fired because of AI. The narrative that they were getting rid of bad workers was their excuse, not the reason. Many great engineers got let go. Many project managers that had been with the company through ups and downs. One guy was let go after being poached from a FAANG after his 3rd day. So don’t say anyone deserved it.

Layoffs are a signal to markets of struggles, and firms absolutely do, in practice, need to justify them (and their scale and focus) to avoid the risk of a self-fulfilling market perception that they signal a problems that they do not fully resolve. (If there is already a problem narrative, much of the justification is obvious, and the firm just needs to cover explaining how the layoffs address the problem.)

However the best work I ever did was done when I didn't have a pressure of being fired for offending the wrong person, and that I had the psychological safety to think longer term- since a short term "time-waste" often converted to better long term outcomes for everybody.

Even if they feel they ARE being productive, they should be allowed to let them go. The ultimate point of a job is not to get paid, it is to produce work that accomplishes a goal set by the employers. So if they change those goals for some reason, then the letting-go should be allowed.

I really wish there was some sort of UBI to disincentivize clinging to a near-useless (in terms of ultimate goals) job. Heck, just making unemployment not contingent on getting fired (another perverse incentive) would be an improvement.

That's not what layoffs are. In fact, your belief is not productive. Why are you waiting for layoffs to get rid of people who are not being productive? Why are you supporting people being unproductive?

> You need a way to get rid of dead wood, otherwise you would be too afraid to grow and hire when you need to.

That's not what's happening. Generally it's a result of leadership failing to do their job, misusing resources, and needing to compensate for that in the market.

Layoffs are signals that the leadership is not being productive. Full stop.

Layoffs are not about individual performance

We’re seeing the opposite and the wealth gap is increasing because the elites running our society see us as cattle, not countrymen.

The current point of our country is to increase GDP (which is a fancy way of saying make the rich richer, given the current wealth gap). It should be to enrich the lives of all its citizens.

Sounds like you've never worked here, but in the US that's always been the case.

US corporations do not need you shilling for their rights, they are doing very well in that department without your help, thank you very much.

Alternatively, you can retrain the workers. Replacing workers has serious cost disadvantages: recruiting itself costs money (the HR staff dedicated to that, external headhunters, "employer branding" measures, job exhibition rents and swag), layoffs cost reputation, and new workers need to be trained in your company specific procedures from timetracking to expense refunds.

Unfortunately, these costs are all too often hidden deep in the balance sheets, which makes just dumping off entire departments while hiring up other departments appear much more financially attractive than it is in reality, all costs considered.

And finally, the ethical question remains: executives get paid sometimes a hundred million dollars a year because of the "responsibility" they hold. But in the end, they do not hold any responsibility, any accountability - financial penalties for shenanigans get covered by D&O insurance, and the first ones to get sacked for (or having to live with) bad executive decisions are the employees while the executive gets a departure agreement showering them with money.

IMHO, before a company can even fire a single worker for another reason than willful misconduct, the entire C-level executive has to go as well, with immediate stop of pay and benefits.

And, yes, of course layoffs are something that need to be justified, just as with firing an individual employee, as you know -- the "employee is not being productive" is a justification.

In demanding industries, people spend 2/3rds of their waking hours around their coworkers. That's practically their whole life. It's cruel to encourage coldness in such an environment. You aren't family. But, you can be comrades. Your friendships can be forged through shared struggles, shared spaces and convenience.

It's a unique trait of tech companies to encourage cold but polite relations with your coworkers. Other industries have layoffs, politics and capitalistic competition. That doesn't stop coworkers from becoming friends.

The new generation is more isolated than ever before. The workplace is one of the few remaining mandatory social spaces. We should encourage the organic warmth that builds up between coworkers. It's cliche. But we're social animals.

I don't know that it should be legal to buy a company and then pay for it by loading up the company with debt obligations. It seems like a form of value destruction in order to enrich a bunch of vultures.

Fundamentally it is basically saying maybe we could buy this company and then plunder it with some % chance that it will still stay afloat and keep generating profit after they gut the company to try to service a debt that should not be attached to the company at all and provided no value to anyone but the vultures.

Companies need to be strategic with the messaging so as to not scare shareholders. Hence, they use "strategic refocusing on AI" or "operating leaner and faster" as buzzwords to characterize the layoffs.

In reality, in the last couple years companies are just trying to slash costs however they can because real sustained growth is highly uncertain.

If an employee is not being productive, that is a performance management issue and a good company will start by trying to fix it and if that doesn’t work will replace them. A bad company will retain bad performing people.

Layoffs are when you don’t have the work for them or you can’t afford something so are restructuring or similar. A good company will make layoffs and restructure if the economics require it. A bad company will keep going without doing that, ignoring their finances.

It creates money, but contributes 0 or negative value for the actual gaming industry, unlike other companies like FromSoft that consistently hits the ball out of the park, pushing the envelope on new franchises and new gaming genres. THAT, is creating value.

Their points are cause for unions to organize across companies and industries (though solidarity strike action is illegal in the US because it's effective). But they take for granted that employers should have their way and that employee interests are best served by appeasing owners.

It can also encourage workers to consider the needs of customers and suppliers, the ignoring of which will tend to eventually harm the company and its shareholders. I.e., it is not always a weasel word.