Almost 99% sure that They hired a consultant firm (MBB) that told them who to cut; this is pretty standard practice now at public tech corps. Especially if EMs weren’t in the loop. This looks like purely a margin improvement exercise thats hiding weaknesses in the company’s financial performance.
Thats usually correct for these “surprise” layoffs. For the ones that are announced in advance there is a bit more coordination (like the meta/amazn ones).
I’m sure they don’t know what they are doing or necessarily care, but I’m still curious what the consultants even claim to be looking at to make the list? Job description, git activity, team level profitability, salary, etc?
Employees are treated as a cost which is why you often see the strongest performers inexplicably laid off (since they are likely compensated higher). In situations like this they don’t care about productivity; leadership is given a list and they can move a few people around but for most its game over once they’re on it.
If you know anyone that works at MBB they would be happy to share this with you; if you’re in SF just hit any bar for a weeknight happy hour and you will 100% find someone.
Yeah, honestly this is where LLMs shine since they were trained on so many MBA/HBS materials. Just remember to ask your questions in a way that praises neoliberalism and you'll unlock even more secrets about how they fuck over and alienate workers.
I really don't know. My org now has 40+ engineers with 2 managers. Down from 6. I really don't know how they will do it. Each one of us were handling critical shit, and desperately needed more engineers. PMs made things run and they got hit even harder
No one had any idea. My director got the same email
This style of layoff seems far more common post-2020 than targeted "restructuring". I've lived through a few layoffs now, survived most of them, but each time and at each company I've gotten by on an apparent roll of the dice and nothing more. Every time I've seen some truly important ICs get let go, their EMs having no input.
I used to work for a manager who would blatantly say "I will not hire a white person for this position". Of course, it wasn't an official policy to exclude people based on race. I'm pretty sure that would be illegal? But in practice, some hiring managers would sometimes reject or not even consider candidates of certain races. I've also seen people on hiring panels lower standards explicitly because of "diversity" (but to be fair, only when the candidate was on the fence of hire/no-hire).
This is not accurate. In the USSR and after its collapse, Russians generally don't consider themselves European. I also think this aligns more or less with how the rest of the world sees Russia if you consider the standards of living and the freedoms citizens have in Russia (e.g., no freedom of speech; not being able to freely travel to most of the world). On top of that, don't forget that geographically, most of Russia is in Asia.
Russians need a travel visa to go to any Western country and most of the world. Some EU countries are banned Russians from entering; the US is not issuing travel visas in Russia anymore.
US is actually quite good on offering entry to refugees from Russia. At least 30,000 people from Russia entered US through Mexico and requested asylum in US and many got it. The problem is that it's only option for basically rich citizens of Russia because whole process is expensive, hard and quite dangerous.
EU is much closer, but it does nothing. Putins regime could've lost 30-50% of it's high-skilled workforce if EU or UK just made it easier to immigrate. E.g literally 100,000s of Russian IT workforce left due to war and political situation, but getting actual work visas is hard process and outside of country of citizenship it's only gets harder if not impossible.
But honestly west can't even help Ukraine efficiently. How can one expect EU to actually do anything to cripple Russia economy...
> do i care that your vpn connection is broken by your oppressive goverment
Do you realize that the government restricting access to alternative media sources even more will result in fewer and fewer people in russia opposing the status quo?
ClickHouse is licensed under Apache License 2.0 and Yandex is incorporated in the Netherlands. What are your concerns with it being developed by russians (other than xenophobia)?
According to Wikipedia, the territory now called Mongolia was conquered by White Russians in 1920. Before then it was controlled by the Chinese Republic and before that the Qing dynasty (the rulers of which were ethnically neither Chinese nor Mongolian). In response, the Red Russians assisted Mongolian communists in conquering the country. The assistance included the sending of Russian troops.
How did the company decide who to lay off? They didn't even ask EMs?