Linked – Facebook layoffs are a reminder that your job won’t love you back
I saw something similar when there were layoffs at Microsoft. A company that made a ton of money just didn’t grow revenue as much as the grew it the year before, laying people off to satisfy the stockholders.
“The company is still wildly profitable and, as Recode’s Shirin Ghaffary wrote in September, can afford to make payroll even in an economic downturn. Instead, Meta is choosing not to.
Meta and other Silicon Valley companies are using the economic circumstances to trim fat and make remaining staff work harder. Meta wants to get back to a leaner startup mindset to appease shareholders and raise its dwindling stock price. It’s working, too: The stock is up 20 percent from last week, according to data from financial platform Sentieo.”
The other important thing to remember is that the same people making these decisions stand to benefit the most from their stock holdings in the company. A lot of Zuckerberg’s net worth is from stock in Meta. When those stock prices went back up, his net worth and a bunch of other significant shareholders did, too.
Of course, I should also point out that many of us made some money in our 401(k) portfolios and other investments.
Nevertheless, the most significant point of the article below isn’t to argue about the negatives of being a public company or not, it’s to point out what should have been obvious but too many people in tech have lost sight of. A company that consistently reminds you that you’re part of the family and that everyone should view it that way and dedicate themselves accordingly will let you go in a heartbeat when things aren’t going as well as they’d like.
And people wonder why quiet quitting is all the rage.
