Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

In the first month of 2023, 90,000 people have graduated from Silicon Valley factories. What happened to family? Employee: I was naive.

Silicon Valley's big lie has been exposed!

Former Silicon Valley employees thought they and the company were "loving family."

I didn't expect that in the winter,"family" turned so fast.

Before they knew it, 40,000 employees of Amazon, Microsoft and Google were laid off at the speed of light.

Reality slapped him in the face.

Ten days ago, the number of layoffs was 57,914, but now it has skyrocketed to 90,000 +.

According to trueup.io, 292 tech companies have proposed layoffs in 2023, affecting a total of 90,430 people.

Silicon Valley "delivers" an average of 3,014 talents to society every day.

A horrible nightmare "I was treated inhumanly." "I've had a stab in the back." "I've got to go." After the wave of layoffs sweeping the industry, injured laid-off employees are crying online.

"I'm shocked and hurt, and I'm still digesting those emotions…" Katie Olaskiewicz, a former Google employee, wrote on Linkdln after Google laid off 12,000 people last week. "The feeling of betrayal is so painful, but I don't know who to vent my anger on."

Yes, in Silicon Valley, you can work for the most respected employer in the world, but when you get laid off, you're just a number representing how many dollars you'll save the company.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google laid off 40,000 employees in two weeks, and it was like a nightmare.

On Lindeln and other social platforms, they lament how cruel their former employers were.

Paul Baker, whose mother is terminally ill with cancer, took a month's paid nursing leave. On January 20, he found that his work notebook couldn't enter, hurriedly opened his personal notebook and saw the dismissal email from the company.

Baker was shocked for a moment and then sad.

Baker has long been concerned about Google's overcrowding, but he doesn't think Google will lay off workers. And because Google Ads, where he works, generates good revenue, he feels that even if he cuts jobs, he won't be cut to his head.

Katherine Wong is eight months pregnant, and a week before she goes on maternity leave, she sees on her mobile phone that she is one of 12,000 people being laid off. At that moment, she "couldn't control her trembling hands."

The first thought that came to her mind was,"Why me? Why now?"

Despite being fired, Wong said on Lindln that he loved the company, especially his Google Domains team, and that his colleagues were like "family."

It's not surprising that Silicon Valley employees feel betrayed, because for years, Silicon Valley factories have shaped an atmosphere in which work is not a transaction, and everyone belongs to one big family, working toward the same goal.

While wall street has recently begun to shed more than 15,000 employees, including goldman sachs, blackrock, citigroup and morgan stanley, in financial circles everyone knows that work is a business transaction.

Unlike Wall Street, Silicon Valley's layoffs are the first in 20 years.

In the cold winter, tech workers finally understand: this is not home.

Love and family? You are so naive! In Silicon Valley, hundreds of startups fail every year.

But big factories are different. In the last ten years, apart from a sense of mission, big factories have also conveyed to their employees a sense of security and belonging.

At Google, employees have a special name-Googlers-which means they are not just employees, but also an entrenched part of the organization.

In its early days, Google used to have a sprawling tech park full of amenities where employees could work late into the night and some even sleep directly in the company.

Google's office in Moutain View, California, was then Google's slogan "Devote Yourself to Work," where life and work were integrated.

Facebook's x culture Facebook is the concept of "happy workers" to the extreme.

At the sprawling Menlo Park campus, Facebook employees can go to the gym for group fitness classes and have breakfast at several cafes.

In 2018, Facebook was named America's Best Place to Work, in part because it encourages employees to unleash their "true selves" at work.

To outsiders, Facebook is both happy and successful, achieving the perfect work-life balance.

But is that really the case?

In 2019, a young female employee's speech debunked this "emperor's new clothes" lie.

She bluntly said she felt there was a "bad wind" in the company-everyone was acting: you have to pretend everything is perfect, and you especially like working here. "When I don't feel that way, I shouldn't be forced to act." After the employee spoke, his colleagues applauded.

"Even if you're in fucking pain, you need to act like you like it a lot," said one former employee.

Many former employees also say that in order to be promoted, you have to force yourself and your colleagues to be social.

One reason for this atmosphere is Facebook's performance appraisal system, in which each employee receives ratings from about five colleagues twice a year. This "peer review system" forces employees to seize every opportunity to socialize with colleagues and compete for popularity.

An employee was publicly criticized by his manager for not participating in the group building because he was going through a divorce.

Also, people here are extremely focused on who is connected to who on Facebook and who has something to say that makes the manager happy. A former employee revealed that there are actually a lot of unhappy people, but they are very happy on Facebook.

Now, Silicon Valley's "family" myth has been completely shattered.

When Marc Benioff founded Salesforce, he invoked the Hawaiian word for "ohana," meaning family ties.

Ironically, when Salesforce laid off 10% of its workforce this month, he was still talking about the idea of a "workplace family":"It's not just colleagues who are affected." They are friends, they are family." In a letter to employees, he likened layoffs to the death of colleagues.

Also operating is Xiao Za, who admitted that he misinvested in the meta-universe and had to carry out "Hunger Games" layoffs last November. He thanked the departing employees for their "dedication to the company."

One of the laid-off Google software engineers tweeted: "I find it hard to believe that after 20 years at Google, I learned of my layoff via email. It's like I've been slapped in the face... how I wish I could say goodbye to everyone in person."

Another employee said: "It's time we learned that work isn't your whole life, and for a big employer like Google, you're like disposable chopsticks." People don't live to work."

The idea of "family" is toxic. The idea of a workplace, such as a family, sounds wonderful and creates a deep-rooted sense of trust. But blurring the line between work and family comes at a cost.

Journalists Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen, in their 2021 book Outside the Office, reject this notion of work as family.

"You already have a family, either original or reconstituted. When a company uses that phrase, it defines a transactional relationship as an emotional relationship."

"It sounds tempting, but it's manipulative and it's a ploy to get employees to do more work for less." Family evokes not only intimacy, but also a spirit of dedication and sacrifice, creating lasting bonds of family supremacy."

Yes, treating the company as a family ultimately "forces employees to ignore their own exploitation," with subtle consequences of making employees feel they shouldn't take time off, ask for more money, or raise objections.

What should have been a straightforward relationship got bogged down in guilt.

Eden King, a professor at Rice University who studies industrial and organizational psychology, says some companies promote family values as a smokescreen to extract more value from their employees.

"Dear, we are a loving family. Although the salary is low, you have to work like crazy."

Career and leadership coach Sylvia Bonilla Zizumbo says layoffs are extremely impersonal.

Five important factors play a role in the workplace: time commitment, contribution, personal ownership and dedication, purpose, and performance.

These factors make us feel satisfied and successful at work and more productive. At the same time, people who work together build relationships and trust.

"Considering all this, suddenly letting go really feels like betrayal," she said. "It's as if everything you do for that outcome-time invested, contribution, dedication, high performance, loyalty-doesn't matter."

Dachang: It's all the pot of the epidemic. Of course, the big factories also have their own opinions about the layoffs in recent months.

At the beginning of the Meta epidemic, the world was rapidly migrating to the Internet, and the surge in e-commerce led to extraordinary revenue growth. Many predict that this will be a permanent trend that will continue even after the epidemic is over. That's what I thought, so I decided to invest a lot more. Unfortunately, things didn't go as I expected.

Google's revenue has grown dramatically over the past two years. To match and fuel this growth, we hired too many people, but today's economic situation is very different.

Customers have been spending more during the Microsoft epidemic. Now, they are optimizing and doing more with less.

Amazon As you know, we continue to face an unusual and uncertain macroeconomic environment. With this in mind, over the past few months we have prioritized what matters most to our customers and businesses. After a series of intensive studies, we recently decided to integrate some teams and projects.

This year is expected to be more difficult given the economic uncertainty, coupled with the fact that we've hired too quickly over the past few years. Today, we made the difficult decision to eliminate more jobs, totaling more than 18000.

Salesforce hired too many people because revenue accelerated during the epidemic, which led to the recession we are facing now, and I am responsible for it.

Spotify, like everyone else, I hope to maintain the strong tail of the epidemic and believe that our extensive global business and low risk in advertising will protect us from impact. In hindsight, I was overly ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth. For this reason, today we plan to reduce the headcount of the entire company by 6%.

Stripe At the beginning of the 2020 epidemic, the world turned to e-commerce overnight. In 2020 and 2021, we witnessed significantly higher growth rates than in the past. As an organization, we transitioned to a new operating model, and revenue and payments have grown more than threefold since then. However, the world is beginning to change again.

Is it really "winter"?

Right now, tech companies are laying off workers because... Others are laying off workers.

But not only are they not teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, they have even been making money lately.

And, as those who have experienced it say, it's usually not about performance either.

The question then is why a company would make a job cut that doesn't seem particularly necessary.

Michael Cusumano, vice dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management, says the reason is that investors have changed the way they evaluate companies.

"Generally, when companies are growing very fast, like when revenues are surging 20 or 30 percent a year, nobody cares about profits. But we're not in a growth period right now, so investors will be more cautious."

Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford Business School, has a simple answer: "Follow the trend."

"Technology companies unconsciously copy each other's practices. When someone starts laying off employees, other companies will follow suit."

But sometimes, you have to follow.

Pfeffer says there are plenty of managers who know layoffs are bad for the company, let alone the employees, and they haven't had much effect. However, when everyone was laying off employees, the board would ask why we didn't lay off employees.

Even layoffs can "kill," literally.

In the United States, laid-off workers are 2.5 times more likely to commit suicide.

Even in countries with better social protection, such as new Zealand, layoffs increase mortality by 15-20% over the next 20 years.

Paper address: doi.org/ 10.1177/0004867414521502 For those who are downsizing management and those who stay, they will also be negatively affected in terms of health and mentality.

Not surprisingly, layoffs increase stress. Stress, like many attitudes and emotions, is contagious.

Moreover, stress can lead to addictive behaviors such as smoking, drinking, overeating, etc.

Moreover, academic studies have shown time and again that layoffs do little to cut costs.

Not only does severance cost money, but it also lowers morale and productivity because the remaining employees think,"When is my turn?"

Layoffs do not solve the underlying problem, they are often an ineffective strategy and result in loss of market share and revenue.

As for suggestions, Professor Pfeffer gave several real examples.

After 911, all companies except Southwest made layoffs. As a result, Southwest managed to gain more market share by the end of the year.

Lincoln Electric, a well-known manufacturer of arc welding equipment, did not lay off 10% of its employees, but cut everyone's salary by 10%, and the top management cut even more.

In other words, they don't give 100% pain to 10% of people, they give 100% pain to 100% of people.

Prof Pfeffer says companies can actually use the economic squeeze as an opportunity.

James Goodnight, CEO of SAS Institute, a software company, for example, has never laid off employees and has even hired during the past two recessions.

Clearly, at a time when everyone is laying off employees and stopping innovation, Goodnight is using the talent released by competitors to improve its competitive advantage.

"This is actually the best time to get talent."

References:

https://www.businessinsider.com/layoffs-google-microsoft-salesforce-tech-industry-employees-work-family-lesson-2023-1

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/26/23571659/tech-layoffs-facebook-google-amazon

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/why-copycat-layoffs-wont-help-tech-companies-or-their-employees

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Xinzhiyuan (ID: AI_era)

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