[socialdemocrat]

Idiotic strategy which is about as smart as pissing in your pants to stay warm.

Big firings like this create bad blood, undermines loyalty to company and get many talented people to look at alternative companies to work.

A talented organization takes time to build up but is relatively quick to tear down. Skill in this industry is not exactly easy to get hold of. Talent which leaves may prove very hard to get back.

[ggreg84]

Their goal - and only option - is to sell the company for as much $$$ as possible, and this strategy helps them towards their goal.

This is the simplest and most effective way to make Arm books look good, which is what regulators all around the world - including the UK - have decided is what's best for the world.

So this is not idiotic, this is effective, and is finance 101.

For Arm's long term success this is a very stupid decision. But that's not what any of the parties involved need or care about. What they care about is $$$ right now.

I won't be buying and holding Arm stock, particularly not as a long term investment, cause it looks like its going to be a poor one.

[robert_foss]

Pumping perceived share owner value is only in the interest of the owner of ARM, Softbank. This is the kind of pump and dump scheme that American investors are famous for.

If indeed ARM needed to cut down on people, having a hiring freeze is the way to go.

[nojito]

It doesn't matter how talented your organization is if you can't keep your finances in check.

[blippage]

I think Jordan Peterson had a comment about that. You get rid of people you think are rubbish, but then the top people begin to wonder if they're next. So they leave, because they have options, whilst the whole company slowly slides into mediocrity.

It's not like Arm are facing long-term financial difficulties, their market share is presumably as good as ever, so getting rid of staff seems a bad idea.

[PaulKeeble]

I have seen three redundancy rounds at different companies.

The first resulted in every engineer in the team taking other jobs within weeks of notice. Quite a few were hired back at 3x their wage as a contractors as the projects while the talent found better pay and conditions and never returned. The company ended up paying more for its least influential engineers but without them it would have been in real trouble.

The second the mere threat caused 10% of the engineers to leave within weeks. Some stuck out the redundencies but clearly management had no clue who the talent was and ended up getting rid of some pretty important people. So the rest left gradually over the next year. The brain drain to competitors was very real, 15 years later they have not recovered and I receive regular calls to do contracts for them to bring some software engineering experience even a decade later, its a bit embarrassing really.

The third ended up getting rid of all the people who run a critical system in one of the UK's largest banks. I saw only the aftermath. All the software guys are long gone and its just full of system operators migrating binaries to more modern hardware, many of those systems are completely unmaintained now and have no team and no one knows where the code is stored, if it is still there. When the bugs started rolling in and management couldn't find a place to get them fixed they started hiring to replace the talent they had made redundent but all of them left within a week because the job was clearly impossible without source code which the company had lost.

I haven't yet seen a redundancy round result in anything but the almost complete exodus of talent and the gutting of a companies prior capability. I stuck around for one of them but I wouldn't do so again because the aftermath was horrible and all the people who made it interesting had left or were leaving. Everytime its been abundantly clear that who goes is mostly random, its not based on anything to do with importance to the company and the people that make the place tick know this.

[staticman2]

That's an interesting counter argument to Jack Welchs' "Fire 10% of the company for the sake of firing 10% of the company" management philosophy.

[bobthepanda]

Jack Welch started his tenure in 1981. You can't sustainably do that for 40+ years.

[Kina]

I think it has been demonstrated that Jack Welch was a con man and none of his lessons are worth anything. They're the lies of a charlatan.