[eru]

> [...] this black hole of a company [...]

> [...] massive waves of layoffs [...]

Given that you seem to like neither the ingredients nor the result of the merger, shouldn't you be happy, if they release workers so that they can join more societally productive ventures?

[joschmo]

I'm trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive. It's a black hole because these machines will acquire anything and feed it through the cash flow machine. Massive waves of layoffs because there will be multiple 1K+ layoffs coming over the next year or two as they execute the integration plan.

Massive waves of layoffs are bad for most people and usually great for the company but I won't put a value judgment on it. Some think it "leaves them free to pursue more productive things" and others think "that person is going to struggle for a while due to corporate greed for cash flow." Candidly, I've done several of these deals before where we merge two companies of similar complexity and lay off 50-70% of the combined headcount. The company almost always turns out better for it. Things are that inefficient past a certain FTE size.

For those laid off, it's a different story. An internal analysis done by consultants my team hired 3 years after a multi-stage layoff of 10K people found that >50% of those affected were materially worse off and only 10% were better off. Statistical analysis on the strongest prediction of negative outcomes was age. Nothing else was even close to as relevant.