[TapWaterBandit]

Eh, what's the alternative? Some people have this weird attitude that businesses are not allowed to shrink/fail. Businesses can only ever go one direction and that is more headcount, otherwise give them govt bailout.

Businesses need to be able to grow and shrink. Otherwise we just end up with "too big to fail".

[acdha]

It’s not that businesses can never shrink but that it should be considered and linked to a specific reason (e.g. a change in business strategy or consumer preferences). If they were, say, RIM a decade ago, layoffs would make sense once they had no path back into the consumer market and also were bleeding cash to the point where they soon wouldn’t be able to make payroll. When the Cold War ended, manufacturing layoffs were inevitable at some of the big defense contractors because the market for stealthy aircraft shrunk and nobody else needed to buy them.

A layoff this large means one of two things: the management screwed up on an epic scale (and should be the first to go) or it’s just giving investors a short-term stock boost at the expense of long-term success. Broad layoffs are usually bad for companies long-term because they signal both a lack of management skills and mean that everyone still working there is going to be worried about another round, so politics and making yourself harder to replace will consume a certain amount of otherwise productive time.

[robin_reala]

I don’t think the complaint was in the action, but the horrible wording.

[epistasis]

I'm not sure which of the wordings is supposed to be worse. They are both bad. But that is the nature of a company on the edge of survival.

[hackernewds]

Spotify is not merely surviving. They have numerous monopolistic exclusive contracts and paid $200M for Joe Rogan's podcast. Be the judge on whether that's worth 1500 employees keeping their job

[marcosdumay]

Well, IMO they have a duty to not be frivolous on firing.

It must not be something impossible to do, but it must be hard. And they should favor most other courses of action.

But anyway, it's up to the government to enforce this, and the US (where they are hosted) seems to almost completely disagree. So we get those companies hiring like mad, just to fire like mad in a couple of years, and begin the cycle again a few years down.