[cuongfu]

I wonder if it's companies trying to inflate their year-end numbers to appease shareholders. I agree that it feels like more layoffs this month than I expected, but none of them are necessarily due to 'market conditions' per se, like the layoffs that happened at the end of last year and earlier this year.

Spotify and Hasbro seem like they just made bad investments and focused on the wrong areas for their business and now they (or rather their employees) are paying for it. With Hasbro specifically laying people off right now, I bet it's a way to cut down the numbers of payroll ahead of the Christmas sales rush, which I think probably inflates their overall profit margin.

[andrewxdiamond]

If a company provides a severance package, then a Dec layoff is almost certainly too late to have any impact on the bottom line.

[macintux]

I haven't looked at Hasbro, but the impression I've gotten is that fiscal years and calendar years rarely align for larger companies. No one wants to be spending the Christmas/New Year holidays working on end-of-year accounting.

[no_wizard]

A completely unenforcable concept, but an interesting thought exercise: if executives (and with that, SVP/VPs) were as likely to experience the recieving end of a layoff the same as those below them on the org chart, how would that affect how often they happen in the first place?

For instance, if the VPs and SVPs in charge of the toy division were guaranteed to be part of the layoff, do you think the calculus would have changed? You rarely hear about it actually having reprocusssions on the C-Suite or their immediate peers (VP / SVP).

Look at it from another angle: if the layoff has to happen due to poor planning or lack of direction etc. Thats set from the top but only the bottom layers of your company is affected by the layoff. Shouldn't actually be in the reverse, where executives, SVPs and VPs should be booted as a matter of course, as they are the ones that set the direction after all and supposedly "bare the responsibility" of the company.

This reminds me of a book I was reading, The Hard Things About Hard Things. Its an interesting book, full of alot of useful information, but one thing that grinded my gears is how he talked about layoffs vs removing executives (defined as VP and up)

With layoffs, he says to do it successfully, you need to train you managers to do the following:

- Be able toexplain briefly about what happend, and that it is a company rather than a personal [employee] failure

- Be clear how the employee is impacted and that the decision is non-negotiable

- Be fully prepared about the benefits and support the company plans to provide.

Okay, on the surface, this seems good, but the first two bullets are extremely specific and targeted, while the last one uses more lax language regarding benefits and support the company plans to provide. Which is to say, it does not say serverance, it does not say what good support should look like.

Follow so far? Okay, so its pretty open ended, particularly that last part.

Then, in the exact next chapter, he talks about firing an executive, and it is suppose to work as follows:

- Be clear on the reasons

- Use decisive language

- Have the severange package approved and ready

As you can see, clearly, to fire an executive, you must clearly provide a serverance package and make sure its approved and ready

In a nutshell, this is how they see it. The executive class does not play by our rules, and never has to take the same ownership the rest of us do, period. Its explicitly spelled out that the executive must have a severance package, approved and ready where as supporting frontline employees in a layoff is left to the readers imagination as to what you should be doing for benefits and support.

I want everyone to remember this. Ben Horowitz has said outloud that what we're all thinking is true. Executives see themselves as above non executives, and expect to be treated as such.

This is in a nutshell is why the average worker should never trust the executive class and should unionize

[ryandrake]

I mean, of course. A lot of things would happen differently in business if the decision makers shared consequences and downside with the worker bees. Our system unfortunately is set up such that the executive class reaps the majority of the rewards and upside, while the workers primarily shoulder the downside.

[no_wizard]

This is what makes unions more necessary than ever, in all industries