[altairprime]

If the alternative to the layoff was the collapse of YouTube, then “cannot afford to” applies. Otherwise, “will not afford to” applies.

My point is that we should not implicitly frame layoffs as “cannot afford” without having evidence or claims to support that. If YouTube cannot afford 100 engineers, YouTube’s profitability at all hinges on $50mil/year of expenses, which is a rounding error to the overall business operating it.

It is highly unlikely that the future of YouTube hinges on the absence of these 100 engineers, given the financial and megacorp contexts available to us. Thus, usage of the “cannot afford” framing in this case comes across as an unsupported argument that YouTube is in severe financial distress.

If that distress is real, let’s hear more about it! If the layoffs were due to dire circumstances around funding and runway, that’s material and interesting news — and would explain why the corporation had no choice (“can’t afford”) in the matter.

[robertlagrant]

> If YouTube cannot afford 100 engineers

The article mentions "operations and creator management teams". I didn't interpret that as engineers. But either way, if they aren't required, why pay the money? You can put it to something else instead.

[cogman10]

> But either way, if they aren't required, why pay the money?

The way a lot of layoffs work isn't that those fired weren't required but rather that their work load gets spread out to the rest of the org slowing everything down.

For example, HP fired the in house IT staff and instead contracted it out to an offshore IT firm (which was not great). This lead to just about every department creating their own shadow IT group and a lot of things that should be easy to do (like granting permissions) becoming an absolute nightmare.

And where is that "something else"? Stock buybacks. [1]

[1] https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/stock_buyback

[robertlagrant]

I don't think stock buybacks is the slam dunk you seem to be implying it is. Plenty of companies are too subject to the vagiaries of the stock market. Taking a larger percentage of your company private means you are less subject to that.

Now, it might well be true that moving a key department offshore is worth less to the company than a buyback. But I don't think it's been demonstrated that that's the case for these 100 employees at YouTube.

[altairprime]

Buybacks are demonstrative proof in this example that HP was not in a “cannot afford” situation, but was instead making a voluntary choice to layoff workers in exchange for some other perceived benefit stemming from stock buybacks.

Whether that benefit is profit or control or some other causes, given the evidence presented their decision to layoff workers was voluntary – not compulsory.

If there is some evidence that HP was facing collapse or legal issues or some other impending doom, which outsourcing IT prevented, then that’s interesting and worth discussing, focusing on the core question I’m raising in this thread:

Is this layoff voluntary or compulsory?

If it’s perceived as compulsory, then that needs to be considered and discussed – which defends against the tendency of misleading framing by corporate PR that presents voluntary layoffs as though they were compulsory.