[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.