>> There are no layoffs plans at Automattic, in fact we're hiring fairly aggressively and have done a number of acquisitions since this whole thing started, and have several more in the pipeline.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1hxnh73/automatt...
It seems to me the obvious, from both a business & human perspective, is to stop hiring at first signs of trouble, before layoffs. To do so otherwise is cruel.
I doubt Matt had zero idea about this possibility two months ago.
Corporations and management basically exist to buffer this uncertainty. Employment is actually a really bad deal in good economic times; owners reap almost all the windfall of having a successful product. But in bad times, the company keeps paying you even if they're losing money, at least up until they don't. You get a raw deal, but not as raw a deal as the people paying you.
Likewise with strategic direction. The market's needs change faster than senior executives can adapt: if they always produced what the market was actually clamoring for, the company would run around like a chicken with its head cut off (this actually happens when the CEO panics, and a key CEO skill, and part of the reason they're paid so much, is the ability to ignore every piece of market data saying "You're not hot anymore. Nobody wants you, and the market has moved on" and keep doing what you're doing even though your intuition is telling you that you're doomed and going to lose your cushy $20M/year job). Much of the job of middle management is to buffer senior management's freakouts and tell the ICs "Keep calm and carry on; let's see if he still cares about this new hotness next week."
You know what I absolutely hate about this take? It ignores my shared experience I've had with others (IE, its not just me). I've worked in this industry a long time. So I've inevitably worked for places that ran into financial trouble. In multiple of those cases, it could have been prevented if upper management actually listened to what those of us developing the product had to say about shifting customer behaviors and expectations, that what we were seeing was different from what they were trying to sell and have us develop. It always ended in disaster.
They refused to listen, but never paid the price for that failure, my colleagues did and in one instance, I was on the receiving end of a layoff along with others as well.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/09/ceos-dont-steer/
A good CEO will let in just the little bit of information that saves the company - this was Andy Grove's pivot to focus on microprocessors over memory chips, or Steve Jobs's turnaround of Apple. You didn't have a good CEO, and got your average mediocre CEO that sets a strategic direction and sticks with it regardless of what the market says.
I'm curious though, if you knew your employer was going under, why not jump ship to the competitor that actually did understand what customers wanted? Employees are economic agents too, and oftentimes competitors are more than happy to hire out of their competition.
Still too simplistic. Yeah, they need to filter information and say no to things constantly, I get that is a core skill. If something is repeatedly being brought up by members of your core teams, you should at least look at what they're saying and ask where they are coming from. That is simply good sense. There is a persistence factor in involved in each of these cases that are the source of the frustration.
If what constitutes a good CEO is allowing in the 'little bit of information that can save the company' (really thats a call about identifying useful information before anyone else), objectively most companies have terrible CEOs, and I question the value of the position entirely on that basis, especially at larger public companies.
FWIW, at each of these companies I worked at, the headcount was at most in the hundreds. I was only 2 clicks below the executives in the company tree, there wasn't a lot of barrier to interaction there, which is what I find even more baffling about the whole thing.
>I'm curious though, if you knew your employer was going under, why not jump ship to the competitor that actually did understand what customers wanted?
I did this twice. In the one instance I wasn't able to get moving faster than things were going down hill. Partially, this is a symptom of just how long interview cycles have become over the years. Took me longer than expected, but moreover, the company conducted the layoff faster than I really thought they would. I got the timing wrong by a little bit, it happens.
Its not like you identify an issue one time either, its the repeated ignoring of what happens despite repeated sustained efforts to raise the awareness where it needs to be.