You lay off hard to instill fear and legally-depress everyone's wages, but you give good severance so that when you inevitably want to hire people in the next two months (as GitLab is likely to do), they're aren't too terrified to accept your offer because of all the layoffs you just did. 7% of staff as "layoffs" comes out to about 150-ish? people, but they are also currently hiring for over 100 open job position at GitLab on job boards right now. GitLab is also up 74% year-over-year in quarterly revenue, and had their highest sales quarter ever just four months ago, according to their own PR department (https://ir.gitlab.com/news-releases/news-release-details/git...)
It's a pretty transparent process, frankly. Lots of companies are doing 'fake layoffs' (layoffs they don't need, done solely to appease the executive class, who strongly desire a recession), but unfortunately for them, the truth is that the economy isn't anywhere close to a recession, so they simultaneously have to keep hiring open, to keep labor incoming, to keep up with all the new business growth or increased sales they're experiencing right now.
None of what you have said is evidence that the intention is to "instill fear".
Also, I am not sure how confidently you can assess the health of Gitlab. Those open positions my not actually be "open". While their revenue was up four months ago, much has changed since then. Their next quarter might be down and they are adjusting now.
> isn't anywhere close to a recession
No one knows where the economy is headed.
> It's a pretty transparent process, frankly.
Except that it is not. Perhaps you are correct, but you really have no evidence their decisions were to maliciously "instill fear". It is equally plausible that they are doing what they think is best for the company and the remaining employees.
Scare probably in the sense that performance goes up and some people will quit additionally. So the 7% becomes 10-15% by itself, without them having to pay a severance package.
For the 7% you have to look like you care, since you will be hiring in the future and probably with lower salaries. Mass layoffs are a good way to lower wages throughout the industry.
Don't drive class division. Even the highest paid engineer is closer to being homeless than being any of the people deciding these layoffs. If the primary economic force you have is the sale of your labor, you are labor, and need to act like it.
Our "high" salaries could quickly evaporate if we're not paying attention while the owners of capital are taking advantage of excuses to wage class warfare.
Engineers are still not proles lol. And they will never be, so it's always funny to hear a bunch of highly paid SWE talk like they are class conscious workers. In reality, most are thoroughly professional managerial class, with 0 connection to anything close to labor.
It's even funnier when that discourse seem to mostly happen when firings happen, as if losing your highly-paid cushy job makes you a proletaire.
I mean, it does instill some fear though. Knowing that a lot of companies are going around laying off 5-10% of their folks means I'm a lot less confident I can get a new job if I'm laid off or quit my job. Which means I'm going to keep my head down and do my work and not rock the boat at my current job as much.
Yes, I'm paid well, and yes I have more of a cushion to land on if I got laid off, but I know folks who got laid off last year who haven't been able to get a new job for months. I don't have 6 months of all of my living expenses just laying around in a bank account, and even if I did, that pretty much wipes out my savings.
"Other people are doing worse than you" doesn't mean there aren't rational fears. Making an engineer's salary doesn't set you up for life within a few years.
Workers are workers. Even the most highly paid workers have more in common with the homeless than they do with capitalist class. Get laid off, maybe have a large medical bill, and then any worker could find themself desparate for just a roof over their head. So yeah, it sucks when these huge layoffs are happening, it sucks lot. The best thing that could come from this is for tech workers to realize how precarious their lives are and start standing in solidarity with other tech workers and workers generally. Don't try to drive a wedge between tech workers and other workers.
The working class and employing class have nothing in common.
Franky I'd say this sort of attitude is much more corrosive – the idea that people who feel they are being treated unfairly or poorly should roll over and accept it merely because other people are being treated more unfairly or poorly.
I don’t really agree with the idea that there is an underlying wish to “instil fear” or whatever. I agree even less with the attitude that we should all shut up and be happy so long as someone else is worse off.
The difference is the people on r/antiwork by and large have menial jobs, and/or are students in that very predictable/boring pseudo-socialist phase of their life. People on HN are making like $200k/yr typing JavaScript into a computer.
That's not necessarily true. I've never made remotely close to that as I've always worked on open source projects. Right now I could really use one of those 200k/year jobs but it looks like they're disappearing. So what's next?
