Fungible Tokens

Many years ago, there was some belt-tightening during a downturn at the (large) company where I worked. My boss was recruited to help look for cost savings. Reviewing records for the cafeteria, he spied an outlier. “Oho, what's this? Why are we paying this guy so much?!” Um, that's the guy who makes the Eggs Benedict ... “Say no more.”

In the tech sector it seems that nearly every company “over-hired” during the height of the pandemic, and now they have buyer's remorse. Their regrets play out in jobs lost and lives upended—but not the jobs or lives of the people who miscaluated in the first place.

So what's a company to do? What does the company value?

Perhaps the easiest approach involves taking a hard look at the product portfolio, and dropping some. The associated jobs are no longer needed, so eliminating all of them is straightforward.

Or a company might start by apologizing and paring down the people who were over-hired.

Maybe it will focus on job performance, parting ways with people who don't measure up.

Whatever the approach, there will be a real, human toll.

Late last year, I spoke on a panel for our extended team about work-life balance. They're stressed under normal circumstances, and news about layoffs at other companies was spooking people.

I opened with a hard truth: The company pays you in return for the work you do; it doesn't owe you anything else. For many of us, it's easy to get our identities entangled with the work we're doing (speaking from experience); when you leave (voluntarily or not), the process can be gut-wrenching.

This being Silicon Valley, one can imagine another approach. The scale of the hiring and the laying off (tens of thousands of people) begs for a computational solution. (It's really just a math problem; no fancy generative AI needed.) Focus on how much money would be expended on each employee over some fixed period of time vs. how much money it would cost to send that person packing instead. Rank everyone accordingly. [Well, almost everyone. Leave the executives out of this.] Factor in protected class attributes (race, age, gender, etc.) to achieve a non-discriminatory balance. Crunch the numbers, draw a line, and in the wee hours of the morning, send a personalized form letter to every surplus person.

How efficient! How tidy! No need for uncomfortable face-to-face meetings. No need to witness anyone's distress.

Ah, well, I don't know how the sausage is made (as they say). I do know that, despite the hard truth I shared with my colleagues last year, it still stings to be cast aside.

And I also know that the company I joined on this very day, well over a decade ago, is but a treasured memory.