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0 pointsNifty39298mo ago0 comments

What would you do with all of the employees who are currently working in jobs or on projects or with skills not relevant to the company?

0 comments

lmm8mo ago

Look for mutually beneficial ways forward - reassignment to relevant projects, retraining where necessary, generous layoff package for those for whom neither hits. Realistically the vast majority of PhD employees are going to be highly motivated and want to work on something useful just as much as you want them to.

ungreased06758mo ago

Let them make cool stuff the company can sell, increasing revenue and reversing the decline.

lotsofpulp8mo ago

How to draw an owl: draw the owl.

HDThoreaun8mo ago

They tried that, it didnt work.

kstrauser8mo ago

Unless you're a sociopath, you let natural attrition run its course. If their skills weren't relevant when you hired them, then it's your fault. If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault. The only just thing to do is find a way to make their work meaningful until they move on.

jaggederest8mo ago

No, you give them a fat severance and eat the losses. Maybe 6 months + 1 month per year of tenure, something like that. You're break even by the end of the fiscal year, you just gave someone a lifechanging amount of money, and they don't have the crushing morale problems of "the work I do is pointless" and get to collect unemployment in addition to severance.

If you are honest and generous with people, they aren't mad that you made a mistake and let them go. It's companies that try to give 2 weeks + 1 week per year of severance that are making a mistake, not the entire concept of layoffs.

(Without delving into the systemic reasons that layoffs are inevitable of course. If the system was different, they wouldn't have to happen, but we live in this system at the moment.)

saagarjha8mo ago

A year or two of salary is generally not life-changing.

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runjake8mo ago

> If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault.

Nobody can predict market conditions or technological advances.

If you don’t change course (mission, people) the company will likely fail and then everyone is out of a job, shareholders, pensioners, and 401k holding laypeople look money.

I do think that leadership is not held accountable enough for their mistakes and failures.

coliveira8mo ago

The situation of Intel is much more the result of bad management than the output of their current workers. For all purposes, they're effectively doing what they're were supposed to do when hired. So the logical conclusion is that Intel workers are the ones who should have the power to fire the entire management and put someone in place to fix the issue, not the other way around.

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Nifty3929OP8mo ago

What a sad waste of talent in that case. A waste that could be mitigated by them finding a more productive way to help society than sticking to a pointless job.

naysunjr8mo ago

Agree. We lean hard into sunk cost fallacy when it comes to job training.

“If your name is Farmer you’re a farmer.” mentality but self selected euphemism. “I trained as a software engineer and that’s what I am for 50 years! Dag gubmint trynna terk my herb!”

Service economy role play is the root of brain dead job life we’re all suffering through.

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