> In a letter to staff, Houston said that the reduction in headcount would impact 528 people.
He fired 528 people. That's what he did.
Also, he impacted a lot more than the 528 people he fired. Those who didn't get fired have to take on the work that was being done by their fired colleagues without an increase in pay.
If someone is "fired" I would assume that it's the persons fault (bad performance).
And what was unsaid: ...but I shall suffer no consequences, and I'll upend your life instead. So, I'm good, right?
What even means "I take full responsibility" in this case, if there are seemingly no consequences.
Given how efficiently this was executed, I think he deserves a raise.
Edit: it’s already visible.
Contrast this with the staff member at a university making $40,000 a year that gets laid off with little notice and no severance. Or the guy working in manufacturing that gets laid off because a major customer changed distributor so the company has to reorganize. Those are people having their lives upended.
This talk of money also ignores the negative effects on mental health from being laid-off.
But the most important point here is that a CEO making an obscene amount of money takes "full responsibility" and... still gets paid an obscene amount of money. Easy to take responsibility if you have 0 consequences.
That's wasn't the point of my comment. The point was the $125,000 severance package. You have someone making $40,000 a year getting laid off with little notice and no money to live on. That's bad. Then you have someone getting laid off but the company is giving them another $125,000. To the extent that that's bad, it's something that most folks could never dream of.
The full responsibility personally benefited the CEO by ~$56,000,000
> I'll upend your life instead
$125,000 of severance for high-salary employees that have large retirement accounts isn't "upending" their lives. Complaints about a severance package like that belong in the same bin as billionaires complaining about paying taxes.
That can't be true. Dropbox made less than $5 in the last three months?
looks like they edited the article to mke more sense