I had never heard of the term "voluntary exit" until I heard that the Trump administration is going to do that for federal workers. Is this going to be the new normal?
> “to be deeply committed to our mission and focused on building great products, with speed and efficiency"
I hate this language. It sounds culty. Why can't a job just be a job? Why does everything have to have a god damn "mission"?
It's usually called a buyout. We'll give you N weeks of salary per year of service to leave now. When an employer is in structural decline (like newspapers), you expect a series of buyout offers with declining N until finally there are actual layoffs.
Some places do buyouts to avoid triggering certain laws relating to mass layoffs. There are a bunch of names for buyouts, voluntary exit isn't particularly weird.
Didn't take them long. It's so suspiciously similar it looks like either: the administration requested this type of action, or/ Google took their lead from the administration behaving like Twitter and then decided it's now the acceptable normal.
Either way, have some percentage of 2 million feds on the job market, and some percentage of the Google employees on the job market. Like somebody noted in the Verge comments, Zuckerberg's making a lot of the same sounds.
Q: 'What about the looming “low-performer” layoffs?'
Z: “The right thing to do is just rip the band-aid off. I think, in a lot of ways, it is a nicer thing to do for people who are probably not going to end up making it anyway.”
Elon made this popular with Twitter/X. Offered a voluntary exit in the "Fork in the road" email with a deadline. The message was quite similar, that if you're not aligned with the company's [new] vision, you can choose to leave with severance.
Sure, it's certainly better than layoffs. I don't really dispute that. I'd rather get a severance and I have at least a nominal option about leaving instead of being forced out.
I guess I'm just sick of companies massively overhiring, creating a ton of redundant employees in the process, and deciding to get rid of a ton afterward. We give these corporations so much power in our lives and they treat us like pawns. They control our healthcare and dictate where we live, they should treat this power with the responsibility it deserves.
Well, I guess the root of the problem is that while it's "at-will" employement, neither side is actually expecting the other to leave tomorrow. The company has set goals and etc that it expects you to do for the remainder of the year and you also assumed that it's not going to fire you before you do them.
It is a bit weird that contractually we have no expectations but socially we do.
I don't get the frustration about overhiring. Predicting the future is provably impossible. Everybody is going to get it wrong to some degree. I'd much rather see companies overhire than underhire. At least then the laid off employees get experience and a salary for some time.
I imagine it's either (or both) of the following: job seekers started wanting that in their ads, and people with this way of thinking entered the internal recruitment world.
Pretty common for most big mature companies to do at one point or another as their section of the economy swings up and down. This is probably only new for new big teh companies they have only experienced growth. Cisco has done plenty, and the defense industry does it a lot as contracts wind down.
Way less of a morale hit than layoffs, but it suffers a similar problem to all RIF methods where your high performers say "hmm conditions are that bad you're getting rid of people huh? I guess maybe I will take 6 months my annual salary and go get another job."
> “to be deeply committed to our mission and focused on building great products, with speed and efficiency"
I hate this language. It sounds culty. Why can't a job just be a job? Why does everything have to have a god damn "mission"?