Rich and Paul talk through the tech layoffs, explaining why they happen, why they suck, and what you can do about them (very little) and what you can do for the people involved in them (far more).

Man.

Rich, remember the how the tech industry was always go, go, go.

Grow, grow, grow.

Mm.

And now let me, lemme give you some names.

Microsoft, Google.

Okay.

Facebook, Spotify, huge layoffs all across the industry.

A lot of tech layoffs these days.

Yeah.

You're hearing large numbers of people being sent home.

Uh, it feels weird

if

you're in the tech world where it's just always up into the right.

It's, it's wild to see

Suddenly, you know, are they gonna cut down on fancy coffee and stop

with the massages and the ball pits?

It's, it's, it's a tricky time.

So we should talk about it.

It's not necessarily anybody's favorite subject, but we should, we gotta dig in.

Let's dig

Look Rich.

I got these companies, the biggest companies in the world tech

some of the biggest companies in the world.

world.

They make billions of dollars a quarter, billions of the.

Billions.

Yep.

Tens of billions of of money.

Just dollars.

Just scrooge McDuck levels of gold in their, what do they have?

Bank accounts, companies like that is, does it actually, do you, when

you have like a hundred billion dollars, where do you put it?

they have like Ireland.

Yeah, that's right.

Because it's a tax shelter or something.

It, it gets very abstract and the assets are held in different pla I

get, you know, you have teams of people thinking about optimizing tax strategy

and stuff like that, so No, it's not, it's not TD Waterhouse checking,

so, okay, fine.

You know, just typical things

you're, you're highlighting something real.

There's tons of cash.

And they're making money.

It's not like they're bleeding,

No, they're doing great.

They're

billions every quarter.

Right?

They're reporting it, they're making billions of dollars every quarter.

Um, I think a good way to sort of, it, it, it smacks of greed

to say, why would you send people home if you're making billions?

Uh, the, the challenge you run into is that there are owners, the owners

of this business, and I'm not talking.

One owner.

I'm talking about someone that has three quarters of a

billion dollars in Microsoft.

Mm-hmm.

, Rich Ziade: like as part of a fund, which

three quarters of a billion dollars.

Okay, so this could be the Ontario Fireman's Pension Fund.

It could be such and such fund.

It could be anything.

Yeah.

I mean, it could be private wealth.

Who doesn't?

Who knows?

But here's what they do.

They write a.

They're like you hired incredibly quickly over the last 24 months,

the economy's contracting.

Money is not cheap anymore.

The rates are up.

You should send people home.

You protect my investment, please.

And so what you're seeing here isn't just

the ceo.

The CEO is answerable to those

This is, this is easy to forget, right?

Like the ceo,

they write those letters.

No.

Boy do they.

They really do.

They do.

And it, it is, it's part of their job.

Their job is to look and go, Hey, wait a minute.

Couldn't Microsoft be doing better?

We should send them one of our letters.

And it's funny, you, you might send a letter to Microsoft, not gonna get opened.

If, if Paul Ford writes a letter to Microsoft, it's

gonna sit there on a shelf.

No, but if the Ontario Fireman and uh, sailor's pension fund,

which has potentially billions of dollars or whatever it may be.

those get.

They get opened because they're looking out for the, the,

the members of that fund, right?

They're the people who are waiting for their pensions.

They wanna protect their interests.

So it isn't, now are there CEOs making millions of dollars?

Yes.

Do those CEOs unilaterally get to decide if people stay on or not?

Not unilaterally.

They may propose, Hey, we want to cut back, and the truth.

There was a lot of fast hire.

We hired fast, real fast, real aggressive over the last two and a half years.

There's no way you can't deny it.

Like people just piled on human beings and the, the economy contracted and

hire fast enough,

couldn't

hire fast enough, could not hire fast.

So this isn't by any means, an excuse.

You could still make the case of like, we hear you.

Feel free to take your pension money elsewhere, but this thing is a

publicly traded, all these companies you listed out are publicly traded.

They could cause real damage by pulling out too quickly and diluting the value of

Well, real damage, right?

So let, let's, let's quantify real damage.

We're not gonna do it.

We're gonna hold on to everybody and to hell with you, with your letter.

Oh, well, we're gonna, we're gonna divest ourselves of all of our stock in you.

And suddenly everybody's like, Ooh, that's not good.

Here's what the pension people want to hear.

By the way, there's, there's definitely been CEOs who said,

no, we're not gonna do it.

What?

The pension doesn't, what, what the pension fund people will hear out

is this, let me sit you down and tell you about the next three to

five years and why we need all those people because there is growth ahead.

Here's what they don't want to.

I feel really bad for our employees and we kind of owe it

to them to not send them home.

The pension fund, people want to know that their investment, that there's

a plan behind spending whatever they're spending, and then there's

there that there is growth coming.

Do they sympathize?

I, I don't think they're bad people because they actually are

sympathizing with the pension holders,

right?

Everybody's looking out for the interest, you know, their, their

own interests and that's normal.

This is the puzzle, right?

Because what happens is we get one narrative, which is

Microsoft is laying off 10,000.

people and they're making a lot of money

And they're making a lot of money.

Okay?

So that's true.

And I, I don't, I'll tell you what, no one, there's no expectation that you

should feel any empathy at all in any way.

For the Microsoft leadership that's making these decisions.

They don't expect it either.

, maybe from, you know, their spouses like, boy, that was a tough day of work today.

But, but they know what they're doing.

Look, the formulation I always used and then I, I, I think is really

important is when you lay somebody off, you are not just laying them off.

You are, even if they are a bad employee, you are affecting a family.

You are causing a lot of damage in the world when you lay somebody off.

okay.

So, and I mean these are, these are ultimately human beings.

You might say that they're monsters, but they, they might, they have empathy

and, and so, so they're watching this all unfold and they're about to go.

I grew up in a town with 17,000 people, and if you, if you fire

10,000 people, like, I don't know how I would fire half a town.

Right.

I, it's, it's, massive.

it's, so here's this, the weather system of pure capital.

Shareholders in corporations makes it necessary inside of this system that

large numbers of people have to go home.

There is no easy escape from it unless you have a magical growth story or zone.

And if, if you don't do it, they'll start talking to your board and you'll get in

You, you're touching on what's fundamentally political

about a lot of this stuff, right?

Which is what happens is.

The chatter, the whispers start to come in, you know, Nadella,

what everyone else is doing it.

We hire just as quickly as everyone else.

What's your plan?

Yep.

And then they sort of wait in the weeds and they wait to see.

Right.

And what starts to happen is, Other agendas, other motivations

start to circle, right?

And, and you can sort of feel, start to feel that heat and then

it becomes, frankly, old school political, which is like, okay, we're

gonna need to throw them this bone.

Like there's just the, the, everyone's done it.

And that's a B by the way, part of it.

It's a momentum game.

It's like now is the time.

Microsoft wasn't gonna be the first one to lay everybody

Exactly.

And so and so.

Now it's like, okay, draw up the plan.

Let's see what we're going to to do

Everybody's very sober

Everybody's very sober,

You know, we're gonna take this very, very seriously.

But the reality is, yes, there's a huge why.

I mean, let's be really blatant here.

You, why is Satya, Satya, Nadela, or any of these, cos they're not evil

people, but they are covering their ass.

Because if they don't do this and their competitors do, and it doesn't

all work out good, they're gonna get.

They're ass handed to them, they're gonna be in trouble.

He doesn't own Microsoft.

Yeah.

Sat Nadella is not sitting on in some big chair at the top of the building.

It just doesn't work that way.

He actually, it's one of the worst things.

What is a board meeting?

It is a bunch of film critics telling you how you can make a better.

and you have to smile at them and say, yeah, absolutely.

Of course it's

what I mean.

But they're the owners.

If they're not there for fun, not, they're not always the owners.

Sometimes they're like revered experts in an industry that are just asked

to sit on the board cuz they're so successful and they've done so well.

Right.

It's like Bob Iger sits on, I'm sure other boards because he's Bob Iger.

Like

imagine how exhausting that is cuz you know, he looks in

and he goes, I could do a better job.

better.

He probably does.

Oh, they all do.

They all, they're all very

Yeah,

it is.

What is a giant corporate board.

It is like concentrated narcissism that you're hoping

you can turn to your advantage.

exactly.

So you get this polarized perspectives that kick in.

Right.

One is corporate greed.

This is just yet another example of corporate greed.

Sure.

Right.

And.

The other is just sober capitalist machinery is doing

what it does, it's what it's

supposed to do.

This is means it's a healthy machine.

Markets

should be efficient.

Yeah.

Um, so

10,000 people and 40,000, if you count their families go

home from Google and they, they get their, their badges are revoked.

And you know, some of them, I saw people on Twitter.

One guy wrote a book about how great search is and kind of obviously lived

his life inside of this org, and he's laid off and he is like, whoa, I, I'm

just, I didn't expect to become a, they call themselves zrs, ex glrs, yeah.

For people who leave Google.

And he's like, I didn't expect to become a Zulu this way.

Right.

I mean, look,

humans

construc.

What look like relationships in their minds with these entities, right?

I mean, and it does feel like betrayal, like I'm there 12

years and just like that.

And you know, you, a lot of the, like, the tone of it is an email.

I was, I took, I was working from home and I got an email and I

couldn't get into Slack is how it goes

is how you treat me as a human

being.

This is how you treat me after all these years.

Right.

A lot of the feeling is like, I gave everything to this company

for 12 years and worked real hard.

It really dedicated a big chunk of my life to it, and now I'm

gonna represent the company.

We paid you for that time.

Right.

And now reality has smacked us in the.

And we've stumbled and you are a casualty of this difficult moment,

is, I feel that this is a very complicated part of society and it is.

It's this.

The ethical relationship for a company to have with an employee is to say, we

need you to demonstrate some loyalty and to not speak out of, turn to the

rest of the world about our private doings, and you need to complete

your job, and then we will pay you.

And we will all go along with this relationship for as long

as it makes sense to both of us.

You can leave and we can let you go.

That's the actual transactional relationship of an employee employer.

Re like that is what it

It is what it is.

And you said relationship like four different times

Oh fine.

But hold on.

What happens instead is I, I think like people come into the job and,

and the, one of the ways to get people to come work for you is to say, I

think this is really important and me.

As an individual and they go, I'd love to work on something meaningful.

Mission.

Mission, come on in.

And then everybody talks about the mission.

And mission aligns people and they align around the brand, the identity,

and that all is really, really good.

And everybody, and then you give, they, they say, Hey, you

know, we, we really want some.

Extra stuff.

We went, I don't know, really good coffee.

And you go, absolutely, you're important to me.

Let me get you some really good coffee.

And it's all good.

And then it hits brass tacks and suddenly all the, all the masks come off.

A and I think, I think there's no, there's no advice to give here on

don't, don't start to emotionally invest in your relationship with your employer.

You're gonna do it.

You're gonna do it, right?

Like, and, and look, the truth is for a lot of people, the employer was incredibly

good to them for many, many years.

Like there

you ever been to Google's offices?

mean, I've been there, Google's offices.

It's pretty ama.

I wanna, I, they tried to, they escorted me out, Paul, because I was like,

I'm, can I just stay for one more?

You can press a button and a man on a scooter brings your burrito.

I, it's just a miracle everything.

Look, look, it's a competitive marketplace out there.

They want the best people, et cetera, et cetera.

But

understand

that you may view it as a relationship, but at that scale, even at a

smaller scale, to be frank, there are two things that are going on.

One scale, you are on a spreadsheet.

You're in a spreadsheet like that is reality.

You may be a good performer in your group, which is inside of another

group, which is inside of yet another

group.

is a fantasy.

You are inside of an E R P system run

You're inside of an e r P system for you looking outward.

You Google is everything.

There is your family, there is your hobbies, your vacations, and then

there's Google or whoever you worked for.

That is reality.

Your,

you're the, and it is fundamentally, in many ways, unfair.

Your employer gets to decide the parameters of your life

for you when you get to go somewhere and what you get to do.

That's right.

That's right.

Let, let's translate that into some advice.

It save your relationship coins to actual human relationships.

I feel that that, look, that's one of the hardest things to actually do.

Okay?

Because, because what happens is you work at a company like Microsoft

and you're very aware of the ceo.

The ceo who is, who is in the news, and the brand, and

the products are in the news.

You see him a lot.

He sees you never,

This is real.

You know, you know, I, I, I'll tell you, if I sat in a room with him,

I could have a great conversation who I think I know really well.

Joe, Joe Biden, because he, uh, he was the senator from Delaware.

I grew up very close to Delaware.

Okay.

Joe Biden has been in the corner of my eye since I was about seven years old.

why.

Okay, so decades and decades of Joe Biden.

I know all about Joe Biden.

I know about his family, I know about Senate career.

I know about his scandals.

I just, I know Joe Biden taught the bottom, and I never, never once

until he ran for president really looked at the Wikipedia page.

But, uh, I knew all about Joe Biden.

You know what Joe Biden knows about me.

well.

Not a damn thing he does know.

I'm sure he knows the town I came from, Westchester, Pennsylvania.

Fine.

like he knows, you know, in the same way that he knows Scranton.

Sure.

Cuz he grew up there.

But like, but, but not a thing.

And that those power dynamics are fundamental to every single

structure in human existence.

And we interrogate them constantly and we can't debug them.

They just exist.

They exist.

And so what you wanna do, in my opinion, and I would advise people when I was

their employer, I would try to advise them in their relationship with me.

And it's one of the hardest things to communicate, which is

don't get too connected here.

Don't

get too connected to this abstract entity or the leadership up top.

That's seven layers above.

Get connected to the people around you within work and outside of work.

Because think of it this way, if you are one of those people who got let

go, is there someone at your employer who stayed behind who's like, I know

exactly who to introduce this person to.

I remember being in my twenties and looking at all my bosses

and being like, what are they even.

Thinking, yeah, I should be, I should be in control

It's a common refrain.

very, look, that's just human behavior.

And I'm gonna tell you, it's incredibly self-destructive because what you do

is you focus on the wrong altitude.

You focus on why you don't have control as opposed to what control you do have.

And that took me a long time to learn.

Perfect.

The control you do have,

yes.

yes, energy this

No, but the people who do that, boy do they have a lot

more autonomy and happiness.

I think that's real.

They're

also the ones where it's like, Ooh, got a bad review.

They're the ones where it's funny because they'll be like, I got a bad review.

That person is my enemy.

Time to go, right?

Like they're very, they're very transactional about the relationship,

but they also wear the t-shirt.

Like, they're like, okay, go rah, rah, rah.

And at the same time, in the back of their head, they're like, yeah,

they're

they're coming for me.

That what you realize as you get to know more and more people

later in their careers is they, if the ones who are successful are

the ones who are like, yeah, no, this could turn out really badly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

They, well, they're realistic.

Yeah.

Um, they're a little less emotional, but at the same time they

understand, uh, they understand they only have a limited number of cycles

and you could use them complaining and second guessing, which means you

are not really investing in yourself.

Correct.

At that point.

And I think that's what you're talking about

and accepting your own invisibility, right?

You and I have this wonderful little vest pocket universe

where you and I work together.

We used to run a company.

We're running a new company.

You know who cares

who?

Very, very few people, very, very

few people.

This is real.

real.

We'll go into big meetings and no one will know or care who we are,

and that's

okay.

That's, I mean, that's, negotiating with that and accepting

it is a huge part of the day to day.

also, uh, frankly, a huge part of being rel relatively healthy.

From a mental and psychological place with regards to work.

God.

It doesn't, it's just not, I, I've met the people where work is just this scab.

They just can't stop itching and it's a bad it.

They're just not happy.

Right.

That's real.

Well, and I, I do think like the organizations like Google,

Microsoft, Facebook, et cetera, they really do promise to be your whole life.

That's one of the things I, I really enjoy about when we ran an agency.

It's, it's so transactional in mercenary.

Nobody stays.

I mean, rarely do you stay at an agency for many years,

Yeah.

You're there to up, up your skills and leave.

experience, meet some people and move

And tell everybody how they're running it badly and you

go get a job at a big company.

It's wonderful.

I love it.

No, no, I do.

And I've been on both sides of that, uh, transaction and

Do do you have Avi, any other advice, Paul?

Not just for people who have been affected by layoffs, but uh, those

that maybe were left behind or in other

Well, look, there's something really important here.

I learned this once from a boss and I watched him.

Somebody lost their big executive position.

They get when you get laid off, you.

For a brief period of time, everybody starts to swim away from you.

You have the mark,

Mm.

right?

And they, and they, they don't want it.

They don't want it to rub off on them.

I've been laid off.

It's a bad feeling.

And so, and you're sitting there and you're at home and you're like,

ah, I just need some time to process like right, like you were going.

And so that is the right time to reach out.

Reach out to the person who just got laid off, who you know, and

say, Hey, wow, that's some news.

We'd love to get coffee.

Let's talk about your next steps.

Right, because then you're reminding them they're viable, they're smart,

they did the job for a while.

They can do other things cuz it's, they're in, they're a little bit in

shock and they will remember that from a self-interested point of view.

They'll remember that they will, they will go get another job.

They will probably do better.

Often they do because they're ambitious to prove their former pillar

wrong and then they'll call you.

And that's how you build it.

You take care of them a little bit.

And I, I think this is, everybody's looking at this and they're freaking out

and they're going, I wonder if I'm next.

And then every, you know, some people are going, this is it.

This is the price we pay for capitalism.

And some people are saying, A perfect market just has to do this.

You have no choice.

Put all that aside, because that's above your pay grade.

What is in your purview is to say, do I know somebody who this happened to?

Don't just tweet that you're, you know, they like, Try to get them a job.

You won't get 'em a job in the next week.

It's gonna take 'em months.

yep.

Go get a drink and, and give 'em a sandwich and let 'em know that

cheer them up a bit.

Yeah, tell 'em, tell 'em that you'll, you'll

keep your ears open and so on.

You can't promise a miracle.

No, but that's, that is

that's good.

Good advice.

If that's what it all comes down to, because we, you and I

get in this trap too, Richard, where we're just, we're trying to constantly

negotiate the ethics of the larger.

And I think if you're gonna just give a theme to the advice over and over again,

it's focus on the relationships that are nearby and care for the people who need

care over and over capitalism or not.

Yep.

Common

theme across the board as we close this podcast out, uh, relationships.

That's it.

relationships.

so simple.

And this is like gonna become eventually, I think like an ASMR podcast

where we're just like, focus on the relationships that are close to you.

for the people who you work with.

Uh, if you're out there and you got affected, uh, hang in there.

Uh, connect with friends and colleagues.

You'll land on your feet.

No doubt.

Uh, we've seen this.

We're old enough, Paul, to have seen a few of these.

oh, the good news on this one is there actually is.

Tremendous need for all the skills and talents There may not be, um,

you know, they'll come by and do your laundry and give you a back

rub while you program JavaScript.

But, uh, that might be good too.

I don't, I I see that Google employees and Microsoft, they,

they go in and they never come out

It's like, a

yeah, you're, you're just, you're too taken care of.

Come, come live with us, rich.

And I make coffee in a Keurig and, you know, I, I do the dishes before

I leave this office every night.

It's true.

Um, check us out@zdiford.com.

We've got a new look and feel coming very soon.

Paul.

I'm

soon.

Hello.

At ziti ford.com is the email to reach out to.

We're on Twitter at Ziti Ford.

And

give us five stars.

That's all.

Just fire anywhere.

Just go out and point at five stars in the sky tonight and

say those are for you, rich.

And.

Aw, shucks.

All right, well, that's our advice for today.

Let's, uh, let's get back to work.

a good day.