Yep, and in many cases people got let go, then rehired 2 days later when things got cleared up, and kept their severance. The layoffs were mostly rushed. One guy was going to be a speaker at an event for the company, and as everyone sat down waiting for him to hop on stage, they hadn’t realized he was let go. Absolute waste just to make the numbers look good on paper, but a huge loss of investment.
Imagine youre a senior engineer with 2000 stock units with accelerated vesting (was about 32$ at the time), severance at least in canada was over 20 weeks of pay lump sum given the collective dismissal + vacations. They were dropping 100k(before tx) to engineers to make them go away, and hire them back the week after.
Worst company I’ve ever worked for, but I did make a pretty penny that week. Luckily I got hired a month later somewhere else.
So was this just a purely “everyone’s doing it, so the customers (shareholders) expect it, so we’ll follow suit” type thing? Do mass layoffs inspire confidence in the stock so it goes up? It’s hard to understand from a rational position that throwing away money makes money for the investors.
