CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom just before Christmas wants his job back

96 pointsposted 8 hours ago
by pseudolus
(cnn.com)

80 Comments

catgary

6 hours ago

> Garg acknowledges he’s “hard-nosed” and the famous Zoom layoffs severely damaged the company’s reputation — a mistake he knows will continue to haunt him.

I really hope Garg is here reading this. It’s not just a mistake that will continue to haunt him, it’s all he’s ever going to be. It’s how he was introduced in this headline. It’s how he’ll be referred to when he starts his next venture. If newspapers publish his obituary someday, it’ll be in the first few sentences explaining why anyone knows his name.

happytoexplain

5 hours ago

This is the closest thing to hope we have sometimes. Well said.

wseqyrku

5 hours ago

Wondering why he's taking the heat out of literally everyone else, it's not like layoffs were rare to begin with and that this is the last poor bastard we will ever know to be responsible.

happytoexplain

4 hours ago

He's not. This is one article.

wseqyrku

3 hours ago

I'm asking because here everyone seems to be making a big deal out of this particular case. But it's hardly anything new. If you wanna make a comment on the person responsible or turn of events that leads here you gotta zoom out a little. It's the whole goddam system that allows this.

customguy

3 hours ago

Is someone remembered only for being shitty "new"?

> It's the whole goddam system that allows this.

It allows me and others the same things and yet we don't do them. This idea that you have to talk about everything at once first is just absolving individual doers of specific deeds, not to mention the idea that anyone would have stolen from a blind beggar, we need to heal blindness first etc.

It sounds more cultured when you talk about "incentives" and even "incentive structures", but sometimes it really isn't more than "why was she wearing a short skirt in the bad part of town?"

wseqyrku

2 hours ago

I'm surprised, is all. Mass layoffs are going on for a couple years. I couldn't figure out why it is only making noise now? It's possible I wasn't paying attention before. I only heard from people who were laid off themselves and were pissed off, all the while everyone else were acting like it's how things are done, get over it.

I think I expected a harder backlash than any of this, it does work surprisingly well with large companies. That must cause them to avoid overhiring or risk their entire reputation if they dare to consider mass layoffs, not a readily available option that they can play whenever they want.

xyzelement

6 hours ago

Former employee (though not part of that famous round of layoff)

The noise around Zoom firing was ridiculous. We were a largely remote company with most people having never been to the office (I don't think I had, at that moment) so how exactly do you lay off people except remotely? VG didn't do a great job there but the idea of doing it remotely being evil or whatever was ridiculous - should the people be flown in to NY just to get fired?

Overall I find VG a flawed but reasonable dude. He definitely put his ass on the line for the business, was generous with equity - and was a pretty engaged leader. I don't think much about my time at Better but it was fine.

healsdata

6 hours ago

There's a huge range of options between a terse Zoom call with 900 people on it and flying everyone to NY. And if you're someone who previously said "You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS… SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME" to your employees, you may want to lean towards the more humane options if you don't want to get dragged.

Petersipoi

6 hours ago

There is nothing inhumane about announcing layoffs over Zoom though. Hell I'd prefer to be laid off in the least personal way possible because I'm a grown-ass adult who doesn't need my company to treat my like a child. Tell me and get it over with.

garciasn

6 hours ago

Just like a mass wedding is fucking stupid, so is a mass layoff.

You can have the fucking common decency to do a 1:1 Zoom call with each person. Or at least each fucking team.

Firing 900 people simultaneously is not only stupid and callous, but lazy. There’s absolutely no excuse for that level of inhumanity.

Pedro_Ribeiro

5 hours ago

What does it matter if it's an HR person or the CEO telling me? The job is not coming back either way.

swat535

an hour ago

I don't understand this either. It's a professional environment and all you're doing is a business transaction: you offer them services, they pay you.

My phone provider doesn't have an emotional breakdown when I fire them, why should I?

People should never take anything corporations do personally. This is why all the messaging about "we're a family" is BS..

The biggest issue is the lack of safety net and healthcare for people when they are let go.. severance kind of take care of this but it varies greatly.

But hey.. perhaps working in this industry for decades has made me too cynical.

BeetleB

5 hours ago

I don't know. Pre-pandemic, when doing mass layoffs, it wasn't unusual for a company to hold a giant update meeting and let everyone know they're shutting down the division and that everyone's been laid off.

How is this different?

happytoexplain

5 hours ago

Shutting down is a subset of reasons for mass layoffs. They are not equivalent.

Disregarding that, it's not very different. What is the implication you're making? That it's good because it's common?

BeetleB

5 hours ago

> Shutting down is a subset of reasons for mass layoffs.

Not shutting down the company, but shutting down a division. The reasons are almost always the same.

> Disregarding that, it's not very different. What is the implication you're making? That it's good because it's common?

Having been at a company that had several rounds of layoffs over several years, I can assure you there's no way to do a layoff were people won't complain (and the complaints can be quite petty).

In the last round, it was the manager scheduling calls to let people know. He scheduled them over two days (not enough hours in the day to do everyone). We're all in a team meeting (without the manager), and random people are just piping up "Oh wow. I just got a meeting request." Each of them knew they were getting laid off just by the mere fact of getting a calendar invite. So they have to spend the rest of the day waiting to formally hear what they already know when their time comes.

I dunno. Not saying it's worse than what this CEO did, but I can't see it being better either.

ThrowawayTestr

3 hours ago

>So they have to spend the rest of the day waiting to formally hear what they already know when their time comes.

That's a good thing. More time to steal shit from the office.

Quekid5

5 hours ago

It might surprise you to learn that that would also be considered a dick move.

BeetleB

5 hours ago

As I alluded to elsewhere, I've yet to see a layoff where there's no one who doesn't consider how it was done "a dick move." Your preferred way of doing a layoff will be someone else's "dick move" judgement.

ThrowawayR2

3 hours ago

> "You can have the fucking common decency to do a 1:1 Zoom call with each person."

My employer is not my family. Why would I even want the 1:1 call? It's awkward and pointless. Nothing that is said there will change the situation and saying the wrong thing can harm the employee.

froindt

2 hours ago

I have never viewed my employer as family. I have been laid off though. My manager and HR were in the room. They handled it incredibly well, and I have spoken of them very highly for years. I can't imagine I'd feel the same way if the CEO spoke to me during a mass layoff.

yumraj

4 hours ago

Why are mass weddings stupid? They save each person shit ton of cash and end result is the same.

I’ll argue that over the top destination weddings are the ones that are stupid. Save the money for the down payment for a home.

mingus88

5 hours ago

I am an adult but I am also a human

I would expect a layoff with the same level of care as onboarding. If that’s done 900 people at a time over Zoom, cool. We all know we’re part of a herd.

It just sucks and is completely unnecessary to treat people like garbage on their way out if you have a company culture that otherwise treats people well.

Petersipoi

4 hours ago

Sounds like we're in agreement that a layoff can be done just fine and humanely in a group setting over Zoom.

happytoexplain

6 hours ago

>put his ass on the line

Please don't do this. There are many people who put their ass on the line. He is not one of them. He risked almost nothing from a human perspective.

semiquaver

6 hours ago

Clearly his ass was on the line based on the fact that he was fired and is now likely unemployable.

happytoexplain

6 hours ago

If he's fine, that's not "his ass". Otherwise, do you mean "unemployable as a CEO"? If yes, that's irrelevant. If no, why do you think that? You said "clearly", but it's clearly not clear (assuming you've made it to this point in the decision tree).

pigbearpig

6 hours ago

He was fired 5 years after the zoom layoffs. That information is from the linked article.

__MatrixMan__

6 hours ago

That is, unless there's a contingent out there considering hurting him for this. Probably not justified in this case, but maybe we'd get better leadership if it were a tad more common.

xyzelement

6 hours ago

I find it off-putting that you and another poster think you are in position to evaluate someone else's sacrifice. I pressume that if you had put years and lots of money towards something - you would consider that significant "on a human level".

gopher_space

6 hours ago

I haven't worked for an individual with a failure state anyone would recognize since the mid-90s. There's no sacrifice involved in being addicted to a lifestyle that pays well even if you suck.

bluefirebrand

6 hours ago

> I pressume that if you had put years and lots of money towards something - you would consider that significant "on a human level".

If you are wealthy enough to gamble a bunch of money and a couple of years and still have more money than most people left over if it fails, then no. I don't view that as making any kind of significant sacrifice at all

Seriously. If your "worst case scenario" is still "I could retire comfortably tomorrow without any hardship" then I genuinely feel no sympathy for you if your ventures fail.

simoncion

5 hours ago

> Seriously. If your "worst case scenario" is still "I could retire comfortably tomorrow without any hardship"...

Yeah. A long while back, I was talking to the guy who ran a Subway-branded sandwich shop that I frequented, and had been running it for quite a long while. He was complaining to me how absolutely terribly the business was doing... how he'd lost something like 150K last year and this year was shaping up to be at least as bad.

And, like, on the one hand that's a quite a lot of money for an individual to lose. On the other hand I -at the time- would have been immediately tossed out on the street if I lost even a quarter of that amount in a year. Him? He kept the business open, bleeding money for a couple more years before he shut it down to go do something else. He was unhappy about the change in plans, but very clearly not financially threatened by the losses over the previous years.

A monetary loss that would ruin one person might not even be worth bothering to account for to another. The surrounding context always matters.

happytoexplain

6 hours ago

This is an oversimplification. I didn't make the implication you are accusing me of. Tangentially, please do not presume my feelings based on invented scenarios - it's hostile.

Regardless - yes, my response should be off-putting. The situation we are in is "off-putting", to understate it.

e40

6 hours ago

> so how exactly do you lay off people except remotely?

You have their managers do it. Privately. 500 people at once is just lazy and hateful.

xyzelement

5 hours ago

How long does that take (900 people) - how does your entire 10k people company feel for hours and days knowing the layoffs are happening but not their fate? And how many of those said 10k mortgage originators and engineers do something stupid to customer financial data they have access to while under duress of this uncertainty?

throwaway27448

6 hours ago

> He definitely put his ass on the line for the business

Oh did he risk being homeless? Let's not be hyperbolic here—all he risked was minor embarrassment

nickff

6 hours ago

"Minor embarrassment" is what politicians who 'take full responsibility' while not facing any consequences 'suffer'.[1] Getting canned for it is a bit more than that.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-19958739

happytoexplain

6 hours ago

>Getting canned for it is a bit more than that.

No, in the C-suite, it is not. Yes, in other positions, it is.

SaltyBackendGuy

6 hours ago

What more can he do, other than get canned, to be accountable?

happytoexplain

5 hours ago

Nothing, of course - that's why he is not accountable. Because of the way things currently work, he was not in a situation to be able to be accountable.

Maybe we can change that eventually.

xboxnolifes

6 hours ago

Take a pay cut, push back on investors/board, wait until after Christmas...

sgt101

6 hours ago

Apologise and donate his fortune to homeless charities?

simoncion

6 hours ago

One option is to pay back enough of his compensation from that period (and money made off of investments funded by that compensation) to make his total comp over his tenure equal to that of a low-to-mid-level line worker.

Some say that money is the unit of caring. If that's true, then nothing expresses an executive's commitment to accountability more than him forfeiting enough of his total compensation to put himself nearly at the bottom of the totem pole.

throwaway27448

5 hours ago

Well he is almost certainly wealthier than the people he fired so it's quite hard to take this seriously

xyzelement

6 hours ago

There was some dynamic with Softbank which required VG to put a lot of personal money on the line to keep going. I forget the dynamic exactly.

jroseattle

6 hours ago

> VG didn't do a great job there but the idea of doing it remotely being evil or whatever was ridiculous

I don't think the issue was the communications medium (Zoom.)

> I don't think much about my time at Better but it was fine.

That's the biggest tell about leadership at any company.

lbrito

6 hours ago

Oh, will some one think of the poor CEOs for a change! He puts his ass on the line!

Pathetic

jazzpush2

8 hours ago

You read this from the outside and ask yourself, "how does this guy sleep at night?". He sleeps fine, of course, justifying his own actions/behaviors without thinking of others.

Luigi Mangione spent months trying to contact someone at United Healthcare to no avail. Only when he pretended to be an investor managing a large number of assets did he hear a response.

coredog64

6 hours ago

Luigi was never a UHC customer per the news story today on his guilty plea.

Aurornis

6 hours ago

> Luigi Mangione spent months trying to contact someone at United Healthcare to no avail. Only when he pretended to be an investor managing a large number of assets did he hear a response.

Luigi Mangione was not a United Healthcare customer.

This seems like an incredibly important detail that keeps being left out of this tidbit as it circulates social media. You’re trying to imply that he had some grievance with his insurance with the company, but he was not insured by them. He was trying to get in contact with anyone so he could murder someone high profile. He called the investor relations line as a way to social engineer that.

happytoexplain

5 hours ago

Why is it incredibly important? You said that, but didn't continue.

Must grievances be only with employers/patrons to be valid?

Aurornis

5 hours ago

> Why is it "incredibly important"? You said that, but didn't continue.

I explained it in the following sentence: Leaving it out is an underhanded way of implying that he was trying to get ahold of someone about his own medical conditions, which has been the narrative across social media.

> Must grievances be only with employers/patrons to be valid?

A company doesn’t have to field phone calls from non customers who are angry at their industry. If you’re trying to suggest that companies have an obligation to field complaints from angry non-customers, using an example where someone went on to murder an employee of that company isn't making a compelling case.

adastra22

7 hours ago

> how does this guy sleep at night?

On a big pile of money, surrounded by beautiful women.

cyanydeez

6 hours ago

So people really underestimate (because of, the implication) the power of money to rewire the brand to excuse larger and larger immoral and unethical behaviors and to permanently not understand how the rest of the reality is being bent to the money bubble illusion.

adastra22

6 hours ago

Also selection effects. There have been some great leaders in business with a clear moral code. We lost Tony Hsieh way too young. But by and large those at the top got there for a reason.

cyanydeez

6 hours ago

yes, and to get into the billions of dollars of net worth, you need to both ignore more and more problematic things and believe more and more than you deserve all this.

JumpCrisscross

6 hours ago

> to get into the billions of dollars of net worth, you need to both ignore more and more problematic things

Need is too strong, especially if it’s just for becoming a billionaire. One can absolutely amble into that situation. Where I tend to agree is if you choose to keep those billions versus transitioning to charity.

cyanydeez

6 hours ago

the "need" is POV the person gaining the money.

lovich

5 hours ago

Come on man. No one is ambling into being a billionaire.

There’s a little under 1000 billionaires in the US and the population is estimated at over 349 million. Rounding the billionaires up and the population down to those round numbers and it’s 0.000286532951% of the population getting resources that millions of others are trying to take.

happytoexplain

5 hours ago

Why are you referring to rarity? "Ambling" refers to (RELATIVE) luck, not commonness.

lovich

2 hours ago

Ambling refers to walking into a situation casually. If you think you can amble into being a billionaire in our environment then you’re conceding that capitalism as a system has broken down in the US because there’s no way to casually come into that much money in the presence of competition.

JumpCrisscross

8 minutes ago

> If you think you can amble into being a billionaire in our environment then you’re conceding that capitalism as a system has broken down

Yes. I think you can be a good person and an early engineer at a start-up that gets acquired for billions when the team is still small.

derektank

5 hours ago

Well, that is one thing Vishal has going for him, he’s not a murderer. I hope he sleeps a lot better at night than Mangione does.

tolugenius

7 hours ago

> Garg acknowledges he’s “hard-nosed” and the famous Zoom layoffs severely damaged the company’s reputation — a mistake he knows will continue to haunt him. But as criticized as Garg has been for placing near-impossible demands on the company and its employees, he said Lewis convinced the board he didn’t push hard enough.

> So when shareholders said, ‘You need to take a back seat,’ I complied.”

Man shocked to learn the evolution of shareholder value did not, in fact value him.

mrhottakes

8 hours ago

Leopard who eats faces surprised to find out other leopard ate his face.

BeetleB

5 hours ago

> “He hoodwinked me,” the just-ousted Better Home & Finance CEO said about Daniel Lewis, the man who replaced him last week. “He said he liked the company’s strategy. He praised us on X and used that to get on our board and win our confidences.”

I love SpaceX's strategy for getting us to AGI, the moon, and beyond!

> just as he brought the company to the precipice of success.

I love how success has a precipice.

catgary

5 hours ago

This plus the zoom firing anecdote is basically confirming that Garg operates at a Cousin Greg level.

nemomarx

6 hours ago

> says he was fired on August 3 just as he brought the company to the precipice of success.

> Today, with an imploded refi business and rates closing in on 7%, the AI mortgage company’s market value stands at just $300 million.

Forgive the snipping here, but is the company actually turning around or on the brink of success now? Is there any sign the firings helped them 8 months later?

jerlam

6 hours ago

The 900 person layoffs were in 2021.

Billybrain

5 hours ago

The entire refinancing industry collapsed, its a miracle they didn't file for bankruptcy - they are not totally out of the woods but they do have a great product and great growth.

happytoexplain

6 hours ago

In my humble opinion, he is representative of an evil that is creeping into corporate America. Don't get me wrong: It was always "evil" by some definition, but not like this. It's becoming a cartoon version of "American business". It's like the people in leadership positions increasingly think that running a business consists of yelling at your direct reports until things are done, and sucking up to your superiors, and that's the whole job description.

Ancalagon

6 hours ago

wow I forgot about about this company and this fiasco

time to forget about it again

xyst

6 hours ago

Pushes mass layoffs to appease board or investors. Then cries to news outlets when the same is done to him.

He is nothing but a tool for the billionaires. Nothing else. What did he risk? Nothing. Public embarrassment at best. He gets a golden parachute like every other C-level asshole and lives the rest of his life without having to worry about anything.

blitzar

6 hours ago

It doesn't work like that bud.

People (you) fired don't get their jobs back because they say "they were doing a great job".

la6479

6 hours ago

Tough luck buddy. Every CEO job published in linked in have a 1000 applicants in 2 hours. /s

bdangubic

7 hours ago

he should get his job back around black friday with enough time for another firing round at Christmas time