Ep 26 - Unpacking Tech Layoffs with Joe Onisick - C2C026

Chris Miles: 0:00

Welcome to the Cables to Clouds podcast. Cloud adoption is on the rise and many network infrastructure professionals are being asked to adopt a hybrid approach as individuals who have already started this journey. We would like to empower those professionals with the tools and the knowledge to bridge the gap.

Tim McConnaughy: 0:30

Welcome back to another episode of Cables to Clouds. I'm your host this week, tim, and with me, as always, are my lovely co-hosts Chris Miles and Alex Perkins. Today we have a very special guest with us, a good friend of mine, joe. You know, it just occurred to me. Until this very second show, I never asked how to pronounce your last name. Is it on a say?

Alex Perkins: 0:51

I had to go.

Tim McConnaughy: 0:52

I know, I know.

Joe Onisick: 0:53

You nailed it first try and then you tried to go with the Japanese version.

Tim McConnaughy: 0:57

The second try, excellent, perfect, okay. So, yes, joe, joe's. A lot of people know Joe, whether or not they know Joe, but he's one of those guys who's been around the industry for a long time and pretty much knows everybody. We're, all you know, less than three degrees from Kevin Bacon here anyway, so the odds are really good that you probably know Joe, even if you don't know Joe. So, joe, just in case you don't, though, if you're one of the five people in the industry watching that don't know Joe, joe, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Joe Onisick: 1:30

So for those of you five lucky people that don't know me, you're losing your luck today. I am Joe Onisic. I am a principal of transformation continuum. It's a company I co-founded several years back that focuses on go-to-market for technology products. Basically, we realized that a go-to-market is very disjointed within every big large tech vendor. It's technical marketing, product marketing, product adoption, sales, sales enablement all these different things, and nobody communicates or coordinates well. So we built an agency to do it all. But other than that, I've got about 30 years in tech. I've built products, I've been senior at startups, been acquired, I've done a little bit of every aspect of this stuff and I have an opinion on all of it, and most of them stink.

Tim McConnaughy: 2:12

That is an awesome introduction and actually it's perfect because we brought Joe in, because he has strong opinions. I mean, we all have strong opinions, right, but Joe is saltier than most. So we're going to channel some of that energy today, if at all possible. Today's topic is not really funny and we need to be cognizant of that fact, but at the same time, I hope that we can cover it, we can talk about it and we can bring some value to the discussion around it, because, unfortunately, it's just becoming more and more of a thing in our industry the longer the industry seems to go. So I'm talking about layoffs in general, but specifically in this case, I'm talking about layoffs within the tech industry, the I guess, the velocity, if you will, or just the huge amount of them that we've been seeing in the last year, and we're rolling right into 2024 with a good start. So before I jump right into that, joe, I mean, like I said, we brought you here for your thoughts about it Do you have anything? Just to start us off.

Joe Onisick: 3:23

Look, I think it's not just the velocity that we're seeing over the last year and a half, it's the scale I think it also comes down to like the impersonality and disconnectedness of it. There's a lot of toxicity that's going on with it. Right, there's no good way to do layoffs, but I think a lot of it has been really bad. I mean, a lot of these layoffs were done right after let's end work from home and get you back in the office. So people were relocating and things like that, and then the next day they have no job. I mean, you really couldn't have designed a worse way to do what is being done in tech right now, if you try.

Tim McConnaughy: 3:56

Yeah, absolutely. I mean so speaking of like kind of the impersonality of it. I mean we see more and more artifacts of this every day. Was it just the other day? We saw the person from Cloudflare that was being laid off from.

Alex Perkins: 4:08

Cloudflare.

Tim McConnaughy: 4:09

That recorded. I don't know if you saw it or not, but she recorded herself kind of being terminated and oh my God, it was a dumpster fire. It was horrible.

Joe Onisick: 4:18

Yeah, and look, because this is a tough topic there are also a couple of silver lining pieces, and those silver lining shows this doesn't have to be the way. So one person getting a lot of good limelight right now is the CEO of Nintendo, who came out and said are our developers for games, these are our goal, these are what create us. I'm not letting them go because of a downturn. I'm going to suffer through that downturn and keep them here so that I have them when it all ends and I'm going to be in a better place in my competition. And that's a brilliant stance. That's a stance that cares about your people. That's a stance that cares about the long term. It's probably not a stance that'll last the test of time in our current stock markets, but it's the right stance.

Tim McConnaughy: 4:57

Yeah, I totally agree. So it's complete sidebar. This wasn't planned, but it just happened to work out this way. So I take Japanese tutoring a couple times a week and I was actually just talking with my tutor last night about this and she's in Japan, she's in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and we were talking about the layoff thing and how it's all over the place in the US and she was telling me in Japan apparently that's actually not happening Like it did before. Covid, Japanese companies were run very closely to how American companies run. You'd see layoffs and stuff. But I don't know if the government got involved. It was a little. I was trying to do my translation stuff. I think the government got involved or something. So in Japan it's actually not. They can't just come in and lay off like 30,000 people. There's actually protections in place and I think the EU has something like that too, but I'm not 100% sure.

Joe Onisick: 5:52

Yeah.

Joe Onisick: 5:52

So a lot of countries in areas and territories the EU, japan and the rest do have a lot more protections as to how it can be done and how it has to be done, and a lot of times they're a bit ham-fisted, just like any legislation tends to be, but they do protect the employee quite a bit, and I think that's one of the things that I keep thinking with these CEOs of the companies that are doing these mass layoffs is I don't think they realize, I think they think they're untouchable and, honestly, I think they're in the F round and find out stage. There are tools that we have as employees to push back and those tools will look ugly if we use them. This is the first time in my 30 years in tech where I've heard tech people start to contemplate the idea of unionizing. If we were to unionize, collective bargaining will end this Now it will at first be great and then it will get bastardized just like everything else, until they're getting murdered on cost because we have the power.

Joe Onisick: 6:49

The other option is legislation. You get enough tech people with enough money to donate to enough campaigns. You're going to see change.

Joe Onisick: 6:55

It's not about the vote, it's about the campaign contributions If we have disposable income for it. So at some point we're going to stop eating what they're feeding us and they're going to have to come to a reckoning, or they can come to their own reckoning. They can see the writing on the wall and realize there's only so much intelligent people are going to take. And oh, by the way, we're intelligent people, we're their problem solvers.

Alex Perkins: 7:16

I will say real quick, before we jump too far from it, the Cloudflare thing. What made that really even worse was the CEO was coming out and trying to explain how he does stuff and, like you said, joe with the F round and find out phase. It's like that's going to happen very soon if people keep doing stuff like this and trying to defend it or talk about those policies more publicly like that.

Joe Onisick: 7:41

And that points on something we never see. We never see a CEO step in front of the market and fall on their sword. My staff and I made that executive leadership decisions. We invested in the wrong places, we brought on too many people and now we have to cut people's livelihood to get the business right. But I want to be clear this is our fault. Now, even if they did the same thing with a level of accountability, it would come off very different.

Joe Onisick: 8:07

But instead you're like generation machines and I look at it and I'm like you make 450 times your average employee on average. So what is that money for? You're supposed to walk on water and predict the market and shift the company. That's your job. That's why we're paying you astronomical fees. So if all you ever give us back is excuses for failure, why are you getting a paycheck?

Alex Perkins: 8:32

Very well said yeah.

Chris Miles: 8:35

Especially because it felt like it was doubling down on, like, oh, this is a proven process we have. And I'll be honest if what we saw, you know. He did say they don't get it right every single time, but if that is what is part of their proven process, then that's bullshit, that's not a that's not a proven process. If the people exiting your company are being treated like that, that's that's not proven at all 100%.

Joe Onisick: 8:57

That's guess and check, right, that's what that is. That's. We're going to try this out. That didn't work. Your problem, not mine I'm still taking a bonus home. I think the other thing we miss is that if you look at executive compensation in the US right and I'll use the US market because it's one I know the best executive compensation go look at any 10 case statement of any publicly traded company. The CEO's pay breaks down into like five categories. But if you really look at those categories, they all come back to quarterly profit. So if I screw everything up this quarter and we are down profit, but I lay off 15,000 people, we go up profit. I take a huge bonus home and you lose your livelihood. Like we've created a system that's so easy to game, they're incentivized to game it Now you're absolutely right, right, and yeah, I mean, that's the thing.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:45

So I was actually going to say something very similar. Like you, go to the like look at the board of directors of all these corporations, right, and they are. It's like the old golden parachute thing, right, when there's no true accountability at the C-suite for any of this right.

Joe Onisick: 10:00

No, no, the thing I've said and I've said this to a couple of CEOs because I like to punch bears but when you look at what goes on with this, they have all the cards and they use them to their advantage and all they deliver is excuse. So what I've said to them is if your employee came to you the way you go to the market, with excuse after excuse after excuse for failure, after failure after failure, at what point would you get rid of that employee? The market doesn't care. They're not getting rid of you as long as you're printing profit. But you can run the company into the ground on profit. I mean, look at GE.

Tim McConnaughy: 10:38

Little Jack Wills. Yeah, thanks, jack.

Joe Onisick: 10:42

What kills me is you look like GE is a great example. I've been researching this a lot because it's been going on and it bothers me personally. When I climbed out of a bottle years ago, I found this thing called Empathy, and it's the worst. Stay away from Empathy, don't touch it. It's terrible. But so I started really hating what I'm watching in the industry. So I started researching companies like GE. What happened to GE? Why did they go from this pinnacle of a company that was worldwide renowned to this joke that created the show 30 Rock? If you look at GE prior to Jack Wills, their financial reports and 10 case statements bragged about how much they paid in taxes and how much they paid in salaries. They bragged about how they contributed back to the society that allowed them to exist. Now companies brag about how little they pay in taxes, how little they pay employees. We have shifted our moral and ethical values as a country to support the profit-driven system.

Tim McConnaughy: 11:36

Yeah, if there's any country that buys well that created and then buys into prosperity gospel, that's the United States for sure.

Joe Onisick: 11:45

Yeah, and this isn't like a capitalism versus socialism discussion. There are a million flavors of capitalism, million ways to implement it, and we in this country have gone through several. That was a very different nation than the one we've evolved to over 50 years.

Tim McConnaughy: 11:58

Yeah, and I don't want to steer us too far too fast, but what you said about how we're firing the best people, we're getting rid of people that are useful and good, and you do it at a scale like we're seeing like 20,000, 30,000 people, I mean a lot of people are saying, oh well, these companies built over hired that's the word you hear. A lot over hired and don't get me wrong, they probably did over hire During the pandemic especially. I mean that was like the time to be getting into tech right, like I think we could all remember that, and part of that was because of the extreme amount of agility and quickness and adaptability that was required to get everybody into a virtual environment right.

Alex Perkins: 12:53

Lots of people have fast stories. Yeah, it was the perfect time for us, because they needed this exact skill set right To get everything stood up very quickly in all these new environments. Yeah, absolutely.

Joe Onisick: 13:06

Yeah, and if you look at that time and you look back at the articles and the trade rags and stuff at that time, it was a boom for tech employees as a whole that time and prior salaries were going up, the ability to work from home, benefits were going up, companies were talking about their culture.

Joe Onisick: 13:19

They were trying to do whatever they could to attract talent and I think in some ways, what this is is the idea of pushback on that, what they would euphemize as market corrections, but it's an extremely ham-fist and extreme version and I think a lot of our layoffs are one tech company goes out and drops 10,000 people. They're the first to do it. They take a bunch of flak, but now the anger's gone, so everyone else is like, okay, well, I can slip in 5,000 here and 10,000 here and oh, by the way, we'll flood the market with talent so that everyone will have to come crawling back. On our terms, I think it was an accidental growth to a tool. I don't think they nefariously all got together and planned with twiddling fingers and Mr Burns run on the show, but I think, as they saw it happening, they all saw opportunity and put more blood in the water.

Tim McConnaughy: 14:11

Absolutely. I remember, so I'm in and we are Chris and Alex and myself we're all in tech communities and I remember well, like right around, I think, near the end of maybe 2021, like right around 2021, 2022, maybe even to the early part of 2022, I was telling people like, if you're gonna make a move, if you're gonna get an attack, or if you're gonna find a new job and you're gonna take that huge bonus and do huge salary and get that new job, do it quick, because the employers are gonna they're not gonna take being the backseat in the car for very long, right, and of course we see what kind of has happened. You needed to seize the opportunity, like right then, before the tables turn and employers, we're back in the driver's seat of this whole thing, making people like you said, let's fire a bunch of people, flood the market, depress wages, make everybody just feel happy to have a job.

Alex Perkins: 15:07

Not, you know anyway, Well, to go back on a point that was brought up earlier, you said, right, like the CEO is getting paid to make these decisions and kind of predict the market, and we all just agreed that they probably did over hire. So it's like, where's the responsibility for that? Two years later, after all, that is gone and now all these layoffs are happening right.

Joe Onisick: 15:27

It's like, yeah, some of those over hires weren't like accidents, mistakes or investments. No, again, Some of that was hoarding the hoarding Intentional talent.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:37

yeah, hoarding right exactly.

Joe Onisick: 15:39

And so you get a bunch of people, and there's a bunch of people spinning their wheels thinking they have a real job, but really what their job was is to keep them out of the competition's hand, and so as soon as cuts have to come, they're doing everything they're supposed to, and that's taking agency away from your employees, right, like Joe, there is nothing you can do to keep this job. You're just a placeholder on a line sheet until I don't need a placeholder anymore.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:01

So I mean, so we've got an article we got grabbed from TechCrunch and we're gonna put in the show notes and it's coming over some of the numbers, because I think, in order to really understand kind of the scale, I think everybody knows, especially in tech, that there's just like a huge amount of layoffs that are going on and continue to go on, but I don't think anybody really feels understands the true scale of what's happening.

Alex Perkins: 16:23

So you know it's different when you aggregate and see it.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:26

That's it right. So let's see. I'm trying to find the number here. So in January, let's see in 2023.

Chris Miles: 16:33

2023 alone was 250,000.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:37

That's it. Yeah, I was trying to add the numbers up on this article.

Alex Perkins: 16:39

I didn't have it ready.

Chris Miles: 16:40

250,000, dude that's people, every single one of them, right, and that's a 50% increase from the previous year. Just to show, like you said, the scale A quarter million.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:50

Yeah, a quarter million people.

Joe Onisick: 16:52

And then think about that as families, right, what are you talking like? 1.5 kids per couple or something? Yeah Right, you're talking about a lot of people affected, a lot of humans affected.

Alex Perkins: 17:01

Yeah, that's like 800,000 people affected.

Tim McConnaughy: 17:03

probably something around there Like this is actually really good lead-in, because the question I have in my mind and I kind of think I don't know how to say it. I know the answer, but I am thinking it's you know, I think we can probably get somewhere close to it when you think about that, right, so you're going to dump 250,000 people within a year into the market. Obviously, all those people don't stay unemployed, right? But then again you also have to be like scratching your head, like, well, you know, where did they go? Then, like, you got 250,000 people, you know, dropped into the market, where did they go? Why were there 250,000 positions eliminated? You know that were there before, in the year before and, like I said, we're rolling right into 2024 with that same thing.

Tim McConnaughy: 17:47

And I think I mean the answer is, of course, it's financial in some way. Right, we've had this is soapbox moment, and I want to get your take on this too, joe and guys. We've had this quantitative easing in place for god damn there a decade. Like, did it ever stop after 2008,? Really, like after the crash in 2008,? I'm not sure it ever really stopped. We've had quantitative easing, and what I mean by that, by the way, I'm talking about the money printer right, like we have. You know, the central banks have been buying up bonds and flooding the market with money and making extremely low rates to borrow, right. So, you know, for like a decade, we've had pretty much anybody with an idea, anybody with an idea and you know, a bank account could probably fund their own startup, you know, and that's a lot of human capital right. That's kind of built up over that period of time, you know.

Tim McConnaughy: 18:41

Then you have COVID with. Well, we know what happened during COVID. Right, the CSPs like went into stratosphere because they had they were best positioned. I think again and I'll give just, I'll give everybody a chance to talk about this as well, or completely disagree with me you know, you had COVID, you had the CSPs and other tech companies were just like right in the right spot at the right time to help these companies essentially continue to operate by being agile and getting them, you know, online and virtual, you know, and then you got the federal government coming in and just flooding, just paycheck protection loans, like business loans, like zero interest, everything right, keep the economy going. During COVID, you know what else could have happened, like, what else could be the result eventually, once we take inflation combat measures.

Joe Onisick: 19:28

Yeah, I mean this was a very predictable result for anyone looking to predict it right. Like the airlines are a great example and I know it's outside of the realm of this conversation but they took huge PPP loans, they took huge benefits, they took like complete bailouts and then they waited until the exact moment they were allowed to do the layoffs and as soon as cuffs came off, they did the layoffs anyway. Nobody's job got protected for more than a handful of months and the CEOs took home millions of dollars in bonuses. That was literally just taxpayers paying CEOs. Like there was a slight laundering, but it was just very slight.

Tim McConnaughy: 20:02

Very slight yeah. The most socialist capitalist country, I guess, outside of China.

Joe Onisick: 20:08

We're a corporate welfare state. Like we hate welfare for people, we love welfare for corporations.

Chris Miles: 20:15

Yeah, that's one thing that always looks so like. Discouraging to me is this is, like you said, tim, it's all based on financials, and if you look at the numbers of layoffs that were done last year, just similarly, hopefully this is we've seen the worst of it this year, but this all happens in January, right Before Q1 kicks off, right? So is like. The thing that I don't understand is like is this the only way to have a successful Q1 is to eliminate hundreds and thousands of jobs and ruin people's livelihoods, and then everyone else is, you know, left to react and do more with less. Is that how it's done? Because it's pretty grim if that's the way to do it.

Joe Onisick: 20:55

Yeah, well, I think what happens here and especially when you start getting to solutions it gets worse when you think of it as a simple problem. This is definitely not a simple problem. It's a complex, interconnected problem that goes back to a lot of things, and I think a lot of it is the way we've structured what we expect out of a company. So, from a US market perspective, we expect quarterly growth, quarter after quarter, regardless of what business you do.

Tim McConnaughy: 21:19

Yeah, forever, Forever always has to grow.

Joe Onisick: 21:23

That only exists if that industry continues to grow. So again back to an easy example and like the small kid to pick on, is the airlines right? That's a fixed market. There's not like, there's not a way to get a huge increase in air travel. You have a fixed amount of dollars that are going to come in. You have a fixed set of competitors who are very entrenched. You're competing in the same space. So if you need to grow quarterly profit, year after year, quarter after quarter, there's only so many places you can come.

Joe Onisick: 21:49

And what we're seeing with Boeing's major failures is it comes from cutting quality, safety, cost and service. Right, it's got to come from somewhere. We set them up for failure. That doesn't excuse it, but it means we've got fault too. We got to look at this whole pie and this whole picture. The other flip side of this is how do we get rid of people that aren't working? Right? Layoffs are one thing. Cutting 10,000 people arbitrarily is not about who works and who doesn't. But when I hire Joe and Joe sucks, how quickly do I identify that Joe sucks and get rid of him? Right, and in a lot of corporate policy, hr's job is to protect the company, not the employee. They're there to be the face of legal because no one wants to deal with a lawyer. So they have these long, convoluted processes to get rid of people you've identified are no good Managing out.

Joe Onisick: 22:37

yeah, we can go sleeping dead weight and then the layoff becomes an easy button right. So it's like and these are just two components of a very complex process that we have to look at holistically to be able to get to a point where a layoff is a rare thing, that is, an actual correction when mistakes truly happen.

Alex Perkins: 22:53

Yeah, and like to add to that. I mean, with this large number of layoffs right, I meant to bring this up earlier on, but this is a good point too when this happens, like there's no personalization of any of this, when it's that large of a number, like you're not laying off people because of performance issues or legitimate reasons, right, like that's literally just take a spreadsheet and just that. That. That, that, that, like the numbers are too big for it to be anything besides that.

Joe Onisick: 23:20

Oh yeah 20,000 people.

Joe Onisick: 23:22

It just gets filtered down right, like this SVP has to get rid of 10,000 people, he hands out a number to everyone below him. Yeah, just yeah, it's, it's uh, it's very arbitrary. Now there are, there are people that were dead weight. They get shuffled in there because some managers like, fine, they, I can get rid of Joe. Right, that you know. I understand why they want to get rid of me. It's all good, but, um, but for the most part it's completely arbitrary. It's just groups of people getting lumped together and gone.

Tim McConnaughy: 23:51

And not every single layoff that happens is because the CEO made a huge mistake or they're waiting for their golden parachute. And I'm not saying this. Cisco, for example, does limited restructuring that's what they call it, limited restructuring, where they decide that, hey, this line of business is not doing well, we're going to cut it, we're going to refocus elsewhere, whatever that looks like. Is that a layoff? Absolutely, it is still absolutely a layoff.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:22

We're not here to give free passes to anybody, but at least the and the reason is still financial. Because, of course, if they had $20 billion in the bank or I say $20 billion, that's a lot, cisco, sorry, $20 trillion in the bank they probably wouldn't do anything. They just be counting their money. Two bills, you count their money, but at the same time it's not like, oh, we're doing this limited restructuring for no reason, or just we decided that we have to beat the Wall Street number. We got to get rid of them, although that often does. At the end of the day, it's all. You nailed it, joe, when you said about you know, you have to make the quarterly number, have to grow forever. If you can't grow forever, you can make it look like you're growing by cutting your expenses.

Joe Onisick: 25:03

Yeah, and here's kind of the simple lit mistests that I run through in my head. For can we fix this? Is there a fix? I guarantee that if the stock market implemented a policy that said you know, we, whatever. However they want to implement a policy, they have a million ways to do this. There's a thing called activist investors that they'll use to replace your board and replace your CEO. If you're not playing their games by their rules, they can make you play their rules.

Joe Onisick: 25:25

But if we implement a policy that said in a quarter where the CEO does a layoff more than X percent, they cannot take home a bonus, I guarantee the layoff problem would get fixed. Right, if we took it away as the easy button, somebody smart would figure out a solution, right. So we know solutions exist. Those CEOs are not going to go home without a $10 million check that month. Right, they're not going to be able to deal with that, right. So we know solutions can be had. They're just not being had because layoffs are so easy. Any idiot can create profit with a layoff and any of them exist with CEO titles doing that.

Alex Perkins: 25:59

That's man. Okay, I'm glad you said this, because I wanted to bring this up earlier when we were talking about the board structure or the incentivization structure. But it's like, who's going to enforce that? Is it each individual company's board? I don't know how all this works. This is a legitimate question, but I don't understand. Like you said, it can be done in the stock market, but will that cover everything? Or does it have to be done at each individual board that comes up with these incentivization structures in the first place?

Joe Onisick: 26:29

It gets complex and subjective, but overall, the way the stock market today works is the CEOs got a fiduciary duty to generate profit quarter by quarter. That's the understood law. Now, it's not an actual law, it's not an actual policy. I don't know if it's written down somewhere, but we'll say it. You have a fiduciary duty to do this. You can be sued for it. So if a CEO does not generate profit, they can be sued. They can be taken to court for that right, or their board can get rid of them. Or if the board isn't getting rid of them and they're protecting them, then the stock market does what's called activist investors, which they come in. They buy enough of your company to start replacing board members until you have a board that votes the CEO out. Right, it's some way. It's just an exchange of dollars. Until we get rid of you, how much working dollars do we have to put in?

Joe Onisick: 27:19

And, in fact, the easy way to know that I'm not just full of crap is there's a new business entity, fairly new business entity that's gaining some traction in the US market right now, called a Benefits Corp.

Joe Onisick: 27:30

Now, to be clear, there is a B Corp, which is a different thing. It's a certification thing. It's fairly European, but in the US we have a Benefits Corp and there's only a few states that really have the ability to incorporate as Benefits Corp. But the difference between a Benefits Corp and your traditional C Corp, the main difference and there are more and I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, financial advice and business advice but the main difference is that a Benefits Corp can align social, employee and customer priorities as equally weighted with profit. And the only purpose of allowing a Benefits Corp to do that is a CEO can't be sued or removed for weighing customers and their employee satisfaction, product quality, environmental safety, whatever it is along with profit. So we actually have to have a legal entity to say you can run a company that isn't just trying to bleed profit out of customers. That's insane.

Tim McConnaughy: 28:23

I think it used to be that way, though you go back to like the 50s and 60s I'm not saying there weren't always evil corporations that were right, but you go back to like, if you will, the golden age of what is it? A chicken every pot and a car in every garage or whatever right Before the stock market really kind of I don't know became vicious, if you will, before this idea of this fiduciary responsibility really became almost enforceable like well is enforceable by getting sued and all of this. Right, corporations, businesses, cared about their stakeholders at least as much as their stockholders. Right, and it worked Like it worked. That was the crazy part. It worked and we? It just wasn't good enough for people to make money fast enough. That needed to be making money faster, I guess.

Joe Onisick: 29:08

Yeah, but this is also not the first ebb and flow of this we've even seen in the US. Right, there was a time and I forget we've got a name for the time, but it was we had the railroad tycoon, we had the oil tycoon and we had the financial tycoon. So, like JP Morgan, the Rockefellers, there was a few others, but these like huge, super wealthy families sitting on giant monopolies that used monopoly tactics all the way down to like hire goons and thugs to go break legs and break up unions physically with bats, right, like that's a literal thing that happened here in the US, like the Pinkerton's. So so we, we got rid of that, we broke up the monopolies, we used antitrust laws, we embedded them, and then we just kind of got lax and we let that stuff go, and so now we're back in that role.

Joe Onisick: 29:51

I mean, there are four companies I could name, which I won't which are 100% tech monopolies right now. Right, we've allowed that same thing to grow again and the problem is it takes control. And then we've done a lot of other things in our legislation and policy that allows everything to be paid to play, including our government and elected officials. Oh yeah, it means that now there's so well entrenched that it takes a lot of votes to fix it, especially in a heavily gerrymandered country.

Joe Onisick: 30:19

That's a whole different topic, but it's like. It's like we've set up a lot of things to make this really hard to fix.

Chris Miles: 30:25

Yeah, the, the. I don't know if we want to get into the details of of how to unionize, because I feel like that's probably a very loaded question, but I mean the fact that you bring that up, that that's even being considered by some of these large tech. You know, it's definitely not the, the higher ups, it's the employee basis considering it right. So the idea of that coming to fruition is, I think, that's a good thing. Obviously, it protects the employees. But I mean, what would we say? Cause there's always fear mongering that comes down from the top, down to to warn people to not do that, whether we can. Oh, they're going to take your money, they're going to actually stag, they're going to make innovation stagnant, and things like that. Well, I mean what? What is your take on that? How is that actually going to affect the speed at which we innovate and and progress forward in technology?

Joe Onisick: 31:17

So that's a big question, but I'll give you kind of my idiot's two cents right. And so this is the high school dropouts opinion on unionization. First, unions are a religion in the U S. You either love them or hate them. There's very few in between, you know. There's a handful of people that don't care, but either way you're passionate against or for. To me, being passionate against or for government or unions or religion or something like that, it's not about the thing, it's about the implementation of the thing. There are good governments, bad governments, good unions, bad governments.

Joe Onisick: 31:47

I am currently, as of probably the last two years, begrudgingly for tech unionization. I would have been adamantly against it previously. The reason I'm begrudgingly for it is a union. At its base is a structure that consolidates power. It consolidates the collective voting power of the workforce. Anytime you consolidate power, you're going to attract grifters who want to control that power for their own usage, and you've seen this play out in our own unions here in the U S.

Joe Onisick: 32:16

They started out being kids out of coal mines, getting us not working weekends doing great things. We all appreciate and forget that they did for us, but then they got to the point where there are horror stories that people love to throw around, where the guy wax on the floor was making 75 K a year with full benefits, right? Okay, is that where we needed to be? Probably not in like 1980, right? So I don't like the idea of an uncontrolled power structure, because you can predict the end results. The union leaders will start to take in more money, they'll start to take bribes, they'll start to do this, they'll start to do that. If you don't protect against it. But if you implement it right, with the right level of controls, you can do it. The reason I'm begrudgingly for it, even though I don't think we'll implement them right, is because we're running out of options. And so the hamfisted heavy hammer, sledge hammer, like I've got one in my toolbox. It doesn't come out much, but when I need it, you know it comes out and does a damn job.

Tim McConnaughy: 33:09

Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point, right, Like what recourse exists for people otherwise, right, Like I mean and I'm not saying we're there, right, but I mean, if I can't tell you how many times I've looked at Twitter and seen somebody post a picture of a guillotine, basically with a caption, like just saying just yeah, and that's the other recourse and that was one our founding fathers believed in, you know.

Joe Onisick: 33:36

I mean, I believe it was Jefferson that believed that we should have a revolution every like 60 years or something like that, like he's like you just got to keep things up and start from scratch.

Tim McConnaughy: 33:44

What is water? The tree of liberty with the blood of patriots?

Joe Onisick: 33:48

Yeah, but I think there are other options. Right, like, I think unionization is an option we can have and I think if we do it, we should really think it through and we should put in some controls Because, again, any, whether again, whether it's a religion or a government, whenever you consolidate power and money, grift comes. Oh yeah, it will come. The easier the power and money is, the more grifters you'll see. And as soon as you get rid of that stuff, the grifters go somewhere else, because the only intelligence they have is to find easy money. So if you make it hard money, they'll find easier money. You know, be the hard target, right. But the other option that I think we're seeing play out a bit is the freelance economy, where people are saying why am I going to go be beholden to you and act like I'm loyal to you when you're not loyal to me? And in fact our company runs a lot on this.

Joe Onisick: 34:33

When we run projects for customers, I bring in the best of the best. I can't afford that person on my bench, but they don't want to be on my bench. They want to be doing what they do because they love what they do. So they go get whatever projects they want they do whatever they want. They spend more time with their family, but when I have their money for a project they want to do, they get paid to do that and therefore they have autonomy. They have agency right. They get to pick and choose the projects and customers they work with. I think we'll see more of that, where it's like why am I going to trap all of my capacity with some jerks for $250,000 a year when I can maybe work a little harder, maybe make a little less, but at least have peace of mind?

Alex Perkins: 35:10

That definitely attracts. Like. That's something I see often everywhere too, especially in like consult bar spaces and things like that. So I think that makes a lot of sense. And this real quick. Let me tie it back to an earlier point that Tim was making a while back. As these 250,000 employees got laid off. The question is, where do they go when they get back into the workforce? Because it wasn't full of people that were low performers or whatever other reason. Some of these people are very high performing, right People that were in very high up positions in all these different companies. They're gonna fill all these open positions and it's basically like there's no way for someone that's not a top level principal architect or something to come in and fill a position anymore. So that's another problem that I see happening and I don't know how that gets solved.

Joe Onisick: 36:06

Yeah, and I think you just hit on multiple problems, right. One is, with this many people on the market, you're gonna have very senior people, very seasoned people, very adept people taking roles that are beneath them or not exactly what they want. So how long are they gonna do that? Absolutely as long as they have to and no more, right? So you're not helping yourself on the back end of this, because you're gonna get a bunch of disenthused people that are coming in to do the job because they need to paycheck right now just to make sure things are stable. And the second, the better role comes along they're gonna leave.

Joe Onisick: 36:34

Now, the cost of transitioning an employee to a company has got a million estimates and nobody's got a right number on it, but averages that I've seen come into something like 80 grand to replace a role in a senior level right, that's $80,000, you're just gone when that person goes. And then the loss, productivity, the gap that comes with it. But the other problems these people are now, their confidence is shot, right, they're hurting, their mental health is shot and they're coming in. Are they gonna be on their A game? Some, yeah, but not all of them, right. And now, how loyal are they gonna be to you? How much are they gonna believe what you say? Because you just literally told them we don't have a culture, you're not family. We'll get rid of you. The second we don't feel like we want you for whatever reason and we'll make an excuse about it.

Tim McConnaughy: 37:19

Yeah, you hit something I had thought about earlier when we were talking about it and I never really quite got there in my head because I hadn't fully thought of the thought which happens a lot with me, by the way, as you know, as you well know, no, but when a company lays off 20,000 people, that costs them so much that we'll never end up in a budget sheet. So so much of this layoff shit is based on putting a number out there for the street or cutting costs to get that number for the street or whatever. These are things that a bean counter say, a accountant, whatever, what do you want me to call them?

Alex Perkins: 37:56

They can put on a budget sheet right Be nice.

Tim McConnaughy: 37:59

You know I'm sorry, I'm getting heated. They can put that on a budget sheet, right? So you can say this person's salary total comp package will save us this much money if we fire this person. Right, that's something that can be represented in a financial report. What you can't represent is the tribal knowledge that goes with that person. And when you fire 20,000 people, you have no idea which is what you just got rid of. We walked out that door. I mean, you can't even begin to understand the tribal knowledge. You are hollowing out the core of your business and you don't even know it. Right, you're like a dead man walking. You have no idea.

Joe Onisick: 38:34

No, and you know I spent a lot of time in the InfoSec world now. So one of the interesting reports I heard out of the InfoSec world a year or two ago is that 80% of IT professionals will tell you that they can't guarantee that when an employee leaves, they are able to cut off all of their access, which means you just got rid of 20,000 people and your IT team can't even tell you that they can't still access internal systems. That should scare you.

Chris Miles: 39:02

Yeah, and not to mention that obviously there's immediate repercussions that, like you said, don't show up on the budget seat. But then there's also, like this elongated fallout. That also happens as well, because you definitely lay off people that were in customer facing roles, that were managing relationships for long periods of time and at the drop of a hat they're gone. And now the customer that has been loyal to you and has been treated exactly how they wanted to for the last six to 12 months, et cetera, that's all gone, and they probably weren't notified ahead of time and they felt like they were, that the rug was taken out from under them and they may end up losing deals later on down the line. So there's increased fallout there as well.

Joe Onisick: 39:49

Oh, 100%. And then you also have to look at like, what type of company you are right. Like, if I'm a seller that gets laid off from Cisco, my customers are probably gonna continue buying Cisco. Right, that it's a loyalty to a brand in a way that's trained and the way you operate and the rest. But if I'm a seller that works at a var, there's a chance my customers are coming with me because they can still get Cisco and I'm a relationship based seller, right.

Tim McConnaughy: 40:11

Yeah.

Joe Onisick: 40:12

There's a lot of ancillary loss that comes off, comes off with this. But that also brings up another point. Sales teams usually get hit less because they're directly representative revenue dollar in, dollar out. That's true, black and white. So you're also telling the rest of your teams that get hit harder. You will always be second class citizens because while the sales team can't work without you, I can't tie what you do directly to an earned dollar.

Tim McConnaughy: 40:35

That's exactly it. No, that's exactly it, man. It's so funny that when you peel back the onion, that is this whole whole shit endeavor how much of it is like painfully obvious that it's based on a budget sheet that is not in any way representative of what's actually like useful and valuable to a business.

Joe Onisick: 40:58

One thing I always recommend to everybody in a professional career, but especially in the tech career there's a thing called GAP, the general accepted accounting principle, something to that effect.

Joe Onisick: 41:07

right, and GAP is the basic rules for how we run finance. Get a book for GAP for beginners if you're not familiar, and understand how your company, at least at a very high level. I'm not a numbers guy, I don't math, it's like frickin' Greek to me, but I can understand the basics right. So understand that, because that tells you a lot. And one of the big things there is where do you you as a human sit? On the books. So on the books, you've got assets and you've got liabilities things that the company has that are worth something and things that the company has that they pay for. Where do you think we all sit with our employers? We're liabilities. The desk you sit at is an asset. Yep, we're sitting in it our liability. So when somebody says we're family, we love our people, our business is our team, no, because your CFO thinks of me as a liability, and I'm not just any liability, I'm the worst liability, I'm a monthly recurring cost.

Tim McConnaughy: 42:02

It's so true, unfortunately. Okay, I mean, we could go for God knows how long, but we probably need to start wrapping up. I hate to leave it. It sounds so grim and dark and I hate to leave it without some kind of silver lining to it, but I honestly believe that we're not. I would be spitting falsehoods if I was able to give you a silver lining right now. 2024 is shaping up to be possibly just as painful as 2023. I don't know that any of us have any advice to anyone who's been impacted because, if I'm being honest, I have just always I've been lucky enough that I haven't been yet. I wish the best to those who have, but just yeah.

Joe Onisick: 42:47

I've got a bit of silver lining of you, one one.

Tim McConnaughy: 42:48

Please, I don't want to end it in such a grim future.

Joe Onisick: 42:53

So, first, I expect we will see a lot more layoffs this year. So then, let's get that out of the way before we silver lining. Let's wrap up the pain before we bandaid right, yeah, clean the wound. That's going to sting a bit. A lot of the layoffs that are coming in the next phase are predictions that Gen AI can replace some of my knowledge worker staff. Right, and there are a lot of companies that are going all in with that and they're being forced by the market and everyone wants to adopt the new buzzword fast.

Joe Onisick: 43:18

What we're going to see out of that is companies trip over their skis all over the place. They're going to replace smart people with dumb AI before the dumb AI is ready to do the job. So there is going to be a lot of opportunity for us, the intelligent tech community that built this industry, coming out of that. So it's going to be painful. We're going to get through some stuff, but then people are going to be hiring you to come unscrew the things that they just made a bunch of bad decisions trying to go into Gen AI to replace you with. So I think we'll see some corrections that happen, but I think this is our time to come together and decide how are we, as the workforce that creates the profit, going to use our power to push back?

Alex Perkins: 44:04

Just to add to that. It's not just the Gen AI stuff. I agree that's what's coming, but something that's already here is all the overspend when COVID happened for building out a digital footprint. We see this everywhere. Everybody's trying to cut back on their costs that they were using in the cloud. So that's already happening a lot, and yet Gen AI is just going to add even more fuel to that fire. So yeah for sure, we're going to see more and more of that.

Chris Miles: 44:32

Yeah, I think it's definitely a bit of the COVID recoil, compounded with the AI. What would you call it? Ai anxiety? I don't even know what you call it. But yeah, it makes me wonder, now that you say that, joe, whether or not the all the people that are now getting hired to implement these AI stacks and things like that are they going to have to pay for what comes at the end whenever there's a shitty product that's put out there and et cetera. But probably not.

Joe Onisick: 45:01

Now these companies are going to hire the typical schmos. They get to come in, do some consulting, not talk to your team. Make them implement some stuff that fails, walk away and take their paycheck. They got names like McKinsey.

Chris Miles: 45:13

Nice.

Alex Perkins: 45:14

Nice. You've seen the valuations of these companies, Chris.

Tim McConnaughy: 45:17

Yes, all the valuations are nuts dude.

Joe Onisick: 45:21

And one thing we can do is the more competition in tech, the more job opportunity and the more employee power we have. We get competition in tech by asking our legislators to enforce the existing antitrust laws. That's where competition comes from.

Tim McConnaughy: 45:35

Yeah, that's a very good point as well. Hopefully there's at least a couple of them that haven't already taken the lifetime subscription to all the tech company lobbying, but we can only hope, all right. So this is Tim with Cables to Clouds, and with me, as always, is Chris and Alex. Please subscribe to us on your favorite pod capture, if you haven't already. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Buy our Girl Scout cookies, take our pamphlet for our religion, whatever. Really, all of the above would be fine. Okay, so everyone, have a good week and see you next time. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.