Originally published at: Watch: CEO of Better.com fires 900 employees over a Zoom meeting | Boing Boing
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Similar thing happened to me this year. The animation company I work at (as a programmer, not an artist) lost a big deal with Netflix and laid off essentially everyone, something like 450 employees. The Microsoft Teams meeting that I saw (after the fact as I was on vacation at the time, so joy!) was about three minutes long and had the CEO literally break down in tears. Emotional stuff.
Then a few months later he sold the division I worked in to the biggest monopoly software provider in our industry. Emotions be damned, that cash though!
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Considering how much of the economy in the US is basically dependent upon real estate gaining value perpetually, hearing about a mortgage company laying off 900 employees makes me pucker a bit.
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Simultaneous boing? Though this one has a lot more info
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Had to see what better.com is all about …mortgages. They’re just rounding up customers for large banks which underwrite the loans. So there’s nothing particularly special about the service except for a memorable URL.
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You haven’t seen the bubble wobbling for the last 2 years?
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I now deeply regret utilizing this company to refinance my mortgage. Hindsight is always 20/20 but damn this sucks. I try not to do business with any company that would do this sort of cruel dumb shit but it’s hard to know who’s who, especially in financial fields.
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CEO: “If you are on this call, you are part of the unlucky group being laid off…”
Me: Immediately leaves call
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Wait for it!
He has to say “terminated immediately”, then disconnect, and he can watch the lights go out on his sob story of how hard this is for him.
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"…terminated immediately.
Merry Fucking Christmas!"
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CWAA.
His definition of ‘survive’ must mean ‘ensure that I can personally rake in at least $25M in bonus compensation this year’.
Greed is good?
Tell that to all the homeless who died in LA this past year.
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Am I missing something here. Did he really "laid out a vision of what he called ‘Better 2.0,’ " on the same call where everyone who listened had just been fired?
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Aside from how particularly callous this incident is, firing people right before the Xmas holiday is pretty much SOP for corporate America, at least in my personal experience.
For example, four years ago, the small corp I work for “laid off” 45 people in our office, literally right before the annual office holiday party. TPTB practically promised they were done ‘downsizing’… then, the next year they “laid off” another 46 people, again right before the holiday. (That holiday party was especially awkward, as more than half the reception hall was completely empty.)
Over the next two years after that second purge, the company suddenly started ‘hemorrhaging’ employees; people had seen the writing on the wall and starting quitting in droves as they got better jobs. Even our office manager ‘moved on to spend more time with her family.’
Hell, I was in the middle of a job search myself, back when Covid first struck.
So it goes.
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Key factor not in this report (but in the other one):
The Softbank-backed mortgage lender announced in May it was going public through an SPAC and last week received $750 million in cash as part of the deal. The company is prepared to have more than $1 billion on its balance sheet.
So this was NOT about “bad financials.” They literally just got $750 million and will have a BILLION on their books come January. Merry fucking Christmas indeed. But he’ll get his I’m sure, and fuck those 900 families.
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In one deposition in 2019, he told a former business partner—once the best man at his wedding—that he was “going to staple him against a fucking wall and burn him alive.”
He said that… in a deposition???
“I’m going to staple you against a fucking wall and burn you alive SO HELP ME GOD”
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Yeah, he’s a piece of work. But… this story has been making the rounds in various social media lately and what I find odd is the focus on one specific aspect of it – that he laid them off via Zoom.
My reaction to that is - how else are 900 people going to be laid off all at once, these days? There’s no office to go into these days and literally any way of individually contacting all of the people will only cause far more problems than they solve.
I was furloughed in 2020 in a manner very similar to this. There were two Zoom meetings scheduled and everybody was told to only attend the one they were given the invitation to. In one meeting, the people were told that they were not furloughed and in the other meeting, we were told that we were. This was an understandably emotional time for everybody but literally nobody complained that it was done over Zoom. How else?
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It’s not the teleconference part that gets me. It’s the 900 people in the meeting and it lasting for a little under ten minutes part that does.
If they’re gonna cut that many people loose, they should do it one to one, imo.
Or at the very least in much smaller groups
Hey, they wanna be lean, so they should be doing 900 individual meetings, and seeing what “it’s just business” really entails.
These people weren’t interviewed in a 900 person video conference, so they shouldn’t be laid off like that either.
This is someone’s source of income being taken away.
It should be done privately, in a way that allows them to process their feelings.
Not corralling them in for a mass slaughter.
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Ugh. This stuff sucks.
I work in high-end eCommerce consulting and I’ve twice been laid off in December. They don’t care about your holidays, they just care about preserving their own bonuses and stock options.
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With interest rates so low during the pandemic, refinances have skyrocketed. I’m amazed a mortgage company thinks they’re not making enough money right now.
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