this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
281 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
69865 readers
2717 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I hear what you’re saying, but revenue isn’t profit.
Well you see if you fire people, next yeah you can make the same revenue with less costs...
This is modern executive "leadership"
Nothing can go wrong, trust me bro
Yes, but I dont think that's relevant. Whether gross or net, they are still ruining lives to achieve a pointless profit motive.
Edit: relevant, not irrelevant
It's relevant in that it's entirely misleading. If profits are low they aren't actually able to just "coast along" making less revenue.
Crowdstrike posted a GAAP Net Loss of 20 million for 2025. So a 30-50M cost savings is the difference in continuing on at all or not. There's more to it than that, obviously.
Your point is (probably) valid once you fix your words which is what I assume you mean by saying it's not relevant. But, instead of telling people their rebuttal is irrelevant you should try to adjust your own words to convey your message more accurately.
The quarterly profit motive where CEOs are incentivized through bonus structures to focus on short term profit goals leads to situations where the companies product or service is substandard and they make bad long term decisions that affect the lives of many including their own employees when they over hire and then can no longer afford to pay them.
Might be worth mentioning how much money the company spent in stock buybacks, and how much the executives were compensated in previous years. It's a shame.
Profit isn’t required to maintain a company. Only enough revenue to cover costs. Everything else is a surplus.
Profit would be appropriate if it were earmarked to offset difficult future fiscal periods, so that the business could continue to operate in lean times without having to punish employees through layoffs or failure to keep up with cost of living or cutting back on other benefits.
But we all know that's not what happens. Owners never have to experience consequences; customers and employees always do, for things that they have no control over.
Absolutely, but I would even go as far as to say that things like rainy day funds or reinvestment should be considered costs of business not “things we might do with profit”.
Oh yeah, yeah - from a financial/reporting perspective, such a fund wouldn't be considered "profit" in the strictest capitalist sense.
If you consider that kind of fund to be for the benefit of customers and employees, it might be considered "socialist profit." Capitalist profit serves the ownership class. Socialist profit serves labor and consumers.
The no needless pedantry for one day challange: failed.
It's not needless pedantry. Revenue is the income acquired before costs, and those costs include employee compensation. Reducing the number of employees has zero immediate effect on revenue. A company with US$10B in revenue can still be losing money if their expenses are higher than revenue.
This is important to point out, because reporting very often uses the wrong metric to describe a company in comparison to its behavior. Revenue is rarely the correct metric, and mentioning it as a comparator in this article makes the issue less clear.
Note that I am not defending CrowdStrike here. Hell, they're the ones saying that layoffs are going to magically increase revenue:
I'm no paragon of business, but I fail to comprehend how having fewer employees is going to make your sales go up. Maybe they're laying off salespeople, which puts the fear of god in those who are left as a "motivator"? Laying off people who perform the services they sell seems counterproductive in relation to revenue.
They're being intentionally misleading about this, and pointing that out is not pedantry.
This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in.
The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025.
What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities...
... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees.
So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses.
Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that.
...
But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens:
Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management.
Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified departments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new.
So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did...
So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess.
... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent...and decreased morale, increased stress basically always reduces efficiency, to some extent.
Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak:
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/
It’s not needless pedantry because the original comment is just wrong. They probably can’t coast by on 200 million fewer dollars of revenue, while they surely could on 200 million fewer dollars in profit.