Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah tells employees to ‘work longer hours’ in year-end email::Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah sent a year-end note to employees, suggesting they work longer hours and do better at mixing work with their personal lives.
Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah tells employees to ‘work longer hours’ in year-end email::Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah sent a year-end note to employees, suggesting they work longer hours and do better at mixing work with their personal lives.
Even if you take the cuntish language away, if I were a shareholder I would be spooked by a leak like this.
Anyone, even VC’s and middle-management types that share memes on LinkedIn can tell you that “working smarter” is better than putting in long hours. The latter is a desperation move, usually kept for when goals aren’t being met, or when you want to mask the problem of poor planning, over-promising, or under-delivering.
If the CEO is coming out with rhetoric like this, it shows that things aren’t going well, and that any plans to correct course are probably misguided. It also likely points to future dissent in the ranks, as any good VP or SVP that isn’t in their position through ass-kissing would likely laugh this off and do their job properly, against the CEO’s direct call - the kind of person the shareholders would actively want in the main leadership role.
Sadly, COVID and a weakened economy have pointed out just how poorly many top companies are run. Whether it’s continuous layoffs, misguided RTO demands, calls to “do more work” from employees, or belittling your own IC’s, it’s probably a sign that the “old ways” of management are showing their flaws in a modern economy, and that new ideas will likely be what rules the market for the next 10+ years.
Sadly, COVID and a weakened economy have pointed out just how poorly many top companies are run.
I’m going to take a shot in the dark here and clarify the sad part is that our top companies are poorly run (often showing us that the capitalism doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to as per ideology). And it’s sad that it took a tragedy like the COVID-19 epidemic to put it in sharp bas relief.
It’s not sad that high-level mismanagement of companies became visible, except maybe to those managers are going to see consequences for failures they couldn’t have prevented.
I’m no fan of capitalism, but it is kinda working. These companies aren’t seeing extended growth, so they are suffering. Sadly, that is being put on the workers instead of the leaders, and managers at a certain level are avoiding all blame and consequences. Internally, if you were to look at most of the tech companies that have made huge job cuts, you’ll see dozens, if not hundreds of executives that were drafted from failing arms of the business to a new area entirely, days to weeks before layoffs. At both Google and Amazon, it’s now basically an exodus sign for many when a VP moves from, let’s say YouTube, over to Search.
It’s why I really wish that the tech industry in particular was smart enough to unionize. The problem that tech faces is that many view it as a meritocracy, and they’re happy to see widespread decline…as long as it doesn’t affect them.
I enjoy the schadenfreude and I’m happy to play the game. Having worked in door-to-door sales, phone sales, warehouses, as a barista, bartender, gigging actor, musician, dancer, comedian, supply teacher, retail, children’s birthday party magician… my office job is the least hard work I’ve ever done but one where I have to play the part as if it’s incredibly difficult and taxing. And then go into meetings where I say, “hmmm… well if we’re going to market this product… we have to really think about the market we’re bringing it to.” And everyone nods sagely. h If capitalism is a machine that sucks up money to the top by pretending CEOs are working hard, it’s perfectly fine for me to suck money out the side by pretending being a senior manager is working hard.
I can and do work hard when I have to, but also, American culture is so fucked that people genuinely think it’s better to seem like you’re doing something than actually doing something
100%. It’s not a good sign even if judged from a totally heartless position, but like you said, CEOs like this are backed by investors who think similarly.
It’s such a myth that these attitudes are “just business”. It’s become so obvious that many investors and executives will go to war against the people who generate wealth for them out of habit and ideology even when every business school lesson tells them that they’re gonna kill a golden goose. Oh well.
Fully agreed, it’s almost a textbook indication of how established businesses harm themselves from short-term plays, except both sides actively want the harm because they can just push the damage onto the employees.
With luck, the golden goose moment isn’t too far away, although with tech in particular, it’s been sad to see that over the last decade most people dream not of creating “the next Google”, but to land a cushy FAANG job and to rest and vest.