Nike lays off the highest-paid employees who are in 99% of cases older and the highest performers as well. Then they throw in a few others just to make sure no accusations of age discrimination can be thrown around. Layoff after layoff after layoff, the same thing happens. Is nobody thinking about the future and what it will do to the company when all the highest performers are gone? When most of the institutional knowledge has been shown the door?
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This is so true! How many people make it past 20+ years these days.. NOT MANY. And you wonder why… I’ll be lucky if I make it to 10 and get a sabbatical..
I don’t think it’s always that easy, from how I understand it, each department gets a number of heads to cut. Obviously the more the expensive I think it “shaves” down on the number of heads you need to cut.
But from my experiences here, the more tenured employees are probably the most jaded. So they typically get targeted. Second - teams that don’t have a clear use also typically gets impacted. Right now in my department we have about 8 - 9 people supporting this highly specialized skill that we probably need a quarter of the time… I’m fearing they’ll be impacted because we typically cut stuff like that. However, when our projects go side ways because we don’t have that “25%” skill since we all had to step up to meet that other area of expertise.
In my eyes it’s 3 categories:
- Poor organizational setup and/or specialized skill
- Low CFEs
- Wrong place, wrong time.
This is mostly true from what I have seen. Talent means nothing. It’s about cost and trying the new shiny penny. Look at where the company is now. Stupidly making the same mistakes over and over. Selling sneakers isn’t hard. There is no knowledge transfer. Mo--nic leadership.
I’m 60+ at Nike 30+. Your statement doesn’t hold water.
Wrong position at wrong time or bad attitude gets you laid off.
Our ELT is in it for the short term. You’re talking long term.