Tech can get fired. They’re going to get worse before they get better — which means the next few months will be full of companies trying to survive this extended recession.
At least that’s the entrepreneur. Nolan ChurchMap Who cares who helped lead the 2020 layoffs as chief people officer. It estimates that 30,000 to 40,000 tech workers worldwide will be laid off in Q1 2023 — a number that follows more than 100,000 layoffs so far in 2022, according to layoffs.fyi data.
Church spoke with me last week on Equity about how his experience at Maps and Doordash in the world of people operations has influenced his perspective on the best playbook for layoffs. He is also building Continuum, a venture-backed startup looking to match executive talent with startups for full-time and part-time opportunities. Incredibly, his vision for a more flexible workforce is consistent with the fact that this week’s layoffs alone mean tens of thousands of workers are now looking for work.
My full conversation with the church is now live wherever you find the podcast, so give it a listen if you haven’t seen it yet. Below, we’ve extracted four key quotes from the interview, from the CEO’s canned statements about how he thinks about Twitter’s workforce cuts.
The conversation
Let’s talk about Twitter and ownership. A few days after Jack Dorsey was fired, we saw him tweeting that he was finally hired to be in charge of Twitter. The delay in his response has drawn a lot of attention, leading me to wonder if the board is increasing the way employees expect CEOs to take responsibility for major layoffs.
Over the past 12 years, the pendulum of who has power between workers and employers has swung heavily in favor of workers. We are now at a moment when the pendulum is swinging back. If you predict where the next five to 10 years will go, the best talent is ultimately always in demand. And now I think that workers will continue to have more power going forward. And companies remember how to capture this moment.
To your point around Jack, quite honestly, I thought. [his statement] It was very weak. He waited to say anything; He sent it as two sentences. As someone who followed Jack and was a long time fan of Jack, I thought this was the definition of poor leadership. And I expected a lot from him. And if I were an employee thinking about working for Jack in the future, I would think twice about it.
