Better.com CEO is taking time off after laying off 900 employees via Zoom

[Calista241]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by JudyM (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).

Source: CNN

Better.com CEO Vishal Garg, who laid off 900 employees over a Zoom meeting that lasted less than three minutes, is taking time off from the company, Vice reported.

"If you're on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off," Garg said on the December 1 webinar. "Your employment here is terminated, effective immediately," he told them.

Garg's leave is also effective immediately, according to a Friday email from the company's board of directors. Day-to-day operations will be taken over by the company's CFO, Kevin Ryan. Better.com added that it is hiring a third party firm to do a "leadership and cultural assessment," whose recommendations "will be taken into account to build a long-term sustainable and positive culture at Better."
CNN Business has viewed the email and has asked Better.com for comment.

"The recommendations of this assessment will be taken into account to build a long-term sustainable and positive culture at Better," the email said.

The online mortgage company's mass layoff affected about 9% of its staff. Just days later, three of the company's top communications executives resigned, according to multiple media reports.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/10/business/better-com-ceo-vishal-garg-time-off/index.html

[Ford_Prefect]

1. Better.com CEO Vishal Garg: Schmuck in charge.

[greenjar_01]

2. Modern companies have been developing smart ways to lay people off for decades

They even made a movie about it with George Clooney. The fact of the matter is that Vishal Garg is a know-nothing imbecile, and thought this little stunt would be amusing and "disruptive" of the - I won't say good, but at least considered - ways of firing people that actually constitute best practices in industry for a reason.

The usual entrepreneur/disruptor bullshit. Institutional norms develop for a reason, you stupid motherfuckers.

And the conservative pundits cheering this on...who are you arguing against? Every top company in America has ethical protocols for laying off workers. Nobody in any respectable company would behave in this way.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

6. Smart ways? Who would want to work for Garg after this self-owned debacle?

[greenjar_01]

11. Read post

I'm obviously not calling Garg's way smart.

[lapfog_1]

3. what the hell do they need 9000 employees for anyway

they are a website that automates the mortgage application process.

Kind of a crappy one at that.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. You could do better than that? How many do you think it should have? 900? 90?

Better.com pulled in 680 million dollars in the first half of 2021. That's double the previous year.

So call it a $1.3 billion revenue stream, and expected to grow. That's $143,000 revenue per employee and rising. It's not the best, but it's respectable.

That kind of business is much more than a couple of techies installing software on a server farm that a couple of programmers wrote.

How many do you think it should have? 2,000? 200?

[lapfog_1]

13. I'm going to guess that most of the employees

were not writing software, as for running their own server farm... why in the world would you do that now? AWS cloud (or the many competitors) or something like HPE Greenlake (if you don't want a true cloud implementation) would be the way to deploy this.

So my guess is that most of people were either in sales or support. And that seems like a lot for a company that does $1.3B.

The ( former ) CEO was an asshole, and firing people in a Zoom call is are really shitty thing to do.

But yeah, I could run the place on a few thousand employees and probably pay them better... and look for other opportunities in the housing market to expand the business by using both automation and AI (and more people).

At least if I needed to fire people, I wouldn't do it that way.

(And yes, at one point in my career I managed a group of around 30 people... and the company was going through a tough time and I was told to RIF about 12 people... and that was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. They came back and asked me to find another 5 people to fire... and I gave them just 1 name).

[Bernardo de La Paz]

14. Sounds about right. . . . nt

[Bev54]

4. "Time off" is that what they are calling it these days?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. Board better layoff Garg. . . . nt

[Baitball Blogger]

8. What happened? Is he traumatized by the backlash he received when word got out?

[dalton99a]

9. Billionaire taking time off to enjoy his loot

[crim son]

10. The company I work for

fired 500 in one day. About 200 of those were asked to come into the office and were fired en masse. The rest got the news via email. That was the day Management stopped referring to its employees as a family because you don't treat family like that.

Interesting side note: what they were trying to fix by this mass firing, was not fixed and if anything, it's worse.

[Cryptoad]

12. If ur employer is having to lay people off

in this booming economy,,,,,,u best find a new job. ur company will never survive the post coivd economy boom,,,,,

[IronLionZion]

15. Not sure if it's a vacation or the board is firing him

Most CEOs have sweet golden parachutes in their contracts

[JudyM]

16. Locking

The sudden zoom firing of the employees was in LBN, making this is a dupe of that info: https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142837388

To explain a bit further: updates (such as this) to existing LBN posts need to be, themselves, important enough for LBN. Had the CEO rehired the employees, or maybe resigned, that would be major news, but this is a story about his taking time off and working on the company redesign, so not important enough news for this forum. Please feel free to repost it in General Discussion, though, if you’d like.