> Klarna made a major mistake in not letting the majority of employees know if they were safe from layoffs or not, for a whole night.
I worked for a company that didn't let people know if they where safe, for a week. A friend worked for a company that didn't let people know for 3 months. It's beyond stupid, people becomes nervous and starts looking elsewhere and it's always the best people who leave first.
That being said: Why does Klarna have 7500 people employed? I feel bad for the people who will be losing/have lost their job, but they also won't be the last in tech. Klarna have done what Google, Twitter and other have done, hired people they didn't need, so now productivity per employee is too low.
15 years ago I worked for a company that used Klara for payment, right when they started to expand beyond Sweden. The experience was interesting to say the least. They where completely naive about fraud. They didn't understand the markets they where trying to expand to. If everything else failed, payback the customers and let the retailers deal with any loses.
While I'm sure they improved, based last my experience with them in 2016, I don't see how they could be ready to enter the US market.
> I worked for a company that didn't let people know if they where safe, for a week. A friend worked for a company that didn't let people know for 3 months.
Finland has in some respects even more stringent employment laws than Sweden. If a company is laying off people, it needs to "negotiate" with employee representatives for a set amount of time. For small companies or small layoffs, the time is two weeks, but if there are at least 30 employees and the layoff affects at least 10 of them, the negotiation time is six weeks. Companies typically say at the outset which employee groups are affected but delay the decisions about individual employees to the end. I don't know if this is by law, but I suppose that saying sooner would be an opening for a union to claim that the negotiations were not done in good faith, and possibly sue the company.
Having been a potentially affected employee on two occasions and an employee representative on one of them, let me say that waiting six weeks for the decision is not fun for anyone.
I've worked for (non-tech) companies that didn't let employees know they were safe for months - and they did it almost every.single.year... and always just before Christmas, like they planned to hurt people as much as possible. Utterly despicable.
Thinking about it, I guess they hoped to make people jump ship before they were pushed, but it destroyed any semblance of a good relationship between employees and management/HR.
When referring to productivity, what do you mean in this case? For Google, their profit per employee is still very high (about $300k [0]). Of the top 10 biggest employers in that list, they are 3rd-highest-earning per capita.
For the last 7 years I noticed a strange trend in tech. The skill of management was not getting the people you needed, but instead turning down people you didn't.
Whenever ive been a manager for the last 7 years its the same. One day you get a ping for “can you onboard X”. It doesn't matter if you had work for one more person or not, thus projects are created for them to do something.
I worked for a company that didn't let people know if they where safe, for a week. A friend worked for a company that didn't let people know for 3 months. It's beyond stupid, people becomes nervous and starts looking elsewhere and it's always the best people who leave first.
That being said: Why does Klarna have 7500 people employed? I feel bad for the people who will be losing/have lost their job, but they also won't be the last in tech. Klarna have done what Google, Twitter and other have done, hired people they didn't need, so now productivity per employee is too low.
15 years ago I worked for a company that used Klara for payment, right when they started to expand beyond Sweden. The experience was interesting to say the least. They where completely naive about fraud. They didn't understand the markets they where trying to expand to. If everything else failed, payback the customers and let the retailers deal with any loses.
While I'm sure they improved, based last my experience with them in 2016, I don't see how they could be ready to enter the US market.