Good morning readers,

It is Monday, and if you have to go to work physically, or sit in front of a laptop for a meeting at your home because you work remotely, you may want to consider working harder today. Tech companies are laying off employees across the board, and this is being done quietly. You may want to avoid receiving a dreaded email or a phone call.

While the headline is about WazirX, one of India’s largest crypto exchanges, which has laid off 40% of its staff. But the problem runs deeper. Vauld, a Crypto exchange and lending platform, which filed for bankruptcy protection in July, had to let go of almost all of its employees in India. CoinSwitch Kuber, a unicorn crypto exchange is close to launching a traditional finance platform soon. So, some of the roles within the crypto platform may restructure soon or already have started.

We need to understand what tech giants across the world mean by restructuring.

Meta and Alphabet have asked hundreds of employees to re-apply for job openings in their companies or will be asked to leave. This restructuring is a way to let them go without announcing layoffs, reported The Wall Street Journal.

Google cancelled a bunch of projects in its R&D division Area 120, and employees working on the cancelled projects were told they would need to find a new job within Google by the end of January 2023 or they will be laid off, reported Tech Crunch.

Meta will freeze hiring and restructure some teams to trim expenses and realign priorities, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg according to a Bloomberg report. This will be the first major budget cut since Facebook was founded in 2004. THE FIRST EVER BUDGET CUT on the biggest social media platform ever built.

So, while we hear big headlines about Tech Companies and Crypto Companies laying off their employees, the truth is that, if worded carefully, it would never be called layoffs. Massively larger corporations are doing the same thing, and it is being reported way less because it is called various different names like restructuring.

Let us circle back to WazirX for instance. The news was published exclusively by CoinDesk. Since then multiple crypto media and Indian news agencies that circulate this as a wire to all media publications have picked it up. WazirX gave a statement to CoinDesk, but the news of the sacking was based on the statement of two people who were fired among many others.

The people let go were informed that they would be paid a salary for 45 days, and they no longer need to log in to work, hence their accesses were taken off simultaneously. This is a good security measure as you do not want a fired employee to have any access to confidential data.

Maybe WazirX should have called this a restructuring, and told the employees to find new jobs in 45 days.

Here’s what WazirX said in a statement,

“As India's No 1. exchange, our priority is to be financially stable and to continue serving our customers… To achieve this, we've had to reduce our staff to weather the crypto winter. This situation is similar to the trying times the industry faced in 2018”

At this point, I am sitting here wondering, why would anyone want to trust a crypto company if they will eventually be laid off when times are hard?

But as I pointed out before, why would anyone want to trust even a tech giant like Google or Facebook which may lay off employees when times are hard?

Not only this, companies in the US hire a ton of contractors, who do not get any benefits like employees and then when times are hard, these companies terminate the contracts. This doesn’t get reported as laying off. (Times are hard, just writing it for the fourth time for fun)

Apple cut over 100 contractor roles from its recruitment arm across several regions, Bloomberg reported in August, and Meta terminated the services of 60 contractors from Accenture the same month, according to an ET article.

But WazirX and other companies that announce layoffs or are discovered by sneaky journalists find out about sacking within the organisations, are at the end of a social media trial. Still, the same social media just controls the narrative when it comes to silently sacking off their own staff.

Quiet Firing, Silent Sacking

A recent LinkedIn poll asked people if they have witnessed quiet firing. The term stands for treatment at the company where the employee doesn’t get raises or is moved to projects with less meaningful work, is deprived of growth opportunities or roles that will accelerate their career, and many other subtle ways to make an employee not exceed in the company.

Over 20000 people voted on the poll, 48% of employees have seen quiet firing in the workplace, and 35% have faced it during their careers.

According to an INC42 tracker, over 12500 employees have been fired from Indian Startups in 2022 alone.

Major economies globally are struggling, and we may not have seen the end of the layoffs yet.

There is nothing wrong with being ambitious and trying to make it as an entrepreneur, but do not quit your day job just yet. The current economic conditions may not support you in your endeavour.

And if you’re already an entrepreneur, stay strong, try not to fire your employees, and maybe try restructuring the roles instead (Sad Wink).

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