Thread regarding Western Digital Corp. layoffs

It's not news when a CEO pockets $100,000,000 while firing 100s of the people who helped earn that money. You'll do better interviewing billionare CEOs after their rocket flight.

Ambulance chaser. You won't get the Pulitzer on this one. WD no different than a hundred other tech companies right now.

It’s simply part of the culture now. Execs learned it from their time at Cisco. Pretty soon you’ll see fake news about how wd is one of the best places to work, guaranteed!

At a time when there is heated competition in the tech space between US and China, this stupid company just laid off hundreds of semiconductor specialists. Most of them Chinese and Koreans. Guess what will happen if they decide to go back and join the competitors.

This is a consistent trend among American semiconductor companies. They will layoff experienced technologists during downturn to make the investors happy. And then these incompetent executives will run to US Government crying over IP theft, and how there is a huge talent shortage. In my estimate, major US semiconductor companies have lost over 40% technologists in the past 24 months as a result of attrition, voluntary retirement and layoffs.

If any one really believes US can compete with China, Korea and Taiwan with clowns like DG, PG and Sanjay at the helm, they are living in a cuckoo land!

While laying off people at the lower level, they keep hiring at the upper level (VP level) from outside, instead of promoting from inside. If you do the math, how can we be saving money, not to mention that we lose the talent of the real worker.

Hi Yowei,
I doubt you would get useful forward looking info, especially not anonymously. We've had 2 layoffs already this past 8 months, and I heard from this forum there will be another one in August. With those two, the upper management informed the employees 2-3 months ahead.

Rant/hyperbole/name-calling aside, unfortunately layoffs has become new normal. In general, the sticking point to me is that some companies laid off people because they didn't make enough profit, not because they had been losing money. The solution to this should be some kind of law that requires company to meet certain financial criteria before laying off people. Also when they layoff people there should be law that protects employee as far as minimum severance they would receive.
With the current WDC situation, the CEO mentioned that this is cyclical thing and the outlook for 2024 looks good if not better, but yet they still laid off employees even when we didn't over-hire during the COVID bubble (if I understand correctly our headcount is net negative from since COVID time).

Another thing I noticed that I have not seen before is the fact that the VP brushed off the questions asked during AHM on how many people they laid off. This is public info that could be retrieved from California WARN act website, but yet they are not willing to say it and instead telling the employees that the number is not important. One of the engineering VP even said that we shouldn't talk about the number in respect to those who got laid off. They just deprived people of their income, and they thought public info is disrespectful. I took that as an insult to our intelligence.

In my case, I'm almost 50 and I know ageism is going strong in high tech industry, that's why the consistent layoff threats is something that keeps me awake at night.

The real story is how leadership team is financially draining the company. The layoffs are just a means to their end. The CEO is a crook and should be in jail. Along with all the other Cisco Losers he brought in.

People who have been laid off at WD recently can also talk about their anxiety and pressure. WD had several rounds of RIFs the last 12 months

@NPR/NYT and the rest of the so called media. Let woke go broke.