Employment compensation

Twitter’s former head of HR filed a proposed class action lawsuit against the company on Wednesday, demanding Elon Musk pay out $500 million to former employees for allegedly not paying severance fees to laid-off staff. Courtney McMillan, the head of total rewards for the company’s benefits programs before she was laid off in January, claimed in the lawsuit that Twitter’s then-CEO Parag Agrawal promised employees they were entitled to their paid severance under the Merger Agreement.Mr. Tweet Fumbles Super Bowl…

Meta is continuing with cuts this week, lopping off approximately 6,000 more of its workers in yet another round of mass layoffs. Most of these newest job losses are expected to impact people on the business side of Meta’s operations—including staff in ad sales, marketing, and partnerships—according to multiple reports and an earlier company statement outlining plans.Making the Facebook Papers PublicNewly axed employees began posting about their layoffs on LinkedIn and Twitter on Wednesday. The company sent out an…

The news outlet Insider announced to staff via email Thursday morning that the company lay off 10% of its workforce, including staff writers.Meta's Apparent Firing GoofInsider Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Carlson announced last week that the outlet’s writers would be experimenting with ChatGPT. Asked if the layoffs were related to the nascent use of the AI chatbot, an Insider spokesperson said, “Of course not.”Insider Incorporated president Barbara Peng announced that layoffs in an email to staff this morning that was…

Photo: Steve Jennings (Getty Images)PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada, the author of the worst tech layoff email in recent months, wants you to know that she’s sorry. She refused to use the word “layoffs” and quoted Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps not right thing to do when laying off 7% of your employees.Tejada told employees that she regretted sending the Jan. 24 email where she announced layoffs, or as she called them, “refinements,” celebrated employee promotions, teased good financial results, and quoted Martin Luther…

Google previously announced it was laying off 12,000 employees, or about 6% of the company.Image: Drew Angerer (Getty Images)As layoffs continue to plague the tech sector, even the titans of the industry aren’t safe. Amidst ongoing layoffs at Google, we’ve learned the company has let go of its mental health executive, according to Insider.Kristin Maczko wrote on Linkedin that she served the company for fifteen years, with over one year in the position of Director of Global Mental Health and Wellbeing. According to…

SoundHound, a voice AI company that laid off 40% of its employees earlier this month, announced Tuesday that it had successfully raised $25 million in equity investment. That funding brings good news for the laid off staff, three of whom previously said what measly severance they were offered—just two weeks, no health insurance—was conditional upon SoundHound securing new investment, as exclusively reported by Gizmodo. SoundHound was blunt in a statement on the investment: “Confirming our funding news and that former…

The concert occurred on Tuesday in Davos, Switzerland while the company announced layoffs the following day. Image: Sean Gallup (Getty Images)Layoffs are plaguing the tech industry left and right, but that doesn’t mean the big-wigs have to suffer too. Ahead of laying off several thousand employees, Microsoft hosted an exclusive Sting concert at Davos for executives.The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that the concert was about 50 people, including executives from Microsoft, who got to enjoy the musings of…

Google’s layoffs came two days after Microsoft announced it would lay off 10,000 workers.Photo: JHVEPhoto (Shutterstock)Google told employees in an email on Friday that it would be cutting 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its global workforce, in its largest layoffs in company history.In the email, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees that Google had hired aggressively over the past two years to match the dramatic growth it had experienced. However, much like other tech companies, the company now finds itself facing a different economic…

Screenshot: https://www.soundhound.com/SoundHound, a voice AI company, laid off nearly half of its remaining staff last week—roughly 200 people—in a major company-wide downsizing, according to three employees who lost their jobs and an email from the CEO viewed by Gizmodo. What’s more, the former SoundHound employees are in for a rough landing. Their severance package includes no healthcare and just two weeks of severance, and that’s only if SoundHound can raise more money, the three laid off staffers told Gizmodo. If the…

From a people-power perspective, Twitter is inarguably a husk of what it once was. Since Elon Musk took over the social media platform at the end of October 2022, the company has lost more than an estimated three-quarters of its staff to layoffs and voluntary departures. On Wednesday, the cuts continued. The company has slashed about 40 additional jobs in its data science and engineering sectors, according to a report from The Information. A source close to the matter also confirmed Wednesday layoffs to Gizmodo and noted…