I think this story about Musk pursuing laid-off employees for inadvertent overpayment of salary is fascinating. What if the argument was that the said employees had been overpaid for work that they were supposedly doing but in fact were not - the reason for their layoff. Accounting errors could come about in different ways. If the employer could prove that the effective hourly wage was not quite earned by the employee because they had mouse-jigglers doing pretend work or their performance was so abysmal that it called for wage-recalibration. There are many ways to claw back money from the hapless employees. It matters little that in many situations they were hired to do performative work and boost headcount so that the hiring manager could make a "strong" case for their own promotion.
I have been in situations where the number of employees is off by a factor of five to twenty depending on how you are counting. In such a situation, the overwhelming majority of people milling around doing so-called work really, truly have nothing to do. They do their best to look busy (back to back meetings all day long is the most favored and well-recognized way) and deliver results (extremely detailed and completely non-informative status reports submitted in various incarnations multiple times a week, is a well-known way to show progress towards goals where none exists - either progress or goal). The sad reality is that most employees cannot demonstrate that their work had value or meaning.
My friend E works for the government of his state. E has been tasked with reducing the cost of running that state's operations in the cloud. It turns out that the cloud provider has no desire to tamp down the cost of running the state's business on the cloud. The vendors will help him to an extent but want to place long term contract headcount in the state in return. E has no winning strategy.
He is not technical enough to re-architect the cloud implementation he has been tasked to optimize and the "experts" are lacking the incentives to help him out. It may be argued that E is failing to do the job the state paid him to do. Some overzealous state government apparatchik may decide E needs to be laid-off for non-performance. In reality though, E is doing the best he can given the hand he has been dealt. While it is true that he had failed to reduce the cost of operations by 25% as was the goal assigned to him, it certainly not account of him being malicious or lazy or worse. If employment contracts were tweaked a bit, E could be laid off and the state could ask him to return the extra dollars that were paid to him.
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