<story><title>How Zildjian, a 390-year-old family business, avoids layoffs (2013)</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/id/100538450</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vortico</author><text>The article doesn&amp;#x27;t spend 1 second explaining the answer promised in the title but keeps reinforcing how &lt;i&gt;good&lt;/i&gt; and flowery it is that Zildjian doesn&amp;#x27;t lay off anyone.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m in the audio hardware industry, and the answer is clear. Yes, being a no-growth company is a big reason, and yes, they&amp;#x27;re incredibly selective of their new employees. And they&amp;#x27;re a stable company, which helps. Go to NAMM, ship products to retailers, design next year&amp;#x27;s product, repeat. Incredibly stable.&lt;p&gt;But they have ups and downs just like every other company, which &lt;i&gt;at best&lt;/i&gt; follows the trend of the industry&amp;#x27;s economy. There are two options a company will do to cope with this situation.&lt;p&gt;1) Lay off X% of their workforce, shielding their existing employees from the financial &amp;quot;downs&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;2) Lay off 0%, increase the workload of everyone to account for the financial losses, and see who quits.&lt;p&gt;This is incredibly common in the &amp;quot;tech arts&amp;quot; industries like pro audio hardware because their employees can easily find better paying (2x) jobs elsewhere but choose the audio industry because they&amp;#x27;re following their personal dreams.
They&amp;#x27;re much more willing to make large sacrifices at their job, so they are less adverse to leaving if their boss says they need to hammer out 120 cymbals a day instead of 80.
And of course some people quit and often decide their dream isn&amp;#x27;t worth it anymore.
It&amp;#x27;s a bit easier for the company because there&amp;#x27;s less paperwork when someone quits, and they&amp;#x27;re guaranteed to keep their most passionate employees (by the algorithm&amp;#x27;s design).&lt;p&gt;To hire more employees during the financial &amp;quot;ups&amp;quot;, they just continue their campaigns that working them is the &lt;i&gt;best job ever&lt;/i&gt; despite the low pay, because well, to some wanna-be-cymbal-builders, that&amp;#x27;s the truth. Imagine loving your Zildjian cymbals since you were 7 years old, finally with the opportunity to work for them when you&amp;#x27;re 20! (fine print: 46 hard hours at $28k&amp;#x2F;yr)&lt;p&gt;Nothing&amp;#x27;s really bad about this. It&amp;#x27;s just high supply and low demand of workers, so I&amp;#x27;m not saying one method is better than the other. I&amp;#x27;m just trying to offer my view on the topic of the article, since the actual article fails to address their own question at all. (The only near-answer I in the article is that the employees aren&amp;#x27;t fully replaced by automation but instead moved to other jobs, but come on, how is Zildjian different from the other tens of millions of jobs in America that can&amp;#x27;t be replaced by automation? This is hardly the real reason in Zildjian&amp;#x27;s case.)</text></comment>
<story><title>How Zildjian, a 390-year-old family business, avoids layoffs (2013)</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/id/100538450</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nerdponx</author><text>They do happen to have the advantage of being somewhat of a niche product with inelastic demand and (to my knowledge) no good automated substitute.  I&amp;#x27;m sure that if somebody figured out a way to make cymbals as good as these on an automated line, they&amp;#x27;d do so.&lt;p&gt;That aside, this was an interesting quote:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;The Greek immigrant has been retrained seven times in 40 years&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>