> Vice Digital’s teams will be disproportionately affected by the layoffs. Currently, the company’s digital organization accounts for 50% of headcount costs, “but only brings in about 21% of our revenue”
> “everyone will be able to keep their work-issued laptops”
This happens a lot because of logistics costs. Managing inventory means hiring people. The total cost of the laptops is probably less than salary + benefits for a staff to handle it and storage or sell at huge discount
I used to run an all-remote engineering team and even though we had the right personnel in place, it still often ended up that for anything short of a new top-of-the-line device, it would be left with a departing employee as a gift because the cost of shipping and paying import duties to get it to the next most logical person in line to have possession of the device was often more than the value of the device itself.
Even for high-value hardware that might have been financially worth reclaiming at the end of someone's employment, there was always a buyout clause in their hardware issuance agreement and we encouraged people to use it if they liked their laptop. We _really_ didn't want the gear back most of the time.
Last time I turned in a laptop (which was about 6 years old--wasn't my day-to-day system), I had to go through the whole routine of reformatting, cleaning stickers and the like off as well as I could, and shipping it to our IT department. I'm sure it was just recycled when it arrived.
with leasing however it comes back into focus as an asset you have to recover. Many companies have turned to leasing programs where hardware is rolled over every three years.
In my experience in the field, media companies are typically super slow to upgrade tech, so I'd guess at least half of these laptops are refurbished, at least three years old and only half functional from constant overuse (if you work in digital media, you know the job is way more than 40 hours a week).
> “everyone will be able to keep their work-issued laptops”