<p><pre><code>  &gt; Human resources and insurance software startup Zenefits
  &gt; has announced that 250 employees are being made redundant,
  &gt; representing 17 percent of the company’s workforce.
</code></pre>
Before &quot;being made redundant&#x27; became empty buzzspeak, it had a very specific meaning: When things are restructured in such a way that two people end up doing the same job, one becomes redundant. For example, if you have an in-house recruiting team, and you become aqui-hired by BigCo, they may decide that all recruiting will be handled by their existing team, and your recruiting team becomes redundant.<p>Notice that the job to be done is still there, it&#x27;s just that the company has more people doing it than necessary.<p>But in this case, the company is laying off a lot of its sales force and recruiting team while mumbling further content-free buzzwords about refocusing its strategy. Meaning, they aren&#x27;t growing any more, so they won&#x27;t be selling as much or recruiting as much.<p>The job to be done is no longer there. Therefore, those aren&#x27;t redundancies, those are layoffs, pure and simple.<p>The distinction is important, because &quot;redundancies&quot; can arise as you grow (e.g. acquiring), but &quot;layoffs&quot; imply that the engine is sputtering. Eliminating redundancies is a matter of optimization. Laying people off is a matter of scaling back your ambitions.<p>The company is obviously trying to spin this, and VentureBeat is regurgitating their press release word-for-word without any editorial oversight whatsoever.