I am absolutely certain this is to suppress wages and employee rights. It is a coordinated effort across the industry and should be immediately investigated.
The whole experience the last few years has taught me a valuable lesson about how simple and reactive all of these tech companies are. No one really knows what they are doing. Other than a very few special people, most of the leaders at these major tech companies are not super-geniuses. They are human like the rest of us and subject to all that it means... Irrational, over-reactive, subject to the whims of the stock market, etc...
I was a young kid during the dotcom bubble and in highschool during the '08 downturn so I wasn't really aware of the macroenomocic trends in the industry then, but now that I am older and deeply invested in the tech economy it's so obvious.
I find it freeing to know that no one really knows what they are doing. Looking into startup world from academia, it seemed like these people really were thoughtful and strategic in how they operated.
After getting into a couple very well funded startups, and seeing how the sausage is made, you realize that no one knows what they are doing. It's not that they're stupid, just that business is hard and the environment is always changing. Sure there might be some "master of the universe" types, but you can create a good business solving the most immediate and pressing problems.
Getting someone to give you money for a product is always hard. We see things all around us that we and others pay for every day, but that's just survivorship bias. It doesn't stop many of us from thinking it's easy, "there's n-billion people on the internet, if I can get 1%..."
I'm not sure why anyone would think the people running these companies are any more intelligent than anyone else. In some intellect measures like emotional intelligence they are even often quite weak.
These companies are either setting all-time profit and revenue numbers or just missing last year's all-time records. Wall Street wasn't happy that they just missed their growth targets, but keep in mind that all growth is compounded. So they have never been more profitable, and yet here we are.
In the end it is all about what stock markets expect and want. Before they wanted hiring, now they want layoffs. There is really no collusion.
In general I think the true leadership of many of these companies is overstated. Layoffs are way to appear to save money so they are doing just that. And the pandemic seem to have been growth in remote products, so they had to grow for that. Even if most of the new workforce might not have been needed.
What mechanism allowed that? From what I recall corporate bond rates were low but not no cost low. Bank rates maybe were like a few percent but infinity money?
If you were MSFT or AAPL, you could issue 0%(or close to it) bonds and investors would lap it up. IIRC AAPL did issue a 0% bond at some point in the last few years.
The person you are replying is making an apt analogy between dynamics that drove comp up and those that are guaranteed to drive it down. If one was not collusion, what's the reason to think the other one is?
Disagree. What we saw for the last 4-6 years was a 0% interest rate phenomenon. The bubble has popped, hiring as a measure of growth is over, and things are normalizing.
I'm pretty sure you're allowed, as management, to notice what your competitors do and respond accordingly. It's, you know, the foundation of all price discovery. You just can't make actual agreements with them.
Just look at the market since COVID. We're coming out of a bubble. When stocks go way up, companies get drunk on their newfound riches and spend excessively, just like individuals. Then times get leaner and they cut back. Only difference is that individuals aren't usually putting other people out of jobs when they do it, at least not directly.
This has happened many times before and will continue to happen cyclically as long as people are free to spend their money how they see fit. Why would this particular time be the result of some vast conspiracy?
No, but it means you should probably have specific evidence of malice before assuming it. It's similar to Occam's Razor: Just because "the simplest explanation is usually the best", does not mean that the simplest explanation is always right. But it's usually a good idea to start with the simpler explanation because a simpler theory is easier to interrogate.
Adam McKay and Charles Randolph wrote a script. Therefore, Jared is wrong about what he is capable of doing and what is he capable of learning. However, Jared is based on a real person - Gregg Lippman. Despite this, after a brief search I found no public information about the arrest of this brother. So either Gregg didn't say this or he said it and it wasn't true, because people in his position would have been told the difference during the course of their life or maybe I didn't search hard enough - but I don't think I should search harder, so if you really feel this is strong support please provide evidence it is so.
I'm more interested in building explanations on reality than supporting my positions with comedic fiction. I'll share some small part of my explanation. I apologize for my lack of brevity.
In game playing we have the ability to calculate the time to calculate and store perfect play in various games. After around the complexity of chess we get to the point where it is physically impossible to store perfect play because the combinatorial explosion generates more states than we have atoms to work with in our universe. This forces approximation, which forces error, which means that for almost every task in this universe error is not only present but absolutely demanded. In multi-agent settings these issues only get worse, because not only is the state space very high due to the combinatorics, but in addition the optimal policy is a function of other policies. The connecting point here is that since our problems are a superset of things we know to be physically unrealizable it follows that error is inevitable and therefore the observance of stupidity relative to theoretical ideals is inevitable.
Founder culture is completely at odds with sophisticated cynicism.
- Paul Graham
Hence the need for an investigation. I don't think there is collusion, but I wouldn't be surprised.
My conspiracy (let me put the tinfoil hat on) is that corporates and mega rich people wanted the recession badly because they can benefit from it. But it didn't happen so they're doing the layoffs and increasing prices to manufacture the recession despite their all-time high profits.
Genuine question. How would the mega rich benefit more from the recession than from a stable or high growth environment?
Seems easier to capture a bigger piece of the pie when the pie is growing for everybody no and nobody complains?
Not to mention the social and political unrest which might be triggered by a recession. Recent and old history has shown times and times again that it is when people go hungry or desperate that they challenge the established social order.
Any time labor makes headway against Capital, Capital Revolts. Which is why we saw a lot of unionization in the past, it was the only way to make any headway.
No. They all knew they over hired and were simply waiting for the first one to make a move. And, if you look at the numbers relatively, these are barely a scratch with the numbers hired over the last few years.
I think you are right but this site is mostly for the "Temporary Embarrassed Milionaires" crowd that identify more with those large companies than with the average worker.
The irony is that many of them are actually part of this layoff reading this and still they don't agree with what is really happening.
The inevitable periodic 'crash' that is part of the capitalist system is a feature, not a bug. It helps suppress wages, keeps workers in their place. So I think you are right on the money.
So many more layoffs will be announced in the coming weeks. But remember: all companies will show (record) healthy profits none the less.
Even the hacker news crowd that lives lavishly and is mostly unharmed by all of this should not feel save at all, you are just as expendable as the anonymous warehouse worker or fast food person.
Speaking of which, the 100K+ tech worker has more in common with the average fast food or retail worker than the owning class: you are worker slaves that fear for their well-being if without work.
Unfortunately I'm afraid the HN crowd is just too comfortable to realise that capitalism is destroying everything, from freedom and autonomy to democracy to the environment.
Yeah that's bullshit. Came from a blue collar home, worked in the trades until I found my way into computers. Don't have a college education and carved myself out a nice career in tech being self taught and hustling for 20 years. From my perspective, this site is not for the "Temporary Embarrassed Millionaires," but unfortunately populated by too many from the "Sad I Missed The Bolshevik Revolution" crowd salivating whenever the opportunity to yell "You're oppressed brothers and sisters!" arises.
I'd hardly call a 30 year professional career in various fields and collars as "survivor bias." The network of people I've been exposed to over that period of time alone puts a hole in that argument. Tossing out that term to try and justify a terribly flawed argument is as silly as the unsubstantiated statistic provided as emotional evidence.
I've seen many articles like that, and they conveniently never show the actual question that was asked. If I had an unexpected expense I'd probably put it on my credit card just for convenience, and then pay it off at the end of the billing cycle incurring no additional fees. But it would be silly to include me in the category of not being able to afford it.
You are 'debating' in bad-faith and you know it. Always moving the goalposts, changing the narrative, inventing stories so they have excuses to wave the facts away.
Tech companies know what some people are still pretending may or may not happen. The economy is going to get super rough this year and rates are not going to get cut any time soon.
Nah. These are all dumb companies which people shouldn't have joined in the first place. You won't find companies like Valve doing this. Join a good company people, instead of dumb, boring ones run by another run of the mill CEO.
Not that I agree with the above comment, but Valve is a private company. Hence, they would not be beholden to shareholder pressures. Perhaps the argument the posted intended was to never join a pubic company?
Cause it is a proper company run to solve problems and not make money out of selling vaporware. It also doesn't hire in bulk and has a culture which is a step away from all this madness.
I am laughing at your "absolute certainty." You probably meant "I have a feeling that I can't support?"
Would you call the previous few decades of tech employers bidding comp insanely high as they competed for talent "a coordinated effort to boost wages?" Why not?
