[HN Gopher] Tech layoffs keep stacking up
___________________________________________________________________
Tech layoffs keep stacking up
Author : Swizec
Score : 252 points
Date : 2022-07-01 13:07 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| FastMonkey wrote:
| Layoffs seem to be up, but that's a questionable chart if ever I
| saw one. I doubt they have had representative coverage of the
| market for that whole period. With those numbers, looks like it's
| as much a chart of the increase in their data collection on
| layoffs as it is a chart on layoffs.
| ozzythecat wrote:
| Amazon is surprisingly not yet in that infographic in the latest
| lay offs.
|
| When I left Amazon last year, there were effectively two Amazons.
| One is a group with half baked product or service ideas, throwing
| garbage at a wall to see what sticks. The other Amazon is like a
| retirement community worker, keeping legacy services alive,
| ensuring their security recertifications, and not much else.
| There isn't even a concept of innovation.
|
| Though I don't work there anymore, I'm still a shareholder. I
| look forward to the company trimming the excess fat. If the
| broader market really is impacted, unfortunately, there's going
| to be a massive army of H1Bs suddenly faced with leaving the
| country.
| supernovae wrote:
| Amazon recently stated they're going to run into an issue of
| having to re-hire people they fired/let go - the workforce
| isn't that diverse.
|
| The best thing that could happen to Amazon is unionization.
| Stability in their massive churn and perhaps more stability as
| a company.
| saos wrote:
| That graph is awful
| paulpauper wrote:
| which is a tiny percentage of the labor force unless I am missing
| something important
|
| it goes to show how despite all the media attention tech
| companies get , they are a drop in the bucket as far as the labor
| market is concerned (except amazon and its warehouse workers)
| aninteger wrote:
| More mobile friendly link:
|
| https://nitter.net/HayekAndKeynes/status/1541760176826499073
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| Hacker News at 16th of September 2008, when the 2008 hit was the
| strongest:
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075626/http://news.ycombi...
|
| top story: > Stock Market Meltdowns - Why they will happen again
| and again and again (blogmaverick.com)
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075626/http://news.ycombi...
|
| second story: > Stack Overflow Launches (joelonsoftware.com)
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075523/http://news.ycombi...
|
| if you want to see what people were discussing back then
|
| blabla print money, blabla dont print money, blabla change jobs,
| blabla dont change jobs, its the fed's fault, its wallstreet's
| fault, more regulation, less regulation.. etc
|
| or people bashing apple claiming android is going to disrupt the
| app store
|
| one thing is for sure, almost all predictions going forward in
| the chaos are as good as random, anyone can explain the chaos in
| hindsight.
| dang wrote:
| Third most popular story of the day after the launch of Stack
| Overflow and Ron Garret's Lisp-at-JPL perennial. Seems about
| right.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-09-15
| prions wrote:
| The trueup data casts a pretty wide net. Seeing Microsoft on that
| list and makes the impression that layoffs are hitting FAANGs in
| a similar way to high growth startups, but those layoffs were due
| to Microsoft pulling out of Russia.
|
| https://www.trueup.io/co/microsoft#layoffs
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Similarly, the Tesla layoffs sounded like an office of in-house
| data labelers close to the tool developers in California being
| replaced by outsourced temp workers after the labeling tools
| reached maturity. It's a stretch to call that a tech layoff.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Amazon Mturk is cheap too
| np_tedious wrote:
| Also contained Better. Debatable how much it is a tech company,
| and I believe many of the layoffs were mortgage loan officers.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It's not unusual for companies who are doing fine to use
| industry layoffs as cover to cut under-performing employees.
| htormey wrote:
| All this panic about tech layoffs seems a little premature given
| we haven't even begun to see the impact of rates hikes on
| quarterly earnings yet. Many companies still have open recs and
| budgets to keep hiring.
|
| I work at a company that just laid off 18% of the workforce
| (Coinbase) including many people in engineering. The day this
| happened my email, LinkedIn, Twitter inboxes exploded with
| companies asking me if I knew of anyone looking for a job or if I
| myself had been impacted.
|
| I reached out to many of my former colleagues who had been
| impacted to see if they needed help. All had multiple interviews
| in flight and were not having trouble finding jobs.
|
| Aside from many crypto companies the inbound jobs were from many
| public and private companies and spanned many industries.
|
| I expect tech layoffs to get worse and the white collar job
| market to tighten towards the end of this year and 2023.
|
| I expect the main driver for this will be cost reduction at
| public and private companies in the lead up to earnings or
| quarterly reports. Main cost for a tech company obviously being
| labor.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| The thing that seems _so_ weird to me about the current state
| of the economy is that you have lots of "smart people"
| shouting pretty loudly "A recession is coming! Is going to be
| bad! We may already be in one!!" I don't remember any recession
| - not the early 90s recession, not the .com bust, not the Great
| Recession - having anywhere near so much foreshadowing. Sure,
| there were people during the .com boom saying "Umm, you know,
| 'eyeballs' don't pay the bills and at some point you need to
| actually make money" and during the 00s housing bubble "I'm not
| even sure lenders are using the 'can you fog a mirror' test
| anymore when making loans", but it wasn't particularly
| widespread, and large sections of the economic and policy elite
| actively downplayed the possibility of recession.
|
| Now though, I see the exact opposite. Tech moguls, central
| bankers, VCs, etc. etc. have been warning "this is going to be
| really bad" now for months. But, in actuality, it's not _that_
| bad (yet). Yes, inflation is really bad, but unemployment was
| 3.6% in May. It still feels like many companies are having a
| very difficult time hiring and keeping workers.
|
| So why the difference? I don't want to go into "conspiracy
| theory territory", but I do think it's pretty undeniable that
| there is a marked difference in "warning levels" between the
| current time and recessions in the past 40 years.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| Republicans want a recession so they can blame the Biden
| administration. Pretty simple.
| geitir wrote:
| Republicans wish they had that much power. The US isn't the
| center of the world
| jjav wrote:
| > I don't remember any recession having anywhere near so much
| foreshadowing.
|
| The 2008 downturn had tons of warnings, everyone I knew who
| had any visibility into product shipping and future orders
| was talking about the big slowdown in orders, across all
| kinds of industries.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yeah it was the tail end of a boom in Ireland, and I
| remember being in a hotel during the week and every
| conference was public sector, zero private companies.
| That's when I knew things were gonna be bad.
| jmann99999 wrote:
| I'll give a slightly different view. Many of us who lived
| through the early 90s, the dot com bubble, and the great
| recession are worried about this because recessions happen
| pretty frequently (every 4-6 years). However, the last big
| downturn for the US was 2009.
|
| While there was the Covid downturn, in general, the economy
| has been on the upswing for 12 years. The US Federal Reserve
| has appeared to manipulate that due to the Great Recession.
|
| So, many of us are worried that roosters are coming home to
| roost.
|
| That doesn't mean it will happen, but our fear is mean-
| reversion.
| tootie wrote:
| I think you're misremembering. The 2001 and 2007 crashes were
| very widely foretold. The current recession risk concensus
| seems pretty weak to me right now. That's just perception but
| the popular joke goes something like "economists have
| predicted 8 of the last 3 recessions".
|
| The risk of an unexpected recession is much worse than a
| warning that doesn't come true so warnings are always
| pessimistic. Risk right now still feels 50/50. The next CPI
| report after the major Fed action will be watched very
| closely.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > I think you're misremembering. The 2001 and 2007 crashes
| were very widely foretold.
|
| Hard disagree, at least by what I said in my comment about
| what "widely foretold" meant. I mean, the IMDB opening
| description of The Big Short starts with "When four
| outsiders saw what the big banks, media and government
| refused to..." Michael Burry,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry, famously said
| he wasn't a super genius or anything, and was surprised
| that so few other folks saw the coming housing collapse
| like he did.
|
| Again, my point is not that nobody could foresee that the
| recessions were coming, it's that the institutional "powers
| that be" - government, large corporations, VCs, etc. -
| _actively_ downplayed the risk of recession. The exact
| opposite is happening now.
| tootie wrote:
| JP Morgan navigated the 2007 crisis and came out on top.
| They're saying recession risk is 50/50 and the S&P will
| end up positive for the year. There were definitely a lot
| of people in power and especially policy makers who put
| their own interests ahead of what the data tells them.
|
| Burry is also a shameless self-promoter who has predicted
| a lot of disasters that haven't happened including WW3 a
| few years ago. There's like a dozen people who have made
| careers out of claiming to be the only ones that
| predicted the 2007 recession. If you keep predicting
| recessions you're bound to be right. In reality, it's
| just not possible to predict accurately. Here's Krugman
| in late 2006 presenting the data and putting the
| recession risk for 2007 at 2:1
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/opinion/01krugman.html
|
| Right now there are several indicators flashing and a lot
| that aren't. Technical data like P/E ratios, volatility,
| yield curves are great at predicting things that happened
| in the past but they just can't be relied on as being
| infallible.
| willcipriano wrote:
| That's because this recession is going to be manufactured.
| Powell was clear, wages are rising too fast for the feds
| liking so they are going to crash the ship into the rocks.
|
| https://mronline.org/2022/05/26/u-s-federal-reserve-says-
| its...
| Aunche wrote:
| Lol. What a loaded piece-of-shit article.
|
| > According to a transcript of the presser published by the
| Wall Street Journal, Powell blamed this inflation crisis,
| which is global, not on the proxy war in Ukraine [1] and
| Western sanctions on Russia [2], but rather on U.S. workers
| supposedly making too much money.
|
| [1] https://multipolarista.com/2022/03/24/us-official-
| ukraine-na... [2] https://multipolarista.com/2022/03/24/us-
| official-ukraine-na...
|
| This is basically Russian propaganda. The author and
| founder of that website has a history of sympathetic
| covarage of authoritarian regimes
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grayzone). It's also
| funny that these far-left journalists always cite their own
| previous articles. Powell mentions the war in Ukraine as
| contributing to inflation, but since he didn't call it a
| "proxy war" I guess it doesn't count.
|
| > "Employers are having difficulties filling job openings,
| and wages are rising at the fastest pace in many years,"
| Powell complained.
|
| LOL. Definitely sounds like a complaint to me. No
| editorializing here. That's why Powell said this later in
| the press conference:
|
| > If you think about it, if you look at the last cycle, we
| had a very, very--longest expansion cycle in our recorded
| history, and in the last two, three years, you had the
| benefits of this tight labor market going to people in the
| lower quartiles and it was--you know, racial wealth and
| income--not wealth but income gaps were coming down, wage
| gaps. So it's a really great thing. We'd all love to get
| back to that place, but to get back to anything like that
| place, you need price stability.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/transcript-fed-chief-powells-
| po...
| naveen99 wrote:
| It's an old fashioned sports league lock out. Players
| salaries too high in fed's opinion. Labor's cut approaching
| 60%[1]. I think the owners prefer it at 50% if not lower.
|
| 1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Seems like a weird theory considering the history of that
| graph over the last 70 years. Not really much variation
| considering how much the US economy has changed.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| The expectation is that interest rates will be increased to
| reduce inflation however this increase will also be expected
| to cause a recession. The hope would be that this recession
| would be smaller than the later recession that might be
| expected later from the high inflation. The theory was the
| same in the '70s between Carter and Reagan. This time around,
| some think that raising rates won't work in the same way to
| curb inflation due to differing theories about its cause.
| Needless to say, these things are hard to predict.
| opportune wrote:
| People knew there were dotcom stock bubbles (dotcom bubble)
| and real estate bubbles (GFC). People knew during the gas
| crisis that the supply shock sent inflation skyrocketing
| (70s). People knew that wildcat banking would cause
| insolvency and runs (tons of recessions and panics in the
| 19th century), people knew that unrestricted lending would
| cause the mother of all long squeezes (Great Depression).
|
| In this case people knew that overly dovish monetary and
| fiscal policy would overstimulate demand. That leads to
| inflation, and the Fed's job is to balance inflation with
| employment, and since the unemployment rates they look at
| very low, that means it's time for them to raise rates to
| curb inflation by reducing aggregate demand. This has a
| knock-on effect of cooling asset prices since credit becomes
| more expensive and harder to get, so the market deleverages.
|
| One difference is that expectations are set but interest
| rates/the money "printed" due to overly dovish policy are
| still in the process of being changed. So stocks are sold off
| and people are planning for a recession, but layoffs and the
| actual economic cooling haven't happened yet.
|
| It's entirely possible that the fed is able to cool inflation
| easily (it could also resolve itself if Russia stops fighting
| or China stops trying to do zero-COVID) without that much of
| a recession, but raising rates lowers demand, so since rates
| may go much higher than they are, a recession is likely. In
| terms of assets, rising rates and subsequent recession
| involving lowered rates are already priced in
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I've had 3 folks respond now that "hey, people knew these
| bubbles were coming", so apologies that my original point
| wasn't clear.
|
| I _wholeheartedly agree_ that some people saw the crashes
| coming, and honestly, I don 't even think they were that
| hard to spot. I'm a pretty big fan of Jeremy Grantham, who
| considers himself a "bubble historian", who points out that
| while the timing of when bubbles pop is almost impossible
| to determine, the fact that one sector is _in_ a bubble is
| not.
|
| But that said, my point is that the institutional powers
| that be were _very_ quiet, or in many cases actively argued
| against the possibility of a recession, in both the .com
| and Great Recession cases. In the present day the exact
| opposite appears to be happening. The seats of
| institutional power (central bankers, execs of large
| corporations, rich VCs, etc.) have been talking about the
| sky falling for a while now. That is what is really
| different.
| [deleted]
| LandR wrote:
| My only anecdotal datum here is that I just got a new job, and
| every day I'm getting multiple messages from recruiters looking
| for developers. Full Time and Contracting.
|
| If it's all gone to shit, I'm not seeing it here (Scotland),
| salaries I'm seeing are really good for the area too.
| rongenre wrote:
| That's my hope as well, however in 2001, I was getting flooded
| with recruiter messages at the same time that layoffs were
| going on. For a few months people were having pink-slip parties
| because they just assumed it was always 1999. It was pretty
| scary, to be honest.
|
| Eventually the recruiter messages tapered off until about..
| 2005.
| varispeed wrote:
| > salaries I'm seeing are really good for the area too.
|
| That I don't get. It should rather be good for the skills you
| have on offer, not where you are based. From my experience the
| offers are pretty sh*te and only gone up slightly. You also
| need to take into account being caught in the higher tax
| bracket. So if the offer is PS120k you'll only get PS73k, which
| these days isn't that much considering costs of living are not
| the same as 10 years ago. That being said, I have received a
| couple of offers for over PS150k recently so at least the trend
| is upwards. Still not enough for me to consider.
| zerr wrote:
| I believe it is about weeding out mid-high 6-figure (and
| sometimes 7-figure) staff. It is understandable that 5-figure
| (underpaid) European devs are not affected.
| jedberg wrote:
| Google, Meta, and Amazon are all actively making 7-figure
| offers, according to levels.fyi.
| jamiegreen wrote:
| What do you specialise in if you don't mind me asking?
| LandR wrote:
| C# .NET, SQL and some JS
| cageface wrote:
| It took a while but after the dotcom boom it was hard for even
| good tech people to find work. We were getting 100s of very
| qualified applications for every open position we had.
| Hopefully things don't get as bad as that this time.
| dhosek wrote:
| More anecdata: My employer is still hiring and has a lot of
| open dev roles.
|
| On the other hand, the flood of unsolicited recruiter emails
| that I delete without responding has become less flood-y in the
| last month or so.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Same here. My flood of emails has cut down by roughly half,
| and LinkedIn has far fewer notifications about matching in
| searches, in mails, people viewing my profile, etc.
|
| Two months ago it was extremely busy and noisy. It might be
| even less than half the activity today.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Same, I currently work at fortune 10 and while I actually
| appreciate recruiters reaching out to me unlike many other
| folks, I've had to start ignoring everything on LinkedIn
| because I'm getting upwards of 1-5 people asking me to
| talk/interview per day. One company was claiming 400K salary
| too, so I really have no idea where any of this stands.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| The fact that there was so much hiring over the past 5-10 years
| meant that there was also a lot more recruiters.
|
| And now that the hiring is reduced, the number of recruiters
| haven't (especially since they tend to work on commission,
| rather than on a fixed salary). Since they now have fewer jobs
| to connect people to, even they are likely to get more
| desperate and send more recruiting pitches to candidates,
| because they aren't filling as many jobs as easily and earning
| as much commission.
|
| IOW, seeing an increase in recruiter activity can be completely
| consistent with reduced hiring (and is also consistent with
| increased hiring), so in itself it doesn't tell you much.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| I'm also in Europe and my concern is that this, like many
| things, starts in the US and then we get the same at a few
| months down the line.
| mountainriver wrote:
| Same I'm still getting offers
| randomsearch wrote:
| You're just way down the domino chain.
|
| VCs react first, in the most savvy and farsighted places.
| That's why we're seeing symptoms already.
|
| There is literally a geographical delay. Things like house
| price crashes take time to spread. The more remote you are, the
| less connected you are to the global economy. Scotland is
| relatively isolated.
|
| The tide has gone out, make plans.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| > The tide has gone out, make plans.
|
| chill bro, things will be fine, planned or not
|
| the wheel keeps turning
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Actually, I'd suggest that bootstrappers react first, and VCs
| react somewhat after the public markets do.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Data from indeed seems to support your anecdotal datum:
|
| _" Employer demand for workers remains strong, with Indeed job
| postings as of June 24, 2022 54.2% above their pre-pandemic
| baseline. New job postings, defined as those on Indeed for
| seven days or less, are also well above their pre-pandemic
| baseline, up 68.3%. While job postings growth has slowed, the
| leveling out has been moderate."_
|
| https://www.hiringlab.org/2022/06/30/june-2022-us-labor-mark...
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| Job listings is a terrible metric because it has never been
| cheaper to have a listing. Listings are nearly double pre-
| pandemic norms while actual hires are only up slightly from
| pre-pandemic norms. This implies that each job listing is
| much less effective than it was. If companies would stop
| throwing away 90% of resumes because they didn't exactly
| match the keywords for the job, perhaps this would be better.
| The bottom line though, is we shouldn't factor listings into
| any metric in much the same way that me putting a $100
| trillion price tag on an item doesn't increase inflation.
| Track actual transactions.
| supernovae wrote:
| I don't see this at all in the tech industry. Companies are
| actually scouting for talent.
|
| Heck, my family in service industry says anyone with a
| pulse is hired these days.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I'm in Western Canada and locally, provincially and nationally
| there's a ridiculous number of open tech positions. I guess a
| chart that included hiring wouldn't be highlighted on
| twitter...
| adra wrote:
| Yeah, I'm getting way more unsolicited job recruitments than
| ever before. I'm not sure if companies actually need the head
| counts or feel like they can pickup some cheap(er) hires now
| that the market is off.
| varispeed wrote:
| I am in the UK and had quite a number of Canadian companies
| looking to recruit recently. Interesting.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Same here, the market still feels hot to me. Just interviewed
| with dozens of firms, plenty of interest apparently.
|
| Of course this kind of thing can change very quickly, and
| agency recruiters won't really know for a while.
| gkoberger wrote:
| I'll start by saying that overall I agree. For engineers,
| specifically, things are still pretty good and companies are
| actively hiring.
|
| That being said, be careful with this assumption. Recruiters
| aren't going to stop recruiting; that's their job. At many
| companies, they have a certain amount of outreach they're
| required to do. If they stop emailing, then all of a sudden
| they stop doing their job, and that means they're personally
| going into layoffs with bad numbers.
|
| The jobs still exist, but behind the scenes it's likely things
| are changing. Companies are hiring 2 engineers instead of 10,
| or increasing their hiring bar significantly. The difference
| between "we're desperate to hire" and "we're open if someone
| great comes along..." is huge, but you won't see a difference
| in how recruiters treat you.
|
| tl;dr = if a company cuts their hiring plan from 10 engs to 1,
| they still send the same number of recruiting emails.
| vasco wrote:
| Exactly this, recruiter messages volume might actually
| increase because they also know companies are tightening and
| so they need to lock in those placements asap before roles
| dry up outright.
|
| A bit of my job ends up being a hiring management and the
| amount of recruitment agencies that want to send developers
| our way increased a lot. They are getting desperate.
| puranjay wrote:
| Much of this seems to be a complete miscalculation of the "new
| normal" of the pandemic. There was a narrative that somehow all
| the wild growth we had seen in the pandemic years when everyone
| was forcibly locked at home would sustain forever.
|
| Of course that wasn't going to happen and should have been
| obvious to anyone. The pandemic is over and the "new normal" has
| just gone back to the "old normal" with marginal changes in
| work/play patterns.
|
| This was always going to happen, with or without current rate
| hikes. The rate hikes just accelerated everything by 2 years.
| minraws wrote:
| I think there is another way of looking at it, as a way for the
| incredible growth in startups to the finally being understood
| by the new and old entrepreneurs.
|
| Hiring and such didn't only happen in the pandemic period but
| also overall in almost the entire past decade(2012-2021).
|
| Hurting the understanding of the people in the market, we are
| now seeing the sudden shrinking to have caused them to figure
| out priorities of either growth or profitability in even later
| phases of the business. At least that's what it seems like to
| me.
|
| Because the jobs market is almost just as good in tech as
| always, it's just big startups and companies are shrinking and
| increasing margins while smaller ones in early phases of growth
| are still increasing jobs or just in sheer numbers.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| The great part is that tech (and other white collar) workers
| used that small window of opportunity where they had tremendous
| bargaining power to push for policies that will make it even
| easier to replace them.
|
| It feels like a white collar repeat of what blue collar voters
| did in the US in the 70s and 80s.
| erklik wrote:
| > The great part is that tech (and other white collar)
| workers used that small window of opportunity where they had
| tremendous bargaining power to push for policies that will
| make it even easier to replace them.
|
| Any examples of those policies?
| Sateeshm wrote:
| I'm guessing they are referring to remote work location/wfh
| nilkn wrote:
| Work from home. Even with the pandemic over and some big
| tech companies not wanting to fully commit, remote work has
| become dramatically more commonplace in the industry than
| it was a few years ago pre-pandemic. Even conservative
| companies like Two Sigma were forced to introduce flexible
| hybrid models.
| lkjdsklf wrote:
| The very obvious one is remote work policies. Before you
| were only competing against people in your immediate area
| or people who were willing to move. Now you're competing
| against everyone. That's a much broader pool of employees
| for companies to pull from.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Employees also have a much broader pool of employers to
| pull from.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| That's just one side of the coin. With remote work, your
| pool of available jobs also increases. At least in Europe
| that's a big win since the whole continent has only 2 or
| 3 hours of difference.
| puranjay wrote:
| Isn't that worse for employee wages though? More
| employees to pick from = more competition among workers =
| lower wages?
| jacknews wrote:
| I wonder how much of this is real, and how much is part of the
| fed's acknowledged plan to push wages down.
|
| I mean obviously the layoffs are real, but are they necessary, or
| just symptoms of the chill winds and fear now blowing from the
| fed.
| xbar wrote:
| There are a lot of companies, small and medium, without enough
| revenue or funding to pay employee salaries, given reasonable
| budgeting into the next several quarters.
|
| This is as real as it gets.
| ghaff wrote:
| It does seem at this point as if companies that haven't been
| able to make money, sometimes for years--especially those
| that should have been "pandemic businesses" (looking at you
| meal kit subscriptions)--are going to have to significantly
| raise prices, cut costs, or turn out the lights.
| puranjay wrote:
| Ser, we're at a point where a company like Uber looks like it
| might never turn an operational profit, and is quietly planning
| to/has existed most markets.
|
| If $33B in funding doesn't get you a dollar in profit, you have
| to wonder if its all even worth it.
| kmlx wrote:
| > has existed most markets.
|
| which markets did Uber exit voluntarily?
| puranjay wrote:
| Most recently, they've reportedly been exploring exit
| options in India [0]. Friends in my startup circle
| corroborate these rumors.
|
| As an end user in this country, it definitely looks like a
| business that's close to capitulation.
|
| 0: https://www.news18.com/news/business/uber-explored-
| options-t...
| dfxm12 wrote:
| If this is a reaction to the Fed raising rates, the layoffs
| aren't necessary, but by and large, these companies put short
| term gains above all else, which is why they are doing it.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I'm bullish: the recession fears are overblown. Adjust the SPY
| for inflation and we're not that far off from where we were in
| 2020.
|
| https://www.multpl.com/inflation-adjusted-s-p-500/table/by-y...
| francisofascii wrote:
| The SPY is much higher than 2018, 2019, which makes me think it
| has more to fall. But that doesn't mean recession, it just
| means back to normal.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Uh, there's been 3 years of real economic growth since
| 2019...?
| seabrookmx wrote:
| Isn't inflation the problem?
|
| Inflation -> Rate hikes -> Growth slows
|
| ?
| InTheArena wrote:
| While there is still a open question about how much the sudden
| reversal of monetary policy from the last 15 years of "hey! all
| the money can print" that led to companies going into debt to
| purchase their own stock to "oh crap, inflation, let's tighten
| the money supply" affects the durability of companies...
|
| that said...
|
| There are some very hyperbolic people comparing this to the .COM
| crash and also to 2008/2009.
|
| In 2001, there was literally a site doing nothing but reporting
| in flamboyant terms all of the "fucked companies" going under.
| IIRC, it was dozens a day, at one point, with people stating that
| the Internet had failed, and it was all going down the drain.
|
| In 2008, absolutely no one had any clue what was going on but
| everyone knew it was catastrophically bad. People were trying to
| guess if it would be merely the worst recession ever or the
| second great depression.
|
| This so far seems like a fairly normal correction. We will see if
| Debt blows up and changes that.
| rednerrus wrote:
| The difference between now and 2001 is the reliance the rest of
| the world has on the tech we work on. Some of this stuff is
| trivial but a lot of it has people/enterprises that rely on the
| work we do.
| pirate787 wrote:
| Contagion is ripping through crypto, at least, in a way that's
| more like 2008.
| htormey wrote:
| Nah, I disagree. I work in crypto (coinbase) and was working
| in tech in the Bay Area in 2008.
|
| As of today, many crypto companies have money from 2021/early
| 2022 raises and are still hiring. In 2008 the private tech
| market reaction to the stock market crash was swift and
| brutal.
|
| It was really hard to get a job in 2008. Today it feels like
| their is a big lag between stock pullbacks and jobs drying
| up. None of my colleagues who were laid off are having
| trouble getting jobs in crypto and have options in other
| parts of tech if they want it.
|
| To be clear I expect the jobs situation to get worse this
| year and in 2023.
| anbotero wrote:
| Why do you expect jobs situation to get worse in 2023?
| Shouldn't these corrections happen now so companies plan
| their runway to ~2 years?
| [deleted]
| ptero wrote:
| I do not see comparisons of today with 2001 or 2008 as
| hyperbolic. I was working during both of those and remember
| them as fairly localized. Large areas were demolished, but
| there were plenty of other areas to move into for sharp,
| technically literate folks.
|
| I had friends who, in 1999, were freshly-minted millionaires at
| Microstrategy, then lost it all less than a year later. And a
| friend who joined Lehman after his Wharton MBA in the summer of
| 2006. While it was not fun to be in the middle of the burst
| they all easily found high paying jobs within a few months.
|
| I suspect this crisis may be worse as, after spending trillions
| on covid lockdowns, we have fewer options to spend our way out
| of this problem. The pain in both 2001 and 2008/9 was limited
| as the US pumped money into economy and inflated another bubble
| just as the previous one was bursting, and I think this option
| is not easy to use today. But I am not an economist, we shall
| see in a couple of years how this shakes up.
| supernovae wrote:
| The thing is, We don't have fewer options. We're just
| exploding over with talking heads telling us we can or can't
| do something.
| tptacek wrote:
| There is nothing going on in the tech industry today that
| even resembles 2001. For that matter, neither did 2008.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Yet.
|
| Crashes are not instantaneous.
|
| Crypto alone is easily a dot com sized scandal.
|
| Cheap cash has led to a lot of dysfunctional and gigantic
| industries, eg food delivery.
|
| We are nowhere near the bang yet.
| jpgvm wrote:
| The entire crypto market is a drop in the bucket. It
| could all go to zero tomorrow and not have any
| significant impact on anything (except maybe risk
| sentiment for a short period).
|
| The cheap cash situation on the other hand is the
| elephant in the room. Unprofitable companies are about to
| be under immense pressure.
|
| I don't know if there is going to be much of a bang
| rather than a very long deep slide for equities
| (especially tech) as indices undergo P/E compression.
| When we start seeing 12 P/E then maybe things will turn
| around.
| grey-area wrote:
| No that's right we're still in the denial phase some time
| in 2000 but the layoffs have started.
| tptacek wrote:
| People say that pretty much every time there's negative
| economic news, and eventually they'll be right. But it
| hasn't happened yet.
| matwood wrote:
| I went through both 2001 and 2008. Maybe crypto is relatable,
| but beyond that it's not close. Overall, companies have great
| balance sheets now. The VC funded, questionable businesses
| will have some washouts. But, in 2008 the whole financial
| system was coming apart - not localized at all. I remember
| going long on BofA and thinking if they go under it doesn't
| matter if I lose my investment.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I went through both, as well, and I'd say this is maybe
| similar to the early stages of the 2000/2001 contraction in
| that it's in particular affecting tech and happening rather
| slowly. Certainly not 2008, which was abrupt and severe,
| but didn't affect the tech sector as strongly as other
| sectors.
|
| I wouldn't rule out that in 6 months the parallels with
| 2001 are more pronounced. However I agree it's not really
| close, especially with Google/Facebook/Apple/Amazon, etc.
| are still printing money at an incredible rate and that
| money continues to sprinkle into other parts of our sector.
|
| During the .com crash there was a severe pullback in
| general on investment in the online startup space in
| general and it wasn't until the Google IPO that I felt we
| were truly out of that phase.
| supernovae wrote:
| the only parallel to 2001 i see is crypto. The rest of
| tech is on pretty sound footing all things considered.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the technology sector 2000/2001 was pretty bad. Obviously
| some large established companies weathered the storm
| relatively well. But the carnage even at companies like Cisco
| and EMC was immense. And they were still a lot better off
| than the dot-bombs. A ton of people were unemployed or
| underemployed for a long time and quite a few left the
| industry.
|
| I was laid off right after 9/11 and I have no illusions that
| I was _very_ lucky to land a job (at reduced comp with
| someone I knew well) quickly given that I otherwise didn 't
| even have a nibble.
| dan_quixote wrote:
| Judging by the number of people living paycheck-to-paycheck, I
| think all it will take is a slight uptick in layoffs to light
| the fuse for another housing crash.
| grey-area wrote:
| We're at the tail end of the largest asset bubble in history
| with near 10% inflation, war, pandemic, debt at > 100% GDP and
| interest rates rising from a decade near 0.
|
| None of this is normal and what follows won't be either.
| supernovae wrote:
| The 80s,90s and 2000s would like a word with you.
| grey-area wrote:
| There are quite a few differences, the crypto bubble is
| similar to 2000 I guess.
|
| https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ (see market
| cap)
|
| https://www.multpl.com/inflation-adjusted-s-p-500
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL#0
|
| This won't end well and in the current environment of high
| inflation the fed has no choice but to raise interest rates
| and companies will continue to layoff into the recession.
| supernovae wrote:
| Sure, there are differences... but in the 80s, i remember
| people burning their houses down to collect insurance
| money because of things like high interest rates, high
| inflation and the savings and loan scandal amongst
| following a huge energy crisis, a huge escallation in the
| cold war, political strife and so much more.
|
| As for the fed, they're raising interest rates to cool
| things off - hopefully people are investing in ibonds and
| just _maybe_ savings accounts will see more than 5th of
| 1% again so there are some upsides.
|
| Layoffs? they're happening but unemployment still went
| down.
| shadowtree wrote:
| Well, there is this: https://layoffs.fyi/
|
| and many other offshoots.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| https://www.thelayoff.com/
| UkrainianJew wrote:
| Nah, it's comparable.
|
| In 2001 people believed that registering .com domain and hiring
| a few code monkeys will guarantee financial success.
|
| In 2008 people believed that investing into risky derivatives
| backed by FOMO will guarantee financial success.
|
| In 2022 people believe that getting a bullshit degree (with a
| $XX,XXX loan) and landing on a job where you either don't
| produce anything of value at all, or work on a solution-in-
| search-of-a-problem guarantees financial success (through a
| successful IPO of an unprofitable company).
|
| The 2022 crisis is the abundance of freshly minted capital and
| the shortage of people willing to do any hard work beyond
| office politics and manufacturing of bored apes. The pressure
| has been building up for a while, but the steady amount of
| people from poorer countries willing to do the hard work for
| the West kinda kept it in check.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's comparable in the sense that you can write a message
| board post tying them together. It's not comparable in any
| other sense.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Much of this is due to the reversal of the tight hiring market.
|
| For the past several years tech companies were desperate to hire
| because everyone was growing and the hiring market was tight.
| This inevitably results in companies loosening their hiring
| standards and retaining underperforming employees because they
| can't afford to reduce team sizes.
|
| Layoffs combined with hiring freezes (or slowdowns) signal real
| stress within a company. However, many of these layoffs are
| single-digit percentage layoffs from companies that are still
| hiring across the board. That's not so much a traditional layoff
| as a pruning of the workforce. That pruning wasn't happening as
| much when hiring was tight, but now that hiring is easier and
| real, actual layoffs have put more good candidates back onto the
| market, the companies who simply collected too many
| underperforming employees can afford to churn some of them back
| out of the company. Doing it as a "layoff" makes it more
| palatable than going on a firing spree.
|
| That said, when it comes to interviewing you shouldn't assume
| that a laid off employee was necessarily underperforming. A lot
| of companies don't really perform layoffs with surgical precision
| and will instead drop entire teams at once. I've watched great
| engineers get swept up in minor staff reductions simply because
| they were assigned to bad managers or doomed teams that they
| couldn't save by themselves. I've also hired great people who
| came right out of layoffs at other companies and I would have
| missed those resumes if I had been using dumb filtering rules
| like ignoring anyone who had been laid off.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| The mirror image of this churn happened after the recovery from
| the dotcom bust.
|
| During the bust, tech workers took ANY job, no matter how
| terrible, and held on for dear life so they didn't end up
| unemployed for 2 years. Finally, the market recovered, and
| companies experienced turnover as people finally had the
| opportunity to move to greener pastures.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| > During the bust, tech workers took ANY job, no matter how
| terrible
|
| Same feeling, but from a bit different perspective. During
| the dotcom bust I've learned to love layoff periods. Cause
| then friends and neighbors from friendly and neighborly other
| teams _suddenly_ started to look for more work instead of
| looking for less work - and my life became a bit easier.
|
| At the time my team of 2 (two) was handling 12 (twelve)
| rather simple but important projects. Steve and his team of 4
| (four) in Denver was handling 1 (one) similar project. Then
| the bust came, and the prospect of layoffs. And here we are
| at the meeting where I am transferring three of my projects
| to Steve's team.
|
| After the meeting Paul, a PM from France - we enjoyed working
| together, asked me, puzzled: Mike, why on earth haven't you
| fought to keep your projects?? And I go: Paul, I have nine
| more of these - do you want some?
| ruffrey wrote:
| I have to continue this train of thought. It is dangerous that
| people consider layoff as a performance indicator for the
| employee. It's just too hard to tell.
|
| I was laid off recently along with many others because an
| entire experimental project was killed because the market
| shifted (crypto, I know). Prior to that I'd received top
| performance marks and had been promoted to team lead. They gave
| me a great recommendation for the next gig.
|
| It's as easy to get a low performer who's on a PIP and
| employed, as a high performer in a risky company. Hard to tell
| which one you're interviewing.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| I was laid off a few years ago because the company that hired
| me hadn't actually won the contract they thought they won.
| Really hard to pin that on engineering's performance.
| spidermanjones wrote:
| Recently laid off under conditions that I'm convinced are
| similar.
|
| I was at my org for roughly 9 months, I came in as part of
| a large class of new hires across the entire org.
|
| The last 4 months we were in crunch mode trying to land a
| big client that leadership continued saying would be a game
| changer for us. My eyebrow was already raised, because if
| one company is that much of a game changer, what happens if
| we don't get that client?
|
| Sure enough, as I was texting with a friend who was spared,
| he let me know as soon as the last person left the office
| that day from layoffs, company had the weekly all-hands and
| announced sure enough, they didn't get the client.
| mech422 wrote:
| I've seen this in the past, though it hasn't bitten me...
| I'm really against 'pre-emptive' hiring for this reason.
| Its not fair to mess with people's livings just because you
| promised something in a contract that you can't currently
| fulfill.
| willcipriano wrote:
| The worst part is it isn't like they don't have another
| option. Could choose to hire a contractor or let people
| know upfront about the risk of the job not being there in
| a few months, but that would drive up the rates people
| would ask.
| mech422 wrote:
| Yeah, and the new hire potentially turned down a long
| term job for something that evaporates before they even
| start...
| jlg23 wrote:
| > Its not fair to mess with people's livings...
|
| Given that this is the status quo, employees should adopt
| the same attitude. When working for an ethical employer,
| I'll work 48h/day if the situation requires it, but for
| everyone else, I'll bill them for the "quick question
| over the phone" outside of my agreed upon working hours;
| and I'll quit when someone else makes a good offer. Once
| a (spectacularly unethical) employer tried to pull the
| "think about the others in your team" stunt only to be
| amazed when I found them better jobs within a week and
| everyone else quit, too. I cannot say he learned from
| that experience, but I equally cannot say I regret my
| decision.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| I have never been laid off. Not because I'm an especially
| good engineer, but because I have a good understanding of
| business and internal politics. I would have been fired from
| 4 of my 7 jobs eventually if I hadn't left.
| triyambakam wrote:
| That sounds pretty prideful, attributing what is also
| somewhat luck to your perfect insight. No amount of
| "understanding of business and internal politics" can
| prevent it. But it is better than being ignorant to it all.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I don't read it like that. Some people have a spidey
| sense for this sort of thing. I've only ever been laid
| off in my life twice. The first time I was completely
| blind-sided, because on a the Wednesday you have an all-
| hands meeting and see your name on the org chart the CEO
| puts up, and on Thursday they decide on a different
| direction. The second time was quite recent, but I
| already had one foot out the door, was actively
| interviewing, but the lay off came a little sooner than
| expected. Some people just pick up on the natural ebb and
| flow of a business and can sense when the winds are
| changing. I am as dumb as a box of rocks in most regards,
| but I have a good sense of when an organization is
| beginning to shift under my feet and no longer feels like
| a good place to stand.
|
| To add a differentiator between laid off and fired, I've
| been fired twice in my life, once after I quit (toxic
| manager), and once when I refused to do something clearly
| illegal (another toxic manager).
| tessierashpool wrote:
| how can you be fired after you quit? that's like somebody
| murdering you after you died. I'm all for asynchronous
| communication but some things are unavoidably sequential.
| ardit33 wrote:
| Give two weeks notice, and get shown the door that day?
| gnicholas wrote:
| It also seems to conflate 'laid off' with 'fired', which
| makes it a little harder to understand. Is GP saying he
| would have been fired (for cause?) at these jobs? Or is
| this just using the term 'fired' in the colloquial sense
| of 'involuntarily terminated, for whatever reason'?
| cyberlurker wrote:
| It can mitigate the chance of being laid off. Keeping
| your head down and working hard isn't enough anymore.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| It never was. If everyone else is doing that then your
| value is a commodity. At some point soft skills and other
| differentiators come into play most of the time.
| ghaff wrote:
| Certainly awareness of your performance, your
| relationship with your manager, what's happening with the
| company/your project etc. all may send signals that it's
| time to start looking elsewhere. But sometimes executive
| decisions happen without a lot of warning. And sometimes,
| to the point of a lot of the discussion here, something
| may be affecting the sector as a whole (or wider) so it
| may not be easy to find another position. A lot of people
| who post here seem to assume that getting a new job is
| something you send a few emails about and expect to get
| deluged with interview offers. That's not true of many
| people even today and certainly isn't true at all during
| downturns.
| nvarsj wrote:
| I've had a similar experience. It's usually obvious to all
| the ground floor engineers when the building is on fire.
| I've left roles twice where shortly after there were large
| layoffs, including a fairly well known startup a couple
| years ago. My motivation is usually because I can see the
| company can't be saved and I'm burned out trying.
| oreally wrote:
| Flex aside, anything you can share?
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Let me continue this train of thought even further. Your last
| sentence nails it. Even a firing for "performance" is not
| necessarily an indicator that the candidate before you would
| be a low performer _at your company_.
|
| Sometimes, people are fired for "performance," when what that
| really means is "new manager/tech lead didn't like them."
| Interview enough people and you'll see this at some point.
| Sometimes, low performers in one environment are star
| performers in another. This is what happens when founders are
| replaced by more experienced executives, among other
| scenarios. Sometimes, people with impressive credentials (PhD
| + significant publications + previous experience, for
| instance) will completely bomb your interview because they
| can't figure out which of their language of choice's
| container types is suitable to the task. I literally
| interviewed that candidate once. Sometimes, people are fired
| for straight up illegal reasons that have nothing to do with
| performance. (This literally happened to me at a big company
| you've probably all heard of and used their product.)
|
| As a company and an interviewer, the best thing for all
| involved is for you to have a structured process with which
| to evaluate all candidates for a given position, and follow
| it. No interview process is perfect at either selecting good
| candidates or rejecting bad ones, but if you have and follow
| a structured process, at least you should get _consistent_
| results out of your interview process, and you can calibrate
| your hiring bar from there. I don 't want to go into much
| more detail regarding "structured processes," but if you
| search on HN for u/tokenadult's hiring comment _cum_
| copypasta (albeit an _informative_ copypasta), most of what
| 's there still holds true according to the best and most
| current research on hiring.
| folkhack wrote:
| > It is dangerous that people consider layoff as a
| performance indicator for the employee.
|
| Hard agree.
|
| I've hired high performers from dumb layoff situations like
| start-ups going belly-up, companies resizing, contracts
| getting prematurely terminated, etc. I wouldn't consider a
| layoff a negative metric unless the interviewee outright
| admitted "they were trying to get rid of me."
|
| I'm always shocked when people bring it up as signal vs.
| noise in regards to interviews.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| There's also always the possibility that someone is
| struggling in a role or company or project, bored and
| unmotivated or burned out, and they will be amazing for you
| in the role you need.
|
| And it's also possible they were actually high performing
| in their last role but they managed to bruise someone's ego
| and wound up first on the layoff list as a result.
|
| There is just way more to firings and layoffs than
| performance.
| ghaff wrote:
| People also are only fungible to a point (depending on
| role). If a company makes organizational or directional
| changes and the role someone was hired into doesn't
| really exist any longer, there's no guarantee that they
| can do a very different role equally well and/or that the
| company will necessarily be interested in making a person
| who would never have been hired into that role from the
| outside work out somehow just because they're with the
| company already.
|
| Mind you. Companies can do more with internal
| development/retraining and institutional knowledge is a
| thing especially with large organizations. But, at some
| point, no one's going to be happy.
| varispeed wrote:
| This also depends on the definition of "performance". A top
| performer at one company may be considered useless at
| another. It all depends on who they hired. Then of course you
| can have poor management - someone may not be great a context
| switching and if manager keep asking to look at different
| stuff every day or if there is a ton of junior developers
| needing help with everything, then you may not have mental
| capacity to do quality work on the stuff you are measured by.
| refurb wrote:
| Agree 100%. I've been through 4 layoffs so far and while
| there is _some_ correlation with performance, politics still
| dominates layoff decisions especially at more senior levels.
|
| You can be at the top of the layoff list for nothing more
| than voicing your criticism of company strategy at some
| random meeting.
|
| I've seen very talented VPs go from "hero" to "zero" in the
| span of a month when the CEO decides to change direction and
| concludes those people aren't "aligned with the new direction
| of the company".
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I wouldn't worry about it - it's internet message board know-
| it-all syndrome.
|
| Layoffs are financial and political decisions. Sometimes
| people layoff idiots when given the chance, other times they
| layoff the smartest people to protect their friends. I
| consulted at a bank where a SVP would reorganize non-core
| business units into his org specifically to meet his
| reduction target while minimizing business impact. Those
| people were cannon fodder from day 1.
|
| Hiring is the same way. If you only hire pristine resumes
| without gaps, you're selecting for survivors - not the same
| as performers. It's more of a statement about the hirer-er
| than hire-ee.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > I consulted at a bank where a SVP would reorganize non-
| core business units into his org specifically to meet his
| reduction target while minimizing business impact.
|
| You never know when you need a sacrificial lamb, eh.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| > It's more of a statement about the hirer-er than hire-ee.
|
| Yep. Before the IPO the task came up to increase our
| development team size to 200 people, cause "people would
| rather invest money in 200 developers than in 30". We would
| hire anybody who was able to _say anything sapient_ about
| the task "insert an element into a double-linked list" (and
| were amazed when 80% of applicants were unable to pass this
| simple barrier).
|
| On the other hand - when layoffs came they were rather
| reasonable and the worst people were let go. (None of them
| were among the people who passed the above-mentioned
| barrier though).
| adriand wrote:
| > insert an element into a double-linked list
|
| I've been programming professionally for 20+ years and I
| had to look this data structure up. Granted, once I
| reviewed it, node insertion is trivial, but I hope you
| gave applicants that opportunity. Or perhaps your line of
| work commonly deals with stuff like this.
|
| I've spent my career in web and mobile product
| development, usually with a business focus of some kind,
| and it still surprises me sometimes how little I've used
| certain topics from college, like mathematics. I think
| most of the math I've used I likely learned by grade 6.
| InefficientRed wrote:
| Leetcode interviewing is a hot mess, but "insert an
| element into a double-linked list" is _literally_ high
| school computer science.
|
| More importantly, having the general problem solving
| skillset to reason through this problem in 20-30 minutes
| seems super important to many aspects of front-end
| development...
| lukeck wrote:
| Similarly to the person you're replying to, I needed to
| confirm that a doubly linked list is what I thought it
| was because for me, high school and college were decades
| ago. I just haven't had to use that knowledge in many
| years of professional development. Now I've refreshed my
| memory on the data structure, inserting an element is
| straightforward. In other words, the harder bit for me is
| the boring trivia of what is the data structure with this
| name, while the far more interesting questions how do you
| use it and what are its advantages and disadvantages are
| easy. I would expect that a good interview would focus on
| the more interesting parts.
| InefficientRed wrote:
| Probing for information and not being too afraid of
| "looking dumb" to ask foundational questions about the
| assignment are, in fact, part of what's assessed in a
| leetcode-style question. If we're honest, that's probably
| more important than the actual problem.
|
| At most places I've interviewed, _each_ interview
| question is a 25 minute - 30 minute session. Since white-
| boarding the solution takes perhaps 5-10 minutes max, in
| this case, there 's plenty of budget to refresh
| definitions and provide a clean interface from which the
| actual task begins.
|
| Critiquing "insert into DLL" as an unreasonable question
| does a disservice to the "less leetcode" position :(
| acheron wrote:
| I don't know what high school you went to, but "literally
| high school computer science" at my school was "here's
| how to format a business letter in Microsoft Works".
| InefficientRed wrote:
| I know only because I volunteer in AP CS classrooms.
| Linked Lists are covered fairly early in the course.
| Doubly linked list insertion is one of the standard
| reversed classroom (?) labs in one of those teacher's
| courses (but not others; we spent more time on trees in
| one class and one of the teachers was quite bad and spent
| a hilarious quantity of time on String.format). The kids
| do just fine in an hour or so.
|
| My high school did not offer CS except as an independent
| study (you could technically do anything as an
| independent study, so "offer" is shorthand for "convince
| a teacher to let you sit in their classroom during
| planning period").
|
| There have existed high school CS courses since the 80s.
| (The AP CS exam was introduced in 1984.)
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I was laid off once because the company I worked for went out
| of business. So there's that. Although maybe some would say
| it was my fault for not programming better so that the
| company stayed in business?
| Animats wrote:
| I was never laid off, but I once quit three weeks before a
| company went out of business. When I heard that someone's
| paycheck had bounced, I was out of there.
| izzydata wrote:
| Unless your company was 4 people that is an unreasonable
| expectation.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| It's almost as if every human being is complex, multifaceted,
| and always growing. Perhaps every one of us who's
| interviewing and writing perf reviews would benefit from
| questioning a system that tries to reduce human beings to a
| handful of sentences on a CV.
|
| On the other hand... grinding LeetCode is way more
| measurable. ;)
| Blackstone4 wrote:
| But but but...they have a gap in their resume/CV....can't
| possibly hire them...bad...bad
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| They've had decades to question this the moment researchers
| came out with evidence of the complexity of the entire
| matter, and the status quo failing to capture any of said
| complexity. 'Intuition' has still reigned till this day
| regardless.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Working in crypto you accepted this risk with open eyes.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| One of my best engineers came from a layoff. He stayed with us
| until the end. I know he went on (after being laid off from our
| company) to do pretty intense stuff.
|
| Good with math. He was trained as a physicist.
| hintymad wrote:
| > For the past several years tech companies were desperate to
| hire because everyone was growing and the hiring market was
| tight.
|
| I'd rather categorize it as for the past several years the
| managers in tech companies seize the chance to inflate their
| teams to boost their careers at the cost of their companies,
| while the leadership in those companies are just too
| incompetent to tell separate the Wheat from the chaff. It's not
| their money, after all. I mean, why the hell does DocuSign need
| 7000+ people? Why the funk did Uber need to build their own
| Slack? Why in whoever's name does Uber's ATG need to hire >
| 2000 people under two years to build a research project? Why
| did Coinbase need to have > 3000 people to build a god damn
| crypto exchange? Incompetence is just not enough to explain
| these jokers.
|
| And the crown of the crowns, of course and again, goes to Uber:
| they think that k8s wouldn't scale yet their in-house crap
| would beat the k8s community and therefore they hire a freaking
| organization to build their own resource scheduler, as if Uber
| has "internet scale". Yeah, right.
| foobiekr wrote:
| In December of 2000, I went to a company all hands. This was a
| company in the networking industry, a high flyer, and a day or
| two before the meeting the CEO of the biggest player in the
| space, Cisco, announced that they were experiencing the biggest
| slowdown the company had ever seen, and the biggest slowdown
| that any of the members of the board of directors had ever
| seen. They were warning that they may miss, and they were even
| broaching the topic of having a massive inventory write-down
| (which, later, they would: $2B+ of written off inventory).
|
| At the meeting, our CEO announced that he wasn't seeing any of
| this, that it was a Cisco problem, and that it was an indicator
| that we were even winning! Of course, a number of our customers
| were on the brink of declaring bankruptcy, including Cable and
| Wireless and a few others. Worldcom was about to happen.
|
| Of course, our CEO said, not only weren't we laying off, we
| were going to accelerate hiring, and we did. No layoffs
| planned, more heads to take more of the market!
|
| We did accelerate hiring. Our group almost doubled in the next
| three months with more reqs opened. One day in early April, I
| was the last interviewer for a candidate who had done really
| well and was walking the guy out. Normally at the time we'd
| make an offer on the spot if the interview was positive enough,
| we would do incremental round-tables in those days as we went,
| and this one was positive, so I was a little confused. We
| happened to walk by my manager's office as we I was seeing him
| out - were on our way to the elevator. He rushed to join us as
| and had positive things to day on the way down by gave me a
| look. We said goodbye and my manager says, "Yeah, there's a
| hiring freeze as of a few minutes ago, so all reqs closed."
|
| A month later, the CEO denied any layoffs were pending or
| planned, but suggested that we do a prayer at the company all
| hands in April. To pray for... something? Worldcom not to go
| bankrupt? I don't quite remember, I was so shocked. Very
| explicitly, the CEO promised: "no layoffs are planned." And
| then, about a month later, the company did its first ever
| layoff.
|
| And this brings me to the point. New companies - and there are
| a lot of them this round just like there were going into 2001 -
| suck at almost everything. They don't know what they're doing
| and they do a lot of idiotic stuff. I've worked at companies
| that peanut butter the layoff, that try and cut functions, that
| target non-human expenses first (such as HW prototypes or
| expected builds for labs or server farms), companies that
| target engineering first (or specific engineering disciplines,
| like ASICs or new boxes, where the project can, in theory if
| not reality, be put into hibernation for a bit), that target
| customer support or marketing first, and even one that targeted
| sales first (because there weren't any). New companies that
| have not done it before get stupid.
|
| This layoff was the first ever for the company, and they had
| absolutely no fucking idea what they were doing. What actually
| happened for about half of the managers was they wanted around
| the cube area at 9am in the morning and did a sort of "duck
| duck go" in their heads, and when they approached someone they
| decided to lay them off or not based on whether they appeared
| instantaneously busy. To this day a friend who was at the same
| company swears that when his manager came to lay him off, "can
| you talk for a few minutes?" he survived entirely because he
| told the guy to go away because he was incredibly busy on
| something another team needed and could talk in an hour or two.
|
| So yeah, don't judge people by layoffs from small or new
| (years) companies. Judge each candidate by what they do and can
| do and what they've done, not that they ended up on the wrong
| side of the layoff.
| jameshart wrote:
| Also just pruning projects, products and divisions that aren't
| panning out as well as others. In simple economic turns, when
| interest rates are low, investments with relatively low returns
| can make sense. So initiatives get staffed even if the expected
| value of their payoff is marginal.
|
| When interest rates go up, there are low risk ways to get those
| same returns, so business expectations of ROI go up.
|
| So projects that made sense, were being run well, but which
| simply aren't likely to make high enough returns are going to
| get canned in these conditions. No reflection of the staff laid
| off in such a case at all.
| sharadov wrote:
| Making the statement that companies are laying off
| "underperforming" employees is a gross assumption - I got laid
| off with 25% of the workforce at a pre-ipo company that raised
| 550 million USD. Most large layoffs are happening at pre-ipo
| companies which raised a ton of money in 2020/2021 and were
| hoping to go public.
|
| Unfortunately the tables turned since Feb 2022, investors want
| them to tighten belts and reduce cash burn.
| TimPC wrote:
| There are some layoffs but from what I've seen so far hiring
| salaries are not coming down. This to me speaks of a subset of
| tech companies slowing down rather than a general crash. There
| are plenty of companies still hiring and hiring at top rates.
| It seems like half of all the layoffs are in crypto which is a
| typical response to the underlying assets dropping 80+%. The
| remainder seem to be companies that are over reliant on debt-
| based capital responding to higher interest rates.
|
| To get the tech slowdown you're proposing the higher interest
| rates will have to shake out through all of venture capital and
| start-up money will have to tighten up.
| dc-programmer wrote:
| Keynes had a theory that wages are sticky-down meaning they
| rarely decrease.
|
| My guess is tech salaries will stagnate for a while. But with
| poor performance of RSUs and inflation eating into purchasing
| power this will essentially be a pay cut.
| tech_tuna wrote:
| Not only RSUs but stock options as well. I've always
| pushed/leaned/fought for a higher base over more options. I
| prefer a bird in the hand.
|
| However, if your timing is good and risk tolerance is high,
| taking more options over a higher base can work out quite
| well.
| dc-programmer wrote:
| Options do not seem like real wages to me because unlike
| RSUs I've never been able to translate them to cash.
| You're totally right. And with future expected value of
| options decreasing (and RSUs), base is more important
| than ever.
| TimPC wrote:
| Base is important but tricky to get a large proportion
| of. You can negotiate some increase in base but if you
| want to go too aggressively getting a lot of it will
| lower total comp. The fact is companies pay base with
| cash on hand and pay options by issuing new shares.
| Issuing new shares doesn't feel like real money in the
| same way to a lot of corporations so they are happier to
| do that. I agree markers are currently on a downward
| trend but I think RSUs are still a valuable portion of
| compensation. Even if they end up worth only 70% of their
| initial value you can get a larger total comp from a mix
| of RSUs and base than just base.
|
| Options on the other hand are largely vapour in modern
| markets. Many start-ups are electing to stay private for
| time periods exceeding fifteen years. They fully expect
| most employees to not be able to afford the options they
| get because of the tax implications combined with limited
| ability to sell. Some services exist to try and alleviate
| this problem although most do so imperfectly and take a
| large premium for the risk and uncertain time window for
| the shares to become publicly tradeable. These days I
| mostly don't bother looking at companies that can only
| offer options because they generally aren't willing to
| offer a high enough base to compensate. I'd far prefer
| $200k base and $200k RSUs to $300k base and $100k of
| uncertain options. The first offer is far easier to find
| than the second as very few start-ups are willing to
| raise base to compensate people for the lack of liquidity
| in their options.
| lumost wrote:
| depressed RSUs will likely act as a compensation
| adjustment. If your compensation is 50% RSU, and RSU's fall
| by half - then you have a 25% pay cut. With the recent
| market turbulence some have seen close to a 50% cut due to
| RSU price declines.
| mech422 wrote:
| >> Much of this is due to the reversal of the tight hiring
| market.
|
| No idea where you are, but I'm not seeing any reversal at my
| job or in positions listed...
|
| Personally, I think the layoffs are due to tech companies not
| hitting profit numbers the investors expected. Just like the PC
| market, seems people expected Amazon, FB, Netflix, etc to keep
| growing at 20+% yoy.
| nojito wrote:
| Most tech companies were growing through manufactured growth
| due to how cheap it was to get capital.
| indymike wrote:
| > For the past several years tech companies were desperate to
| hire because everyone was growing and the hiring market was
| tight.
|
| Recruitment Tech founder here. The job market is still tight.
| There are two open jobs for every available person. Source: Fed
| Chair Jermaine Powell. This means you lay off, someone else
| will hire quickly.
|
| > However, many of these layoffs are single-digit percentage
| layoffs from companies that are still hiring across the board.
| That's not so much a traditional layoff as a pruning of the
| workforce.
|
| 100% this is the story. The pruning seems to take two forms:
| classic "underperformance" and, as much as I hate this, people
| who just won't come back to the office, or have moved to lower
| cost areas and will not accept a pay cut.
| rank0 wrote:
| > or have moved to lower cost areas and will not accept a pay
| cut.
|
| Why would anyone accept a pay cut if their job is remote? I
| get it if location based pay is used for jobs that require in
| person. But how can the employer have it both ways? Why would
| the employer want to subsidize more expensive lifestyles for
| a remote position?
| indymike wrote:
| > Why would anyone accept a pay cut if their job is remote?
|
| People are not accepting cuts and that is leading to
| positions being eliminated (layoffs) as employers are
| realizing they can pay sometimes 50% less than their high
| cost of living area wages.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| Because the people making hiring decisions are mostly
| located in high cost of living areas, which is why I'm
| skeptical they'll succeed with it much longer.
| indymike wrote:
| > Because the people making hiring decisions are mostly
| located in high cost of living areas,
|
| Cutting costs usually lets those people get bigger
| bonuses, so the incentive is towards forcing the issue.
| pm90 wrote:
| > I get it if location based pay is used for jobs that
| require in person. But how can the employer have it both
| ways? Why would the employer want to subsidize more
| expensive lifestyles for a remote position?
|
| Employers don't pay high because CoL is high; they pay what
| the market allows them to pay.
| Kye wrote:
| How many of those openings are real, and how many are fig
| leaves to meet policy requirements before hiring internally
| or to get some benefit for "job creators"?
| indymike wrote:
| I'm not aware of a program that awards "job creators" for
| saying they have an opening. For example, most tax credits
| for creating jobs require increased headcount and or
| increases in pay on payroll tax returns.
|
| The system used to get demand numbers is a survey, and has
| been done the same way for decades, so it's pretty reliable
| compared to counting job ads on job boards. Job ads often
| will contain lots of duplicates (search spam) and fake
| jobs.
| grey-area wrote:
| This is entirely down to the recession and rising interest
| rates.
|
| Companies are adjusting for future earnings falling and the
| cost of money going up.
| [deleted]
| marktangotango wrote:
| > the companies who simply collected too many under performing
| employees can afford to churn some of them back out of the
| company. Doing it as a "layoff" makes it more palatable than
| going on a firing spree.
|
| Seems to me this implies that companies that do this, have
| found a way effectively measure performance and productivity. I
| don't think OP intends to say this, it is pretty much
| impossible to measure productivity of individual developers. I
| mean those on the team know who is or isn't contributing from
| day to day, but among teams and over time it is much more
| difficult. If someone has figured this out they should be a
| $billionaire by now.
|
| I'd go further and counter that this is completely bogus claim,
| and yes, no one hiring should view a candidate being laid off
| as being related to anything performance or desirability of the
| candidate.
|
| In my experience, layoffs are merely a popularity contest.
| otterley wrote:
| It is absolutely possible to calculate engineering
| productivity at the product level. The arithmetic is very
| simple. It's far more difficult at the individual level,
| though.
| mattm wrote:
| What is the arithmetic?
| marktangotango wrote:
| Thank you. This is precisely my point.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Exactly - companies that layoff due to careless over hiring do
| not use surgical precision when laying off.
| 1024core wrote:
| Isn't there some site called "Dead Company" or something like
| that which keeps track of layoffs? Or am I thinking of the 2002
| dotcom crash...
|
| Edit: oh right, thanks @blakesterz, it was called "Fucked
| Company"
| blakesterz wrote:
| Yep!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
| agotterer wrote:
| There's https://layoffs.fyi which is keeping tally
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| cgb223 wrote:
| Is anyone keeping a running tally of these on a website
| somewhere?
| pavlov wrote:
| In 2001's post-dot-com apocalypse there was fuckedcompany.com
| for this purpose... Maybe they'll do a comeback.
|
| Seems like Fucked Company is officially preserved by the
| Library of Congress because... September 11? Huh.
|
| A profanity-laden title on a dot-gov site always manages to
| surprise:
|
| https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0020126/
| smoe wrote:
| This site made the rounds in the beginning of the pandemic for
| the layoff wave back then. Still seems to be actively tracking
| on a quick glance
|
| https://layoffs.fyi/
| felideon wrote:
| The screenshot in the tweet is from
| https://www.trueup.io/layoffs
| DanAtC wrote:
| layoffstracker.com has an RSS feed which is fun to throw into
| work Slack channels: https://layoffstracker.com/feed/
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| There are millions of tech employees so the number of layoffs is
| minuscule so far.
| ralph84 wrote:
| From the Great Resignation to the Great Layoff. For the first
| time in 50 years workers started to have some leverage on
| employers and it only took a few months for the coordinated
| response to shut it down.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > coordinated response
|
| are you saying companies are coordinating their layoffs?
| Chinjut wrote:
| The Fed is certainly working to punish labor, by their own
| statements.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I wonder how many of these companies are actually having issues
| versus the number who are pre-emptively cutting loose people that
| they believe they can lose should the market actually turn.
| mtoner23 wrote:
| tbh, 16k jobs in these overvalued industries isn't much. We are
| adding hundreds of thousands of jobs in real industries every
| month. Places that make things that people want.
|
| Tesla is kind of the exception to this but aren't there always
| layoffs there? seems par for the course.
| dhzhzjsbevs wrote:
| > in real industries
|
| riplol
| themitigating wrote:
| It's amazing how for some people hatred of the political
| opposite causes glee when tech companies fail and people lose
| their jobs. People who may not be political and who probably
| need their job.
|
| All of this being done on internet forums and social media
| produced and managed by those same people.
| dhzhzjsbevs wrote:
| I don't blame em. Tech has always thought of itself as a
| bunch of snowflakes.
|
| Reality is, yes, it's a new industry, but no, it's not
| special.
|
| Every other industry I've been exposed to has all the same
| bullshit office politics. The same supposed "in jokes" that
| only "their industry" would understand.
| mtoner23 wrote:
| The world will get by if we have fewer coinbases, SaaS
| companies and other tech jobs. If we have fewer factories,
| oil refineries, meat packing plants; there will be shortages
| and riots.
| fatjokes wrote:
| I mean, hopefully some of those tech jobs are making those
| oil refineries, factories, meat packing plants more
| efficient.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Then they're in a "real" industry. How many of them are
| actually doing that?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I was recently interviewing for a lot of jobs (20 or
| more) and most of them were in "real" industries. Making
| factories more efficient, improving logistics, tools for
| various laboratory facilities to work more consistently
| and efficiently, etc.
|
| Around 75% of what I encountered touched real products,
| workers, and production directly.
|
| It seems like there is plenty of that kind of tech out
| there and in development right now.
|
| The other 4 or 5 companies were strictly internet
| related, selling digital products to people doing things
| on computers.
|
| I'm not sure if I encountered that because that's a
| reasonable representation of what's out there right now.
| I do know I prefer work where I get to support real
| people doing real things, so to speak. In any case, there
| are definitely roles like this out there and plenty of
| companies hiring.
| igobyterry wrote:
| I'm in agreement with you.
|
| I know the people who were laid off were passionate about what
| they were working on - and this was a big disruption to their
| life.
|
| But when I see some of these layoffs, my immediate thought is:
|
| 1.) Who is this company and how did they have so many people?
|
| 2.) OK, that industry experienced a COVID boon (edtech,
| mortgages)
|
| 3.) Taking advantage of others laying off people to get rid of
| poor performers
|
| Netflix laying off employees; I'm sorry, but Netflix is mostly
| a catalog of garbage at an ever increasing cost, with
| legitimate competitors at this point.
| YZF wrote:
| Right. The same site from which this is taken shows ~400k open
| tech positions. That ratio is pretty decent.
|
| Didn't Elon just say how Tesla's software needs more work? How
| is he going to do that without software engineers? Is Tesla
| even laying off software people or other employees? As a model
| 3 owner, the mobile app sucks, the in-car UI/UX which was
| cutting edge is now falling behind, let's not talk about auto-
| pilot/self-driving. They should be desperate for better
| software people.
|
| The one common thing about "overvalued" companies is that they
| either need to show strong growth or their stock is going to be
| decimated. Management often looks at headcount as proxy of
| growth (I'd argue that's not always correct but that's a
| different question). It's extremely dangerous for the stock
| price of these "overvalued" companies to do massive layoffs
| both in term of further hurting the short term and a big impact
| on the long term. If they have plenty of cash they can and
| should be looking forward. That said this can be a reasonable
| excuse to offload some lower performing employees or adjust
| some priorities.
| sfo_suger_daddy wrote:
| More isn't a replacemnet for better
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > Places that make things that people want.
|
| Please ignore the man behind the curtain.
| themitigating wrote:
| "real industries"?
|
| What is a real industry to you? Farming done by migrant, mostly
| illegal workers, or machines? Manufacturing of goods that
| mostly happens in China?
| mtoner23 wrote:
| a real industry makes things that people want. Farming,
| mining, chinese manufacturing. Coinbase is a glitch in our
| regulations on the other hand and we shouldn't be wasting our
| brightest minds on convincing people to sign up for accounts.
| akavi wrote:
| Is Flexport part of a real industry? Is Stripe? Is Gusto?
|
| Just because something is not physical, doesn't mean it's
| not valuable.
| puranjay wrote:
| Not to be a luddite, but a ton of tech ventures now straddle
| the edge of value addition to society. Value might be
| subjective, but its hard to see how a NFT marketplace is as
| valuable to society as, say, a tractor factory or steel
| plant.
| supernovae wrote:
| Netflix isn't an NFT and just because they have competition
| now doesn't devalue them as first mover with millions of
| subs.
| esotericimpl wrote:
| wpietri wrote:
| For sure. The unicorn era is characterized by an oversupply
| of venture capital that gets spent well in advance of
| proportionate proof of utility. E.g., Theranos and WeWork.
| Or pretty much the whole [1] of the metastasizing
| crytpowhatever space. Layoffs in nonproductive companies
| are good, IMHO. And the sooner the better, as the longer
| someone spends in a bubble, the harder it is for them to
| adapt when the bubble pops.
|
| [1] Not your personal favorite, of course. That one's the
| pony in there somewhere.
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/12/13/pony-somewhere/
| IanDrake wrote:
| themitigating wrote:
| I find those to be exceptions to most companies in our
| economy. Construction of housing, food, medicine, water,
| army/police are your base levels.
|
| An NFT marketplace is a similar to gambling or derivatives.
| The value is potential income for people.
| mellavora wrote:
| "value" is an ambiguous word. I think you understand it
| as "something people are willing to put money into",
| which certainly covers gambling.
|
| Another definition of "value" is something which
| increased the economic output, a positive-sum game. Thus
| gambling (which is zero-sum) does not create value.
|
| Derivatives do create value in the second sense, in that
| they can be used to protect against risk, thus creating
| value (or allowing the creation of value). Yes, they can
| also be used for the equivalent of gambling, but they
| have additional uses.
| wpietri wrote:
| Just to be clear, gambling is a net societal negative.
| For every dollar that goes in, less than a dollar in
| income comes out. It's going to happen, but let's not
| pretend that it's value-creating.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > An NFT marketplace is a similar to gambling or
| derivatives.
|
| Derivatives have real utility.
| [deleted]
| dannyphantom wrote:
| I find the comments here somewhat reassuring but my anxiety is
| through the roof; I feel as though I would be on the chopping
| block in the event of a layoff. It's one thing to hear that
| you're doing a good job by your team and manager but when you
| _keep_ hearing announcements & reading about layoffs elsewhere it
| really erodes away at your confidence.
| bartvk wrote:
| Same here. This week, I made an overview of my cashflow, should
| my current client no longer need me. I'll be fine but still
| these layoff news items are worrying me.
| tonymet wrote:
| Tech leadership is using scare tactics to panic the workforce and
| drive down wages. Less than a year ago the same companies were
| blowing billions on stock buybacks. No one know's the future.
| matt321 wrote:
| I frequently read these and look at which areas exactly are
| getting dumped. I've have never read an article that said
| engineers are getting laid off. Most layoffs I see are overhead.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| I wonder the same. Is it actually technical talent, or is it
| other functions like sales, marketing, recruiting etc?
| gdulli wrote:
| The quote from Rounders about not realizing you're the sucker
| at the table, but it's about not realizing that you're the
| overhead.
| mathverse wrote:
| Nobody can make any relevant conclusion here the same way nobody
| can really predict if we are in recession or we are heading to
| one. This is again one of those where HN does not know anything
| about anything where $500k and $50k engineers talk about their
| bubbles.
| [deleted]
| scifibestfi wrote:
| The era of cheap money is over. Interest rates can't come down
| without making inflation worse. The tide is going out and we're
| starting to see what was real or not. Crypto got wiped out and
| now the tech and real estate bubbles are popping.
|
| Home Price to Median Household Income Ratio is even worse than
| 2008.
|
| https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...
|
| Redfin and banks have started layoffs as they're seeing demand
| quickly drop with mortgage rate increases.
|
| Savings have dried up.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVE
|
| Consumer debt is at an all time high.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCLACBW027SBOG
|
| We're in the early stages and I fear we're looking at a
| combination of the dot com crash + 2008, but longer lasting
| because the Fed won't be able to bail us out this time.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| +1 I totally agree with you: the US government has been
| printing money (if you will allow an imprecise analogy) like
| crazy to prop up property values and stock equities. I don't
| know anyone who thinks that the future will be anywhere as good
| as 1990-2015 (even allowing for 2001 and 2007-2008 downturns).
|
| Both political parties service wall street and our defense
| industry, not regular people and don't really care about
| inflation and other problems that slam the poor and lower
| middle class. Printing money is good for the republican's and
| democrat's constituents (the elites).
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| And yet the dollar is getting stronger relative to other
| currencies.
|
| This whole "government printing money" framing is very wrong.
|
| The government was printing money and it led to tremendous
| growth. In other words, the economy was able to absorb the
| money which meant the money printing was absolutely
| appropriate.
|
| However, we had several external supply side shocks due to
| the pandemic, and Russia's war on Ukraine, which drove the
| cost of goods higher. Since the US government cannot really
| stop Russia from killing civilians in Ukraine, or force China
| to get rid of its zero COVID policy, or single handedly fix
| the logistical breakdowns in all the shipping lines, etc, it
| has to rely on the only tool it has, which is cooling the
| economy. In essence, it's solving a supply chain shock with a
| demand side response, because that's all it controls.
|
| In fact, the fact that the Fed had kept interest rates low
| and "printed money" meant that it has a lot of leeway to
| actually tackle this situation right now without causing too
| much pain. After several significant increases, the target
| rate is still 1.5-1.75, which takes us back to what the Fed
| had reduced it to during the peak of the 2008 crisis.
|
| Which means that thanks to its policies, the Fed still has a
| lot of room to help control inflation without causing too
| much pain, something which wouldn't have been possible if it
| had prematurely raised rates earlier.
| kmlx wrote:
| > However, we had several external supply side shocks due
| to the pandemic, and Russia's war on Ukraine, which drove
| the cost of goods higher.
|
| just a sec. huge inflation started before Russia's war. and
| it was due to the government printing huge amounts. the
| politicians miscalculated and we're paying the price.
| Russia's war just confirmed things will be bad, it was not
| the precursor, no matter what the politicians are saying.
|
| https://news.sky.com/story/amp/us-inflation-hits-fresh-
| four-...
|
| > And yet the dollar is getting stronger relative to other
| currencies.
|
| this is because the US dollar is considered a safe haven
| asset. especially in a global recession.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Dollar is getting stronger because other countries either
| had similar irresponsible policies or are a shitstorm for
| different reasons. All things considered, the US, with its
| world-dominating and extremely robust economy, is the
| safest bet for weathering the storm, and so the whole world
| buys dollars to invest in the US.
| ascendantlogic wrote:
| > Crypto got wiped out
|
| Crypto is in another winter cycle. We've seen this before. The
| interest rate/inflation story had a part to play in that but
| this is a normal market cycle for this sector.
|
| > now the tech and real estate bubbles are popping.
|
| I don't think the real estate bubble has "popped", rather
| cooling off from the massively overheated valuations in 2021. I
| don't see a cratering of existing home values (yet).
|
| > I fear we're looking at a combination of the dot com crash +
| 2008
|
| Turn off the news that spends all its time trying to convince
| you the sky is falling 24/7.
| mellavora wrote:
| > Crypto is in another winter cycle. We've seen this before.
| The interest rate/inflation story had a part to play in that
| but this is a normal market cycle for this sector.
|
| Curious. What do you see as the forces which drive a crypto
| market cycle? What is a normal crypto market cycle?
|
| As an illustration, Ray Dalio talks about short-term debt
| cycles as driving the economy; where the debt is (hopefully)
| linked to investment in activities which increase the
| economic outputs.
|
| Or a business cycle is "business cycles are marked by the
| alternation of the phases of expansion and contraction in
| aggregate economic activity,... the aggregate measures of
| industrial production, employment, income, and sales, which
| are the key coincident economic indicators used for the
| official determination of U.S. business cycle peak and trough
| dates."
|
| For crypto, I don't see anything more than simple
| supply/demand, and it is really unclear what drives that
| besides pure speculation.
|
| If it is just driven by speculation, then what makes for
| "normal market cycles" in speculation?
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| > If it is just driven by speculation, then what makes for
| "normal market cycles" in speculation?
|
| Miners are rewarded in BTC for keeping the network secure,
| and they sell these BTC to cover operating costs. Every
| four years, the mining rewards are cut in half (per the
| consensus protocol). Miners have less coins to sell, which
| results in a supply shock. The price floor between these
| supply shocks is ostensibly determined by economic activity
| outside of speculation. This has resulted in a repeating
| four-year market cycle. Of course this pattern will only
| continue until it doesn't. You can search "halving" or
| "halvening" for more info.
| https://www.investopedia.com/bitcoin-halving-4843769
| piva00 wrote:
| Miners being rewarded in BTC doesn't explain anything
| about the underlying value of it that would explain a
| boom-bust cycle, miners are just performing the
| validation task but there is nothing else driving demand
| for BTC except for speculation. No real usage for real-
| life transactions, no real usage as a currency.
|
| What exactly would drive demand for BTC except for
| speculation?
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| Parent specifically asked about the four-year market
| cycles and I answered that specific question.
|
| To your more broad question, BTC demand outside
| speculation is driven by economic usage, despite HN's
| doubts. If it wasn't for that, I'd be asking the same
| question about its value. If you're open-minded and
| interested in learning, I've written up answers to that
| question several times.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31932743
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| You mean the comment where your first two contentions
| (about Ukraine donations and PornHub only accepting
| crypto) are shown to be wrong in the first two comments
| that appear for me? Sorry to be snotty here, I guess. But
| the days when I can drive ten minutes and pay for
| groceries or a pizza or cat food or socks in crypto are
| not here. What besides porn, drugs, and I suppose
| donations should I be spending on with crypto as a US
| citizen today?
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| Re: Ukraine. My article was March 23, the second article
| is Apr 28. So suppose they got back online a month later,
| that doesn't mean they've always been online. Just like
| if GitHub is online right now, it doesn't mean they've
| never had any downtime.
|
| > He noted that since "the national bank is not really
| operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers,
| to make it very quick and get results almost
| immediately."
|
| That quote is pretty unambiguous. At least for a time,
| Ukraine benefited from a financial system with no central
| point of failure.
|
| -
|
| Pornhub probably offers different payment methods
| depending on your jurisdiction. I don't know much about
| that industry, I was just quoting a thread from the day
| before where a few people confirmed.
|
| -
|
| You're right that in a first world country, with reliable
| infrastructure, paying for uncontroversial products (note
| uncontroversial != legal), BTC will have more friction.
| Even if BTC is wildly successful, I'll be happy never to
| buy socks with it. But there's lots of adoption in other
| countries, and for fringe products like the ones you
| listed plus VPNs, "water pipes", etc.
|
| And why are you asking for use cases "besides" these?
| That's the problem with these threads. Someone says "no
| use cases", then I list some use cases and cite my
| sources, then the next reply is "actually those don't
| count, please give me even more use cases!" Posting in
| these threads is exhausting.
| [deleted]
| almost_usual wrote:
| > Crypto got wiped out and now the tech and real estate bubbles
| are popping.
|
| Crypto got wiped out but a BTC is still hovering around 20k?
|
| > now the tech and real estate bubbles are popping
|
| I sincerely doubt it, things might slow down and plateau but
| with the cost of everything going up (including rent) people
| will still desire a home with a mostly fixed cost. We also
| haven't seen any massive layoffs yet coming from tech
| companies.
|
| Also if home prices plateau and inflation rips the value of
| those homes are deprecating without price reductions.
| bink wrote:
| Home prices have been rising far faster than inflation. The
| "people will always desire a home" and "plateau" talk is
| straight out of the Realtors playbook and is said before
| every pullback.
|
| People have forgotten what a real estate downturn looks like
| because it's been propped up by the Fed for so long, but in
| the good old days (before 2004 or so) it wasn't uncommon to
| go through periods where the average house took 9-12 months
| to sell and sellers went through 3-4 Realtors before it sold.
| Do the Realtors still say that 6 months is the average time
| to sell or have they forgotten that too?
|
| The fact is that people buy homes based on monthly payment
| and significant rate hikes are something we haven't seen in
| decades. When the monthly payment doubles housing prices go
| down.
| nilkn wrote:
| Monthly payments haven't doubled.
|
| Here's an example. Imagine a $500k house in Texas with a 2%
| property tax rate and $2k/year in home insurance. Suppose a
| hypothetical buyer is putting 20% down.
|
| At a 3% mortgage interest rate, the monthly PITI payment
| would be $2686. At a 6% mortgage interest rate, the monthly
| PITI payment would be $3398.
|
| That's a substantial increase, to be sure, but if payments
| had doubled then it would cost $5372, not $3398.
|
| How high would mortgage interest rates need to be for the
| payment to actually double? Answer: about 12.8%. So
| interest rates would need to more than double from where
| they are today to see actual housing payments double.
| [deleted]
| grumple wrote:
| > Crypto got wiped out but a BTC is still hovering around
| 20k?
|
| Yes, losing 2/3 of your value is getting wiped out.
| almost_usual wrote:
| Still 5x pre-covid March 2019.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Not hovering, gradually dropping.
|
| Crashes are not instantaneous. They occur in patches.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Home Price to Median Household Income Ratio is even worse
| than 2008.
|
| And don't forget, the people that were lucky enough to get
| houses before they became unaffordable have to (somehow) fork
| over the real estate tax on the insane valuations of those
| houses - which newly unemployed folks won't be able to do, so
| there are going to be even more houses for investment firms to
| buy.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| LOL, we aren't even getting started yet!
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| This is interesting. To be honest, I don't see recession as
| much as maybe attempts to trigger it by some companies ( right
| now, it is clear companies are poorly equipped to deal with
| empowered employees ).
|
| Yeah, easy money from FED is drying up for banks ( and various
| companies and rely on access to easy money from banks.. such as
| early tech ), but should that automatically mean crash?
|
| It can still happen. While I am certainly preparing for this
| possibility, I dislike various CEOs saying its coming and media
| trumpets putting it in bold letters.
| mellavora wrote:
| > should that automatically mean crash?
|
| No, not automatic. But it sure increases the likelihood.
|
| Especially after years of cheap money have allowed tremendous
| unproductive investment. It isn't just banks, it is every
| company with access to capital markets.
|
| Unproductive investment made sense when money was free ("easy
| money"), but when money starts to costs, those investments
| get closed down. And the people those investments employed
| become unemployed.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I think we are in agreement here. I found no issue with
| this logic.
| yobbo wrote:
| > Yeah, easy money from FED is drying up for banks
|
| It's impossible to know certainly how much and where it was
| having effect. Housing market was just one place, which
| caused a sort of wealth effect as households' equity
| increased. Stock buybacks might be analogous.
|
| These mechanics have been in play since 2010? Potentially
| alot to roll back.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| 20% of the Russell 3000 are considered Zombie companies.
| Without easy money they will be severely harmed and many will
| go under. And that 20% was based on numbers when debt was
| cheap, no doubt it's even worse as the rate increases keep
| coming.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| What's being measured- is the Y axis # of jobs?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Some companies, before being acquired, go on a hiring spree. I
| guess they do it to bump up the price.
|
| Then, when the deal is closed, there's usually a reorg involving
| massive layoffs, where the most affected people are usually the
| people that just got hired.
| France_is_bacon wrote:
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| These types of things are almost always corrections. A granola
| bar company blows up and hires 500 employees in two years and
| builds out a massive office and gets funding. 2-3 years later the
| same vcs say hey you are not having hockey stick growth. Time to
| cut costs and lay folks off.
|
| At any given point at any major city there are a half a dozen to
| a dozen of those company corrections happening at once. When talk
| of a recession happens a few of the companies that might have
| been given a bit more slack are told to shape up earlier.
|
| So many of these are companies that boomed during covid and now
| are correcting.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| Layoffs are normal and happen every year, and moreso during
| inflation.
|
| Hiring is still hectic. Every company and recruiter I know is
| trying everything they can to find candidates. Our company is
| desperate to hire and we're nothing special.
|
| One of the reasons there's so much hiring going on is a bunch of
| emerging markets have entered the field and are looking to build
| tech products. Another is that the developed world is still awash
| in record corporate profits and have plenty of runway to fund new
| development. But there has been no huge push to get more bodies
| into the labor market in the past 4 years so the numbers are
| still too low. Add to that the onward march of retirement of old
| staff and we're going to be in a hiring crunch for a few more
| years. Companies might actually have to learn to be efficient /
| use a few staff to get more done
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I'll add to my earlier comment [1]
|
| When the cost of capital increases it's bound to have ripple
| effect on an entire generation of startups which were founded
| when money was effectively free (0% interest rate). When it's
| ingrained in companies' DNA that they have to grow at all cost
| you can't then suddenly ask them to start focusing on profit.
| They built this huge structure by ignored fundamentals such as
| cash-flow, unit-economics, business-model (selling $2 for $1).
| Now that they have built this 100 story sky-scrapper they can't
| just go back and fix the foundation. It's going to be a painful
| process.
|
| It's fascinating to trace the genesis of present crash to Fed's
| policies post 2008 crisis. The interest rates were kept
| artificially low to prevent another Great Depression. 2010s saw
| an unprecedented rally of tech/growth stocks, fuelled by cheap
| capital. Growth at all cost was the mantra, hoping companies will
| turn profitable at some point a la Amazon. Uber's CEO hit the
| nail on the head when he wrote "The average employee at Uber is
| barely over 30, which means you've spent your career in a long
| and unprecedented bull run".
|
| There were signs of rate hike in 2019 but COVID forced Fed to
| create trillions of $$. Which only added fuel to the fire;
| equities, housing, crypto saw unbelievable growth.
|
| However the signs of inflation were clear in early-mid 2021 they
| were hoping it to be transitory. But when the inflation data came
| in late 2021 it turned out to be multi-decade high leaving Fed
| with no choice but to raise interest rates for the first time in
| more than a decade.
|
| Which brings us back to growth companies. As Uber's CEO candidly
| stated "Channeling Jerry Maguire, we need to show them the
| money". 2020s will be all about cash flow and efficiency.
|
| On the other hand expect to see cool innovations as it requires
| genuine scarcity to look for out of the box solutions. While
| Amazon's stock soared in 2010s their core tech was being built in
| 2000s while they were relentlessly driving for efficiency.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31369813
| ttul wrote:
| Funny that nobody generated a similar chart as tech firms were
| hiring like crazy over the past two years...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-01 23:01 UTC)