[HN Gopher] Lyft to lay off about 700 employees in second round ...
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Lyft to lay off about 700 employees in second round of job cuts
Author : WFHRenaissance
Score : 339 points
Date : 2022-11-03 15:44 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| [deleted]
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Anyone that was around for the "Turn of the Century Crash" may
| find this familiar.
|
| With all the massive scaleups, companies were becoming bloated as
| hell. They also became fairly sloppy with their money.
|
| Time to pay the piper.
|
| But unlike some bubbles, there's a real industry, here (like in
| the 'oughts). It's a return to a [still pretty decent] baseline,
| as opposed to an implosion to nothing.
|
| In the early Web days, the money started to become silly, and
| people were thronging to the industry, despite having no
| qualifications, and no passion for the tech. They just wanted
| money.
|
| Basically, they were expensive, and they sucked (sound
| familiar?). Most were Web developers, or around the process of
| creating and maintaining Web presence.
|
| Also, some people were very, very good, and some marvelous tools
| came of it.
|
| This is like the Late Devonian extinction. The table needed to be
| cleared off, to give rise to the new.
|
| The company that I worked for, had survived being fire-bombed
| during the war, a major depression, and multiple recessions. They
| were absolute tightwads.
|
| At one point, they started making a whole lot of money, and got
| silly.
|
| Piper, meet company.
|
| They have basically contracted back to what they were. Everyone
| is writing them off, but I'll bet they come out of the scrum, OK.
|
| Same with the tech industry.
| granshaw wrote:
| I was too young then, but did that crash have the same
| "everyone and their mother sees it coming and have been talking
| about it months before" feeling?
|
| Cause this "crash" is surely like that - it has to be the most
| "expected and talked about" one in modern times...
| matwood wrote:
| The .com crash was obvious it was going to happen, but when
| was the problem [1]. Companies were IPOing with no business
| model and no clear path to one. Imagine if the majority of
| the nasdaq was SPACs and crypto...yeah. I wish
| fuckedcompany.com was still around because it cataloged the
| implosion of the insanity.
|
| [1] The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay
| solvent.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| > I wish fuckedcompany.com was still around because it
| cataloged the implosion of the insanity.
|
| Kozmo was the GOAT in the dead pool.
|
| Blows my mind that Kozma's failed business model is back
| and bigger than ever, but with the same fundamental
| profitability problems.
| matwood wrote:
| Haha...I will always remember Flooz [1] as my personal
| 'WTF is going on'?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooz.com
| bombcar wrote:
| They were missing a blockchain!
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Amazon Prime is Kozmo with a profitable version of the
| business model.
| matwood wrote:
| Talk of Kozmo has made me want to peruse failed .com
| companies and see if any of the models could work today.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| I always think of it as more of a DoorDash thing. There
| was that whole partnership with Starbucks immediately
| before the implosion.
| [deleted]
| __s wrote:
| Yes
| daxfohl wrote:
| Plenty of people prognosticating a crash every year since
| 2009 but it never came. Most of us expected a long term crash
| in 2020 but it was a quick rebound. This year seemed like
| something was off but maybe just temporary due to supply
| chains and Ukraine, since spending and employment was still
| strong. I'd not say a crash is written in stone yet.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| The .com eventually became obvious in the last year or so,
| but before that is was 4 years of lunches with ex-coworkers
| in some .com telling me "you just don't get it."
| kerbs wrote:
| I was young too, but I think the .com bust was far more
| obvious than the housing crash which snuck up on a lot of
| people.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I would argue that this is not because it was difficult to
| see coming, but because most people have a bias that makes
| it difficult for them to imagine something that's "normal"
| abruptly coming to an end. This was the era of _" I got a
| loan for this house in 10 minutes. I added granite counter
| tops, mopped the floor, and sold it for a $20k profit in 9
| days."_ type shows.
|
| TV is TV, but that was genuinely happening. The market was
| just completely broken.
| kerbs wrote:
| The part of the housing crash that I was inferring was
| hidden to most was how deep the credit markets were tied
| up in housing, to the point where a housing bust meant
| banks collapsed and all money was frozen.
|
| I was young(ish) at the time, but I imagine some knew
| housing wasn't sustainable. I'm not sure there were many
| outside the stars of The Big Short quite knew how
| vulnerable the entire banking system was because of
| housing before it all came down.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The housing crash was obvious - talk to anyone trying to
| buy a house in 2004 or even 2003. By 2005 or so I had
| friends that were getting cold called with offers of nodoc
| nodown interest only loans.
| kerbs wrote:
| Was it obvious Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers would
| collapse? That Morgan Stanley would need a bailout?
|
| The crisis with the housing criss wasn't that housing
| collapsed, it's that the world economy went along with
| it.
| acdha wrote:
| It wasn't necessarily obvious that specific banks would
| fail but it was obvious that the big guys were playing
| high-risk games and were going to be left with a lot of
| foreclosures or writing off a lot of paper value. This
| was known to basically everyone in the industry, too - I
| briefly considered buying in New Haven in 2008 and got
| mortgage pre-approvals from a few banks. I had an
| interesting conversation with an older loan officer at a
| Connecticut state bank, who was the only one who didn't
| approve me for WAY more than I thought reasonable and
| explained why very matter of factly, and noted that since
| his bank didn't resell the mortgages as CDOs they had to
| be more careful about risk.
| yardie wrote:
| 2001 crash primarily affected tech and finance. Everyone else
| that worked in physical atoms just got on with it and did
| their job.
|
| 2008 crash was different. Literally everyone was over-
| leveraged and swimming debt.
|
| This feels more like the 2001 crash coming than the 2008
| crash. Most of the economy will trundle along while those
| running on VC money will fade away.
| ghaff wrote:
| To be sure the 2001 crash was also mixed in with 9/11 and
| its aftereffects. But, in general, I agree. 2001 was
| catastrophic for a lot of people in the broad tech domain--
| as in not even a sniff of work and, for many, just got a
| job any job doing something else. I was really lucky to get
| a related job at the small company someone who I had been a
| client of in a prior role ran. Things still got difficult
| over the following year but I had not so much as a nibble
| otherwise.
|
| Offers were withdrawn, tons of companies went under, even
| the big firms like Cisco had massive layoffs.
| khazhoux wrote:
| > To be sure the 2001 crash was also mixed in with 9/11
| and its aftereffects
|
| The dot-com crash was in the Spring of 2000.
| ghaff wrote:
| It wasn't a point in time. I was laid off a couple weeks
| after 9/11--and there were many subsequent layoffs at
| many companies through ensuing weeks and months. It
| probably began around Spring of 2000. I was at an analyst
| conference around that time when Cisco reported down-
| earnings.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| In 2000 it was a lot more obvious that dotcom prices were
| completely untethered from reality. Same for home prices and
| handing out loans like candy in 2006.
|
| This one is more of a general "Hey this market is too high",
| but nothing as concrete that's completely out of whack imo.
| tqi wrote:
| Oh awesome, would love to ask a few questions about your
| experience:
|
| 1. What did it feel like day to day as a person working in the
| industry during that time, and did it differ from the "bubble"
| period prior or more "normal" period immediately following?
|
| 2. How long after the bottom before the recovery felt "real" to
| you, and did you see companies / people change their behavior?
| freshfunk wrote:
| Not OP but first off I'd say that while some things feel
| similar, I don't think we're close to how bad it was back
| then if you look at the magnitude of the fall out. So take
| these answers understanding that things were worse back then.
|
| 1. It felt like a nuclear winter for tech jobs between
| 2000/2001 and 2004/2005. Jobs were available but it was way
| more competitive to get them and you were a lot less likely
| to get that dream job. You either settled for a crappier job
| or you changed directions. Many younger people just went back
| to school (get the master, law degree, etc.) as an
| alternative.
|
| It felt like the party was over. All the great company perks
| disappeared. Traffic on freeways disappeared. The mood was
| very flat. It wasn't sexy being in tech like it is today.
| Nowadays people just talk about TC or stock. That kind of
| talk disappears.
|
| 2. Like I mentioned above, it was about a 3-5 year period.
| Again, not all situations are the same. But whenever you have
| large macroeconomic problems, they take time to sort out. It
| also depends on how quickly the downside factors resolve
| themselves. The longer it takes to solve those, the longer a
| recovery is dragged out.
|
| It also depends on what the growth engine is for pulling
| things back up. Back then, there was a resurgence in internet
| business starting around 2005 when "web 2.0" got popular and
| many new businesses came on the scene. This includes social
| networking, ecommerce, web publishing.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's a fairly good explanation.
|
| My company made imaging peripherals, and were very
| conservative, so they weren't on a bandwagon. Our jobs were
| OK.
|
| I feel like the .com crash was pretty telegraphed. People
| who could spell "HTTP" were being hired as Chief In Charge
| Of Everything Web Gods, and they were spending company
| money like candy.
|
| It cleared the way for companies like Google and MySpace
| (which met its end, not long after).
|
| My company got fat on consumer cameras, which were
| destroyed in about 2010, after the smartphone revolution
| started to really get going. The next seven years were kind
| of a mad scramble for market share, while the managers kept
| doing everything but admitting that they really screwed the
| pooch, by not anticipating the rise of cellphone cameras.
|
| Come to think of it, there is a lot of that "Nobody saw it
| coming" language, here, as well.
|
| I am very fiscally conservative, and my indicator of a
| coming reckoning, was watching all the Scrooge McDucks,
| diving into their piles of money. That doesn't end well
| (see: 1929).
| dver wrote:
| Mostly the same points.
|
| In early 2000 within a few months the traffic on 680 south
| over the Sunol Grade(main road to the SV from points NE)
| went from dead stopped at 4:30am, to no traffic at all at
| 7:30am. It was breathtaking.
|
| I managed to hole up in a consulting gig in manufacturing.
| We had our rates shaved 20% and felt lucky. Everyone who
| had left for greener pastures called up looking for work
| over the next year. I mean everyone. It was sad.
|
| As described above, there were no jobs to had.
|
| I recall a new building put up around the 580/680
| interchange. I used it as my canary, when it was occupied I
| would call the recovery happening. It was empty from
| 2000-2003.
|
| 2008 was bad for other sectors, tech had issues, but
| nothing like 2000.
|
| What's going on now isn't the same. There are specific
| pullbacks. Twitter is about the Elon buyout. In other
| places there is money. And in my manufacturing universe I'm
| having trouble finding people.
| tqi wrote:
| Super interesting, thanks for sharing!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 1. During the time, as was alluded, I was watching all these
| folks I _knew_ were knuckleheads, getting all "tech-bro"
| (That is not a new thing). They would often treat me in
| fairly shabby fashion, for not jumping on their bandwagon.
|
| I did get pretty good at Web stuff, but as a volunteer side
| gig. I've actually been designing Web sites since the
| mid-'90s, but I never made it a full-time vocation.
|
| 2. I think it was about five years, before the next bubble
| began to form, as Google started getting big. 2007, was when
| smartphones showed up (the iPhone). That changed everything,
| but it took a few years, to really become ubiquitous.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Although I do think an industry downturn is here/coming, I don't
| think Lyft is part of the trend. Lyft, specifically, is just a
| bad company. It has never made an annual profit, will never make
| an annual profit, and is gravely overstaffed for its operations.
| Liabilities are approaching assets on the balance sheet. They
| have to cut somewhere. They already shed their useless little
| autonomous driving division, and I expect them to just abandon or
| spin off the bike share.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| I believe the bike-share is their most profitable division.
| Would it make sense to spin that off? It has a de facto
| monopoly in many markets it operates in
| janeerie wrote:
| The one specific person I saw that was laid off today was in
| their bike-share division, so it apparently is involved in
| the layoffs.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That's cool, I am just vaguely concerned about it. They seem
| to have tacitly abandoned it in the East Bay area.
| shoshoshosho wrote:
| The maintenance for Citibike is also basically nonexistent,
| many bikes that feel like peddling through mud
| silveraxe93 wrote:
| But that's the point right? The economy was flush with cash and
| bad companies were alive that shouldn't be. It was
| unsustainable.
|
| Now we're just seeing the good companies slimming down and bad
| ones failing.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Ask HN: Isn't recession just mass hysteria ?
|
| Layoffs leading to more layoffs leading to the entire economy
| slowing down ?
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Worse: Money is an illusion. We mistake a unit of measurement
| (like grams, or gallons) for wealth. In a recession, workers
| come to a construction site - material is still there, so is
| electricity and power tools ... but work can't continue and
| they will be fired because the boss has run out of inches.
|
| (Thought stolen from Alan Watts)
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > Worse: Money is an illusion. We mistake a unit of
| measurement (like grams, or gallons) for wealth. In a
| recession, workers come to a construction site - material is
| still there, so is electricity and power tools ... but work
| can't continue and they will be fired because the boss has
| run out of inches.
|
| This is because the boss imagined getting more inches in
| future and made a leveraged bet. A downturn is a great
| opportunity for someone enterprising to become a boss and
| take everything in the construction site, hire people and
| build it themselves.
| ISL wrote:
| Money isn't an illusion. It is a useful abstraction of human
| effort/potential.
|
| The workers will be fired because the boss has run out of
| societal-effort credits.
|
| The only "illusion" is the collective understanding that
| these "made-up" credits can be redeemed with other
| counterparties for human effort in the future. So long as we
| all approximately believe that idea, it works.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Yes!
|
| Both the bubble and the crash are almost purely psychological.
| It's greed and fear coming in waves. There can be technical
| fundamentals, but to take the example of Bitcoin, you don't
| need any technical fundamentals. Humans can create and destroy
| value on top of a very complex random number generator.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It just feels like the psychology behind a bank run. 1.
| Convince people their bank is in trouble. 2. They withdraw
| all their money. 3. Now the bank really is in trouble.
|
| Or 1. Convince people stocks are going to go down. 2. Mass
| sell-off. 3. Now stocks really are going down.
|
| I think this is just a self-fulfilling prophecy where
| business leaders convinced themselves a slowdown is coming,
| causing them to take actions that will result in a slowdown.
| A lot of what happens at the CxO level is looking around at
| your peer companies and imitating what they are doing.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _1. Convince people stocks are going to go down. 2. Mass
| sell-off. 3. Now stocks really are going down._
|
| Pet conspiracy theory: boom/bust cycles are not only
| inevitable, but desirable to some extent. If the housing
| and stock markets didn't undergo catharsis every so often,
| new/beginning investors wouldn't be able to buy in.
|
| The signs are usually telegraphed well in advance, but not
| by collusion or intent. A self-organizing conspiracy of
| sorts. It could be interpreted as "herd mentality" but I
| think that oversimplifies what's really going on, and why.
| eric-hu wrote:
| > Pet conspiracy theory: boom/bust cycles are not only
| inevitable, but desirable to some extent.
|
| I wouldn't call this a conspiracy theory at all. The
| founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund
| in the world, spent time and money to publish this idea
| in various forms. I learned about it from here:
|
| https://youtu.be/PHe0bXAIuk0
|
| There's more to this idea---the long term debt cycle---
| but the premise is exactly what you stated. There are
| benefits to both the boom and bust phases of the economy.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Or - stocks have been ridiculously overvalued for a while
| now and are just coming back to earth somewhat.
| https://www.longtermtrends.net/market-cap-to-gdp-the-
| buffett...
|
| I'm not saying I know that's what's happening. But I
| wouldn't be surprised.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Stocks were valued mainly pretty good when you consider
| interest rates. As rates go up then the expected return
| on stocks needs to change (we expect more return on them)
| so the prices fall. For instance, a dividend paying stock
| will see its price fall when interest rates increase
| because the dividend yield is a percentage of the stock
| price. When interest rates are low the yield can be low
| which means the price of the underlying stock is high.
| Until their profits catch up with the new reality the
| stock price will remain lower.
|
| As for high flying tech (cloud, etc) - yeah, probably too
| much speculation there.
| gryBrd1987 wrote:
| Yup.
|
| Powell has been saying for months he wants people to save
| and pull cash out of the economy.
|
| This is intentional because DC decided tech workers were
| undermining Washingtons of course most correct and
| immutable control over agency.
|
| Why if all these people kept earning and could acquire more
| assets and live comfortable, politicians and uber rich
| would have no place in our society.
|
| The fundamentals must be maintained. Fundamentals being we
| serve their goals, not the other way around.
| vkou wrote:
| Somehow, I doubt that Marxism-Leninism and a destruction
| of social class in America is going to be achieved on the
| backs of... Comfortable, gruntled white collar employees
| making 200k-500k/year from selling ads.
| gryBrd1987 wrote:
| Mostly I was agreeing with the analogy of a run on a
| bank. Fed pulled out of funding the economy as it was.
| Less money for them to spend on coffees, Ubers, etc.;
| less to "trickle down" given the uncertainty of grandpa
| Powell's intention to bring pain to households (except
| his own of course; he's got enough to be insulated from
| his actions).
|
| If you want to go on a specific tangent involving dead
| men's philosophy, be my guest. I was merely attempting to
| illustrate how apt the bank run analogy is.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Or 1. Convince people stocks are going to go down_
|
| Stocks are not the economy.
|
| We literally have a cold war with China escalating, a hot
| war in Europe (which we aren't _directly_ involved
| in..yet), all after years of loose monetary and fiscal
| policy, inflation is at generation highs, with rates rising
| and housing relating prices crashing, and on and on...
|
| Maybe HN needs some more serious economic analyses posted
| if people think all of this is caused by a 15% fall in SPX.
| bee_rider wrote:
| At least we can get jobs in the MIC I guess.
| umeshunni wrote:
| MIC?
| waterhouse wrote:
| Guessing "military-industrial complex".
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| I was there during the dot com bubble bursting. Psychology
| factored into it, but it wasn't the primary reason the bubble
| bursted. The main two reasons were:
|
| 1. Hype around new technologies is sometimes warranted.
| Electrification, for example. It wasn't clear how long it
| would take for these weird new internet companies to really
| start turning a buck, but after a few years spreadsheet
| parameters were updated and the whole financial industry saw
| the writing on the wall for most web companies.
|
| 2. Many _profitable_ and _completely unfunded_ web companies
| primarily received their funding from other web companies
| that were. This set off a cascading reaction of bankruptcies
| and massive layoffs. Advertisers, publishers, tool makers,
| and many others were in this second category of legit
| business that lost the vast majority of their customers.
|
| One of the downsides of an inflating currency is that there
| is a general feeling of "well I have to invest my money
| somewhere!" that is hard to overcome and leads to bubbles
| until the sky starts falling, so I agree with you that
| psychology is a factor; but the fundamentals still dominate
| in the medium to long term.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| The current environment has a similar feeling to the early
| part of the dot com bubble-burst. In that early part of the
| burst we had the feeling that it _could_ get bad, but we
| also were sort of deluding ourselves into thinking that it
| wouldn 't be _that_ bad.
|
| ...also HN today kind of looking like fuckedcompany[1] back
| in those days.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| I agree that there are similarities, but many of the web
| businesses these days are legit with happy customers. The
| challenge seems to be more widespread across the economy
| and there are a few not-so-black-swan-anymore looking
| things on the horizon (e.g., a Sino war) that could
| dramatically change the picture for the whole industry.
|
| My take away is that we may have a mild recession, but
| the likelihood of a massive recession is a lot higher
| than it has been in decades.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Exactly. One of the central features of the dot-com
| bubble were that stupid (as in never-gonna-work /
| _Silicon Valley_ -the-series) companies were getting
| massive amounts of funding.
|
| Then, it was because {value} = {idea} + {Internet}.
|
| Except nobody knew how much value the {Internet} part
| added, because the Internet wasn't done solidifying in
| terms of capability (e.g. "AJAX? What's that?") or
| connectivity (PocketPC!).
|
| Now, the Internet is a pretty well-known quantity.
|
| So while Uber and Lyft and Masayoshi Son's portfolio
| might be massively overvaluing things, the fundamental
| nature is well understood.
|
| Some stupid companies will die, but there are lots of
| companies making actual money doing actually useful
| things.
|
| And the primary casualties of the dot-com bust are all so
| consolidated that the tools-impact will likely be lesser
| too. Amazon/MS/Google aren't going to go bankrupt over
| softer cloud demand.
| foobarian wrote:
| I have a hard time imagining the analog of Nortel or
| Lucent today. They simply vanished.
| umeshunni wrote:
| Wework, various lending and fin-tech companies (e.g.
| Better), Crypto companies.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| It's not hard to imagine Lyft and/or Uber vanishing.
| Paraphrasing Buffet: The easy-money tide is going out and
| we're going to find out who's been swimming naked.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Then imagine this: War over Taiwan. One way or another
| all the fabs get incinerated.
|
| Which companies go bankrupt now?
| [deleted]
| anm89 wrote:
| Is people leaving an area that's about to get hit by a
| hurricane mass hysteria?
|
| Was it not mass hysteria when FB, a company that everyone
| openly hates and who's main product is clearly dying was hiring
| by the thousands so they could "expand"?
| psadri wrote:
| Inflation do to supply side constraints is not just mass
| hysteria.
|
| High inflation - need to reduce demand - slower economy -
| layoffs.
| pphysch wrote:
| Is it mass hysteria, or returning to the mean after a decade+
| of mania?
| lamontcg wrote:
| Definitely not. Not in the absolute way that you phrased the
| question.
|
| Psychology is a clear factor which acts as a positive feedback
| loop, but raising the cost of money/credit is very, very real
| to a lot of businesses. The immediate effect it has on the cost
| of loan service for cars and houses will start to affect those
| markets pretty quickly, which spills over into homebuilders.
| And companies at the margins that have been surviving by cheap
| debt service will get pushed over into insolvency.
|
| Then those closures and layoffs affect demand, that affects
| every other company in the economy. Those people couldn't
| afford houses and cars at any interest rate, and they're not
| buying computers or anything else as well, they're probably
| trying to sell their used cars for some cash. Since everyone's
| spending is someone else's demand then as spending contracts
| demand destruction ripples through the economy.
|
| The psychological effect is another positive feedback loop,
| though, and it will cause the correction to overshoot to the
| downside.
|
| At the same time, though, this means that assets are on a fire
| sale, and the rich people who have cash on the sidelines can
| step in and buy up even more of the country, which does put a
| floor under the crash.
| jdlyga wrote:
| That's how the economy works basically. We cycle between
| overenthusiasm and sheer panic.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| In this case, rising interest rates have a very direct negative
| impact on new investments. As new investments contract, demand
| shrinks for services across the industry. As demand shrinks,
| fewer employees are needed and companies need to reduce
| headcount to avoid overspending relative to revenues.
|
| There is a cascading effect, but it would be a mistake to
| attribute it all to a big psychological mistake. When demand
| goes down (in this case due to rising rates) there really is
| less money flowing into companies.
| frontiersummit wrote:
| This puts it mildly. Paul Volcker has been (perhaps unfairly)
| called the Father of the Rustbelt, due to how rising interest
| rates broke the back of manufacturing in the American Midwest
| during the late 1970s and early 1980s. "Cooling" the economy
| means layoffs and plant closures, often concentrated in
| specific geographic regions. The only question is: what firms
| and employees get sacrificed to placate the inflation Gods
| this time around?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Rising interest rates & a strong dollar
|
| Ironically, you can generally have your financial house in
| order as a country or be globally manufacturing-
| competitive, but not both*.
|
| * Exceptions Germany, Japan, et al., but as you go up the
| value chain you gain enough profit leeway to paper over the
| general rule.
| aksss wrote:
| We should not ignore that for countries like Japan and
| Germany, they have an enormous advantage in not having to
| spend realistically on a defense budget relative to their
| risk-prone geography, living as they do under an
| umbrella.
|
| https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?en
| d=2...
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02
| /19...
| Clent wrote:
| Why are those countries the exception and not America?
|
| Other countries figure it out. America cannot. Therefore,
| it's not possible. America!
| gretch wrote:
| The poster you are responding to is probably incorrect in
| many regards. There aren't really 'exceptions' just
| 'differences'.
|
| For example, Japan's economy definitely is not feeling
| good at the moment, even if some particular metrics are
| performing at a top tier.
| drc500free wrote:
| Critically, tech workers are compensated highly because they
| are working on investments. We're not laying bricks where
| it's easy to measure what we accomplished in a given day, we
| are usually building products and tech stacks that are
| projected to bring in FUTURE cash.
|
| When interest rates were held low, the planning horizon was
| very long and we got a huge expansion in future-looking
| projects. Now that horizon is shrinking and
| disproportionately impacting the jobs that are associated
| with future investments rather than ongoing operations.
| nunez wrote:
| Adding context: the US Fed raised the interest rate benchmark
| this week to 4%, with the expectation that it will be raised
| higher. Credit's getting a lot more expensive.
| Spivak wrote:
| Yep, don't even look at mortgages until housing prices drop
| in response to the rate increases. Because the amount of
| total money paid in interest over a 30 loan increased more
| than 2x over the last year.
| curiousgal wrote:
| > avoid overspending relative to revenues.
|
| Most companies are already making a shit ton of money. Firing
| people won't keep their stock prices from going down if a
| recession actually hits. It's moot.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Lyft are not one of those companies though.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| How far the stock goes down will depend on profitability.
|
| Would you rather own a more or less profitable company?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| They could run out of money of course. It's about the cash
| flow. When rates were low a lot of companies used debt to
| acquire cash, use it to hire/spend beyond their current
| means in order to expand their business (more revenue
| later). This is pretty common, use debt to build a
| warehouse/data center/app widget/etc. In a recession, that
| extra revenue may not come, so they need to cut spending so
| spending < revenue instead.
|
| Especially a company like Lyft that is likely losing money
| many months. I don't know about today, but Uber and Lyft
| were famous for using venture capital to spend more than
| they took in every month. Eventually they run out of cash
| reserves, or they decide they can't acquire more.
| ShivShankaran wrote:
| they are also a lot in debt. Almost everyone of them
| borrowed with corporate bonds in the last 6 months on a
| very low interest rates.
| echelon wrote:
| It also impacts the loans that companies frequently take out
| and the interest-inflated payments they need to service their
| debt.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| And this is more likely what's impacting companies like
| Lyft. Their business model worked in an easy-money
| environment, but doesn't work in an environment with more
| normal interest rates where it's harder to borrow money and
| costs more.
| programmertote wrote:
| > As new investments contract, demand shrinks for services
| across the industry. As demand shrinks, fewer employees are
| needed and companies need to reduce headcount to avoid
| overspending relative to revenues.
|
| As someone who has only taken Econ 101 in college, can you
| explain
|
| 1) why the demand shrinks when there's not enough new
| investments? Shouldn't demand at least be the same overall (I
| mean I can see that fewer new houses are built, so the demand
| for timber might shrink. But that only explains the housing
| sector. I'd imagine the demand might stay constant for some
| industry such as transportation)?
|
| 2) Related to #2, if demand does not shrink by much,
| shouldn't the same number of workers be kept employed to
| fulfill the demand for goods?
|
| If it's true that the contraction of new investments causes
| shrinkage of demand, it means the economy is heavily reliant
| on industries/sectors which relies on new investments (aka
| growth)?
|
| Thank you in advance for elaborating your answer!
| rchaud wrote:
| Some of these questions won't be answered in Economics
| class, but may be in Management Science class (that's what
| they called in back in my day).
|
| Regarding your #2:
|
| Companies cannot adjust headcount in real-time. Economics
| is a 'social science' as a result; you cannot create
| experiments in controlled environments with randomly
| selected populations like you can with the natural
| sciences. Experiments of this kind happen do happen, but
| for small-scale things like behavioural finance among
| neighborhoods, rather than between billion-dollar
| companies.
|
| Layoffs are a human decision. As such, the logic behind
| them, and the timing of them, can't fully be explained by
| economic theory.
|
| One reason why workers are sacked even when demand remains
| the same, can simply be because there is a surplus of
| labour available at that time, and the company is betting
| that they can fire them and rehire at lower wages.
|
| Another reason is simply 'fitting in' with what everyone
| else is doing to meet Wall St expectations (or VC
| expectations). Look at the job cuts today: Stripe 14%, Lyft
| 13%, Mollie 15%. Why are they all the same? Because they
| are all in the 'tech' industry and valued by the same set
| of metrics.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| To put it simply, a portion of demand today is speculative
| and based on the expectation of greater demand in the
| future.
|
| for example, you might buy 2x the material and labor you
| need for today's demand, because you need them to meet
| tomorrows higher demand.
| opportune wrote:
| New investment is things like making buildings, investing
| in VC, making new machines for manufacturing. Those are
| funded by cash or loans. When interest rates rise more cash
| goes to seeking interest and less toward these physical
| investments, and less money is created de novo from loans
| to fund these things.
|
| It's worth keeping in mind that money spent on new
| buildings and machines goes to wages of employees building
| them, which then goes to rents and food, and elsewhere
| throughout the economy.
|
| For 2, yes and no. A lot of workers are employed doing
| things with low or speculative marginal ROI (example: Coca
| Cola starts funding R&D into a new line of beverages)
| because the cost of capital (taking a loan against cash
| flow or spending earnings on reinvestment instead of
| returning it to shareholders) is low. Increasing interest
| rates increases the cost of capital, the risk feee
| opportunity cost of spending money on more speculative
| pursuits like R&D. So now Coca Cola might instead choose to
| return that money to shareholders or not take out financing
| to start operations like that
| amf12 wrote:
| > why the demand shrinks when there's not enough new
| investments?
|
| The way I understand it: when interest rates increase, the
| ROI for any investment goes down, which makes many new
| investments risky or worthless. Thus investments in new
| projects go down, which reduces the demand. The investment
| could be a new shop, raw materials for new buildings,
| software projects, etc. When it's said the "demand"
| decreases, its not the want that goes away but the ability
| of people to realize the want that goes away.
|
| > if demand does not shrink by much, shouldn't the same
| number of workers be kept employed to fulfill the demand
| for goods?
|
| Depends. If the cost of doing business rises, the profit
| decreases. To maintain value, there could be a decrease in
| headcount increase or layoffs.
|
| > it means the economy is heavily reliant on
| industries/sectors which relies on new investments (aka
| growth)
|
| I think (and someone who is more aware can correct me), it
| boils down to the ROI. Why would any business investment in
| something with risk when the ROI doesn't make it worth it.
| If the risk-free interest rate 5%, any investment with a
| ROI of say 7% or below (higher for riskier investments) are
| out of the question. Any entity could make money by saving
| at the risk free rate.
| drc500free wrote:
| Tech jobs are somewhat decoupled from true demand. They are
| usually inherently an indirect investment, not a direct
| cost. But when they and their activities go away, you lose
| the B2B demand that they had to accomplish their jobs and
| the B2C demand they had from spending their salaries.
|
| For example, my last 3 product jobs have been a business
| travel offering, an HR learning management tool, and a
| Predictive analytics tool for data scientists working in
| marketing. A lot of the users who paid the bills were some
| form of tech worker that were executing on projects that
| were future investments.
|
| Investors have been handed a truly mind-boggling amount of
| cash since 2008, but there hasn't been a lot of stimulus to
| the actual day-to-day economy. Valuations had to go up to
| accommodate this cash, and without a corresponding increase
| in consumer spending there's really only one lever in the
| financial model that drastically impacts valuation without
| seriously changing the core business: year-on-year growth.
|
| Most growth stories are laughably improbable, and the
| investors need plausibility to play the game. Fundraising
| turned into a story-telling competition of who could spin
| the most plausible growth story that is hard to verify and
| hasn't been disproved. That story is some form of "we will
| completely dominate market X, by building software that
| enables hyper-scaling with minimal unit costs, and that
| also includes AI/ML/Optimization (to be developed) that
| solves the inherently hard problems in this industry."
|
| That story is used for both VC-style external fundraising
| and internal project pitches, and it has crowded out most
| other approaches. A side-effect of that story has been a
| massive bubble in the jobs that can deliver on it -
| software engineers, designers, data scientists, product
| managers, etc. The game at most firms has been to keep
| kicking the outcomes down the road and claim that the
| hockey stick growth is right around the corner.
|
| That worked until interest rates went up and far-future
| cash became much less valuable. The CFO and the Fund now
| need to show results in the very near term, and the knives
| are being sharpened for departments and companies who can't
| deliver on that. Those departments and companies remove
| demand when they fold, and there isn't a clear immediate
| activity that returns quick cash to replace them.
| himinlomax wrote:
| Mass hysteria is a positive feedback loop, but not all positive
| feedback loops are mass hysteria.
| hammock wrote:
| What recession? We are not in a recession. Unemployment data
| and the broader economy are still strong. Saying otherwise is
| dangerous, to be honest
| superfrank wrote:
| Agree we're not in a recession, but I'm not sure I'd say
| we're in a strong place. The impression I've got from the
| articles I've read is that no one knows what the fuck is
| going on. Some indicators look great (like unemployment), but
| others look bad (like inflation).
| bombcar wrote:
| We are certainly in _something_ but what it is hasn 't had
| a word assigned to it yet. Maybe it's stagflation, maybe
| it's swagflation, I dunno.
|
| Every downturn is like all the others and every downturn is
| a unique snowflake.
| ssteel wrote:
| Low employment combined with high inflation is forcing the
| fed to raise interest rates to induce lower demand with the
| side affect being higher unemployment. This is how they
| killed inflation in the 80's. They are trying to thread the
| needle of inflation and recession. The likely outcome is
| eventually a recession.
|
| Conversely, the government could raise taxes across the
| board to control demand and trickle that money back to
| individuals over time, but it is political suicide.
| matwood wrote:
| Keep in mind when the fed talks about lower demand, that
| includes lower labor demand. They are likely to be forced
| to push demand to recession levels if they want it to
| match supply across the board. More lockdowns in China is
| certainly not helping on the supply side, and the latest
| jobs report showed the labor market not loosening.
| andreilys wrote:
| The definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of
| negative growth, which we've had.
|
| We're waking up from a a long night of heavy drinking (free
| money via zero interest rate, unrestrained QE, etc.), the
| bill is due and you're plugging your ears and yelling that
| the party must go on.
| hammock wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds like MAGA speech. Aka the greatest threat
| to our democracy right now
| jhickok wrote:
| But we had growth last quarter now, right?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Preliminary report. It will get revised.
| snapcaster wrote:
| dangerous? come on man get a grip
| stingrae wrote:
| Tech or SAAS has definitely had a major correction/downturn.
| This is not evident in the unemployment data because it is
| such a small contingent vs the US population
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| It might be overdue. Tech came out of the 2008 recession
| pretty well in the mean (of course some people suffered
| badly). A lot of companies came out of it saying to cut
| costs they had to invest big in their technology.
| [deleted]
| colechristensen wrote:
| Yes, but so was the bubble that preceded it, in the opposite
| direction.
|
| If you have a whole economy ignoring signs and pretending
| growth goes forever you get bigger, harder crashes.
|
| We can hope that this downturn is going to be a short wave just
| in response to the post covid overhype. But really there are
| still big problems with real estate valuation with lots of
| things going to be literally under water in decades and
| everything overpriced as a result of bad policy with low
| interest and too many people having enormous loans for most of
| their working lives.
|
| Housing as investment needs to be drug out into the street and
| shot, but there isn't really any way to do that which doesn't
| cause a huge economic shock.
| melling wrote:
| We could have raised rates a few years ago but the markets
| panicked , the President complained, and the Fed caved.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/24/interest-rates-trump-attacks...
|
| We deserve the world we have.
| pjc50 wrote:
| This is definitely something considered by economists; Keynes
| called it "animal spirits" or more boringly "expectations". If
| people think the economy is likely to be bad they're likely to
| want to take defensive action early .. causing the economy to
| be worse.
| chomp wrote:
| Macroeconomics is economics plus psychology. Broader trends in
| the economy have elements of human behavior affecting them.
|
| If you see cloudy skies, and the weather reports suggest "maybe
| hurricane, maybe not", and your neighbors are boarding up their
| windows, you might be driven to action as well.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| On the other hand, if you have a pizzeria, and people are
| talking about diets, cholesterol, unhealthy food, everyone is
| buying fitness gear... but you still have a line infront of
| the restaurant, and your take-out phone operator doesn't have
| time to go pee, you don't fire workers.
|
| So, internal numbers are probably showing a downwards trend
| too, if so many companies are laying off workers.
| selectodude wrote:
| On the other hand, companies use recessions to cut
| headcount without causing the people they want to keep to
| head for the exits too.
| ouid wrote:
| no? If paying employees has a return on investment that is
| lower than the interest rate on federally insured bonds, I will
| prefer the federally insured bonds. The biggest driver of
| inflation, and thus interest rate, is the supply/demand for
| labor.
|
| What we're seeing are the natural consequences of the fed's
| mandate to prevent inflation. This is _always_ at the cost of
| demand for labor, bu design.
|
| The regulation supplied by the fed preserves the interests of
| capital at expense of the interests of labor. The dual mandate
| is essentially meaningless.
| weatherlite wrote:
| Recession is mass hysteria just like an economic boom is mass
| euphoria...
| rollulus wrote:
| I've been wondering the same. At some point it could become a
| self-fulfilling prophecy. Sadly enough we cannot A/B test both
| scenarios: one with the (possible) mass hysteria and one where
| everyone stays calm and stays the course.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Yes and no. Economics involves the trade of real Goods or real
| value. It also involves a psychological level based on
| expectation and predictions. There's a constant dance trying to
| align the latter with the former.
| paganel wrote:
| I don't know about "mass hysteria" but this inflation has
| certainly made me purchase less physical stuff and especially
| less services, I guess I'm not the only one. Generally speaking
| a sudden decrease in buying is cause for a recession, unless
| you go the Keynesian way and make the Government make up for
| the lost demand, but I have a feeling that most of the
| governments are out of "good" money to throw at that.
|
| I do live in Europe and not in the States, though, maybe things
| are different there.
| yonaguska wrote:
| I believe it's probably worse for you in Europe simply
| because of the energy costs eating up more of your income.
| Energy costs are going up here as well, but it seems to be
| more dependent on where you live and less dramatic for now.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| You need to be profitable today in the current market. The
| money funnel is turned off so little venture funding and high
| rate loans.
|
| So I don't see it as mass hysteria but instead. "We need to cut
| costs by 10% to avoid hitting the downward spiral of taking out
| loans".
| lysecret wrote:
| Nothing is "just" one thing. But the there is a reinforcing
| effect which definitely makes it worse. You can check out
| "animal spirits" and Keynes if you want to go down a rabbit
| hole ;)
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I don't see any mass layoffs among manufacturers, commodities
| producers, and energy companies
|
| More like a long overdue correction in tech.
|
| Some of these businesses have been around for nearly 15 years
| and haven't had a single year of consistent profits. It was
| about time that markets humbled them.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| There were huge layoffs in energy throughout 2020 and 2021,
| and while employment levels have been increasing, they are
| still far below 2019 levels. The correction has already
| happened in energy, triggered by COVID shutdowns, so they
| don't need to happen again now (hopefully).
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Yes, tech businesses built up a lot of unnecessary employees
| during the boom and didn't want to have layoffs for morale
| and PR reasons.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Tech work went from deathly 60-80hr work weeks, to comfy
| WFH jobs where you can skate by on 2 hours of work a day.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Layoffs are the working stiff's cancel culture.
| seydor wrote:
| big tech trying to increase unemployment ... except tech is a
| tiny fraction of the workforce.
| jstx1 wrote:
| Where are we heading if every company drop 10-20% of their staff?
| findthewords wrote:
| Narrower "operating leverage".
| lovich wrote:
| Might get absorbed by other companies but at lower rates. The
| faangs, and especially meta and google, have been starving a
| lot of startups and less efficient companies of talent.
|
| If your business model wasn't profitable enough to handle all
| your engineers having over 250k tc it's been a bit of a
| difficult market to hire and retain people in the past few
| years
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 2 years ago?
| seibelj wrote:
| 10-20% of their staff _so far_
| ren_engineer wrote:
| the TikTok "day in the life of a project manager" ecosystem
| will be devastated.
|
| People who actually get work done will be fine
| malfist wrote:
| Tell me you've never been laid off without telling me you've
| never been laid off.
| mabbo wrote:
| An interesting time, imho.
|
| The costs to explore a startup are pretty low these days. You
| can live anywhere (move somewhere with relative low COL), you
| can develop just about anything cheaply (open source, plus easy
| frameworks). You can work with like-minded people all over the
| world easily (remote work for '20-'21 made big inroads in that
| department).
|
| And we may suddenly have a few tens of thousands of talented
| developers looking for work- maybe they'll make a startup, or
| maybe they'll join one where they get paid mostly in equity.
|
| Interest rates are high, which means that investors into
| startups will want a bigger cut, but still have their money
| that they want to invest.
|
| Overall, it sounds to me like a great time to be investing in
| startups.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > or maybe they'll join one where they get paid mostly in
| equity.
|
| Yup, most people who lost their jobs and are wondering how to
| feed their families will definitely pick to to not be paid
| for even longer...
| smileysteve wrote:
| To completely reasonable 6% unemployment levels that will
| slightly shift the scales of worker supply and demand?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Tech meme stocks != every company.
|
| If the Department of Defense & Amazon & Walmart start laying
| off 10-20% of staff - that would mean something. All of these
| tech layoffs don't even represent 1% of tech jobs so far. Let
| alone anything meaningful for the overall US economy.
| datalopers wrote:
| All these companies have vastly overhired. Think of your own
| peers and colleagues. How many are a) utterly useless or b)
| competent but don't have anything to do so they spend time
| working on mostly pointless projects to improve their CV?
| onion2k wrote:
| _How many are a) utterly useless or b) competent but don 't
| have anything to do so they spend time working on mostly
| pointless projects to improve their CV?_
|
| I hope my colleagues aren't reading this and looking at me.
| bombcar wrote:
| If you don't know who the useless colleague is, it's
| probably you!
|
| Not entirely true, but I think most people can (if they're
| being honest) get 70% or more correct when guessing who
| will be laid off.
|
| The only wildcard usually is when entire teams are let go,
| and sometimes those are predictable, sometimes surprising.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >" If you don't know who the useless colleague is, it's
| probably you!"
|
| My problem is that I have an almost crippling sense of
| impostor syndrome and I undervalue my contributions
| constantly. I don't feel entirely useless, but I do feel
| like an under-performer - despite probably being an
| average developer in my cohort.
| datalopers wrote:
| > get 70% or more correct when guessing who will be laid
| off.
|
| What happens when it's the managers themselves who are
| useless, overpaid, and can't evaluate the team for actual
| efficacy?
| BoorishBears wrote:
| One comment in the Stripe layoff thread was someone who's
| manager didn't get to put any input into the process.
|
| Honestly its funny reading threads like this with people
| beating their chest about useless coworkers. Instead of
| thinking of useless coworkers and colleagues, think about
| what percent of the entire industry that's working on
| things with no hard output, no interest in profitability,
| banking on free money that's drying up...
|
| If you're working somewhere with so many incompetent
| colleagues you think 13% layoffs is not trimming anyone
| useful, odds are _your entire unit_ is in trouble.
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, I should have clarified - useless doesn't
| necessarily mean the employee sucks at the job they're
| doing; it could also mean they're an expert at doing a
| useless job, even if the skillset could be utilized quite
| valuably.
|
| I feel there's a lot of this in crypto, where you have
| absolutely amazing developers doing amazing code for no
| point.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I consider myself to be rather decent at what I do. I
| also know that, all things considered, I am mostly
| useless as an employee right know. Wjy? Because in
| reality my skill set is simply noy needed at the moment,
| nor will it be for quite some time to come. Things
| changed since I was hired, lucky for me current
| management doesn't have the stomach to announce a x %
| layoff, even if they should IMHO. Not that I complain so,
| for now.
| bombcar wrote:
| That's when you start seeing teams get axed, though you
| will often have a "reorg" instead, where managers are
| shuffled around and then a layoff event where the ones
| they don't want are let go.
|
| Unfortunately the useless and overpaid managers are often
| the best at brown nosing.
| djur wrote:
| I can't think of a single person I work with or have worked
| with recently who meets this description.
| [deleted]
| anonymoushn wrote:
| sir the promo criteria say to do complex things that require
| coordinating a lot of people
| hef19898 wrote:
| You have promotion criteria?
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| Not my experience at all. I work for a big company and we've
| been under staffed for basically as long as I can remember.
| The default position is not enough people to do what we need
| to do.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > How many are a) utterly useless or b) competent but don't
| have anything to do so they spend time working on mostly
| pointless projects to improve their CV?
|
| I bet the people who hired them get to keep their jobs
| despite failing to a) hire useful people or b) competent
| people that can work on useful projects and c) burning cash
| while d) not turning a profit because e) they are just a
| gambling mechanism for investors.
| spacemadness wrote:
| I absolutely will never conduct interviews for a company
| again if I'm going to be punished depending on how they
| work out. Some people interview well and their behavior on
| the job does not match what you expected due to a large
| number of reasons from team fit to personal issues.
| superfrank wrote:
| No idea if it's true, but in my mental model, remote work
| plays into this as well. Pre-covid, large companies were
| restricted to hiring the talent in their area. If there
| weren't enough talented people near the company, they would
| often end up hiring people who were under qualified, just to
| fill seats. Remote work made the talent pool bigger which
| means more qualified candidates. These layoffs are allowing
| large companies to lay off some of those under qualified
| local hires.
| jylam wrote:
| Weird to put that on the employees if you ask me. It's not
| like there is exactly 13% of bad employees. Or 25% of bad
| employees but they decide to just fire 13% for some reason.
|
| To me, it seems quite evident, they need to reduce the
| spending for any reason, so they reduce the workforce.
| Nothing to do with useless employees. You can be shit at your
| job or very good, they will have a metric threshold telling
| them you need to go. Same at Twitter, Meta, Google, whatever.
|
| Stop putting that on the employee who spent 3 months to get a
| job just to be told they wasn't useful. That's 'bad' managing
| all the way down, nothing to do with the employee, at all.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| GP said they have overhired, which is definitely bad
| managing, or that employee aren't productive, and if >5-10%
| employees are non-productive that is a managing or
| interviewing problem as well.
|
| But saying it has nothing to do with employee is also not
| correct. If someone is signing up for a company that does
| not manage its finance sustainably, they should expect
| this. And company would only overpay if they aren't
| focusing on cost at that moment. So for all the folks who
| managed to double their CTC in COVID period should be
| prepared for this case.
| gretch wrote:
| > they decide to just fire 13% for some reason
|
| Maybe they fired some after and evaluation process, and
| than number came out to be 13%. Or maybe they laid of
| department X and that department just happened to be 13% of
| the company.
|
| Why are you so sure the 13% was the starting place of all
| their thought process?
| bluedino wrote:
| Back in the 90's my step-father worked in a factory, and he
| and his buddies always joked about a guy there that never did
| a single lick of work.
|
| He took a VHS camcorder in one day, and recorded the guy
| flipping a piece of metal over on a table a couple times,
| then moving the piece of metal to a new table. Repeating this
| over and over throughout a 10/12 hour day.
| cvhashim04 wrote:
| Your dad should mind his own business rather than worry
| about someone else's pockets and/or the work they're doing.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| And your dad had 10 hours to film him apparently
| bluepizza wrote:
| The camcorder stays still, and you need to press the
| button twice. Couldn't have taken the guy more than 5
| mins.
| pc86 wrote:
| 5 minutes to press a button twice? I'll do it in 4.
| datalopers wrote:
| I like that you only went for 4 minutes, giving yourself
| ample room to demonstrate continued improvement in the
| future
| bombcar wrote:
| Under promise and over deliver!
| bluedino wrote:
| Union button-pushers.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Every tech company has only a fraction of the works that
| traditional companies have compared to their value.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I literally cannot name a single person like this in my
| entire career. Yes, less than ideal performs, but nobody
| that's utterly useless or spending all day on side projects.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Same here until my most recent job that I took just this
| year. The amount of brain waste is staggering.
| watwut wrote:
| I knew an utterly useless guy. He was good at making
| impression of a good programmer - read right blogs and had
| correct opinions. Probably reads HN and definitely knows
| all the fads.
|
| It is just that, he never produced anything. I worked with
| him twice. They moved him between teams and both times he
| got absurd amount of benefit of doubt (one of the companies
| was firing people quickly, but not him). Anyway based on
| what I heard, he did nothing whole his career.
|
| But like, he was definitely not a norm.
| acdha wrote:
| In 3 decades I think I've met a couple of programmers
| like that, but about a dozen managers and at least half
| of the consultants. It's pretty hard to pull off in a
| position which usually has some kind of directly-
| measurable product.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I strongly disagree. Many companies (maybe not tech
| companies) are posting very strong profits. Employee surveys
| also show people feeling the pressure of being given
| additional responsibilities due to labor shortages.
|
| I suppose you could make the argument companies are both
| over-working their employees _and_ over-hiring if you 're
| willing to concede these companies are poorly managed...
| which I think has a kernel of truth to it.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Wouldn't this be explained by the "quiet quitting"
| hypothesis?
|
| If 10-20% of the employees in an org pretty much stop
| working completely, then it's pretty natural that the
| remaining 80-90% are going to feel overworked making up the
| slack. Also explains why companies are laying off the dead
| weight resuming hiring almost immediately (like Tesla).
| spamizbad wrote:
| Quiet quitting isn't people refusing to work on the job.
| It's to merely work hard enough to "meet expectations".
| So rather than trying to be a straight-A student you only
| work hard enough to get Cs and Bs.
|
| Anyway, I would say if the Quiet Quitting hypothesis is
| true it definitely points to a business management
| failure. If an employee joined your organization highly
| motivated and a year later feels like going above and
| beyond is not worth it you did something wrong.
| bluedino wrote:
| >> Quiet quitting isn't people refusing to work on the
| job. It's to merely work hard enough to "meet
| expectations".
|
| Office Space came out in 1999 so this isn't anything new.
|
| _That 's my only real motivation is not to be hassled,
| that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob,
| that will only make someone work just hard enough not to
| get fired._
| bsimpson wrote:
| > If an employee joined your organization highly
| motivated and a year later feels like going above and
| beyond is not worth it you did something wrong.
|
| So you've also worked at Google?
| sangnoir wrote:
| Fundamental attribution error: how many of your colleagues
| think the same of you? When it come to you, _obviously_ the
| problem is the "complixities of the problem space" and
| "blockers" you're dealing with, but when it's someone else on
| some random team, they are slow because they are useless.
| bluepizza wrote:
| Wish you were right. Unfortunately, most tech companies
| have some decent amount of people coasting at the lowest
| level of effort.
|
| My current team has 6 people. 3 are delivering at normal
| levels, but the other 3 complete one task per week at most.
| And those are tasks that take a couple of hours at most.
| This is happening everywhere, and is a clear consequence of
| overhiring.
| pc86 wrote:
| How is it a natural consequence of overhiring that 50% of
| your team will work 4 hours/week?
| bluepizza wrote:
| Too many people for too little task queue. Engineering
| managers are more than happy to hold on to headcount to
| justify their own existence.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| An organization with no slack can't respond to
| emergencies in an effective way.
| bluepizza wrote:
| Excellent point. This adds a different dimension to the
| situation, for sure. I can see that the slower crowd
| would keep the boat afloat while the high performers go
| and solve the pressing issues. I have seen it happen a
| couple of times. Still seems a bit wasteful to have half
| of a team essentially parked.
| [deleted]
| mamonster wrote:
| Slowdown in inflation due to wage component of inflation
| falling. What, didn't you hear that the Fed was very interested
| in pulling on that lever? Just yesterday Powell complained
| about the labour market being tight, guess businesses heard him
| all right.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Powell complained about the labour market being tight_
|
| No, he didn't [1].
|
| He justified a rate rise in a faltering economy by pointing
| to the labor market's strength. Were the labor market weaker
| we'd be in stagflation and monetary policy would have no room
| to manoeuvre.
|
| [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCpres
| con...
| mamonster wrote:
| I don't see how what you posted contradicts what I said. I
| guess it all depends on how you interpret what Powell says,
| but him saying the labour market is overheated is a signal
| to the market that unless the labour market stops
| overheating the Fed pivot is not becoming more likely(which
| is all that market participants care about as of today with
| regards to the Fed meeting, i.e when is the pivot coming).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _him saying the labour market is overheated is a signal
| to the market that unless the labour market stops
| overheating the Fed pivot is not becoming more likely_
|
| The labor market isn't being targeted. We have had tight
| labor markets with low inflation before. The Fed doesn't
| spike them for the sake of it.
|
| What's targeted for reduction is inflation. Labor market
| tightness permits the Fed to respond to it, which is why
| it's constantly talked about. If you are on a road trip
| and decide you can take a detour because you have ample
| gas, it wouldn't be correct to say you took the detour to
| burn gas.
| im-a-baby wrote:
| Powell has previously said that he wants higher
| unemployment. He believes this is the only way to decrease
| demand and bring down prices.
|
| > The labor market continues to be out of balance, with
| demand for workers substantially exceeding the supply of
| available workers. The labor force participation rate
| showed a welcome uptick in August but is little changed
| since the beginning of the year. FOMC participants expect
| supply and demand conditions in the labor market to come
| into better balance over time, easing the upward pressure
| on wages and prices. The median projection in the SEP for
| the unemployment rate rises to 4.4 percent at the end of
| next year, 1/2 percentage point higher than in the June
| projections
|
| > We're never going to say that there are too many people
| working, but the real point is this: Inflation--what we
| hear from people when we meet with them is that they really
| are suffering from inflation. And if we want to set
| ourselves up, really light the way to another period of a
| very strong labor market, we have got to get inflation
| behind us. I wish there were a painless way to do that.
| There isn't.
|
| That is why the market goes down when low unemployment
| numbers are released. Powell will continue to raise rates
| until the labor market cools. He's not using the labor
| market to determine whether or not the economy can handle
| more rate increases. He's absolutely determined to increase
| unemployment via rate hikes.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _has previously said that he wants higher unemployment_
|
| He has not. I am open to being corrected with a credible
| source. But every time I see this conspiracy theory, it's
| based on summaries of Fed statements unsupported by the
| statements themselves.
|
| > _is why the market goes down when low unemployment
| numbers are released_
|
| Because the market is anticipating rate hikes. When
| inflation is low strong employment boosts the market. We
| just went through a decade of that.
| im-a-baby wrote:
| I gave you direct quotes from Powell's September Press
| Conference.
|
| https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCpres
| con...
|
| He goes on to say that supply and demand for workers
| needs to be brought into balance. The goal of raising
| interest rates is to reduce demand for labor. He says
| that directly. This isn't a conspiracy theory.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _goal of raising interest rates is to reduce demand for
| labor. He says that directly_
|
| None of your quotes say that.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Exactly. The quotes say that the Fed's goal is to control
| inflation, and that reduced demand for labor is going to
| be collateral damage. But reducing demand for labor is
| not the _goal_ ; controlling inflation is. The quotes do
| not say what im-a-baby claims they say.
| im-a-baby wrote:
| This quote says it:
|
| > The labor market continues to be out of balance, with
| demand for workers substantially exceeding the supply of
| available workers. The labor force participation rate
| showed a welcome uptick in August but is little changed
| since the beginning of the year. FOMC participants expect
| supply and demand conditions in the labor market to come
| into better balance over time, easing the upward pressure
| on wages and prices. The median projection in the SEP for
| the unemployment rate rises to 4.4 percent at the end of
| next year, 1/2 percentage point higher than in the June
| projections
|
| He's expecting the act of raising interest rates to
| increase unemployment to 4.4%. He's doing this to bring
| balance to supply and demand for labor, to ease upward
| pressure on prices.
|
| He is also asked directly when he will know when to stop:
|
| > So I will answer--I will answer your question directly,
| but I want to start here today by saying that my main
| message has not changed at all since Jackson Hole. The
| FOMC is strongly resolved to bring inflation down to 2
| percent, and we will keep at it until the job is done. So
| the way we're thinking about this is, the overarching
| focus of the Committee is getting inflation back down to
| 2 percent. To accomplish that, we think we'll need to do
| two things, in particular: to achieve a period of growth
| below trend; and also some softening in labor market
| conditions to foster a better balance between demand and
| supply in the labor market.
|
| He directly says he's waiting to see softening of the
| labor market before stopping the rate hikes.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _He 's expecting the act of raising interest rates to
| increase unemployment to 4.4%_
|
| > _He directly says he 's waiting to see softening of the
| labor market before stopping the rate hikes_
|
| Yes, because we don't want to ruin the labor market.
| Right now, rates can be raised without spiking
| unemployment. The Fed is trying to estimate when that
| stops happening.
|
| A clear signal that the limit has been reached is the
| labor market actually softening. That doesn't mean the
| Fed is trying to raise unemployment. It's trying to lower
| inflation, and thinks unemployment may rise as a result
| of that, though to date it has not.
| im-a-baby wrote:
| No, that's not what Powell is saying. Read this quote
| again:
|
| > So I will answer--I will answer your question directly,
| but I want to start here today by saying that my main
| message has not changed at all since Jackson Hole. The
| FOMC is strongly resolved to bring inflation down to 2
| percent, and we will keep at it until the job is done. So
| the way we're thinking about this is, the overarching
| focus of the Committee is getting inflation back down to
| 2 percent. To accomplish that, we think we'll need to do
| two things, in particular: to achieve a period of growth
| below trend; and also some softening in labor market
| conditions to foster a better balance between demand and
| supply in the labor market.
|
| Powell says (paraphrasing slightly): "In order to get
| inflation under 2%, we need to do two things. 1. achieve
| a period of low growth, and 2. soften the labor market."
| Low growth and higher unemployment aren't simply side-
| effects of Powell's policy. These two things are
| explicitly stated goals.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Would it be correct to say the Fed's goal is to lower
| economic growth? I don't think so. It's trying to lower
| inflation and predicting negative, possibly necessary,
| side effects. But if you read that quote as saying the
| Fed is trying to raise unemployment, then it's also
| saying the Fed is trying to lower growth, which is an odd
| reading to say the least.
| im-a-baby wrote:
| I think we're arguing over the definition of goal and
| side-effect.
|
| Let's say I have a goal of running a marathon, so I
| decide to start jogging every day. Is my daily jogging a
| side-effect of my goal to run a marathon? I wouldn't say
| so. Rather, jogging every day is an explicit course I've
| set out on with the hopes of achieving my main goal.
| Daily jogging is a sub-goal of the main goal, if you
| will. This logic can be applied to the Fed. The main goal
| is to lower inflation, and the chosen course of action
| (i.e. the sub goals) are to lower economic growth and to
| increase unemployment.
|
| A side-effect would be something akin to knee pain. I
| can't jog without hurting my knees, but having pain in my
| knees isn't something I explicitly set out to do.
|
| A side-effect of Fed policy would be something like the
| gilt crises in the UK. Higher US rates increase yields on
| UK bonds indirectly. But that isn't something the Fed is
| actively setting out to do.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Let 's say I have a goal of running a marathon, so I
| decide to start jogging every day. Is my daily jogging a
| side-effect of my goal to run a marathon?_
|
| You can't run a marathon without your daily jogs.
| Inflation _can_ be lowered without spiking unemployment.
| It 's unlikely. Hence the Fed's messaging. But until
| recently the Fed forecasted a soft landing, _i.e._ growth
| and low unemployment amidst rising rates and falling
| inflation.
|
| Better analogy: engine temperature. You're driving and
| keeping an eye on the thermometer. You see the
| temperature is low and so feel comfortable accelerating.
| The goal is getting to your destination faster. The low
| temperature lets you accelerate, which in turn raises the
| temperature. But raising the engine temperature wasn't
| the point. It reverses cause and effect to say your goal
| was to raise engine temperature. It wasn't. Engine
| temperature was simply a limiting factor you were paying
| attention to.
| im-a-baby wrote:
| Using analogies is always dangerous because they're never
| going to be a perfect fit. But the difference between
| your engine analogy and the federal reserve's actions is
| that anemic economic growth and high unemployment is not
| a side effect. In your engine analogy, adding more gas
| and air into the engine increases the amount combustion.
| It's the combustion that increases speed, so in a sense
| increase combustion is a goal. Released heat is just a by
| product of the reaction. In the economy, the amount of
| economic activity and the amount of available labor are
| what drive prices, so these things are the combustion in
| the piston, not a byproduct.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _amount of economic activity and the amount of
| available labor are what drive prices_
|
| The relationship is sufficiently complex to permit _e.g._
| falling unemployment, falling (not negative) wage growth,
| falling (including negative) growth and falling
| inflation. It 's not a deterministic system.
|
| > _in a sense increase combustion is a goal_
|
| No, it's not, because the goal--reaching the destination
| quickly--would be accomplished equally well in an
| electric car with no combustion. That's the difference
| between a goal and an effect.
| im-a-baby wrote:
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| No. That quote still doesn't support your assertion. It
| clearly says that the actual goal is to control
| inflation.
| [deleted]
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| > We're never going to say that there are too many people
| working
| [deleted]
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _We're never going to say that there are too many
| people working_
|
| I'll admit that was a poorly-worded statement. But it
| still doesn't convey the Fed targeting a higher
| unemployment rate. It isn't. It's targeting lower price
| growth, and keeping an eye on the labor market to avoid
| overtightening.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > He's absolutely determined to increase unemployment via
| rate hikes.
|
| either i'm deluded or there has to a better way to run an
| economy than this...
| bombcar wrote:
| It's literally the mandate of the Fed and the only levers
| they have are rate changes and threats of future rate
| changes.
|
| Something something the measure becomes the means or
| something.
| stingrae wrote:
| Their goal is to reduce inflation. Increasing
| unemployment, is a side effect of rate hikes but
| ultimately, reduces demand for consumer goods thus
| reducing inflation.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Their goal is to keep inflation steady at a manageable
| rate, and to prevent any deflation at all. Since
| inflation indicators haven't been too reliable in the
| last 20 years, they were caught horribly off guard. But
| ideally, they would make small changes one way or the
| other to maintain a nice equilibrium that would keep
| employment levels relatively stable.
| stingrae wrote:
| True in the ideal case.
| hajile wrote:
| Inflation in staple supplies and food are radically
| inflated too and they aren't reducing when people go on
| unemployment.
| baq wrote:
| the economy runs itself, mostly. rates are one of the
| very few direct knobs anyone has that are sort of
| predictable.
|
| well you can also commit fiscal suicide like the recent
| has-been-a-PM of UK showed, but in that case the economy
| runs you quite explicitly.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| There are a ton of levers (not all under the Fed's
| purview). This is just how capitalism works though,
| others must suffer at the expense of capital. It's bad
| enough when the government doing the bare minimum, like
| trying to put a bunch of people to work to replace our
| crumbling infrastructure, gets decried as "socialism".
| Those voters must not understand (or simply not care)
| that voting for the same corporate interests over and
| over again will just lead to the working man sacrificing
| more to big business.
| Aunche wrote:
| > Powell will continue to raise rates until the labor
| market cools.
|
| This is entirely different from "complaining that the
| labor market is too tight." The Fed has nothing against a
| tight labor market so long as we don't have high
| inflation. Imagine you're a doctor and you're telling
| your patient that you're going to administer chemotherapy
| to a child until either the cancer goes away or they get
| too sick. Then you see protestors trying to convince
| laymen that you're complaining that a child is
| experiencing too much cell growth. That's exactly what GP
| is doing.
| im-a-baby wrote:
| This seems unnecessarily pedantic. Powell has said he
| believes the tight labor market is driving inflation.
| It's a totally fair characterization to say "Powell
| believes the labor market is too tight" given his
| statements. In this case, "too tight" means "tight to the
| point of causing inflation"
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Powell has said he believes the tight labor market is
| driving inflation_
|
| No, he has said nominal wage growth is driving inflation.
| Wages and unemployment are related but not the same
| thing.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What do you think is driving nominal wage growth if not
| low unemployment?
| lsllc wrote:
| Zorg-onomics?
|
| "Excuse me, sir. The council is worried about the economy
| heating up. They wondered if it'd be possible to fire
| 500000. Maybe from one of the smaller companies where no
| one would notice..."
|
| "Fire one million".
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119116/
| aliqot wrote:
| Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg! Put some respect on his name
| pcurve wrote:
| slowly returning to normal salary, along with stagnation of
| pays for those who were brought on high.
|
| I suspect a lot of underqualified people were able to get jobs
| at high salary in the past 1 year.
|
| I know this has caused grief and concerns for more tenured
| employees doing the same job (and better)
| dv_dt wrote:
| The conventional wisdom floating around financial news is that
| a recessionary period is/was expected lasting around a year.
| This is a way to smooth out gross revenues over that year as
| well as knock out some expectations on salary growth. That it
| all happens to be coordinated is an interesting thing to
| contemplate about self-fulfilling prophecy, or natural market
| reactions, or maybe spin wild conspiracy stories about.
| dv_dt wrote:
| *net not gross fyi
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Rising discount rate hits companies with higher valuation
| multiples first, so tech will be hit worse than other sectors.
| A bit different than the GFC
|
| Lower wages in tech, higher unemployment.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| Twitter, Lyft, Swipe... is there a wave coming?
| xtracto wrote:
| IMO We are in the middle of it: https://www.trueup.io/layoffs
|
| Hoping it doesn't get uglier than 2020.
| cabbagesauce wrote:
| Given Lyft have (had?) an office in semi-fascist state of
| Republic of Belarus, there's no wonder they are laying off
| someone. I double checked, the evidence of Minsk office is washed
| from their career portal. Yet, the old listings are there[0].
|
| UPD. One more link was located[1]
|
| [0] https://startup.jobs/backend-engineer-all-teams-minsk-
| lyft-1...
|
| [1] https://park.by/en/residents/lift-bieler/
| cowuser666 wrote:
| what's the connection between having an office in a quasi-hemi-
| fascist state and layoffs?
| cabbagesauce wrote:
| Layoff to save rep among other things?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Tesla was one of the first big tech companies to start this
| cycle, announcing a 10% layoff in June. Now they're hiring at a
| rapid clip. https://insideevs.com/news/617007/tesla-hiring-boost-
| after-l...
| [deleted]
| xeromal wrote:
| Didn't they layoff a lot of labelers after they felt confident
| in their auto labeling?
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Incidentally, those layoffs were shortly followed by a huge
| increase in the number of reported FSD incidents...
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| That probably has a lot more to do with the massive
| expansion in the FSD beta pool.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| I've never heard of labeler ftes but nothing about tesla
| would or should surprise me at this point
| __Parfait__ wrote:
| Getting talent on the cheap
| fny wrote:
| This is all pretty standard culling. They're just trying to
| scare people into recession think (i.e. don't try to negotiate
| a raise) and rehire cheaper outsourced or--get ready for this
| buzz word--"insourced" labor.
|
| Remember, the big tech cos also increased their work force
| sizes dramatically during COVID, so a more aggressive reduction
| push is understandable.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> big tech cos also increased their work force sizes
| dramatically during COVID_
|
| During Covid freshly printed money was raining from the sky
| fort big tech. Not so much now.
| ulchar wrote:
| What would "insourced" mean exactly? Cheap remote domestic
| hires?
| papercrane wrote:
| Unless it's taken on a new meaning, insourcing is just the
| opposite of outsourcing, i.e. using the companies own
| workforce and resources for a project.
| booi wrote:
| That's just called a job
| jonny_eh wrote:
| That doesn't sound that scary.
| fny wrote:
| Yes. They hire devs from the Midwest instead of major metro
| areas.
|
| The term was coined during the Obama era[0] and I've seen
| it shopped around by a few US dev shops recently. It's also
| called "near shoring" or "rural outsourcing."
|
| [0]: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/01/11/e
| veryth...
| henryfjordan wrote:
| I've heard "near-shoring" before but always in the
| context of hiring workers from Mexico or other countries
| further south that share time-zones with the US.
| [deleted]
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Yes. They hire devs from the Midwest instead of major
| metro areas.
|
| Which is great, IMO. It's time we opened the doors to
| more talented developers across the country rather than
| requiring everyone to move to a few big cities to get the
| best jobs.
|
| Yes, compensation will come down relative to those big
| cities, but it will still be coming up for those devs
| outside of major metro areas (otherwise they wouldn't be
| taking the jobs, obviously)
| dr-detroit wrote:
| sn_master wrote:
| The term "insourcing" was used in the movie "The Campaign"
| to refer to bringing cheap Chinese labor to the US and
| paying them similar wages and offer same working conditions
| as in China to save on shipping costs.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLwdvvzKJqs&t=32s
| SevenNation wrote:
| This is what the other side of a hiring blitz looks like. On the
| ascent, company after company speculatively hired extremely
| expensive workers - because the surface economic signals were
| misleading people who should have known better. There was so much
| money to throw at employees that offers were being extended just
| to keep candidates away from competitors.
|
| This went on so long and with such fury that employees,
| candidates, and CS students began to view the orgy of
| overspending as the new normal.
|
| Now a normalization of economic conditions throws the entire
| thing into reverse. Too many fresh-faced candidates showing up
| with resume in hand, too many workers on payrolls doing little to
| nothing for wages 3-10x what they should be, too little revenue
| to continue business as usual, and a stock market that pulled the
| rug out from public companies using shares as a form of self-
| printed currency.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| CS was already a popular bet among incoming college students,
| but the memory of the manic 2020-21 period have fuelled a vast
| flight of talent to CS majors, at least in my country. Everyone
| is convinced that the only way to make any real money fast is
| to learn how to code. The expectations are absurd - most expect
| to make doctor-tier salaries right after graduation (source:
| wife teaches at university).
|
| By 2024, the steady drip of fresh CS graduates is going to turn
| into a flood.
|
| An entire generation of teenagers saw the tech boom, the crypto
| boom, and the SPAC/IPO mani. Its going to color college major
| choices for years.
|
| In short: downward pressure on programmer wages.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| > In short: downward pressure on programmer wages.
|
| Entry level programmers maybe - lets see how many can
| actually stick around past first midterm
| nkjnlknlk wrote:
| People have been making these doomer claims since 00s to my
| memory and all that has been proven since then is we don't
| have enough software engineers.
| delecti wrote:
| I almost feel like coding is currently what typing was 60
| years ago. "Typist" isn't really a job anymore, but
| stenographer and transcriptionist are. Likewise, I think
| that coding needs to become something basically everyone
| can do a tiny bit of, but only a relatively smaller group
| do as their entire job.
| baq wrote:
| almost anybody can be a coder but _software engineering_
| is super freakin ' hard - and I only say this because I'm
| soon wrapping up my second decade of doing it. the amount
| of things you can't efficiently learn at school is
| staggering. I see young promising people focusing on
| 'tech stacks', 'deep learning', etc. hence missing the
| forest from the trees and think that it simply isn't
| possible to exit school as a competent software engineer.
| you have to really try to be one to become one and no
| school makes you do that. it's you.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Yes my algebra professor used to say same thing almost 20
| years ago now
| robotnikman wrote:
| On the other hand, it seems like technical proficiency
| might be going down with newer generations. Many were
| raised on smartphones and tablets where you just tap
| something and it does the thing. Devices nowadays
| abstract a lot of the underlying system away from the
| users, even to the point where apparently the newer
| generation struggles with the concept of files and
| directories.
| mountainofdeath wrote:
| This has been happening for at least the second half of the
| prior decade. I graduated in 2014 and that was the second year
| EE/CS had a significant uptick in enrollments. When I started
| in 2010, it was mostly the "runs Linux on the desktop" hacker-
| types.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| I was a freshmen in 2004 it was already widely believed CS
| career was reliable source of middle class income. Nothing we
| see here is new
| aksss wrote:
| Wage inflation, interesting that the whole "fight for $15"
| thing literally died overnight at some point. But when you're
| at 40-year high for inflation, rates rise, part of what the Fed
| is _trying_ to do is raise unemployment. Here you are.
|
| https://thehill.com/policy/3658981-why-the-fed-is-pushing-un...
| relaxing wrote:
| > interesting that the whole "fight for $15" thing literally
| died overnight at some point
|
| Not that interesting. With the Senate split 50/50 it only
| took one Democrat to kill that effort.
| tqi wrote:
| Did these companies accelerate planned layoffs because they
| figure Twitter layoffs on Friday would help take the spotlight
| off of them?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I doubt these are at all related to Twitter layoffs, we've been
| seeing announcements of layoffs from tech companies a few times
| a week for a few weeks now.
| nkozyra wrote:
| I think the point is about the timing of the announcement. I
| could see it landing a little softer when people are talking
| about the Twitter stuff.
|
| On the other hand, big companies do this all the time and get
| a little bad press and then move on with their lives.
| shaburn wrote:
| More likely in response to the interest rate raise. Effectively
| the leathal injection to the tech sector.
| vecter wrote:
| There's no way that they planned a layoff within a week. They
| take much longer to plan and execute.
| gryBrd1987 wrote:
| There's no way these people chat in a Signal chat group?
|
| It's funny how people on a technology forum discount other
| normal humans also using technology
|
| I mean Musk's Twitter texts just revealed they do exactly
| that.
| tqi wrote:
| Def, I meant more moving up the timeline to get it into this
| new cycle.
| bombcar wrote:
| If they did they'd have pushed to Friday evening or Monday.
|
| I think once the layoffs _started_ companies began to follow
| suit. There 's a serious herd mentality that's hard to avoid.
| eclipticplane wrote:
| I suspect we'll see more of these in the coming weeks as
| companies go through planning for next year.
| WalterSobchak wrote:
| https://archive.ph/VKWGP
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| Reminds me of COVID onset tbh.
| pcurve wrote:
| people have short memory, but that was pretty brutal.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Wow, another one? I just finish reading the thread on Stripe... I
| think we're going to need a Sacked-HN category.
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://layoffs.fyi
| Taurenking wrote:
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Wait until Twitter layoffs are out today or tomorrow. Winter is
| coming.
| drstewart wrote:
| >Winter is coming.
|
| Pressing X to doubt. Many of these companies did layoffs
| during the pandemic (like Lyft) - which in many cases were
| just an excuse to cull low performers - then just continued
| to grow at insane paces. Even these layoffs just put them
| back at pandemic-level figures.
|
| Call me when companies are smaller than they were even before
| the pandemic, let alone crashing and burning.
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