[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why is everybody copying layoffs?
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Ask HN: Why is everybody copying layoffs?
Google: 12000 Microsoft: 10000 Amazon: 18000 Meta: 11000
Twitter: 4000 Salesforce: 8000 200,000+ laid off in tech since
the beginning of 2022.
Author : indus
Score : 16 points
Date : 2023-01-20 22:06 UTC (54 minutes ago)
| dboreham wrote:
| Because they are all owned by the same rich people with the same
| world view.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| When everyone is doing it, companies see it as an opportunity to
| trim down the fat they have accumulated during the good times.
|
| There's no stigma for them doing it if everyone else is.
|
| If they lay people off in good times, then that is a serious
| indication of trouble at the company.
|
| If they lay people off in bad times then that is an indication of
| wisdom and prudence.
|
| I've seen it in multiple recessions.
| myko wrote:
| > I've seen it in multiple recessions.
|
| What's interesting here is that, in the face of all the fears
| about a recession, no recession actually seems to be happening
| andrewstuart wrote:
| yep. It's just a bunch of lemmings.
| causality0 wrote:
| The more removed the financial and tech world is from the
| rest of the economy the more they cloud reality by distorting
| GDP figures. We may not be in a recession but everyone I know
| has more difficulty paying for things and a more negative
| economic outlook than they ever did in '09.
| snbitne wrote:
| Growth stage startup CEO here. At the end of last year our board
| meeting was a pitch from outside investor director to founders
| recommending a 50-75% layoff, despite several years of runway.
| The capital class is despondent that the stock market has melted,
| and the solution is to pull the ladder up and nurse wounds. In my
| opinion, companies are all responding with their own values
| informed version of what their financial stakeholders have been
| urging them increasingly to do.
| moneywoes wrote:
| How big is your startup
| lostcolony wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| The financials aren't actually telling these companies to lay
| people off; the shareholders are. The macroeconomic climate is
| very different than the microeconomic climate; the
| microeconomic climate for most of these companies is "slow
| expansion", not "contract". In fact, many of them are still
| hiring even as they're laying people off because of that. But
| the shareholders are very much concerned, and so this is much
| more of a response to that.
| indus wrote:
| So if you have to do, would it be 10% a few quarters or go for
| the full blow in a single shot
| awacs wrote:
| Love him or hate him (I'm more the latter at this point) Elon
| showed you could trim 70% of the workforce from Twitter and it's
| still up and running. So with that logic, that being on the
| extreme side, trimming some smaller % is a no brainer to the
| boards of most companies now.
| ssgodderidge wrote:
| Many tech companies made the same assumptions in the last two
| years (e.g. online transactions/ecommerce will stay at COVID
| levels). Those assumptions turned out to not be true, so they are
| course correcting to match the current economic climate.
| indus wrote:
| Microsoft added 70,000 new employees in the last 3 years.
|
| How much of this is course correction vs sheer cluelessness?
| ac2u wrote:
| It's rather memetic in a way, everyone thinks everyone else knows
| best when it happens. Then the mimeses becomes a self fulfilling
| prophecy and private liquidity starts to tighten up even further
| than the tightening because of interest rates.
|
| I'm guessing the decision makers here are sometimes aware of the
| irrationality of the snowball effect, but bet on it being
| irrational not to copy it before the market reality hits them and
| they have to make even deeper cuts in future.
| groffee wrote:
| Musk showed with Twitter that something like 5% of engineers are
| carrying the other 95% that are all dead weight, it's entirely
| possible to get rid of the dead weight and be better than ever.
| It's just common sense.
| thdc wrote:
| I definitely agree on big tech company bloat, but do not agree
| with those percentages (or at least on average).
|
| I also don't think he properly sorted engineers between
| slackers and non-slackers due to reasons like the speed at
| which cutting occurred and the rehiring into firing to fix
| whatever random issues.
|
| Industry wide layoffs are a nice cover to cut inefficient
| workers, although I don't know how well they can be sussed out
| in large companies. My own company with only a few hundred
| employees cut some people and I can say that, of the ones I was
| familiar with, they were mostly slackers or low performers.
| fl0ps wrote:
| I think more than "dead weight", Musk was trying to get rid of
| what he deemed a culture problem. Using the dead weight as an
| excuse he did multiple rounds of purges, with "useful"
| (productive+culture matching) engineers also getting purged in
| the process as an acceptible loss, only perhaps seeing that as
| a bit too far later on (recall there were engineers being asked
| to come back on an individual basis). The purging wasn't a
| surprise from my perspective of , in the past, seeing CEOs
| agressively weed out employees who only slightly disagree with
| them, let alone the "actively plotting"(?) Twitter employees
| who, you may recall, Musk was pouring over internal
| conversation logs to find, it seems.
|
| And to expound on the main topic, I think what we're seeing is
| a confluence of the above: using downturn, etc. as an excuse to
| shed perhaps individuals or groups that are in opposition to
| the culture the board thinks is useful, drowned out by a total
| also comprised of some amount of acceptible loss in employees
| the company wouldn't mind keeping.
|
| Watch as some individuals from all of the above are
| individually asked to rejoin with a pay bump.
|
| My two cents.
| tekla wrote:
| Who is everyone?
|
| Why do companies that are known for being overly bloated mean
| anything for the rest of the economy?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Twitter, Salesforce
|
| For large US software companies, it's basically everyone.
| amalgamated_inc wrote:
| Cause recession? Money is suddenly tight?
| indus wrote:
| But google, Microsoft, etc have $200bn on their balance sheets!
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Rule of Acquisition #10: Greed is eternal. [1]
|
| The shareholders always want growth and profits.
|
| [1]: https://memory-
| alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition
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(page generated 2023-01-20 23:00 UTC)