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Seems like a lot of people want the market to crash. Or, everyone is trying to time the pop. Fundamentals for Tech is still pretty solid. Yes all the crypto/NF
by pm90 4y ago
Seems like a lot of people want the market to crash. Or, everyone is trying to time the pop.
Fundamentals for Tech is still pretty solid. Yes all the crypto/NFT can crash and burn but demand doesn’t seem like its going to fall unless there’s an actual crash.
IMO the fact is simply that policymakers have become really good at ensuring that crashes like 2008 don’t happen again.
Don’t believe the BS VCs are trying to sell. Yeah, startups won’t be able to raise money, its ok, there’s a ton of demand elsewhere for Tech jobs.
- tempsy 4y agomy guess is that competition for jobs at mega corps is actually going to become relatively fiercer because everyone now is seeking a flight to safety. i do wonder if that means that companies can get away with offering smaller compensation packages
- pm90 4y agoAs long as they’re not colluding but competing, this seems unlikely. As a sibling comment pointed out, wages “tend to be sticky”.
- tempsy 4y agoThere are pay bands. If you have multiple offers you can usually counter for more equity. In this market if you’re a megacorp you have the upper hand when the competition is Uber and their stock is down 70% eg you don’t need to counter so aggressively and offer so much more money whereas you might’ve a year ago
- fnordpiglet 4y agoMega corp comp doesn’t work like that. It takes years to adjust their bandings. As a hiring manager it always frustrates you because you’re hopelessly out of touch with the pervading market for comp. If they want to reduce costs they’ll slow hiring before reduce comp.
- tempsy 4y agoSuccessfully negotiating for more equity usually depends on other offers. Now that mega corps are clearly outperforming the Uber and DoorDashes and Squares of the world they have no competition other than other megacorps and don’t have to counter with more equity simply because someone has an offer from Uber. Didn’t mean pay would drop below a band but you’re likely going to be able to get away with the lower end instead of the higher end of a band if you’re perceived as “safe” in this market
- fnordpiglet 4y agoIf you already have a job then they’re explicitly competing against your existing employer even without other offers. You’re right though if you can’t shop other jobs it might depress your upside, and if you’re coming in off a layout you should expect parity unless you have competitive offers. Ultimately though comp models won’t change.
- tempsy 4y agothere are plenty of ways a company can pay you less without having to change their entire comp model and wasn’t suggesting that was what was happening the point is a flight to safety gives Megacorps leverage they didn’t have 1-3 years ago. they can pay you at the lower end of a pay band or interview you for a lower level than you asked for. and if people are desperate enough because they are in a tanking company or laid off they might take it. And when everyone is thinking the same thing they can be pickier and get better quality talent for the same money regardless
- fnordpiglet 4y agoThey won’t. I’ve spent 30 years in fairly senior positions at mega corps. It’ll take a few years and only if the other mega corps reduce pay. Their response to a lot of available talent isn’t to pay less it’s to reduce their conversion rates and be more selective. They aren’t competing for talent against startups or even places like Coinbase and Uber for the most part. It’s against each other.
- spacedcowboy 4y agoGot an email last week from Apple “People team” - aka HR. They said they’ve increased the salary pool for this year, so I guess we’ll see how that pans out.
- bamboozled 4y agoMy understanding is we’re not necessarily good at preventing crashes. But we’ve used a new strategy (printing money) to avoid one in the short term. This seems to have created inflation and it’s various seemingly negative consequences.
- rapind 4y agoI believe the technical term is “kicking the can down the road”. We’re experts at it up here in Canada if you’d like any tips.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pm90 4y agoDeficit spending is not a new strategy. Financial crashes are often precipitated by short term factors eg inability to come up with enough capital, cascading failures as financial firms fail and spook all investors. The Fed has essentially acted more proactively to assure the market that it won’t let this happen. If the fundamentals of the system are broken, there isn’t much even the fed could do. That doesn’t seem to be the case (modulo things the Feds cant control eg Foreign Wars).
- bombcar 4y agoYeah, I wouldn’t say we successfully prevented a 2008 crash until we’re through the next crash - as arguably the 2008 crash was a prevention of a 2001 crash.
- nus07 4y agoAs someone on HN had previously mentioned - the crash and burn is more for “cathartic” purposes. Big Tech is the equivalent of 2008 derivatives and the greed , the brashness of I am smarter,the IPOs and VC exits,the parties, the insane wealth to gobble up competition and create monopolies. The nerdy tech worker was replaced by the modern day chiseled , slick , stock options loaded tech worker who would have gone to banking in 2006. They pop adderall and leetcode and crack coding interviews like the bankers did brutal Goldman interviews. They go to burning man as a sign of lifestyle instead of counter culture. Big Tech has upended the middle class and data privacy and gamed our emotions and attention so much that I am tired . I will gladly see my stock values halved if I can get back my simpler times of 1998. I wish I could escape the monopolies and their hold on my everyday life . But maybe I am an old fart so ignore me .
- whimsicalism 4y agoThis sort of tech worker is more of a creation of the media and people's minds that than the actual median highly compensated tech worker. Truth is: nerds mostly remain nerds.
- nus07 4y agoI disagree. If nerds remain nerds and the focus is on learning and trying out cool stuff then Leetcode would not exist . There would be way more companies coming out to compete or springing up with cool stuff . Apart from TikTok upending Facebook , none of the other big tech firms have any competition and I do not see them having a viable threat in the next 5-6 years . They will buy up any competitors. Anecdotally- I know of two people who quit tenured professor positions in physics and neuroscience to join big tech . The one in neuroscience had recently made a big find and Google Deepmind came and offered an insane amount of money she would never make even if she won the Nobel prize.
- novok 4y agoLeetcode is a counter response to an interview type that existed well before the current tech boom, and the interview type existed as long as google was an ascendant company, since they were the ones that popularized it. Before algorithmic interviews, there were microsoft's lateral thinking interviews that were the bullshit interview type du-jour that everyone complained about. The money is the relatively recent thing that made people practice for leetcode more that wouldn't necessarily go into software otherwise, but the algorithmic interview was there before tech started paying a lot and became the only growth engine of the american economy that is left.
- taneq 4y agoYou can’t stop a market bubble from popping with policy. You can only keep the cycle going until the bubble is bigger then the policy maker… which, since the bubble grows exponentially, is soon no matter how big that policy maker is.
- pm90 4y agoNo, but you can try and gently deflate rather than make it pop.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- taneq 4y agoIn theory, yeah. I don't know if this has been done in the past 30ish years, though... it seems that, mysteriously, the people in charge of making those decisions are always the same people who have a lot invested in seeing the bubble continue to inflate.
- donthellbanme 4y ago
- colordrops 4y ago> the fact is simply that policymakers have become really good at ensuring that crashes like 2008 don’t happen again. Yes, the next crash won't be like 2008. The universe is infinite in its ability to present us with new forms.
- cudgy 4y agoTrue. It might be even worse and across many asset classes at the same time.
- paulpauper 4y agoI agree. there is not going to be major crash as all the overrated pundits are predicting, who keep being wrong over and over. Yes all the crypto/NFT can crash and burn but demand doesn’t seem like its going to fall unless there’s an actual crash. Crypto is just a very expensive hobby/fad. It has no bearing on the overall economy. It could all go to zero and the affect on the rest of the economy and stock market would be small or minimal. The Nasdaq and S&P 500 have recovered far faster than bitcoin. Crypto generates no profits, big tech generates hundreds of billions of dollars of profit annually. Facebook alone makes $40 billion/year profit, about 3x that of Walmart.
- jnwatson 4y agoRegardless of the value of crypto itself, it does impact the job market, especially in the security space. A collapse would reduce demand for security professionals.
- sharadov 4y agoNot just crypto - but bunch of companies in other industries that raised a lot of money in the last 2 years have seen layoffs. May was a brutal month - 17K layoffs in tech. https://nypost.com/2022/05/31/tech-layoffs-companies-axe-workers-at-highest-rate-since-2020/ https://nypost.com/2022/05/31/tech-layoffs-companies-axe-wor...
- w-j-w 4y ago> IMO the fact is simply that policymakers have become really good at ensuring that crashes like 2008 don’t happen again. So many people have lost so much money to ideas that rhyme with this one.
- tqi 4y agoJournalists especially seem eager to have tech put back in its place. These days it feels like they are straight up antagonistic towards the whole industry. A quick scan of The Verge homepage, I see mostly sarcastically negative stories (Netflix is finally taking a page from the rest of Hollywood) and neutral PR placements (Marvel’s Spider-Man: Remastered is coming to PC in August). As far as I can tell the only positive headlines are affiliate listicles (Here are the best tablet deals right now)...
- Apocryphon 4y agoWell, a lot of people did cattily tell unemployed journalists to “learn to code.”
- odshoifsdhfs 4y agoWasn't this started because before journalists started losing their jobs, they were telling blue collar unemployed workers to learn to code? So people turn that against them.
- vineyardmike 4y ago> Journalists especially seem eager to have tech put back in its place. Journalists first turned on Craigslist when they stole classified revenue, then they turned on Facebook when they stole advertising revenue. They started turning on tech as a whole as collateral damage. The whole time they shat on wall-street for stealing everyone else's money and being rich. When tech got rich, they turned on them. First in the dot-com era when SF started to get corporate-ified and not counter cultural, and then everywhere when Tech became the new upper-middle class and linked (by journalists) with society's problems. Tech is never not going to be among the best paying profession until governments regulate the industry into less profitability. If Google can make $millions per-employee by having a global reach, then there is no way to stop the salary creep compared to companies that only have local-reach.
- pm90 4y agoIts the job of journalists to bring a cynical/critical eye to important things in society. I'm glad that these folks exist and its their fulltime job to call out bullshit. Of course they will misfire at times. People in tech also seem to forget that a lot of attention to tech is brought to them by the media. The first adopters are generally computer nerds and teenagers; people in media write about it, glamorize and make it mainstream (how many Tech CEOs have been on the cover of TIME magazine?). In fact, my personal perspective is that they haven’t been critical enough; when instagram and WhatsApp were gobbled up by Facebook the prevailing media sentiment was that of the unlimited possibilities in tech for wealth generation rather than concern about the anti competitiveness of the market that it caused.
- lamontcg 4y ago> IMO the fact is simply that policymakers have become really good at ensuring that crashes like 2008 don’t happen again. i sort of don't even know where to start with this one... i'm going to just file it under every other "this time it's different" claim and move on. watch out for CMBS imploding.
- pm90 4y agoSystems fail in many different ways. Its not that the market can never fail, that would be an absurd claim. They are less likely to fail along the lines that they failed before. What we’re seeing instead is people fearing a repetition of the same mistakes and the same failures.
- lamontcg 4y agoYeah it won't literally be a repeat of 2001 or 2008. I mentioned CMBS which along with crypto are the fairly safe bets on what will meltdown this time, and they weren't involved (or didn't exist) last time. The script also tends to vary. I was quiet surprised that the markets had a fit over the 1% fed funds rate and was caught a bit off guard. They're announcing very directly though that they're going to invert the yield curve. They are quite concerned about wage inflation. They are more than willing to tank the economy to get it under control and are invoking the name of Paul Volker. There is no way we get out of this with a "soft landing" and things are going to detonate. Then the fun really begins because the political climate is going to be much worse than 2008/2009. The Tea Party Republicans ostensibly claim to be against any kind of bailout and they'll be willing to play chicken with the entire economy in order to harm the Biden administration. It is pretty obvious that it is going to be somewhat different this time. The idea that policymakers will magically navigate us through these waters though harkens back to the Clinton/Greenspan era of policy. But we don't even have anyone like "The Maestro" running the show this time. Wages are out of control and they're going to crash the economy to get them back under control. That's what they do. They haven't figured out anything magical to avoid the pain, and they always underestimate what kind of chaos it will cause.
- derevaunseraun 4y ago> Seems like a lot of people want the market to crash. Or, everyone is trying to time the pop. This same sort of article has been posted here a couple times in the past two weeks. Some news outlets seem incredibly eager to report this story I feel like there's a certain sort of resentment from the news media towards the tech industry in general, and it's gotten worse in recent years. I think some of it is political, and some of it is out of fear because different outputs of the tech industry have radically changed other industries (e.g. cable TV's former monopoly on entertainment) and their success is dependent on their ability to maintain an online presence
- paganel 4y ago> but demand doesn’t seem like its going to fall unless there’s an actual crash. Not sure about the US but over here in Europe there are billions of euros (probably tens of billions) that are poured right now into the market thanks to the latest EU Next Generation funds (basically post-Covid support money, in fact a typical keynesian move, with all its pluses and minuses). There's a huge digitalisation push that comes from top to down, with actual money set up to pay for (almost) all of it. Add to it the the typical keynes-ian "accumulator" logic and things should be ok for at least the next couple of years for many computer programmers and IT people based in Europe, especially those that will get into contracting and will be able to land some part of the pie (a very big pie, as I've mentioned).