24 ms·

Tech layoffs keep stacking up

288 points by Swizec 4y ago

aninteger 4y ago
More mobile friendly link: https://nitter.net/HayekAndKeynes/status/1541760176826499073 https://nitter.net/HayekAndKeynes/status/1541760176826499073
cgb223 4y ago
Is anyone keeping a running tally of these on a website somewhere?
- smoe 4y ago
  This site made the rounds in the beginning of the pandemic for the layoff wave back then. Still seems to be actively tracking on a quick glance https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/
- felideon 4y ago
  The screenshot in the tweet is from https://www.trueup.io/layoffs https://www.trueup.io/layoffs
- pavlov 4y ago
  In 2001's post-dot-com apocalypse there was fuckedcompany.com for this purpose... Maybe they'll do a comeback. Seems like Fucked Company is officially preserved by the Library of Congress because... September 11? Huh. A profanity-laden title on a dot-gov site always manages to surprise: https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0020126/ https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0020126/
- DanAtC 4y ago
  layoffstracker.com has an RSS feed which is fun to throw into work Slack channels: https://layoffstracker.com/feed/ https://layoffstracker.com/feed/
mtoner23 4y ago
tbh, 16k jobs in these overvalued industries isn't much. We are adding hundreds of thousands of jobs in real industries every month. Places that make things that people want. Tesla is kind of the exception to this but aren't there always layoffs there? seems par for the course.
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
  > in real industries riplol
  - themitigating 4y ago
    It's amazing how for some people hatred of the political opposite causes glee when tech companies fail and people lose their jobs. People who may not be political and who probably need their job. All of this being done on internet forums and social media produced and managed by those same people.
    - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
      I don't blame em. Tech has always thought of itself as a bunch of snowflakes. Reality is, yes, it's a new industry, but no, it's not special. Every other industry I've been exposed to has all the same bullshit office politics. The same supposed "in jokes" that only "their industry" would understand.
  - mtoner23 4y ago
    The world will get by if we have fewer coinbases, SaaS companies and other tech jobs. If we have fewer factories, oil refineries, meat packing plants; there will be shortages and riots.
    - fatjokes 4y ago
      I mean, hopefully some of those tech jobs are making those oil refineries, factories, meat packing plants more efficient.
nathanaldensr 4y ago
LOL, we aren't even getting started yet!
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  This is interesting. To be honest, I don't see recession as much as maybe attempts to trigger it by some companies ( right now, it is clear companies are poorly equipped to deal with empowered employees ). Yeah, easy money from FED is drying up for banks ( and various companies and rely on access to easy money from banks.. such as early tech ), but should that automatically mean crash? It can still happen. While I am certainly preparing for this possibility, I dislike various CEOs saying its coming and media trumpets putting it in bold letters.
  - mellavora 4y ago
    > should that automatically mean crash? No, not automatic. But it sure increases the likelihood. Especially after years of cheap money have allowed tremendous unproductive investment. It isn't just banks, it is every company with access to capital markets. Unproductive investment made sense when money was free ("easy money"), but when money starts to costs, those investments get closed down. And the people those investments employed become unemployed.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      I think we are in agreement here. I found no issue with this logic.
  - yobbo 4y ago
    > Yeah, easy money from FED is drying up for banks It's impossible to know certainly how much and where it was having effect. Housing market was just one place, which caused a sort of wealth effect as households' equity increased. Stock buybacks might be analogous. These mechanics have been in play since 2010? Potentially alot to roll back.
  - ItsMonkk 4y ago
prions 4y ago
The trueup data casts a pretty wide net. Seeing Microsoft on that list and makes the impression that layoffs are hitting FAANGs in a similar way to high growth startups, but those layoffs were due to Microsoft pulling out of Russia. https://www.trueup.io/co/microsoft#layoffs https://www.trueup.io/co/microsoft#layoffs
- np_tedious 4y ago
  Also contained Better. Debatable how much it is a tech company, and I believe many of the layoffs were mortgage loan officers.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  It's not unusual for companies who are doing fine to use industry layoffs as cover to cut under-performing employees.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  Similarly, the Tesla layoffs sounded like an office of in-house data labelers close to the tool developers in California being replaced by outsourced temp workers after the labeling tools reached maturity. It's a stretch to call that a tech layoff.
  - 1-6 4y ago
    Amazon Mturk is cheap too
jacknews 4y ago
I wonder how much of this is real, and how much is part of the fed's acknowledged plan to push wages down. I mean obviously the layoffs are real, but are they necessary, or just symptoms of the chill winds and fear now blowing from the fed.
- dfxm12 4y ago
  If this is a reaction to the Fed raising rates, the layoffs aren't necessary, but by and large, these companies put short term gains above all else, which is why they are doing it.
- xbar 4y ago
  There are a lot of companies, small and medium, without enough revenue or funding to pay employee salaries, given reasonable budgeting into the next several quarters. This is as real as it gets.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    It does seem at this point as if companies that haven't been able to make money, sometimes for years--especially those that should have been "pandemic businesses" (looking at you meal kit subscriptions)--are going to have to significantly raise prices, cut costs, or turn out the lights.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Ser, we’re at a point where a company like Uber looks like it might never turn an operational profit, and is quietly planning to/has existed most markets. If $33B in funding doesn’t get you a dollar in profit, you have to wonder if its all even worth it.
  - kmlx 4y ago
    > has existed most markets. which markets did Uber exit voluntarily?
    - 4y ago
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Much of this is due to the reversal of the tight hiring market. For the past several years tech companies were desperate to hire because everyone was growing and the hiring market was tight. This inevitably results in companies loosening their hiring standards and retaining underperforming employees because they can't afford to reduce team sizes. Layoffs combined with hiring freezes (or slowdowns) signal real stress within a company. However, many of these layoffs are single-digit percentage layoffs from companies that are still hiring across the board. That's not so much a traditional layoff as a pruning of the workforce. That pruning wasn't happening as much when hiring was tight, but now that hiring is easier and real, actual layoffs have put more good candidates back onto the market, the companies who simply collected too many underperforming employees can afford to churn some of them back out of the company. Doing it as a "layoff" makes it more palatable than going on a firing spree. That said, when it comes to interviewing you shouldn't assume that a laid off employee was necessarily underperforming. A lot of companies don't really perform layoffs with surgical precision and will instead drop entire teams at once. I've watched great engineers get swept up in minor staff reductions simply because they were assigned to bad managers or doomed teams that they couldn't save by themselves. I've also hired great people who came right out of layoffs at other companies and I would have missed those resumes if I had been using dumb filtering rules like ignoring anyone who had been laid off.
- ruffrey 4y ago
  I have to continue this train of thought. It is dangerous that people consider layoff as a performance indicator for the employee. It’s just too hard to tell. I was laid off recently along with many others because an entire experimental project was killed because the market shifted (crypto, I know). Prior to that I’d received top performance marks and had been promoted to team lead. They gave me a great recommendation for the next gig. It’s as easy to get a low performer who’s on a PIP and employed, as a high performer in a risky company. Hard to tell which one you’re interviewing.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
    It's almost as if every human being is complex, multifaceted, and always growing. Perhaps every one of us who's interviewing and writing perf reviews would benefit from questioning a system that tries to reduce human beings to a handful of sentences on a CV. On the other hand... grinding LeetCode is way more measurable. ;)
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
There are millions of tech employees so the number of layoffs is minuscule so far.
matt321 4y ago
I frequently read these and look at which areas exactly are getting dumped. I've have never read an article that said engineers are getting laid off. Most layoffs I see are overhead.
- Ozzie_osman 4y ago
  I wonder the same. Is it actually technical talent, or is it other functions like sales, marketing, recruiting etc?
- gdulli 4y ago
  The quote from Rounders about not realizing you're the sucker at the table, but it's about not realizing that you're the overhead.
scifibestfi 4y ago
The era of cheap money is over. Interest rates can't come down without making inflation worse. The tide is going out and we're starting to see what was real or not. Crypto got wiped out and now the tech and real estate bubbles are popping. Home Price to Median Household Income Ratio is even worse than 2008. https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco... Redfin and banks have started layoffs as they're seeing demand quickly drop with mortgage rate increases. Savings have dried up. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVE Consumer debt is at an all time high. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCLACBW027SBOG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCLACBW027SBOG We're in the early stages and I fear we're looking at a combination of the dot com crash + 2008, but longer lasting because the Fed won't be able to bail us out this time.
- almost_usual 4y ago
  > Crypto got wiped out and now the tech and real estate bubbles are popping. Crypto got wiped out but a BTC is still hovering around 20k? > now the tech and real estate bubbles are popping I sincerely doubt it, things might slow down and plateau but with the cost of everything going up (including rent) people will still desire a home with a mostly fixed cost. We also haven’t seen any massive layoffs yet coming from tech companies. Also if home prices plateau and inflation rips the value of those homes are deprecating without price reductions.
  - bink 4y ago
    Home prices have been rising far faster than inflation. The "people will always desire a home" and "plateau" talk is straight out of the Realtors playbook and is said before every pullback. People have forgotten what a real estate downturn looks like because it's been propped up by the Fed for so long, but in the good old days (before 2004 or so) it wasn't uncommon to go through periods where the average house took 9-12 months to sell and sellers went through 3-4 Realtors before it sold. Do the Realtors still say that 6 months is the average time to sell or have they forgotten that too? The fact is that people buy homes based on monthly payment and significant rate hikes are something we haven't seen in decades. When the monthly payment doubles housing prices go down.
LandR 4y ago
My only anecdotal datum here is that I just got a new job, and every day I'm getting multiple messages from recruiters looking for developers. Full Time and Contracting. If it's all gone to shit, I'm not seeing it here (Scotland), salaries I'm seeing are really good for the area too.
- jamiegreen 4y ago
  What do you specialise in if you don't mind me asking?
  - LandR 4y ago
    C# .NET, SQL and some JS
- mountainriver 4y ago
  Same I’m still getting offers
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  I'm in Western Canada and locally, provincially and nationally there's a ridiculous number of open tech positions. I guess a chart that included hiring wouldn't be highlighted on twitter...
  - adra 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm getting way more unsolicited job recruitments than ever before. I'm not sure if companies actually need the head counts or feel like they can pickup some cheap(er) hires now that the market is off.
  - varispeed 4y ago
    I am in the UK and had quite a number of Canadian companies looking to recruit recently. Interesting.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    Probably because U.S. companies hit up Canadian talent hard during the talent crunch, since they mostly speak English at a native level, live in the same time zones, and were cheaper than U.S. devs. I don't think Canadian companies could compete and hire, so mostly just rode it out and let positions sit unfilled. I suspect there are more unfilled positions in Canada than there are unemployed devs in Canada right now, but if layoffs continue, the Canadian companies might get some relief
puranjay 4y ago
Much of this seems to be a complete miscalculation of the “new normal” of the pandemic. There was a narrative that somehow all the wild growth we had seen in the pandemic years when everyone was forcibly locked at home would sustain forever. Of course that wasn’t going to happen and should have been obvious to anyone. The pandemic is over and the “new normal” has just gone back to the “old normal” with marginal changes in work/play patterns. This was always going to happen, with or without current rate hikes. The rate hikes just accelerated everything by 2 years.
- minraws 4y ago
  I think there is another way of looking at it, as a way for the incredible growth in startups to the finally being understood by the new and old entrepreneurs. Hiring and such didn't only happen in the pandemic period but also overall in almost the entire past decade(2012-2021). Hurting the understanding of the people in the market, we are now seeing the sudden shrinking to have caused them to figure out priorities of either growth or profitability in even later phases of the business. At least that's what it seems like to me. Because the jobs market is almost just as good in tech as always, it's just big startups and companies are shrinking and increasing margins while smaller ones in early phases of growth are still increasing jobs or just in sheer numbers.
- asdajksah2123 4y ago
  The great part is that tech (and other white collar) workers used that small window of opportunity where they had tremendous bargaining power to push for policies that will make it even easier to replace them. It feels like a white collar repeat of what blue collar voters did in the US in the 70s and 80s.
  - erklik 4y ago
    > The great part is that tech (and other white collar) workers used that small window of opportunity where they had tremendous bargaining power to push for policies that will make it even easier to replace them. Any examples of those policies?
Invictus0 4y ago
I'm bullish: the recession fears are overblown. Adjust the SPY for inflation and we're not that far off from where we were in 2020. https://www.multpl.com/inflation-adjusted-s-p-500/table/by-year https://www.multpl.com/inflation-adjusted-s-p-500/table/by-y...
- seabrookmx 4y ago
  Isn't inflation the problem? Inflation -> Rate hikes -> Growth slows ?
- francisofascii 4y ago
  The SPY is much higher than 2018, 2019, which makes me think it has more to fall. But that doesn't mean recession, it just means back to normal.
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    Uh, there's been 3 years of real economic growth since 2019...?
1024core 4y ago
Isn't there some site called "Dead Company" or something like that which keeps track of layoffs? Or am I thinking of the 2002 dotcom crash... Edit: oh right, thanks @blakesterz, it was called "Fucked Company"
- blakesterz 4y ago
  Yep! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- agotterer 4y ago
  There's https://layoffs.fyi https://layoffs.fyi which is keeping tally
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
saos 4y ago
That graph is awful
InTheArena 4y ago
While there is still a open question about how much the sudden reversal of monetary policy from the last 15 years of "hey! all the money can print" that led to companies going into debt to purchase their own stock to "oh crap, inflation, let's tighten the money supply" affects the durability of companies... that said... There are some very hyperbolic people comparing this to the .COM crash and also to 2008/2009. In 2001, there was literally a site doing nothing but reporting in flamboyant terms all of the "fucked companies" going under. IIRC, it was dozens a day, at one point, with people stating that the Internet had failed, and it was all going down the drain. In 2008, absolutely no one had any clue what was going on but everyone knew it was catastrophically bad. People were trying to guess if it would be merely the worst recession ever or the second great depression. This so far seems like a fairly normal correction. We will see if Debt blows up and changes that.
- pirate787 4y ago
  Contagion is ripping through crypto, at least, in a way that's more like 2008.
  - htormey 4y ago
    Nah, I disagree. I work in crypto (coinbase) and was working in tech in the Bay Area in 2008. As of today, many crypto companies have money from 2021/early 2022 raises and are still hiring. In 2008 the private tech market reaction to the stock market crash was swift and brutal. It was really hard to get a job in 2008. Today it feels like their is a big lag between stock pullbacks and jobs drying up. None of my colleagues who were laid off are having trouble getting jobs in crypto and have options in other parts of tech if they want it. To be clear I expect the jobs situation to get worse this year and in 2023.
    - anbotero 4y ago
      Why do you expect jobs situation to get worse in 2023? Shouldn’t these corrections happen now so companies plan their runway to ~2 years?
AlwaysRock 4y ago
These types of things are almost always corrections. A granola bar company blows up and hires 500 employees in two years and builds out a massive office and gets funding. 2-3 years later the same vcs say hey you are not having hockey stick growth. Time to cut costs and lay folks off. At any given point at any major city there are a half a dozen to a dozen of those company corrections happening at once. When talk of a recession happens a few of the companies that might have been given a bit more slack are told to shape up earlier. So many of these are companies that boomed during covid and now are correcting.
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htormey 4y ago
All this panic about tech layoffs seems a little premature given we haven’t even begun to see the impact of rates hikes on quarterly earnings yet. Many companies still have open recs and budgets to keep hiring. I work at a company that just laid off 18% of the workforce (Coinbase) including many people in engineering. The day this happened my email, LinkedIn, Twitter inboxes exploded with companies asking me if I knew of anyone looking for a job or if I myself had been impacted. I reached out to many of my former colleagues who had been impacted to see if they needed help. All had multiple interviews in flight and were not having trouble finding jobs. Aside from many crypto companies the inbound jobs were from many public and private companies and spanned many industries. I expect tech layoffs to get worse and the white collar job market to tighten towards the end of this year and 2023. I expect the main driver for this will be cost reduction at public and private companies in the lead up to earnings or quarterly reports. Main cost for a tech company obviously being labor.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  The thing that seems so weird to me about the current state of the economy is that you have lots of "smart people" shouting pretty loudly "A recession is coming! Is going to be bad! We may already be in one!!" I don't remember any recession - not the early 90s recession, not the .com bust, not the Great Recession - having anywhere near so much foreshadowing. Sure, there were people during the .com boom saying "Umm, you know, 'eyeballs' don't pay the bills and at some point you need to actually make money" and during the 00s housing bubble "I'm not even sure lenders are using the 'can you fog a mirror' test anymore when making loans", but it wasn't particularly widespread, and large sections of the economic and policy elite actively downplayed the possibility of recession. Now though, I see the exact opposite. Tech moguls, central bankers, VCs, etc. etc. have been warning "this is going to be really bad" now for months. But, in actuality, it's not that bad (yet). Yes, inflation is really bad, but unemployment was 3.6% in May. It still feels like many companies are having a very difficult time hiring and keeping workers. So why the difference? I don't want to go into "conspiracy theory territory", but I do think it's pretty undeniable that there is a marked difference in "warning levels" between the current time and recessions in the past 40 years.
mathverse 4y ago
Nobody can make any relevant conclusion here the same way nobody can really predict if we are in recession or we are heading to one. This is again one of those where HN does not know anything about anything where $500k and $50k engineers talk about their bubbles.
dannyphantom 4y ago
I find the comments here somewhat reassuring but my anxiety is through the roof; I feel as though I would be on the chopping block in the event of a layoff. It's one thing to hear that you're doing a good job by your team and manager but when you _keep_ hearing announcements & reading about layoffs elsewhere it really erodes away at your confidence.
- bartvk 4y ago
  Same here. This week, I made an overview of my cashflow, should my current client no longer need me. I’ll be fine but still these layoff news items are worrying me.
throwaway787544 4y ago
Layoffs are normal and happen every year, and moreso during inflation. Hiring is still hectic. Every company and recruiter I know is trying everything they can to find candidates. Our company is desperate to hire and we're nothing special. One of the reasons there's so much hiring going on is a bunch of emerging markets have entered the field and are looking to build tech products. Another is that the developed world is still awash in record corporate profits and have plenty of runway to fund new development. But there has been no huge push to get more bodies into the labor market in the past 4 years so the numbers are still too low. Add to that the onward march of retirement of old staff and we're going to be in a hiring crunch for a few more years. Companies might actually have to learn to be efficient / use a few staff to get more done
vishnugupta 4y ago
I'll add to my earlier comment [1] When the cost of capital increases it's bound to have ripple effect on an entire generation of startups which were founded when money was effectively free (0% interest rate). When it's ingrained in companies' DNA that they have to grow at all cost you can't then suddenly ask them to start focusing on profit. They built this huge structure by ignored fundamentals such as cash-flow, unit-economics, business-model (selling $2 for $1). Now that they have built this 100 story sky-scrapper they can't just go back and fix the foundation. It's going to be a painful process. It's fascinating to trace the genesis of present crash to Fed's policies post 2008 crisis. The interest rates were kept artificially low to prevent another Great Depression. 2010s saw an unprecedented rally of tech/growth stocks, fuelled by cheap capital. Growth at all cost was the mantra, hoping companies will turn profitable at some point á la Amazon. Uber's CEO hit the nail on the head when he wrote "The average employee at Uber is barely over 30, which means you've spent your career in a long and unprecedented bull run". There were signs of rate hike in 2019 but COVID forced Fed to create trillions of $$. Which only added fuel to the fire; equities, housing, crypto saw unbelievable growth. However the signs of inflation were clear in early-mid 2021 they were hoping it to be transitory. But when the inflation data came in late 2021 it turned out to be multi-decade high leaving Fed with no choice but to raise interest rates for the first time in more than a decade. Which brings us back to growth companies. As Uber's CEO candidly stated "Channeling Jerry Maguire, we need to show them the money". 2020s will be all about cash flow and efficiency. On the other hand expect to see cool innovations as it requires genuine scarcity to look for out of the box solutions. While Amazon's stock soared in 2010s their core tech was being built in 2000s while they were relentlessly driving for efficiency. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31369813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31369813
- mancerayder 4y ago
  I wonder if that means the "VC-subsidized" companies are going to go out of business. I don't know the list of them, the extent of it, or anything, but from what I understand (again a source would be fantastic), companies like Uber held artificially low prices in order to show customer growth, and for some companies in the face of competition. We have inflation and soon, reduced discretionary spending power which is becoming rapidly more obvious. Airbnb fees are through the roof, and tons of people are choosing hotels over them again. "AirDNA" recently showed a trend towards vacancy, and if you read reddit subs on the topic you'll see hundreds of people piling on saying things like, "I used Airbnb for years, it used to be cheaper than a hotel, now not only is it drastically more expensive with the service and cleaning fees, but the hosts leave a laundry list of TODOs before I check out, and I can't check in til 4pm" Now what?
ozzythecat 4y ago
Amazon is surprisingly not yet in that infographic in the latest lay offs. When I left Amazon last year, there were effectively two Amazons. One is a group with half baked product or service ideas, throwing garbage at a wall to see what sticks. The other Amazon is like a retirement community worker, keeping legacy services alive, ensuring their security recertifications, and not much else. There isn’t even a concept of innovation. Though I don’t work there anymore, I’m still a shareholder. I look forward to the company trimming the excess fat. If the broader market really is impacted, unfortunately, there’s going to be a massive army of H1Bs suddenly faced with leaving the country.
- supernovae 4y ago
  Amazon recently stated they're going to run into an issue of having to re-hire people they fired/let go - the workforce isn't that diverse. The best thing that could happen to Amazon is unionization. Stability in their massive churn and perhaps more stability as a company.
  - ozzythecat 4y ago
    Re-hiring previous employees might be something Amazon does for lower wage, warehouse worker role. I seriously doubt Amazon would rehire engineers from unregretted attrition or employees who were let go. Amazon is actually insanely cost focused. For engineering, Amazon is more likely to hire more aggressively in India, bring more H1Bs to the US, or hire in European markets where total compensation is a fraction of what it is in the US. During my time, a common tactic was to grow offices in India and use them as a pipeline to source H1Bs. In theory, you pay an H1B engineer the same total compensation once they’re in Seattle. Except in reality, if SDE 3 comp is $350K, you can bring an SDE 3 from India for more like $200K. You can get away with this for at least 18-24 months and get enough labor out of that person, until they realize they’re underpaid and demand a higher comp. Then, they either leave Amazon, but you already got several years of cheap labor from them. Otherwise you adjust their pay if you seriously want to keep them around.
paulpauper 4y ago
which is a tiny percentage of the labor force unless I am missing something important it goes to show how despite all the media attention tech companies get , they are a drop in the bucket as far as the labor market is concerned (except amazon and its warehouse workers)
Rebelgecko 4y ago
What's being measured- is the Y axis # of jobs?
29athrowaway 4y ago
Some companies, before being acquired, go on a hiring spree. I guess they do it to bump up the price. Then, when the deal is closed, there's usually a reorg involving massive layoffs, where the most affected people are usually the people that just got hired.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
I wonder how many of these companies are actually having issues versus the number who are pre-emptively cutting loose people that they believe they can lose should the market actually turn.
ralph84 4y ago
From the Great Resignation to the Great Layoff. For the first time in 50 years workers started to have some leverage on employers and it only took a few months for the coordinated response to shut it down.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > coordinated response are you saying companies are coordinating their layoffs?
  - Chinjut 4y ago
    The Fed is certainly working to punish labor, by their own statements.
FastMonkey 4y ago
Layoffs seem to be up, but that's a questionable chart if ever I saw one. I doubt they have had representative coverage of the market for that whole period. With those numbers, looks like it's as much a chart of the increase in their data collection on layoffs as it is a chart on layoffs.
tonymet 4y ago
Tech leadership is using scare tactics to panic the workforce and drive down wages. Less than a year ago the same companies were blowing billions on stock buybacks. No one know's the future.
- mancerayder 4y ago
  Stock buybacks were because of low interest rate, i.e. cheap debt. It was logical.
ttul 4y ago
Funny that nobody generated a similar chart as tech firms were hiring like crazy over the past two years…
France_is_bacon 4y ago
It reminds me of the dot com bubble in 2000. I remember clearly walking around in San Francisco, and every younger person that I saw had a scared and stunned look on their faces, realizing how most of them either were, or were going to be, screwed. Lots of schadenfreude on my part, I must admit. The whole conqueror of the world attitude bugged the hell out of me, when it was reallly just luck that the picked a good profession and happened to be at the "right" time to see a 400% increase in the NASDAQ, as if it was all them. I was in tech also, but it just bothered me to no end. So of course, I see a lot of parallels, although tech workers don't seem to be quite a full of themselves now, even with the monster salaries. Emphasis on "quite."
throwaway71271 4y ago
Hacker News at 16th of September 2008, when the 2008 hit was the strongest: http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075626/http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305191 http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075626/http://news.ycombi... top story: > Stock Market Meltdowns - Why they will happen again and again and again (blogmaverick.com) http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075626/http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305191 http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075626/http://news.ycombi... second story: > Stack Overflow Launches (joelonsoftware.com) http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075523/http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304536 http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075523/http://news.ycombi... if you want to see what people were discussing back then blabla print money, blabla dont print money, blabla change jobs, blabla dont change jobs, its the fed's fault, its wallstreet's fault, more regulation, less regulation.. etc or people bashing apple claiming android is going to disrupt the app store one thing is for sure, almost all predictions going forward in the chaos are as good as random, anyone can explain the chaos in hindsight.
- dang 4y ago
  Third most popular story of the day after the launch of Stack Overflow and Ron Garret's Lisp-at-JPL perennial. Seems about right. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-09-15 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-09-15
steve76 4y ago
imduffy15 4y ago
Sad, frustrated, bitter & angry to have been apart of this. Started the job on April 4th, casual 1:1 with my manager on May 26th turned into HR stating it’s over. Not even one months severance as a good will gesture. Why does bad planning on your part need to result in stress, anxiety, and financial concern for me? The market is thankfully in a good place and I’m good at what I do. Did atleast one interview activity with 20+ places, it was hell, busier than a average work day. To get to final around it took 6-8 hours of interview activities. It would be amazing to see companies that are struggling to hire to create a fast tracked interview process for those laid off.
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
Amid the FTE layoffs, are there any stats on how many contractors FAANG+ have been laying off? I wonder if contingent workers are the first to go, or the last.
Ava433 4y ago

288 points by Swizec 4y ago

More mobile friendly link: https://nitter.net/HayekAndKeynes/status/1541760176826499073 https://nitter.net/HayekAndKeynes/status/1541760176826499073

cgb223 4y ago

Is anyone keeping a running tally of these on a website somewhere?

smoe 4y ago
This site made the rounds in the beginning of the pandemic for the layoff wave back then. Still seems to be actively tracking on a quick glance https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/
felideon 4y ago
The screenshot in the tweet is from https://www.trueup.io/layoffs https://www.trueup.io/layoffs
pavlov 4y ago
In 2001's post-dot-com apocalypse there was fuckedcompany.com for this purpose... Maybe they'll do a comeback. Seems like Fucked Company is officially preserved by the Library of Congress because... September 11? Huh. A profanity-laden title on a dot-gov site always manages to surprise: https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0020126/ https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0020126/
DanAtC 4y ago
layoffstracker.com has an RSS feed which is fun to throw into work Slack channels: https://layoffstracker.com/feed/ https://layoffstracker.com/feed/

mtoner23 4y ago

tbh, 16k jobs in these overvalued industries isn't much. We are adding hundreds of thousands of jobs in real industries every month. Places that make things that people want. Tesla is kind of the exception to this but aren't there always layoffs there? seems par for the course.

dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
> in real industries riplol
- themitigating 4y ago
  It's amazing how for some people hatred of the political opposite causes glee when tech companies fail and people lose their jobs. People who may not be political and who probably need their job. All of this being done on internet forums and social media produced and managed by those same people.
  - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
    I don't blame em. Tech has always thought of itself as a bunch of snowflakes. Reality is, yes, it's a new industry, but no, it's not special. Every other industry I've been exposed to has all the same bullshit office politics. The same supposed "in jokes" that only "their industry" would understand.
- mtoner23 4y ago
  The world will get by if we have fewer coinbases, SaaS companies and other tech jobs. If we have fewer factories, oil refineries, meat packing plants; there will be shortages and riots.
  - fatjokes 4y ago
    I mean, hopefully some of those tech jobs are making those oil refineries, factories, meat packing plants more efficient.

nathanaldensr 4y ago

LOL, we aren't even getting started yet!

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
This is interesting. To be honest, I don't see recession as much as maybe attempts to trigger it by some companies ( right now, it is clear companies are poorly equipped to deal with empowered employees ). Yeah, easy money from FED is drying up for banks ( and various companies and rely on access to easy money from banks.. such as early tech ), but should that automatically mean crash? It can still happen. While I am certainly preparing for this possibility, I dislike various CEOs saying its coming and media trumpets putting it in bold letters.
- mellavora 4y ago
  > should that automatically mean crash? No, not automatic. But it sure increases the likelihood. Especially after years of cheap money have allowed tremendous unproductive investment. It isn't just banks, it is every company with access to capital markets. Unproductive investment made sense when money was free ("easy money"), but when money starts to costs, those investments get closed down. And the people those investments employed become unemployed.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    I think we are in agreement here. I found no issue with this logic.
- yobbo 4y ago
  > Yeah, easy money from FED is drying up for banks It's impossible to know certainly how much and where it was having effect. Housing market was just one place, which caused a sort of wealth effect as households' equity increased. Stock buybacks might be analogous. These mechanics have been in play since 2010? Potentially alot to roll back.
- ItsMonkk 4y ago

prions 4y ago

The trueup data casts a pretty wide net. Seeing Microsoft on that list and makes the impression that layoffs are hitting FAANGs in a similar way to high growth startups, but those layoffs were due to Microsoft pulling out of Russia. https://www.trueup.io/co/microsoft#layoffs https://www.trueup.io/co/microsoft#layoffs

np_tedious 4y ago
Also contained Better. Debatable how much it is a tech company, and I believe many of the layoffs were mortgage loan officers.
mywittyname 4y ago
It's not unusual for companies who are doing fine to use industry layoffs as cover to cut under-performing employees.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
Similarly, the Tesla layoffs sounded like an office of in-house data labelers close to the tool developers in California being replaced by outsourced temp workers after the labeling tools reached maturity. It's a stretch to call that a tech layoff.
- 1-6 4y ago
  Amazon Mturk is cheap too

jacknews 4y ago

I wonder how much of this is real, and how much is part of the fed's acknowledged plan to push wages down. I mean obviously the layoffs are real, but are they necessary, or just symptoms of the chill winds and fear now blowing from the fed.

dfxm12 4y ago
If this is a reaction to the Fed raising rates, the layoffs aren't necessary, but by and large, these companies put short term gains above all else, which is why they are doing it.
xbar 4y ago
There are a lot of companies, small and medium, without enough revenue or funding to pay employee salaries, given reasonable budgeting into the next several quarters. This is as real as it gets.
- ghaff 4y ago
  It does seem at this point as if companies that haven't been able to make money, sometimes for years--especially those that should have been "pandemic businesses" (looking at you meal kit subscriptions)--are going to have to significantly raise prices, cut costs, or turn out the lights.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Ser, we’re at a point where a company like Uber looks like it might never turn an operational profit, and is quietly planning to/has existed most markets. If $33B in funding doesn’t get you a dollar in profit, you have to wonder if its all even worth it.
- kmlx 4y ago
  > has existed most markets. which markets did Uber exit voluntarily?
  - 4y ago

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

Much of this is due to the reversal of the tight hiring market. For the past several years tech companies were desperate to hire because everyone was growing and the hiring market was tight. This inevitably results in companies loosening their hiring standards and retaining underperforming employees because they can't afford to reduce team sizes. Layoffs combined with hiring freezes (or slowdowns) signal real stress within a company. However, many of these layoffs are single-digit percentage layoffs from companies that are still hiring across the board. That's not so much a traditional layoff as a pruning of the workforce. That pruning wasn't happening as much when hiring was tight, but now that hiring is easier and real, actual layoffs have put more good candidates back onto the market, the companies who simply collected too many underperforming employees can afford to churn some of them back out of the company. Doing it as a "layoff" makes it more palatable than going on a firing spree. That said, when it comes to interviewing you shouldn't assume that a laid off employee was necessarily underperforming. A lot of companies don't really perform layoffs with surgical precision and will instead drop entire teams at once. I've watched great engineers get swept up in minor staff reductions simply because they were assigned to bad managers or doomed teams that they couldn't save by themselves. I've also hired great people who came right out of layoffs at other companies and I would have missed those resumes if I had been using dumb filtering rules like ignoring anyone who had been laid off.

ruffrey 4y ago
I have to continue this train of thought. It is dangerous that people consider layoff as a performance indicator for the employee. It’s just too hard to tell. I was laid off recently along with many others because an entire experimental project was killed because the market shifted (crypto, I know). Prior to that I’d received top performance marks and had been promoted to team lead. They gave me a great recommendation for the next gig. It’s as easy to get a low performer who’s on a PIP and employed, as a high performer in a risky company. Hard to tell which one you’re interviewing.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
  It's almost as if every human being is complex, multifaceted, and always growing. Perhaps every one of us who's interviewing and writing perf reviews would benefit from questioning a system that tries to reduce human beings to a handful of sentences on a CV. On the other hand... grinding LeetCode is way more measurable. ;)

zeroonetwothree 4y ago

There are millions of tech employees so the number of layoffs is minuscule so far.

matt321 4y ago

I frequently read these and look at which areas exactly are getting dumped. I've have never read an article that said engineers are getting laid off. Most layoffs I see are overhead.

Ozzie_osman 4y ago
I wonder the same. Is it actually technical talent, or is it other functions like sales, marketing, recruiting etc?
gdulli 4y ago
The quote from Rounders about not realizing you're the sucker at the table, but it's about not realizing that you're the overhead.

scifibestfi 4y ago

The era of cheap money is over. Interest rates can't come down without making inflation worse. The tide is going out and we're starting to see what was real or not. Crypto got wiped out and now the tech and real estate bubbles are popping. Home Price to Median Household Income Ratio is even worse than 2008. https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco... Redfin and banks have started layoffs as they're seeing demand quickly drop with mortgage rate increases. Savings have dried up. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVE Consumer debt is at an all time high. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCLACBW027SBOG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCLACBW027SBOG We're in the early stages and I fear we're looking at a combination of the dot com crash + 2008, but longer lasting because the Fed won't be able to bail us out this time.

almost_usual 4y ago
> Crypto got wiped out and now the tech and real estate bubbles are popping. Crypto got wiped out but a BTC is still hovering around 20k? > now the tech and real estate bubbles are popping I sincerely doubt it, things might slow down and plateau but with the cost of everything going up (including rent) people will still desire a home with a mostly fixed cost. We also haven’t seen any massive layoffs yet coming from tech companies. Also if home prices plateau and inflation rips the value of those homes are deprecating without price reductions.
- bink 4y ago
  Home prices have been rising far faster than inflation. The "people will always desire a home" and "plateau" talk is straight out of the Realtors playbook and is said before every pullback. People have forgotten what a real estate downturn looks like because it's been propped up by the Fed for so long, but in the good old days (before 2004 or so) it wasn't uncommon to go through periods where the average house took 9-12 months to sell and sellers went through 3-4 Realtors before it sold. Do the Realtors still say that 6 months is the average time to sell or have they forgotten that too? The fact is that people buy homes based on monthly payment and significant rate hikes are something we haven't seen in decades. When the monthly payment doubles housing prices go down.

LandR 4y ago

My only anecdotal datum here is that I just got a new job, and every day I'm getting multiple messages from recruiters looking for developers. Full Time and Contracting. If it's all gone to shit, I'm not seeing it here (Scotland), salaries I'm seeing are really good for the area too.

jamiegreen 4y ago
What do you specialise in if you don't mind me asking?
- LandR 4y ago
  C# .NET, SQL and some JS
mountainriver 4y ago
Same I’m still getting offers
skeeter2020 4y ago
I'm in Western Canada and locally, provincially and nationally there's a ridiculous number of open tech positions. I guess a chart that included hiring wouldn't be highlighted on twitter...
- adra 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm getting way more unsolicited job recruitments than ever before. I'm not sure if companies actually need the head counts or feel like they can pickup some cheap(er) hires now that the market is off.
- varispeed 4y ago
  I am in the UK and had quite a number of Canadian companies looking to recruit recently. Interesting.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Probably because U.S. companies hit up Canadian talent hard during the talent crunch, since they mostly speak English at a native level, live in the same time zones, and were cheaper than U.S. devs. I don't think Canadian companies could compete and hire, so mostly just rode it out and let positions sit unfilled. I suspect there are more unfilled positions in Canada than there are unemployed devs in Canada right now, but if layoffs continue, the Canadian companies might get some relief

puranjay 4y ago

Much of this seems to be a complete miscalculation of the “new normal” of the pandemic. There was a narrative that somehow all the wild growth we had seen in the pandemic years when everyone was forcibly locked at home would sustain forever. Of course that wasn’t going to happen and should have been obvious to anyone. The pandemic is over and the “new normal” has just gone back to the “old normal” with marginal changes in work/play patterns. This was always going to happen, with or without current rate hikes. The rate hikes just accelerated everything by 2 years.

minraws 4y ago
I think there is another way of looking at it, as a way for the incredible growth in startups to the finally being understood by the new and old entrepreneurs. Hiring and such didn't only happen in the pandemic period but also overall in almost the entire past decade(2012-2021). Hurting the understanding of the people in the market, we are now seeing the sudden shrinking to have caused them to figure out priorities of either growth or profitability in even later phases of the business. At least that's what it seems like to me. Because the jobs market is almost just as good in tech as always, it's just big startups and companies are shrinking and increasing margins while smaller ones in early phases of growth are still increasing jobs or just in sheer numbers.
asdajksah2123 4y ago
The great part is that tech (and other white collar) workers used that small window of opportunity where they had tremendous bargaining power to push for policies that will make it even easier to replace them. It feels like a white collar repeat of what blue collar voters did in the US in the 70s and 80s.
- erklik 4y ago
  > The great part is that tech (and other white collar) workers used that small window of opportunity where they had tremendous bargaining power to push for policies that will make it even easier to replace them. Any examples of those policies?

Invictus0 4y ago

I'm bullish: the recession fears are overblown. Adjust the SPY for inflation and we're not that far off from where we were in 2020. https://www.multpl.com/inflation-adjusted-s-p-500/table/by-year https://www.multpl.com/inflation-adjusted-s-p-500/table/by-y...

seabrookmx 4y ago
Isn't inflation the problem? Inflation -> Rate hikes -> Growth slows ?
francisofascii 4y ago
The SPY is much higher than 2018, 2019, which makes me think it has more to fall. But that doesn't mean recession, it just means back to normal.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  Uh, there's been 3 years of real economic growth since 2019...?

1024core 4y ago

Isn't there some site called "Dead Company" or something like that which keeps track of layoffs? Or am I thinking of the 2002 dotcom crash... Edit: oh right, thanks @blakesterz, it was called "Fucked Company"

blakesterz 4y ago
Yep! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
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agotterer 4y ago
There's https://layoffs.fyi https://layoffs.fyi which is keeping tally
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

saos 4y ago

That graph is awful

InTheArena 4y ago

While there is still a open question about how much the sudden reversal of monetary policy from the last 15 years of "hey! all the money can print" that led to companies going into debt to purchase their own stock to "oh crap, inflation, let's tighten the money supply" affects the durability of companies... that said... There are some very hyperbolic people comparing this to the .COM crash and also to 2008/2009. In 2001, there was literally a site doing nothing but reporting in flamboyant terms all of the "fucked companies" going under. IIRC, it was dozens a day, at one point, with people stating that the Internet had failed, and it was all going down the drain. In 2008, absolutely no one had any clue what was going on but everyone knew it was catastrophically bad. People were trying to guess if it would be merely the worst recession ever or the second great depression. This so far seems like a fairly normal correction. We will see if Debt blows up and changes that.

pirate787 4y ago
Contagion is ripping through crypto, at least, in a way that's more like 2008.
- htormey 4y ago
  Nah, I disagree. I work in crypto (coinbase) and was working in tech in the Bay Area in 2008. As of today, many crypto companies have money from 2021/early 2022 raises and are still hiring. In 2008 the private tech market reaction to the stock market crash was swift and brutal. It was really hard to get a job in 2008. Today it feels like their is a big lag between stock pullbacks and jobs drying up. None of my colleagues who were laid off are having trouble getting jobs in crypto and have options in other parts of tech if they want it. To be clear I expect the jobs situation to get worse this year and in 2023.
  - anbotero 4y ago
    Why do you expect jobs situation to get worse in 2023? Shouldn’t these corrections happen now so companies plan their runway to ~2 years?

AlwaysRock 4y ago

These types of things are almost always corrections. A granola bar company blows up and hires 500 employees in two years and builds out a massive office and gets funding. 2-3 years later the same vcs say hey you are not having hockey stick growth. Time to cut costs and lay folks off. At any given point at any major city there are a half a dozen to a dozen of those company corrections happening at once. When talk of a recession happens a few of the companies that might have been given a bit more slack are told to shape up earlier. So many of these are companies that boomed during covid and now are correcting.

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htormey 4y ago

All this panic about tech layoffs seems a little premature given we haven’t even begun to see the impact of rates hikes on quarterly earnings yet. Many companies still have open recs and budgets to keep hiring. I work at a company that just laid off 18% of the workforce (Coinbase) including many people in engineering. The day this happened my email, LinkedIn, Twitter inboxes exploded with companies asking me if I knew of anyone looking for a job or if I myself had been impacted. I reached out to many of my former colleagues who had been impacted to see if they needed help. All had multiple interviews in flight and were not having trouble finding jobs. Aside from many crypto companies the inbound jobs were from many public and private companies and spanned many industries. I expect tech layoffs to get worse and the white collar job market to tighten towards the end of this year and 2023. I expect the main driver for this will be cost reduction at public and private companies in the lead up to earnings or quarterly reports. Main cost for a tech company obviously being labor.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
The thing that seems so weird to me about the current state of the economy is that you have lots of "smart people" shouting pretty loudly "A recession is coming! Is going to be bad! We may already be in one!!" I don't remember any recession - not the early 90s recession, not the .com bust, not the Great Recession - having anywhere near so much foreshadowing. Sure, there were people during the .com boom saying "Umm, you know, 'eyeballs' don't pay the bills and at some point you need to actually make money" and during the 00s housing bubble "I'm not even sure lenders are using the 'can you fog a mirror' test anymore when making loans", but it wasn't particularly widespread, and large sections of the economic and policy elite actively downplayed the possibility of recession. Now though, I see the exact opposite. Tech moguls, central bankers, VCs, etc. etc. have been warning "this is going to be really bad" now for months. But, in actuality, it's not that bad (yet). Yes, inflation is really bad, but unemployment was 3.6% in May. It still feels like many companies are having a very difficult time hiring and keeping workers. So why the difference? I don't want to go into "conspiracy theory territory", but I do think it's pretty undeniable that there is a marked difference in "warning levels" between the current time and recessions in the past 40 years.

mathverse 4y ago

Nobody can make any relevant conclusion here the same way nobody can really predict if we are in recession or we are heading to one. This is again one of those where HN does not know anything about anything where $500k and $50k engineers talk about their bubbles.

dannyphantom 4y ago

I find the comments here somewhat reassuring but my anxiety is through the roof; I feel as though I would be on the chopping block in the event of a layoff. It's one thing to hear that you're doing a good job by your team and manager but when you _keep_ hearing announcements & reading about layoffs elsewhere it really erodes away at your confidence.

bartvk 4y ago
Same here. This week, I made an overview of my cashflow, should my current client no longer need me. I’ll be fine but still these layoff news items are worrying me.

throwaway787544 4y ago

Layoffs are normal and happen every year, and moreso during inflation. Hiring is still hectic. Every company and recruiter I know is trying everything they can to find candidates. Our company is desperate to hire and we're nothing special. One of the reasons there's so much hiring going on is a bunch of emerging markets have entered the field and are looking to build tech products. Another is that the developed world is still awash in record corporate profits and have plenty of runway to fund new development. But there has been no huge push to get more bodies into the labor market in the past 4 years so the numbers are still too low. Add to that the onward march of retirement of old staff and we're going to be in a hiring crunch for a few more years. Companies might actually have to learn to be efficient / use a few staff to get more done

vishnugupta 4y ago

I'll add to my earlier comment [1] When the cost of capital increases it's bound to have ripple effect on an entire generation of startups which were founded when money was effectively free (0% interest rate). When it's ingrained in companies' DNA that they have to grow at all cost you can't then suddenly ask them to start focusing on profit. They built this huge structure by ignored fundamentals such as cash-flow, unit-economics, business-model (selling $2 for $1). Now that they have built this 100 story sky-scrapper they can't just go back and fix the foundation. It's going to be a painful process. It's fascinating to trace the genesis of present crash to Fed's policies post 2008 crisis. The interest rates were kept artificially low to prevent another Great Depression. 2010s saw an unprecedented rally of tech/growth stocks, fuelled by cheap capital. Growth at all cost was the mantra, hoping companies will turn profitable at some point á la Amazon. Uber's CEO hit the nail on the head when he wrote "The average employee at Uber is barely over 30, which means you've spent your career in a long and unprecedented bull run". There were signs of rate hike in 2019 but COVID forced Fed to create trillions of $$. Which only added fuel to the fire; equities, housing, crypto saw unbelievable growth. However the signs of inflation were clear in early-mid 2021 they were hoping it to be transitory. But when the inflation data came in late 2021 it turned out to be multi-decade high leaving Fed with no choice but to raise interest rates for the first time in more than a decade. Which brings us back to growth companies. As Uber's CEO candidly stated "Channeling Jerry Maguire, we need to show them the money". 2020s will be all about cash flow and efficiency. On the other hand expect to see cool innovations as it requires genuine scarcity to look for out of the box solutions. While Amazon's stock soared in 2010s their core tech was being built in 2000s while they were relentlessly driving for efficiency. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31369813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31369813

mancerayder 4y ago
I wonder if that means the "VC-subsidized" companies are going to go out of business. I don't know the list of them, the extent of it, or anything, but from what I understand (again a source would be fantastic), companies like Uber held artificially low prices in order to show customer growth, and for some companies in the face of competition. We have inflation and soon, reduced discretionary spending power which is becoming rapidly more obvious. Airbnb fees are through the roof, and tons of people are choosing hotels over them again. "AirDNA" recently showed a trend towards vacancy, and if you read reddit subs on the topic you'll see hundreds of people piling on saying things like, "I used Airbnb for years, it used to be cheaper than a hotel, now not only is it drastically more expensive with the service and cleaning fees, but the hosts leave a laundry list of TODOs before I check out, and I can't check in til 4pm" Now what?

ozzythecat 4y ago

Amazon is surprisingly not yet in that infographic in the latest lay offs. When I left Amazon last year, there were effectively two Amazons. One is a group with half baked product or service ideas, throwing garbage at a wall to see what sticks. The other Amazon is like a retirement community worker, keeping legacy services alive, ensuring their security recertifications, and not much else. There isn’t even a concept of innovation. Though I don’t work there anymore, I’m still a shareholder. I look forward to the company trimming the excess fat. If the broader market really is impacted, unfortunately, there’s going to be a massive army of H1Bs suddenly faced with leaving the country.

supernovae 4y ago
Amazon recently stated they're going to run into an issue of having to re-hire people they fired/let go - the workforce isn't that diverse. The best thing that could happen to Amazon is unionization. Stability in their massive churn and perhaps more stability as a company.
- ozzythecat 4y ago
  Re-hiring previous employees might be something Amazon does for lower wage, warehouse worker role. I seriously doubt Amazon would rehire engineers from unregretted attrition or employees who were let go. Amazon is actually insanely cost focused. For engineering, Amazon is more likely to hire more aggressively in India, bring more H1Bs to the US, or hire in European markets where total compensation is a fraction of what it is in the US. During my time, a common tactic was to grow offices in India and use them as a pipeline to source H1Bs. In theory, you pay an H1B engineer the same total compensation once they’re in Seattle. Except in reality, if SDE 3 comp is $350K, you can bring an SDE 3 from India for more like $200K. You can get away with this for at least 18-24 months and get enough labor out of that person, until they realize they’re underpaid and demand a higher comp. Then, they either leave Amazon, but you already got several years of cheap labor from them. Otherwise you adjust their pay if you seriously want to keep them around.

paulpauper 4y ago

which is a tiny percentage of the labor force unless I am missing something important it goes to show how despite all the media attention tech companies get , they are a drop in the bucket as far as the labor market is concerned (except amazon and its warehouse workers)

Rebelgecko 4y ago

What's being measured- is the Y axis # of jobs?

29athrowaway 4y ago

Some companies, before being acquired, go on a hiring spree. I guess they do it to bump up the price. Then, when the deal is closed, there's usually a reorg involving massive layoffs, where the most affected people are usually the people that just got hired.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

I wonder how many of these companies are actually having issues versus the number who are pre-emptively cutting loose people that they believe they can lose should the market actually turn.

ralph84 4y ago

From the Great Resignation to the Great Layoff. For the first time in 50 years workers started to have some leverage on employers and it only took a few months for the coordinated response to shut it down.

andsoitis 4y ago
> coordinated response are you saying companies are coordinating their layoffs?
- Chinjut 4y ago
  The Fed is certainly working to punish labor, by their own statements.

FastMonkey 4y ago

Layoffs seem to be up, but that's a questionable chart if ever I saw one. I doubt they have had representative coverage of the market for that whole period. With those numbers, looks like it's as much a chart of the increase in their data collection on layoffs as it is a chart on layoffs.

tonymet 4y ago

Tech leadership is using scare tactics to panic the workforce and drive down wages. Less than a year ago the same companies were blowing billions on stock buybacks. No one know's the future.

mancerayder 4y ago
Stock buybacks were because of low interest rate, i.e. cheap debt. It was logical.

ttul 4y ago

Funny that nobody generated a similar chart as tech firms were hiring like crazy over the past two years…

France_is_bacon 4y ago

It reminds me of the dot com bubble in 2000. I remember clearly walking around in San Francisco, and every younger person that I saw had a scared and stunned look on their faces, realizing how most of them either were, or were going to be, screwed. Lots of schadenfreude on my part, I must admit. The whole conqueror of the world attitude bugged the hell out of me, when it was reallly just luck that the picked a good profession and happened to be at the "right" time to see a 400% increase in the NASDAQ, as if it was all them. I was in tech also, but it just bothered me to no end. So of course, I see a lot of parallels, although tech workers don't seem to be quite a full of themselves now, even with the monster salaries. Emphasis on "quite."

throwaway71271 4y ago

Hacker News at 16th of September 2008, when the 2008 hit was the strongest: http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075626/http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305191 http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075626/http://news.ycombi... top story: > Stock Market Meltdowns - Why they will happen again and again and again (blogmaverick.com) http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075626/http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305191 http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075626/http://news.ycombi... second story: > Stack Overflow Launches (joelonsoftware.com) http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075523/http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304536 http://web.archive.org/web/20080916075523/http://news.ycombi... if you want to see what people were discussing back then blabla print money, blabla dont print money, blabla change jobs, blabla dont change jobs, its the fed's fault, its wallstreet's fault, more regulation, less regulation.. etc or people bashing apple claiming android is going to disrupt the app store one thing is for sure, almost all predictions going forward in the chaos are as good as random, anyone can explain the chaos in hindsight.

dang 4y ago
Third most popular story of the day after the launch of Stack Overflow and Ron Garret's Lisp-at-JPL perennial. Seems about right. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-09-15 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-09-15

steve76 4y ago

imduffy15 4y ago

Sad, frustrated, bitter & angry to have been apart of this. Started the job on April 4th, casual 1:1 with my manager on May 26th turned into HR stating it’s over. Not even one months severance as a good will gesture. Why does bad planning on your part need to result in stress, anxiety, and financial concern for me? The market is thankfully in a good place and I’m good at what I do. Did atleast one interview activity with 20+ places, it was hell, busier than a average work day. To get to final around it took 6-8 hours of interview activities. It would be amazing to see companies that are struggling to hire to create a fast tracked interview process for those laid off.

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

Amid the FTE layoffs, are there any stats on how many contractors FAANG+ have been laying off? I wonder if contingent workers are the first to go, or the last.

Ava433 4y ago