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This is a good thing, overall, in the same way that the dotcom crash was a good thing to clear the field of all the frauds. I have the feeling that a few of th

This is a good thing, overall, in the same way that the dotcom crash was a good thing to clear the field of all the frauds. I have the feeling that a few of those large companies are in need of a wake-up call.

adam_arthur 4y ago
Yup The delusional amount of overhiring at these companies was really something. Guess it was too ingrained in their DNA.
- stephc_int13 4y ago
  I was there during the dot-com bubble. Everything that looked like bullshit turned out to be bullshit. And I've seen a lot of delusional bullshit during the last few years, the wort of those coming from Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
  - cplusplusfellow 4y ago
    Elon Musk advertised as a feature that he would cut Twitter staff to bring the revenue per employee in line with industry standards. But I’m curious - What ideas of Elon do you find to be delusional bullshit?
    - kyralis 4y ago
      "Full Self Driving"
    - claytonjy 4y ago
      saying "self driving cars are 2 years away" for the last 5+ years sticks out to me
    - clpm4j 4y ago
      I would say that "living on Mars" could be classified as delusional.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        It was, but once Starship becomes operational, the financial game changes by many orders of magnitude - to a point where a single billionaire with no fucks to give can actually book themselves a ride to Mars. One may hate on Musk for a number of very good reasons, but it cannot be denied him, Shotwell and the rest of the SpaceX team have thoroughly kicked the established space industry mooches into their asses.
        stephc_int13 4y ago
        Elon Musk has unfortunately a very long track record of over-promising and under-delivering. Anything he say should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. I don't think he is a complete fraud, but I would not bet my shirt on his Mark colonization project.
        andsoitis 4y ago
        > billionaire with no fucks to give can actually book themselves a ride to Mars What is a billionaire gonna do once they get to Mars?
        rsync 4y ago
        "What is a billionaire gonna do once they get to Mars?" Undergo profound physical atrophy leading to organ dysfunction and eventually cancer ... ... since Mars gravity is something like 1/3 that of Earth.
        ryandrake 4y ago
        There's a huge chasm between "disrupting an already inefficient space industry" and "living on Mars". We barely have the capability of living long term on Antarctica, and it has plentiful water, oxygen, gravity, a magnetic field, and doesn't have lethal radiation. Until I see a 100K population colony on Antarctica, I'll be unconvinced that we even have a prayer of building a 1K population colony on Mars.
        Firmwarrior 4y ago
    - viscanti 4y ago
      I don't know enough about the science to have a strong opinion, but I've heard a lot of people who have been critical of hyper loop, a very expensive tunnel filled with Tesla cars in Vegas that has much less efficiency than a subway from 50+ years ago, and saying that full self driving would be easy and finished years ago (he's since said full self driving is actually much more difficult than he initially thought). Maybe no visionary is going to get everything right. But there do seem to be some pretty major areas that have received critical feedback from people who seem to understand those domains.
    - paganel 4y ago
      Not the OP but the hyperloop thing is, imho, total bullshit. Not such a big thing though because he hasn't poured billions and billions of dollars into it as Zuckerberg has done with the VR stuff. On the other hand Tesla has been a huge thing. I'm a big anti-EVs guy because I'm, at heart, a petrolhead, and at the beginning I was of course very skeptic of him managing to pull it off. But that opinion of mine changed completely the moment when I realised that a Tesla vehicle is basically a piece of software running/controlling a battery that happens to have 4 wheels attached, and that the Tesla engineers have managed to make good on that. The rocket stuff is also quite cool.
      - alliao 4y ago
        i wish tesla would make hvac for houses to be honest, the amount of thought into managing heat in a tesla is something special; or maybe it's AI
    - stephc_int13 4y ago
      Most of his AI claims are, so far, backed by nothing. The demos are underwhelming, to say the least. The rockets and car factories are impressive. But the tunnels, the robotaxi, the hyperloop, the solar roofs... So far, a lot of over-hyped promises that are looking more and more like vaporware. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0PHv3E8jpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0PHv3E8jpY
    - vic20forever 4y ago
      "Shoot first, ask questions later"[0] when cutting staff seems like a delusional idea to me. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496808
  - idrios 4y ago
    The Metaverse doesn't seem delusional to me, it just seems like a massive gamble. I can easily envision a future where they've cornered the market on VR. Where to play the latest Call of Duty you need to do it through the Metaverse Portal, and you have access to NFT skins that you either bought or unlocked as achievement from other games. I hope that future doesn't happen, or that if it does its through a decentralized protocol and not owned by Meta. But if the Metaverse implodes I'd still consider it a failed gamble than delusional bullshit. I can't defend Musk the same way.
    - stephc_int13 4y ago
      What is looking delusional is the way Meta/Zuck is handling it. They do not have to raise money to build the tech, so they don't even have to advertise anything until they have something really worthy to show and sell. So why are they showing something that is clearly not ready? Either they think that discourse can translate into reality if enough people believe in it (magical thinking), or they think they already have a product. In both case this is delusional.
      - Firmwarrior 4y ago
        My guess is they know that someone else has something vastly superior in the works, and Zuck is trying to muddy the waters and make Facebook synonymous with VR before they can come in and take over. Then Facebook will be able to take a strong #2 position
- noasaservice 4y ago
  It's nice and all to say "yay yay market correction". It's a whole other thing to be cheering for people losing their jobs. Remember, we have one of the weakest social nets in the world. And our medical is nigh exclusively tied to our jobs. But people are losing their jobs en masse (and the C-levels get golden parachutes). Um, yay?
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    Unemployment rate is pretty much the lowest it’s been in history. God forbid we take responsibility for the massive bubble we’ve created through fiscal and monetary excess and actually address inflation These people will be reabsorbed elsewhere, but it will certainly be a sad world when 21 year olds can’t make 300k out of college with 0 experience.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Unemployment rate is currently close to the lowest it’s been in history. Yes, it is. But declines follow peaks. > People who lose their jobs will be reabsorbed elsewhere ...or they won’t, and very soon the unemployment rate will be farther than it is today from the lowest it has been in history.
      - adam_arthur 4y ago
        Unemployment rate is a measure of slack in the labor market, nothing more. It says nothing about an individual’s experience. 5% unemployment means there’s a rotating set of job seekers that comprise 5% of the labor force. It absolutely does not mean that 5% of the labor force is perpetually jobless and unemployable. I hope those lamenting these layoffs were also against the extreme fiscal excess which made them necessary in the end. The road to hell is often paved with good intentions
        Firmwarrior 4y ago
        Ah, Trump will be back in office slashing rates in 2025, shouldn't be too hard to scrape by til then
paxys 4y ago
It's a good thing in the same way that a wildfire is a good thing. Great for the long term health for the forest, terrible for all the animals, people, property that happened to be in the way. The tech industry is going to take a while to recover from the current economic shocks, and everyone – whether you work for the affected companies or not – will have to face some pain in the short term.
- genocidicbunny 4y ago
  Interesting you use that analogy, because to continue it -- if you don't occasionally have smaller wildfires, you end up having ones that end up terrible for the health of the forest too. Not sure what conclusion to draw from that.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    One can also, I don’t know, institute proper forest/infrastructure management and avoid runaway fires like that
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      When I lived in Africa, they used to have controlled grassland fires, every year. I remember driving past one of these, and my mother explained the concept to me. On Long Island (where I live), we have the Pine Barrens. These are areas of scrub and pitch pine trees, in a sandy soil. They require occasional fires, in order to reproduce (opens the cones, and fertilizes the soil). Back in the early 1990s, we had a pretty major wildfire, because they had not been doing controlled burns. I think New Jersey suffered something similar, around the same time. Since then, I hear they do controlled burns. I have seen no "controlled burns" of the bloat that infests the tech industry, so this is likely to be a fairly significant wildfire.
      - dilyevsky 4y ago
        In silicon valley we dont do those, we just let it rip

adam_arthur 4y ago

Yup The delusional amount of overhiring at these companies was really something. Guess it was too ingrained in their DNA.

stephc_int13 4y ago
I was there during the dot-com bubble. Everything that looked like bullshit turned out to be bullshit. And I've seen a lot of delusional bullshit during the last few years, the wort of those coming from Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
- cplusplusfellow 4y ago
  Elon Musk advertised as a feature that he would cut Twitter staff to bring the revenue per employee in line with industry standards. But I’m curious - What ideas of Elon do you find to be delusional bullshit?
  - kyralis 4y ago
    "Full Self Driving"
  - claytonjy 4y ago
    saying "self driving cars are 2 years away" for the last 5+ years sticks out to me
  - clpm4j 4y ago
    I would say that "living on Mars" could be classified as delusional.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      It was, but once Starship becomes operational, the financial game changes by many orders of magnitude - to a point where a single billionaire with no fucks to give can actually book themselves a ride to Mars. One may hate on Musk for a number of very good reasons, but it cannot be denied him, Shotwell and the rest of the SpaceX team have thoroughly kicked the established space industry mooches into their asses.
      - stephc_int13 4y ago
        Elon Musk has unfortunately a very long track record of over-promising and under-delivering. Anything he say should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. I don't think he is a complete fraud, but I would not bet my shirt on his Mark colonization project.
      - andsoitis 4y ago
        > billionaire with no fucks to give can actually book themselves a ride to Mars What is a billionaire gonna do once they get to Mars?
        rsync 4y ago
        "What is a billionaire gonna do once they get to Mars?" Undergo profound physical atrophy leading to organ dysfunction and eventually cancer ... ... since Mars gravity is something like 1/3 that of Earth.
      - ryandrake 4y ago
        There's a huge chasm between "disrupting an already inefficient space industry" and "living on Mars". We barely have the capability of living long term on Antarctica, and it has plentiful water, oxygen, gravity, a magnetic field, and doesn't have lethal radiation. Until I see a 100K population colony on Antarctica, I'll be unconvinced that we even have a prayer of building a 1K population colony on Mars.
        Firmwarrior 4y ago
  - viscanti 4y ago
    I don't know enough about the science to have a strong opinion, but I've heard a lot of people who have been critical of hyper loop, a very expensive tunnel filled with Tesla cars in Vegas that has much less efficiency than a subway from 50+ years ago, and saying that full self driving would be easy and finished years ago (he's since said full self driving is actually much more difficult than he initially thought). Maybe no visionary is going to get everything right. But there do seem to be some pretty major areas that have received critical feedback from people who seem to understand those domains.
  - paganel 4y ago
    Not the OP but the hyperloop thing is, imho, total bullshit. Not such a big thing though because he hasn't poured billions and billions of dollars into it as Zuckerberg has done with the VR stuff. On the other hand Tesla has been a huge thing. I'm a big anti-EVs guy because I'm, at heart, a petrolhead, and at the beginning I was of course very skeptic of him managing to pull it off. But that opinion of mine changed completely the moment when I realised that a Tesla vehicle is basically a piece of software running/controlling a battery that happens to have 4 wheels attached, and that the Tesla engineers have managed to make good on that. The rocket stuff is also quite cool.
    - alliao 4y ago
      i wish tesla would make hvac for houses to be honest, the amount of thought into managing heat in a tesla is something special; or maybe it's AI
  - stephc_int13 4y ago
    Most of his AI claims are, so far, backed by nothing. The demos are underwhelming, to say the least. The rockets and car factories are impressive. But the tunnels, the robotaxi, the hyperloop, the solar roofs... So far, a lot of over-hyped promises that are looking more and more like vaporware. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0PHv3E8jpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0PHv3E8jpY
  - vic20forever 4y ago
    "Shoot first, ask questions later"[0] when cutting staff seems like a delusional idea to me. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496808
- idrios 4y ago
  The Metaverse doesn't seem delusional to me, it just seems like a massive gamble. I can easily envision a future where they've cornered the market on VR. Where to play the latest Call of Duty you need to do it through the Metaverse Portal, and you have access to NFT skins that you either bought or unlocked as achievement from other games. I hope that future doesn't happen, or that if it does its through a decentralized protocol and not owned by Meta. But if the Metaverse implodes I'd still consider it a failed gamble than delusional bullshit. I can't defend Musk the same way.
  - stephc_int13 4y ago
    What is looking delusional is the way Meta/Zuck is handling it. They do not have to raise money to build the tech, so they don't even have to advertise anything until they have something really worthy to show and sell. So why are they showing something that is clearly not ready? Either they think that discourse can translate into reality if enough people believe in it (magical thinking), or they think they already have a product. In both case this is delusional.
    - Firmwarrior 4y ago
      My guess is they know that someone else has something vastly superior in the works, and Zuck is trying to muddy the waters and make Facebook synonymous with VR before they can come in and take over. Then Facebook will be able to take a strong #2 position
noasaservice 4y ago
It's nice and all to say "yay yay market correction". It's a whole other thing to be cheering for people losing their jobs. Remember, we have one of the weakest social nets in the world. And our medical is nigh exclusively tied to our jobs. But people are losing their jobs en masse (and the C-levels get golden parachutes). Um, yay?
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  Unemployment rate is pretty much the lowest it’s been in history. God forbid we take responsibility for the massive bubble we’ve created through fiscal and monetary excess and actually address inflation These people will be reabsorbed elsewhere, but it will certainly be a sad world when 21 year olds can’t make 300k out of college with 0 experience.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Unemployment rate is currently close to the lowest it’s been in history. Yes, it is. But declines follow peaks. > People who lose their jobs will be reabsorbed elsewhere ...or they won’t, and very soon the unemployment rate will be farther than it is today from the lowest it has been in history.
    - adam_arthur 4y ago
      Unemployment rate is a measure of slack in the labor market, nothing more. It says nothing about an individual’s experience. 5% unemployment means there’s a rotating set of job seekers that comprise 5% of the labor force. It absolutely does not mean that 5% of the labor force is perpetually jobless and unemployable. I hope those lamenting these layoffs were also against the extreme fiscal excess which made them necessary in the end. The road to hell is often paved with good intentions
      - Firmwarrior 4y ago
        Ah, Trump will be back in office slashing rates in 2025, shouldn't be too hard to scrape by til then

paxys 4y ago

It's a good thing in the same way that a wildfire is a good thing. Great for the long term health for the forest, terrible for all the animals, people, property that happened to be in the way. The tech industry is going to take a while to recover from the current economic shocks, and everyone – whether you work for the affected companies or not – will have to face some pain in the short term.

genocidicbunny 4y ago
Interesting you use that analogy, because to continue it -- if you don't occasionally have smaller wildfires, you end up having ones that end up terrible for the health of the forest too. Not sure what conclusion to draw from that.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  One can also, I don’t know, institute proper forest/infrastructure management and avoid runaway fires like that
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    When I lived in Africa, they used to have controlled grassland fires, every year. I remember driving past one of these, and my mother explained the concept to me. On Long Island (where I live), we have the Pine Barrens. These are areas of scrub and pitch pine trees, in a sandy soil. They require occasional fires, in order to reproduce (opens the cones, and fertilizes the soil). Back in the early 1990s, we had a pretty major wildfire, because they had not been doing controlled burns. I think New Jersey suffered something similar, around the same time. Since then, I hear they do controlled burns. I have seen no "controlled burns" of the bloat that infests the tech industry, so this is likely to be a fairly significant wildfire.
    - dilyevsky 4y ago
      In silicon valley we dont do those, we just let it rip