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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 weake

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
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > ... slashing rates in 2025, shouldn't be too hard to scrape by til then If rates aren’t being slashed long before then, then either: (1) the brief burst of layoffs were an aberration and the job market will have otherwise stayed strong, so scraping by isn’t an issue. (2) despite a weakening job market, inflation has been so persistent that fighting it remains a higher Fed priority than stimulus, and a politically motivated loosening of monetary policy would be a recipe for slingshotting into hyperinflation.
      - notfromhere 4y ago
        The president doesn’t control interest rates. Trump tried bullying the Fed into lowering rates and didn’t work
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Unemployment rate is a measure of slack in the labor market, nothing more. It says nothing about an individual’s experience. Unemployment rate is simply the ratio of two patterns of individual experience (not employed and actively looking vs that plus currently employed), published after the fact. > 5% unemployment means there’s a rotating set of job seekers that comprise 5% of the labor force. 5% unemployment means that (at the time covered by the report) for every 100 people either not employed and actively looking for work or working, 5 fell into the former category. It absolutely doesn’t tell you how much of that group is “rotating”.
      - adam_arthur 4y ago
        The 5% rotates by definition if anybody is hired or fired, as will always be the case. 5% unemployment is never going to represent 5% of the workforce being perpetually unemployed, as many sob stories try to implicitly portray it as. If an individual is perpetually unemployable, then it doesn’t matter if unemployment is 5% or 1%, they aren’t getting hired anyway
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        dragonwriter 4y ago
        > The 5% rotates by definition if anybody is hired or fired, as will always be the case. No, it doesn’t rotate “by definition”, and the rate isn’t a constant, it is a point-in-time estimate. If there is both hiring and firing going on that isn’t at the edges of the work force some portion of the 5% is transitorily unemployed, but that could be a very large or very small portion, or anything in between.
- noasaservice 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization Just because the general country-wide unemployment is a low number, does not mean with any sort of guarantee that an individual will be able to transition in a decent amount of time as not to unduly impact their life. And given what the oligopoly of banks... err, the FED has been saying, 'they are hitting the brakes of inflation by raising interest rates significantly' - further exasperating the layoffs and slowing/reversing hiring at other firms.
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    There will always be those that suffer Targeting them more precisely with aid is the way to solve that, not helicopter money into massive bubble and inflation. In the end who got hurt the most by the very money handed to them?
    - noasaservice 4y ago
      > There will always be those that suffer With that attitude, there will be. But there doesn't have to be. > Targeting them more precisely with aid is the way to solve that, not helicopter money into massive bubble and inflation. Not aid. Money. Straight up cold hard cash. Any thing else instead, like SNAP, housing vouchers, etc treats them like they have no agency. Yet with corporate handouts, we do no such thing. Look no further than the PPP debacle.
      - adam_arthur 4y ago
        We did hand everybody money, which is why the economy is about to crash as a result of the inflation it propagated. Sorry, you advocate economic collapse, not anything realistic or sustainable. Wishful thinkers have inflicted a vast amount of deaths throughout history due to economic mismanagement. Famine, hyperinflation etc
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Word tip: exacerbating not exasperating.
- bjourne 4y ago
  Do you think that the world will improve if 21-year-old college graduates make less money?
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    Yes, because compensation will more closely match contributions, and I prefer a just world
    - bjourne 4y ago
      Does this logic extend to company shareholders, board members, and CEOs too?
      - adam_arthur 4y ago
        What do you think’s happened to shareholders who held all these tech stocks that are down 90%? They’ve lost 90% of their money, by definition
        bjourne 4y ago
        I'm not sure this is an answer to my question.
        adam_arthur 4y ago
        Where is the disconnect? If an investor does poor due diligence and doesn’t put the work in to determine a reasonable fair valuation for a company, and then loses their entire investment, that is just. If board members give bad advice and the stock falls, they incur losses. These are just outcomes. Most people would agree that attending a 6 week bootcamp shouldn’t entitle somebody to a 200-300k job. And it won’t in the near future. You’ll have to do a lot more to achieve the same comp going forward, just like every other industry. There’s nothing special about tech, it was just a nascent industry in boom times. No longer
glogla 4y ago
That would be normally a sensible sentiment, and a rare empathic one, on hyperindividualist hypercapitalist Hacker News. But here we're talking about people who made at least 300k a year, possibly up to a million. Those who stayed for few years likely never have to look for another job even again. The ones who didn't might still take few years sabbatical.
- gundmc 4y ago
  > But here we're talking about people who made at least 300k a year, possibly up to a million. Those who stayed for few years likely never have to look for another job even again. The ones who didn't might still take few years sabbatical. Are you suggesting that working "a few years" earning $300k in a high cost-of-living area means you likely saved enough money to never need to work again? Or are you suggesting that someone with the skills/experience working in a position that did pay that much for a few years will find it trivial to find another job?
  - glogla 4y ago
    I am suggesting the former. Safe withdrawal rate from investments is usually considered 4 %, so each 100k invested makes you 4k a year. A few years at FAANG, assuming you don't spend it all, will give you idle rich lifestyle before thirty.
gwbrooks 4y ago
I'm not cheering by any means. But the average individual salary at Twitter is ~39% higher than the average household income in the U.S.; the average salary of the folks HN relates to -- the tech team, the ally team, etc. -- is considerably higher. Totally agree our social safety nets aren't the strongest. But precisely because of that, people -- particularly higher earners -- have a responsibility to build their own padding for the inevitable short, sharp shocks to their livelihood. EDIT: I reflexively pulled Twitter numbers, but a quick glance shows the average FB salary is higher.
- acdha 4y ago
  One thing to consider: how much of that salary is going to the high cost of living in the Bay Area? The numbers are definitely higher but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the percentages of people who are n months away from needing to find another place to live – especially if that shock turns out to be sharper than it is short. I lived in San Diego in the mid-90s. One thing I remembered was that the very first job I had doing QA for a COBOL vendor at $15/hour had not just one but multiple applicants with doctorate degrees apply. That was fallout from the Cold War: they’d all worked for big defense contractors on projects which were scaled back, suddenly going from comfortably above average income to nothing. One of the things a bunch of people found out abruptly was how bad it can be to have a lot of your net worth tied up in housing: the market slowed dramatically (nobody needed houses near those employers, many people were waiting to see how the market went, etc.) for everyone at the same time, so a house you could easily have sold before would be on the market for a year. Things are better now in some key ways (remote work, portable skills, etc.) but I still would be surprised if a bunch of people aren’t getting a rough reminder about how badly correlated failures can suck, especially for the ones not making experienced software engineer salaries.

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
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > ... slashing rates in 2025, shouldn't be too hard to scrape by til then If rates aren’t being slashed long before then, then either: (1) the brief burst of layoffs were an aberration and the job market will have otherwise stayed strong, so scraping by isn’t an issue. (2) despite a weakening job market, inflation has been so persistent that fighting it remains a higher Fed priority than stimulus, and a politically motivated loosening of monetary policy would be a recipe for slingshotting into hyperinflation.
    - notfromhere 4y ago
      The president doesn’t control interest rates. Trump tried bullying the Fed into lowering rates and didn’t work
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Unemployment rate is a measure of slack in the labor market, nothing more. It says nothing about an individual’s experience. Unemployment rate is simply the ratio of two patterns of individual experience (not employed and actively looking vs that plus currently employed), published after the fact. > 5% unemployment means there’s a rotating set of job seekers that comprise 5% of the labor force. 5% unemployment means that (at the time covered by the report) for every 100 people either not employed and actively looking for work or working, 5 fell into the former category. It absolutely doesn’t tell you how much of that group is “rotating”.
    - adam_arthur 4y ago
      The 5% rotates by definition if anybody is hired or fired, as will always be the case. 5% unemployment is never going to represent 5% of the workforce being perpetually unemployed, as many sob stories try to implicitly portray it as. If an individual is perpetually unemployable, then it doesn’t matter if unemployment is 5% or 1%, they aren’t getting hired anyway
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > The 5% rotates by definition if anybody is hired or fired, as will always be the case. No, it doesn’t rotate “by definition”, and the rate isn’t a constant, it is a point-in-time estimate. If there is both hiring and firing going on that isn’t at the edges of the work force some portion of the 5% is transitorily unemployed, but that could be a very large or very small portion, or anything in between.
noasaservice 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization Just because the general country-wide unemployment is a low number, does not mean with any sort of guarantee that an individual will be able to transition in a decent amount of time as not to unduly impact their life. And given what the oligopoly of banks... err, the FED has been saying, 'they are hitting the brakes of inflation by raising interest rates significantly' - further exasperating the layoffs and slowing/reversing hiring at other firms.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  There will always be those that suffer Targeting them more precisely with aid is the way to solve that, not helicopter money into massive bubble and inflation. In the end who got hurt the most by the very money handed to them?
  - noasaservice 4y ago
    > There will always be those that suffer With that attitude, there will be. But there doesn't have to be. > Targeting them more precisely with aid is the way to solve that, not helicopter money into massive bubble and inflation. Not aid. Money. Straight up cold hard cash. Any thing else instead, like SNAP, housing vouchers, etc treats them like they have no agency. Yet with corporate handouts, we do no such thing. Look no further than the PPP debacle.
    - adam_arthur 4y ago
      We did hand everybody money, which is why the economy is about to crash as a result of the inflation it propagated. Sorry, you advocate economic collapse, not anything realistic or sustainable. Wishful thinkers have inflicted a vast amount of deaths throughout history due to economic mismanagement. Famine, hyperinflation etc
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Word tip: exacerbating not exasperating.
bjourne 4y ago
Do you think that the world will improve if 21-year-old college graduates make less money?
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  Yes, because compensation will more closely match contributions, and I prefer a just world
  - bjourne 4y ago
    Does this logic extend to company shareholders, board members, and CEOs too?
    - adam_arthur 4y ago
      What do you think’s happened to shareholders who held all these tech stocks that are down 90%? They’ve lost 90% of their money, by definition
      - bjourne 4y ago
        I'm not sure this is an answer to my question.
        adam_arthur 4y ago
        Where is the disconnect? If an investor does poor due diligence and doesn’t put the work in to determine a reasonable fair valuation for a company, and then loses their entire investment, that is just. If board members give bad advice and the stock falls, they incur losses. These are just outcomes. Most people would agree that attending a 6 week bootcamp shouldn’t entitle somebody to a 200-300k job. And it won’t in the near future. You’ll have to do a lot more to achieve the same comp going forward, just like every other industry. There’s nothing special about tech, it was just a nascent industry in boom times. No longer

glogla 4y ago

That would be normally a sensible sentiment, and a rare empathic one, on hyperindividualist hypercapitalist Hacker News. But here we're talking about people who made at least 300k a year, possibly up to a million. Those who stayed for few years likely never have to look for another job even again. The ones who didn't might still take few years sabbatical.

gundmc 4y ago
> But here we're talking about people who made at least 300k a year, possibly up to a million. Those who stayed for few years likely never have to look for another job even again. The ones who didn't might still take few years sabbatical. Are you suggesting that working "a few years" earning $300k in a high cost-of-living area means you likely saved enough money to never need to work again? Or are you suggesting that someone with the skills/experience working in a position that did pay that much for a few years will find it trivial to find another job?
- glogla 4y ago
  I am suggesting the former. Safe withdrawal rate from investments is usually considered 4 %, so each 100k invested makes you 4k a year. A few years at FAANG, assuming you don't spend it all, will give you idle rich lifestyle before thirty.

gwbrooks 4y ago

I'm not cheering by any means. But the average individual salary at Twitter is ~39% higher than the average household income in the U.S.; the average salary of the folks HN relates to -- the tech team, the ally team, etc. -- is considerably higher. Totally agree our social safety nets aren't the strongest. But precisely because of that, people -- particularly higher earners -- have a responsibility to build their own padding for the inevitable short, sharp shocks to their livelihood. EDIT: I reflexively pulled Twitter numbers, but a quick glance shows the average FB salary is higher.

acdha 4y ago
One thing to consider: how much of that salary is going to the high cost of living in the Bay Area? The numbers are definitely higher but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the percentages of people who are n months away from needing to find another place to live – especially if that shock turns out to be sharper than it is short. I lived in San Diego in the mid-90s. One thing I remembered was that the very first job I had doing QA for a COBOL vendor at $15/hour had not just one but multiple applicants with doctorate degrees apply. That was fallout from the Cold War: they’d all worked for big defense contractors on projects which were scaled back, suddenly going from comfortably above average income to nothing. One of the things a bunch of people found out abruptly was how bad it can be to have a lot of your net worth tied up in housing: the market slowed dramatically (nobody needed houses near those employers, many people were waiting to see how the market went, etc.) for everyone at the same time, so a house you could easily have sold before would be on the market for a year. Things are better now in some key ways (remote work, portable skills, etc.) but I still would be surprised if a bunch of people aren’t getting a rough reminder about how badly correlated failures can suck, especially for the ones not making experienced software engineer salaries.