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Every time I read stuff like: > "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economi

Every time I read stuff like: > "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. I can't believe that Google, Shopify, Coinbase, everyone, really believed that this was the new reality going forward. It was written in the sky since April 2020. Anyone with a semblance of understanding could guess that the COVID-fueled situation and artificial economic prop up would come due in the medium term. Really either the folks writing this crap take us for fools, or they're really shortsighted fools themselves.

kmlx 4y ago
sure, but the problems back then were immediate for google et al: "we need more people to deal with the increased flow". they hoped those covid patterns will remain after covid. they didn't.
- grugagag 4y ago
  At that level of money decisions only make sense financially with complete disregard for anything else and without any efficiency in mind
dustingetz 4y ago
we are measuring something about humanity here
saurik 4y ago
So, part of the issue is that those "last 2 years" also simultaneously felt a bit like an economic slowdown caused by the pandemic via lockdowns and infection fear. Maybe for some relevant areas of "tech", such as video conferencing, sure: people alone at home would make that stuff overly important in a way that would crash back down... but, I certainly had felt a world that went from being pretty awesome in 2019 to businesses shutting down left and right through 2020 and 2021 due to people all staying inside. I had not just hoped but kind of expected that, if we ever again felt reasonably safe returning outside and eating at restaurants and shopping together at stores and going out to theaters and the such, that things--including, very relevantly, advertisements on Google for all of those physical products, services, and entertainment options people might now want again--would kind of explode from latent demand and pent up frustration during the COVID period... not that we would only THEN go into a recession! But like, I guess this is why we can say with some certainty that I don't know much about complicated global- or even national- scale financial matters as I didn't know much about how--and very critically when--the Federal Reserve functions (having not had to care at all about this around 2008/9, when I had my bandwagon hitched strongly to the iPhone and everything looked amazing) and have never actively tracked inflation indicators as anything other than a dry numerical input for CPI wage increases :(.
Zvez 4y ago
the worst part is that even when economics growth stopped earlier this year, they didn't stop hiring. They didn't adapt fast enough to reduce the damage. They didn't try to optimize their workforce, they just went on with it till the moment they need to fire 12K
bko 4y ago
Googles revenue grew 41% in 2021, which is higher than normal. But not crazy. It was not about future projections or anything real. It was about cheap money and asset inflation. I don't know the exact mechanisms but I'm not convinced that it was about projections and now a letdown. Revenue is falling sure but it's still growing incredibly fast for such a large company 2022 (TTM) $282.11 B 9.5% 2021 $257.63 B 41.15% 2020 $182.52 B 12.77% 2019 $161.85 B 18.3% 2018 $136.81 B 23.42% 2017 $110.85 B 22.8% 2016 $90.27 B 20.38% https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/revenue/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/revenue/
- avrionov 4y ago
  "Revenue is falling sure" Your numbers show that the revenue is increasing, but the growth is slower, which is very different than the revenue is falling.
  - maigret 4y ago
    The classic error.
phphphphp 4y ago
Companies don’t need to be right, they need to maximise the chance of succeeding. Yes, it was obvious that the raining-money period wasn’t going to last… but what if it had? What if Google had decided to ignore it, and then by some ridiculous twist of fate, it did continue and a competitor did leverage it to beat Google? Firing a bunch of people and killing some projects is a tiny price to pay for the potential upside. As humans, seeing people get fired is painful and we view the individuals responsible in a negative light — which I agree with! — but for Google the corporate entity, and Microsoft and Shopify etc etc it made complete rational sense even in hindsight.
- nickelcitymario 4y ago
  But that's not the intended message when they send out these memos. They're not saying: "Hey, we knew this wouldn't last, but we hired a bunch of people in order to milk the situation for everything we could, knowing we'd have to fire you today. So, sorry we willingly and knowingly did this. But you're fired." I could respect the honesty in that, but that's not what they're trying to say. They're trying to act surprised by the economic shift. "Oops, sorry we have to let you go." Of course it was rational for them to all do this. Lying is often a rational thing to do.
  - phphphphp 4y ago
    Right, because they didn’t know it wouldn’t last hence taking the risk. The message is being written after the fact, and the message isn’t a lie per-se, rather, it’s a human framing of the situation with the subtext of we are a company and a company is not a job factory but a shareholder value factory. Every message every company ever writes that leans on any amount of humanity is, in your characterisation, a lie… and while, sure, that’s technically true, we all take part in this big theatre production where we expect companies to pretend to have humanity — your problem is with all of us participating in this system pretending a company gives a single solitary fuck about any of us. These performative messages are just one small part of the performance, writing an “honest” message where they say “you’re all fired and we don’t care” wouldn’t change anything. They’d still be doing a million other pieces of performative humanity.
hammock 4y ago
>Every time I read stuff like: "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. How are they taking you as a fool? The point of a company is not to maximize employment, it’s to maximize profit. That means hiring up in growth periods, and downsizing in contractions. That’s exactly what they said they have done.
- agluszak 4y ago
  > That’s exactly what they said they have done. But they're trying to frame it as if they cared more about employees than profits.
  - i_am_proteus 4y ago
    They're framing it that way because framing it that way is a strategy to maximize profits.
  - nebolo 4y ago
    I don't think so: they say explicitly that they hired to "match and fuel [...] growth".
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    Would they be more “caring about employees” if the didn’t fire anyone now but they had not hired tens of thousands in the last couple of years?
- boplicity 4y ago
  > The point of a company is not to maximize employment, it’s to maximize profit. Rant: If most people in our society simply decided this wasn't true -- and that, no, the point of a company is not to maximize profit, we could solve so many harms. And frankly, believing this is optional. It's like saying the point of a person is to live as long as possible. Sure, you can choose to think that, but if you do, it would be easy to paint you as a villain. And, of course, thinking that way is completely optional. And...just because many people do think that way doesn't mean we have to. We can choose to apply a different meaning to the idea of a company. As someone that helps run a company, I very much think our company exists to serve our customers in a very specific way. Most of our economic success, actually, comes from many of the choices that would seem to fly in the face of short-term monetary gain. Companies don't exist to maximize profit. Villains do.
radu_floricica 4y ago
Really? Cause I'm making a public note here that I didn't know. I fully expected WFH and automation to continue to fuel the need for software development, albeit at a slower rate. I'm also making a public note that even if I foresaw a crash after printing free money, I didn't expect it to be compounded by the most drastic eco-legislation ever, plus a war in Ukraine. And I sure as hell didn't expect the last two to be so perfectly synergistic in increasing energy prices.
- everdrive 4y ago
  I’m a bit out of the loop. What is the drastic eco-legislation you’re referring to?
- pnutjam 4y ago
  please elaborate on the "drastic eco-legislation", sounds like a talking point from a dubious source.
  - AYBABTME 4y ago
    I assume the Inflation Reduction Act.
  - radu_floricica 4y ago
    Not everything is about US :) In Europe they passed EU wide legislation, I think, around the end of 2020? Can't remember, really, and I'm too lazy too look. Either way, energy prices here were already very high in summer 2021, a full 8 months before the war in Ukraine started.
- AYBABTME 4y ago
  I think WFH and automation gained a boost from the pandemic and while the pendulum will continue to balance back, the overall effect will be more WFH and automation than if the pandemic hadn't hit. Large scale disruptions cause governments to print money, and I think the IRA (which I assume is what you refer to) was in a way predictable, because government historically do infrastructure spending to keep the economy afloat after large scale disruptions. That the Democrats would push infrastructure spending on tech and eco stuff is not particularly surprising. Asian countries have been pouring their R&D in solar panels, chips, batteries, manufacturing, for years. The pandemic very early on made bare the US' dire positioning, versus Asian countries relative advantage in that aspect. I wouldn't have predicted the IRA but it's predictable that an infra bill would have come. That's what happened in prior cases. I didn't expect the war in Ukraine, but we could expect wars. Trouble times create incentives (disparity) and opportunities. I sadly expect more large conflicts in the coming years. I think the average pragmatic person probably also does. As for the current economic crisis, I'll go on a limb and guess it'll probably maintain itself for another 2-3-4y horizon, like prior ones did. And the boiling pot it will cause will be fertile ground for conflicts (and innovation).
Aunche 4y ago
They aren't fools, they just have their own agendas. Sundar and other Google execs don't actually own that much Google stock, so they have relatively little lose by gambling with company money by over hiring. From Brian Armstrong's perspective, Coinbase didn't overhire at all. They captured all the crypto revenue they could during the boom, which inflated their stock price while Armstrong was cashing out as much as he could.
- nova22033 4y ago
  https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-google-shareholders-goog.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g... The top individual insider shareholders of Google are Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Sundar Pichai
  - Aunche 4y ago
    That's my point. Larry and Sergey own 3% of Google each, but have long retired from making any decisions at Google. Sundar only owns .01% of Google and gets compensated in bonuses, so he tunes his strategy on maximizing his bonus.
tephra 4y ago
In a similar vein, I would like to know what the "and I take full responsibility for this" line that CEOs always say in these emails actually looks like besides just saying it in the email.
- brookst 4y ago
  That’s it. It just means that they are making a point of not blaming their reports (“today is a tough day, especially because Bob over-hired in marketing and Kate talked me into that engineering expansion”)
- TheCleric 4y ago
  It's the corporate version of "It's not you, it's me." breakup line.
  - htrp 4y ago
    "It's not you, it's me, but I'm still deciding to breakup with you"
kick_in_the_dor 4y ago
You must be rich from being able to predict the future so well.
- AYBABTME 4y ago
  I did in fact make good money from these broad predictable things. Like these big corps did. And probably a ton of people.
ctvo 4y ago
Give me a break. Everyone knew it wouldn’t have lasted, sure, in the same way we all know China won’t be the manufacturing hub of the world forever or the dollar may not be the primary currency. When will the transition happen? If you knew exactly, like you seem to be indicating, you should make some money off of it. Otherwise hindsight armchair CEO is dull.
xdavidliu 4y ago
> It was written in the sky since April 2020. Anyone with a semblance of understanding could guess that the COVID-fueled situation and artificial economic prop up would come due in the medium term. Can you point to any comments that people with a semblance of understanding made back then in which they were able estimate the rough time window when things would come back down to earth?
- Eupraxias 4y ago
  Fair point! However, I suspect many people have, as I have, been screaming silently for a few years that we will have to pay for all of this at some point soon. I expected what we are seeing, and I'd be amazed if most others on this site are surprised.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  I don’t have proof so you probably will dismiss me but I was saying privately back in March 2020 that we’d go back to normal in 18-24 months. This is just based on historical pandemics so it’s not like you have to be some kind of genius.
- AYBABTME 4y ago
  If you look the Spanish flu in particular, it eventually fade out after 2-3y, and people resumed life by a mix of adapting to the new reality and stopped caring, and the illness mutated to a less dangerous form. People (at least those I think sounded pragmatic) were talking about that back in Spring 2020. I don't know of a comment in 2020 that specifically say that, mainly because I don't keep a log and will not go search for it.
erfgh 4y ago
Hindsight is 20/20.
rvz 4y ago
Well at the height of the market euphoria, nobody listened to my warnings a year ago: From [0] November 2021 Me: 'Finally' The start of the market crash is under way... >> Stock market up 1% today on both this news and decades-high inflation. [0] Then more concerns for preparing for the recession months later after I said we were already in a recession. [1]. >> No. That is completely false. We are most certainly not in a recession. [1] So after many layoffs, rising inflation, US debt ceiling fears happening since then the lagging indicators of this have now take effect and so 'now' we are preparing for the recession? It has already happened and is still happening which it is too late to prepare. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
BurningFrog 4y ago
Everyone knew things would change. Nobody knew when and how.
giantg2 4y ago
"I can't believe that Google, Shopify, Coinbase, everyone, really believed that this was the new reality going forward." They didn't. They knew it wouldn't last. But what they had to do was stay competitive and/or meet demand by scaling up while they could. Now they have a larger pool of talent and can cut people/programs who are too expensive or are under performing.
- AYBABTME 4y ago
  Yup. And I'm annoyed that they pretend it was all a mistake, and try to pass me the reader for a fool by writing this sentence. That's all.
  - giantg2 4y ago
    Yeah, but this sort of thing is common in many industries. The people in power explain things in a political way in the name of communicating with laypeople to avoid bad reactions. This can be CEOs, politicians, doctors, police, developers, etc.
projectramo 4y ago
"Every damn body" knows this in retrospect. At the time -- when we were washing our groceries and we weren't sure if the IFR was 1% or 10%, and if it was airborne or if it was morphing into something worse -- our new reality might have been very different.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  That was only for a few months
htrp 4y ago
The problem also is the justification for management pay is that they are able to predict these kind of things and avoid the kind of disruption to the organization that occurs in this. Unfortunately, it doesn't really seem the case (that and no one gets the credit for just keeping the system running)
mabbo 4y ago
> Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. I disagree. There's charts showing the proportion of commerce online vs offline and it slowly rises over time over the last 20 years. It's following a pretty stable trend. Until the end of 2021 or so, the data really really looked like there had been a 5-6 year jump ahead on the curve thanks to COVID-19. The question was never "is this a temporary change", it was "how much of this is temporary and how much is permanent?". When the dust settled, would we see it go back to a 2-year jump-ahead? Stay at a 5-year? Go back to what was expected? Nobody knew the answer. You didn't. You had a guess. And most people forget what their guess was once they know the answer, and believe they always knew the answer.
- AYBABTME 4y ago
  Agree with you that all in all those companies are still mostly bigger than they were pre-pandemic, and their business indeed get ahead a notch by the effect of the pandemic. And clearly now the dust settles and they're ahead, overall, but need to trim down headcount, because they're not as ahead as they could have been in an alternate universe. That's all fine, although it's not great for those fired. I just can't stand the pretense "oh no we didn't know we over hired" like come on. We _all_ knew y'all were over hiring. Just cut the crap.
wonderwonder 4y ago
They needed the increased labor at the time, they got it, utilized it, juiced profits and now don't need it so are getting rid of it. They used the increased labor to increase profits by 41% in 2021. If they did not have the increased labor in that period would their profits have increased by that much? I see this comment in much the same way I see a bear in a bull market. Stock X is $100 and Bob buys it. Carl tells Bob he is an idiot and the stock is going to go down. Stock X goes to $200. Bob sells. Stock X starts going down and Carl starts telling everyone he was right and he knew the stock would crash. In the mean time Bob is retired and has gotten everything he needed from that particular stock purchase.
- RajT88 4y ago
  Is this the "scalability of the cloud" I keep hearing about?
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    Pretty much. You don't want to know what happens at Amazon when you turn off your EC2 instance.
fhd2 4y ago
These companies work not for their employees, but for their shareholders. I suppose shareholders would have revolted if they hadn't increased investment to potentially hit it big when they could. Turns out these investments didn't work out, so now they cut their losses. From a shareholder's perspective, I can understand this narrative as not foolish, rather courageous. From an outside (and employee) perspective, it can seem foolish though.
kamaal 4y ago
>>Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. In hindsight, yes. But by that definition every decision is a coin flip, because no matter how good we get at predicting things, you are always and always making decisions based on past data, and that can't accomodate random 'act of god' sort of events COVID and Ukraine war was. >>Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. There was no way to know COVID was a phase, we still can't say with confidence that COVID is over.
matwood 4y ago
> Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Are you making the same mistake they did and thinking in 0/1 terms? The last 2 years have shifted the future, but the shifts are gradients with few if any being absolute 0/1.
metacritic12 4y ago
What do you want them to say? "It's our right to fire people and we've now chosen to do so!" Technically true but sounds bad. They're just putting a PR spin on it.
asciimov 4y ago
All of them are doing this to shore up short term value. Say this saves google 1 to 2 Billion over this next year, that's a billion dollars they can spend on stock buy backs and dividend payments.
kloch 4y ago
> Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Don't humans almost always extrapolate their present situation far out in the future?
micropresident 4y ago
They're shortsighted fools.
throw123123123 4y ago
Your clairvoyance must have made you extremely rich as you assess these events with accuracy and perfect timing, and thus made the right open-market financial bets to profit from them.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  What bets would those have been? It’s not always straightforward to bet on economic trends, especially on the short side.
  - throw123123123 4y ago
    Either it was predictable or it wasn't.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jpadkins 4y ago
Can you cite you or anyone making specific claims in 2020 or 2021 that the online growth rates are temporary and not a shift? I was skeptical until mid 2021 when everything in person was opening again, but the shift to online frenzy wasn't slowing. I knew there would be some backsliding, but I thought there was a permanent shift for some people who realized online ordering, online activity is just easier. Some areas haven't backslid much at all (video meetings, WFH, online schooling, etc).
- AYBABTME 4y ago
  Can't really cite, because I consume a lot of material but don't take notes. I think if you picture yourself as a population of 1000. Y'all are someone who hasn't used technology X before because you haven't yet had to, and suddenly you're encouraged to do so. The probability that you will do so now, instead of in X period of time, has increased. It's not going to happen all at once, but over some time, which means the adoption rate will compound. But like any adoption curve, some of y'all 1000 will churn, depending on how useful the technology proves out in the long term. What's the average lifetime before a user churn? You can guess for yourself, how quickly do you get bored with most of your new toys? Some toys stick around because you find them drastically better, some others you start ignoring. So it's not that the online growth rate was temporary, but that it's (sorta) obvious that it was going to recede from it's peak. Like Pokemon Go, which is still popular but nowhere near as it was near day one.

kmlx 4y ago

sure, but the problems back then were immediate for google et al: "we need more people to deal with the increased flow". they hoped those covid patterns will remain after covid. they didn't.

grugagag 4y ago
At that level of money decisions only make sense financially with complete disregard for anything else and without any efficiency in mind

dustingetz 4y ago

we are measuring something about humanity here

saurik 4y ago

So, part of the issue is that those "last 2 years" also simultaneously felt a bit like an economic slowdown caused by the pandemic via lockdowns and infection fear. Maybe for some relevant areas of "tech", such as video conferencing, sure: people alone at home would make that stuff overly important in a way that would crash back down... but, I certainly had felt a world that went from being pretty awesome in 2019 to businesses shutting down left and right through 2020 and 2021 due to people all staying inside. I had not just hoped but kind of expected that, if we ever again felt reasonably safe returning outside and eating at restaurants and shopping together at stores and going out to theaters and the such, that things--including, very relevantly, advertisements on Google for all of those physical products, services, and entertainment options people might now want again--would kind of explode from latent demand and pent up frustration during the COVID period... not that we would only THEN go into a recession! But like, I guess this is why we can say with some certainty that I don't know much about complicated global- or even national- scale financial matters as I didn't know much about how--and very critically when--the Federal Reserve functions (having not had to care at all about this around 2008/9, when I had my bandwagon hitched strongly to the iPhone and everything looked amazing) and have never actively tracked inflation indicators as anything other than a dry numerical input for CPI wage increases :(.

Zvez 4y ago

the worst part is that even when economics growth stopped earlier this year, they didn't stop hiring. They didn't adapt fast enough to reduce the damage. They didn't try to optimize their workforce, they just went on with it till the moment they need to fire 12K

bko 4y ago

Googles revenue grew 41% in 2021, which is higher than normal. But not crazy. It was not about future projections or anything real. It was about cheap money and asset inflation. I don't know the exact mechanisms but I'm not convinced that it was about projections and now a letdown. Revenue is falling sure but it's still growing incredibly fast for such a large company 2022 (TTM) $282.11 B 9.5% 2021 $257.63 B 41.15% 2020 $182.52 B 12.77% 2019 $161.85 B 18.3% 2018 $136.81 B 23.42% 2017 $110.85 B 22.8% 2016 $90.27 B 20.38% https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/revenue/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/revenue/

avrionov 4y ago
"Revenue is falling sure" Your numbers show that the revenue is increasing, but the growth is slower, which is very different than the revenue is falling.
- maigret 4y ago
  The classic error.

phphphphp 4y ago

Companies don’t need to be right, they need to maximise the chance of succeeding. Yes, it was obvious that the raining-money period wasn’t going to last… but what if it had? What if Google had decided to ignore it, and then by some ridiculous twist of fate, it did continue and a competitor did leverage it to beat Google? Firing a bunch of people and killing some projects is a tiny price to pay for the potential upside. As humans, seeing people get fired is painful and we view the individuals responsible in a negative light — which I agree with! — but for Google the corporate entity, and Microsoft and Shopify etc etc it made complete rational sense even in hindsight.

nickelcitymario 4y ago
But that's not the intended message when they send out these memos. They're not saying: "Hey, we knew this wouldn't last, but we hired a bunch of people in order to milk the situation for everything we could, knowing we'd have to fire you today. So, sorry we willingly and knowingly did this. But you're fired." I could respect the honesty in that, but that's not what they're trying to say. They're trying to act surprised by the economic shift. "Oops, sorry we have to let you go." Of course it was rational for them to all do this. Lying is often a rational thing to do.
- phphphphp 4y ago
  Right, because they didn’t know it wouldn’t last hence taking the risk. The message is being written after the fact, and the message isn’t a lie per-se, rather, it’s a human framing of the situation with the subtext of we are a company and a company is not a job factory but a shareholder value factory. Every message every company ever writes that leans on any amount of humanity is, in your characterisation, a lie… and while, sure, that’s technically true, we all take part in this big theatre production where we expect companies to pretend to have humanity — your problem is with all of us participating in this system pretending a company gives a single solitary fuck about any of us. These performative messages are just one small part of the performance, writing an “honest” message where they say “you’re all fired and we don’t care” wouldn’t change anything. They’d still be doing a million other pieces of performative humanity.

hammock 4y ago

>Every time I read stuff like: "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. How are they taking you as a fool? The point of a company is not to maximize employment, it’s to maximize profit. That means hiring up in growth periods, and downsizing in contractions. That’s exactly what they said they have done.

agluszak 4y ago
> That’s exactly what they said they have done. But they're trying to frame it as if they cared more about employees than profits.
- i_am_proteus 4y ago
  They're framing it that way because framing it that way is a strategy to maximize profits.
- nebolo 4y ago
  I don't think so: they say explicitly that they hired to "match and fuel [...] growth".
- kgwgk 4y ago
  Would they be more “caring about employees” if the didn’t fire anyone now but they had not hired tens of thousands in the last couple of years?
boplicity 4y ago
> The point of a company is not to maximize employment, it’s to maximize profit. Rant: If most people in our society simply decided this wasn't true -- and that, no, the point of a company is not to maximize profit, we could solve so many harms. And frankly, believing this is optional. It's like saying the point of a person is to live as long as possible. Sure, you can choose to think that, but if you do, it would be easy to paint you as a villain. And, of course, thinking that way is completely optional. And...just because many people do think that way doesn't mean we have to. We can choose to apply a different meaning to the idea of a company. As someone that helps run a company, I very much think our company exists to serve our customers in a very specific way. Most of our economic success, actually, comes from many of the choices that would seem to fly in the face of short-term monetary gain. Companies don't exist to maximize profit. Villains do.

radu_floricica 4y ago

Really? Cause I'm making a public note here that I didn't know. I fully expected WFH and automation to continue to fuel the need for software development, albeit at a slower rate. I'm also making a public note that even if I foresaw a crash after printing free money, I didn't expect it to be compounded by the most drastic eco-legislation ever, plus a war in Ukraine. And I sure as hell didn't expect the last two to be so perfectly synergistic in increasing energy prices.

everdrive 4y ago
I’m a bit out of the loop. What is the drastic eco-legislation you’re referring to?
pnutjam 4y ago
please elaborate on the "drastic eco-legislation", sounds like a talking point from a dubious source.
- AYBABTME 4y ago
  I assume the Inflation Reduction Act.
- radu_floricica 4y ago
  Not everything is about US :) In Europe they passed EU wide legislation, I think, around the end of 2020? Can't remember, really, and I'm too lazy too look. Either way, energy prices here were already very high in summer 2021, a full 8 months before the war in Ukraine started.
AYBABTME 4y ago
I think WFH and automation gained a boost from the pandemic and while the pendulum will continue to balance back, the overall effect will be more WFH and automation than if the pandemic hadn't hit. Large scale disruptions cause governments to print money, and I think the IRA (which I assume is what you refer to) was in a way predictable, because government historically do infrastructure spending to keep the economy afloat after large scale disruptions. That the Democrats would push infrastructure spending on tech and eco stuff is not particularly surprising. Asian countries have been pouring their R&D in solar panels, chips, batteries, manufacturing, for years. The pandemic very early on made bare the US' dire positioning, versus Asian countries relative advantage in that aspect. I wouldn't have predicted the IRA but it's predictable that an infra bill would have come. That's what happened in prior cases. I didn't expect the war in Ukraine, but we could expect wars. Trouble times create incentives (disparity) and opportunities. I sadly expect more large conflicts in the coming years. I think the average pragmatic person probably also does. As for the current economic crisis, I'll go on a limb and guess it'll probably maintain itself for another 2-3-4y horizon, like prior ones did. And the boiling pot it will cause will be fertile ground for conflicts (and innovation).

Aunche 4y ago

They aren't fools, they just have their own agendas. Sundar and other Google execs don't actually own that much Google stock, so they have relatively little lose by gambling with company money by over hiring. From Brian Armstrong's perspective, Coinbase didn't overhire at all. They captured all the crypto revenue they could during the boom, which inflated their stock price while Armstrong was cashing out as much as he could.

nova22033 4y ago
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-google-shareholders-goog.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g... The top individual insider shareholders of Google are Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Sundar Pichai
- Aunche 4y ago
  That's my point. Larry and Sergey own 3% of Google each, but have long retired from making any decisions at Google. Sundar only owns .01% of Google and gets compensated in bonuses, so he tunes his strategy on maximizing his bonus.

tephra 4y ago

In a similar vein, I would like to know what the "and I take full responsibility for this" line that CEOs always say in these emails actually looks like besides just saying it in the email.

brookst 4y ago
That’s it. It just means that they are making a point of not blaming their reports (“today is a tough day, especially because Bob over-hired in marketing and Kate talked me into that engineering expansion”)
TheCleric 4y ago
It's the corporate version of "It's not you, it's me." breakup line.
- htrp 4y ago
  "It's not you, it's me, but I'm still deciding to breakup with you"

kick_in_the_dor 4y ago

You must be rich from being able to predict the future so well.

AYBABTME 4y ago
I did in fact make good money from these broad predictable things. Like these big corps did. And probably a ton of people.

ctvo 4y ago

Give me a break. Everyone knew it wouldn’t have lasted, sure, in the same way we all know China won’t be the manufacturing hub of the world forever or the dollar may not be the primary currency. When will the transition happen? If you knew exactly, like you seem to be indicating, you should make some money off of it. Otherwise hindsight armchair CEO is dull.

xdavidliu 4y ago

> It was written in the sky since April 2020. Anyone with a semblance of understanding could guess that the COVID-fueled situation and artificial economic prop up would come due in the medium term. Can you point to any comments that people with a semblance of understanding made back then in which they were able estimate the rough time window when things would come back down to earth?

Eupraxias 4y ago
Fair point! However, I suspect many people have, as I have, been screaming silently for a few years that we will have to pay for all of this at some point soon. I expected what we are seeing, and I'd be amazed if most others on this site are surprised.
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
I don’t have proof so you probably will dismiss me but I was saying privately back in March 2020 that we’d go back to normal in 18-24 months. This is just based on historical pandemics so it’s not like you have to be some kind of genius.
AYBABTME 4y ago
If you look the Spanish flu in particular, it eventually fade out after 2-3y, and people resumed life by a mix of adapting to the new reality and stopped caring, and the illness mutated to a less dangerous form. People (at least those I think sounded pragmatic) were talking about that back in Spring 2020. I don't know of a comment in 2020 that specifically say that, mainly because I don't keep a log and will not go search for it.

erfgh 4y ago

Hindsight is 20/20.

rvz 4y ago

Well at the height of the market euphoria, nobody listened to my warnings a year ago: From [0] November 2021 Me: 'Finally' The start of the market crash is under way... >> Stock market up 1% today on both this news and decades-high inflation. [0] Then more concerns for preparing for the recession months later after I said we were already in a recession. [1]. >> No. That is completely false. We are most certainly not in a recession. [1] So after many layoffs, rising inflation, US debt ceiling fears happening since then the lagging indicators of this have now take effect and so 'now' we are preparing for the recession? It has already happened and is still happening which it is too late to prepare. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710

deleted 4y ago
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BurningFrog 4y ago

Everyone knew things would change. Nobody knew when and how.

giantg2 4y ago

"I can't believe that Google, Shopify, Coinbase, everyone, really believed that this was the new reality going forward." They didn't. They knew it wouldn't last. But what they had to do was stay competitive and/or meet demand by scaling up while they could. Now they have a larger pool of talent and can cut people/programs who are too expensive or are under performing.

AYBABTME 4y ago
Yup. And I'm annoyed that they pretend it was all a mistake, and try to pass me the reader for a fool by writing this sentence. That's all.
- giantg2 4y ago
  Yeah, but this sort of thing is common in many industries. The people in power explain things in a political way in the name of communicating with laypeople to avoid bad reactions. This can be CEOs, politicians, doctors, police, developers, etc.

projectramo 4y ago

"Every damn body" knows this in retrospect. At the time -- when we were washing our groceries and we weren't sure if the IFR was 1% or 10%, and if it was airborne or if it was morphing into something worse -- our new reality might have been very different.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
That was only for a few months

htrp 4y ago

The problem also is the justification for management pay is that they are able to predict these kind of things and avoid the kind of disruption to the organization that occurs in this. Unfortunately, it doesn't really seem the case (that and no one gets the credit for just keeping the system running)

mabbo 4y ago

> Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. I disagree. There's charts showing the proportion of commerce online vs offline and it slowly rises over time over the last 20 years. It's following a pretty stable trend. Until the end of 2021 or so, the data really really looked like there had been a 5-6 year jump ahead on the curve thanks to COVID-19. The question was never "is this a temporary change", it was "how much of this is temporary and how much is permanent?". When the dust settled, would we see it go back to a 2-year jump-ahead? Stay at a 5-year? Go back to what was expected? Nobody knew the answer. You didn't. You had a guess. And most people forget what their guess was once they know the answer, and believe they always knew the answer.

AYBABTME 4y ago
Agree with you that all in all those companies are still mostly bigger than they were pre-pandemic, and their business indeed get ahead a notch by the effect of the pandemic. And clearly now the dust settles and they're ahead, overall, but need to trim down headcount, because they're not as ahead as they could have been in an alternate universe. That's all fine, although it's not great for those fired. I just can't stand the pretense "oh no we didn't know we over hired" like come on. We _all_ knew y'all were over hiring. Just cut the crap.

wonderwonder 4y ago

They needed the increased labor at the time, they got it, utilized it, juiced profits and now don't need it so are getting rid of it. They used the increased labor to increase profits by 41% in 2021. If they did not have the increased labor in that period would their profits have increased by that much? I see this comment in much the same way I see a bear in a bull market. Stock X is $100 and Bob buys it. Carl tells Bob he is an idiot and the stock is going to go down. Stock X goes to $200. Bob sells. Stock X starts going down and Carl starts telling everyone he was right and he knew the stock would crash. In the mean time Bob is retired and has gotten everything he needed from that particular stock purchase.

RajT88 4y ago
Is this the "scalability of the cloud" I keep hearing about?
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Pretty much. You don't want to know what happens at Amazon when you turn off your EC2 instance.

fhd2 4y ago

These companies work not for their employees, but for their shareholders. I suppose shareholders would have revolted if they hadn't increased investment to potentially hit it big when they could. Turns out these investments didn't work out, so now they cut their losses. From a shareholder's perspective, I can understand this narrative as not foolish, rather courageous. From an outside (and employee) perspective, it can seem foolish though.

kamaal 4y ago

>>Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. In hindsight, yes. But by that definition every decision is a coin flip, because no matter how good we get at predicting things, you are always and always making decisions based on past data, and that can't accomodate random 'act of god' sort of events COVID and Ukraine war was. >>Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. There was no way to know COVID was a phase, we still can't say with confidence that COVID is over.

matwood 4y ago

> Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Are you making the same mistake they did and thinking in 0/1 terms? The last 2 years have shifted the future, but the shifts are gradients with few if any being absolute 0/1.

metacritic12 4y ago

What do you want them to say? "It's our right to fire people and we've now chosen to do so!" Technically true but sounds bad. They're just putting a PR spin on it.

asciimov 4y ago

All of them are doing this to shore up short term value. Say this saves google 1 to 2 Billion over this next year, that's a billion dollars they can spend on stock buy backs and dividend payments.

kloch 4y ago

> Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Don't humans almost always extrapolate their present situation far out in the future?

micropresident 4y ago

They're shortsighted fools.

throw123123123 4y ago

Your clairvoyance must have made you extremely rich as you assess these events with accuracy and perfect timing, and thus made the right open-market financial bets to profit from them.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
What bets would those have been? It’s not always straightforward to bet on economic trends, especially on the short side.
- throw123123123 4y ago
  Either it was predictable or it wasn't.

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jpadkins 4y ago

Can you cite you or anyone making specific claims in 2020 or 2021 that the online growth rates are temporary and not a shift? I was skeptical until mid 2021 when everything in person was opening again, but the shift to online frenzy wasn't slowing. I knew there would be some backsliding, but I thought there was a permanent shift for some people who realized online ordering, online activity is just easier. Some areas haven't backslid much at all (video meetings, WFH, online schooling, etc).

AYBABTME 4y ago
Can't really cite, because I consume a lot of material but don't take notes. I think if you picture yourself as a population of 1000. Y'all are someone who hasn't used technology X before because you haven't yet had to, and suddenly you're encouraged to do so. The probability that you will do so now, instead of in X period of time, has increased. It's not going to happen all at once, but over some time, which means the adoption rate will compound. But like any adoption curve, some of y'all 1000 will churn, depending on how useful the technology proves out in the long term. What's the average lifetime before a user churn? You can guess for yourself, how quickly do you get bored with most of your new toys? Some toys stick around because you find them drastically better, some others you start ignoring. So it's not that the online growth rate was temporary, but that it's (sorta) obvious that it was going to recede from it's peak. Like Pokemon Go, which is still popular but nowhere near as it was near day one.