10 ms·

Man... HN is full of doomscrolling today with all the layoff articles.

by rabuse 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
"Engineers over the age of 50 sent to a farm in upstate New York to live out the rest their days in peace"
- JshWright 4y ago
  Lucky for me, I'm already up here! (I've got a little over a decade to go before hitting the 50 milestone, but I figured I'd beat the rush)
  - tjr225 4y ago
    [dead]
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    Congrats! It's beautiful up there. You're doing it right [=
- berkle4455 4y ago
  Indeed I believe that's the goal of FIRE.
- sph 4y ago
  Where do I sign? No, I swear I'm in my 50s. I just have a youthful appearance.
- jgalt212 4y ago
  Those are the lucky ones. Others are just put on an ice floe.
- joshmn 4y ago
  I'd sign up and I'm just over 30.
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    I hate to break it to you but when your beloved pet gets sent to a farm upstate, it's a euphemism for being put down or sent to the glue factory.
    - joshmn 4y ago
      Neurologically I am usually the last to understand the point of a joke. I completely missed this.
time_to_smile 4y ago
It's not doomscrolling, its reality. The writing has been on the wall for over a year, and yet people still refuse to see it. We're at the beginning of a major contraction in tech. It might not be pleasant to hear about but if you work in tech it's important to pay attention. It really saddens me how often the HN communities general reaction to unpleasant news is to immediately stick their heads in the sand and claim everything is fine.
- noodleman 4y ago
  I'm not an economist, so I'm looking out for an informed opinion on this. What are you basing this on? I either see the dismissive takes or the doomsayer comments but it all just seems like speculation. I'm not sure if we're in a genuine period of tech decline or it's just overblown companies trimming the fat.
  - time_to_smile 4y ago
    I'm surprised people working in tech can not see this coming, haven't you ever looked at the current tech industry and thought to yourself "something is not right here?" Tech has been a massive game of shuffling around VC money to create the illusion of a massive part of the economy when it's really all the same money being shuffled around looking for profit and failing to find it. The heart of the problem boils down to this: There are basically two types of tech companies a.) unprofitable ones, and b.) profitable ones who make most of their money from companies in group a. For over a decade investors have been focusing more and more on growth while completely forgetting the basics about how a business need to run. This same issue happened in the dotcom bust, PG even has a great description of this from a earlier essay [0]: > It was not just our price to earnings ratio that was bogus. Half our earnings were too. Not in the Enron way, of course. The finance guys seemed scrupulous about reporting earnings. What made our earnings bogus was that Yahoo was, in effect, the center of a Ponzi scheme. Investors looked at Yahoo's earnings and said to themselves, here is proof that Internet companies can make money. So they invested in new startups that promised to be the next Yahoo. And as soon as these startups got the money, what did they do with it? Buy millions of dollars worth of advertising on Yahoo to promote their brand. Result: a capital investment in a startup this quarter shows up as Yahoo earnings next quarter—stimulating another round of investments in startups. I remember the dotcom bust and the big difference between then and now is that the duration of the bubble was much smaller during the dotcom. People back then proclaimed we where in a "new economy" where profits didn't matter anymore. The boom was only a few years and so those critics where proven correct in a short window of time. This time we've been in a bubble so long people don't even remember that companies need to make profits and be sustainable. During the period of cheap money VCs flooded the industry with so much cash it started to get weird. Wayfair is a great example of this, they had 150 data scientists at one point, what in the world does a furniture reseller need with that many DS people? Now we're starting to see the conditions that allowed this bubble to form relax very quickly. Not only is cheap money no longer a thing, but the consumers who have been gleefully pouring their extra money into apps that don't quite make sense are starting to feel their wallets get tighter (actually the data looks like they're starting to max out their credit and being forced to reduce spending). And that's just tech. We truly are in an "everything bubble" [1] were asset classes across the board are wildly overvalued. Unlike the dotcom, this will not stop with tech. 0. http://paulgraham.com/bubble.html http://paulgraham.com/bubble.html 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_bubble
MangoCoffee 4y ago
a lot of layoffs seem to be trimming fat from over hiring during covid
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Didn't Wayfair have a massive layoff right at the start of Covid, though?
  - burbankio 4y ago
    Yes, they laid off ~500 folks in Feb 2020 right before covid gave them a huge (and in retrospect, temporary) shot in the arm.
  - mandeepj 4y ago
    > Didn't Wayfair have a massive layoff right at the start of Covid, though? You missed the following one from last year https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/wayfair-to-layoff-5-of-its-workforce-or-nearly-900-employees/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/wayfair-to-layoff-5-of-its...

Man... HN is full of doomscrolling today with all the layoff articles.

by rabuse 4y ago

Man... HN is full of doomscrolling today with all the layoff articles.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

"Engineers over the age of 50 sent to a farm in upstate New York to live out the rest their days in peace"

JshWright 4y ago
Lucky for me, I'm already up here! (I've got a little over a decade to go before hitting the 50 milestone, but I figured I'd beat the rush)
- tjr225 4y ago
  [dead]
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Congrats! It's beautiful up there. You're doing it right [=
berkle4455 4y ago
Indeed I believe that's the goal of FIRE.
sph 4y ago
Where do I sign? No, I swear I'm in my 50s. I just have a youthful appearance.
jgalt212 4y ago
Those are the lucky ones. Others are just put on an ice floe.
joshmn 4y ago
I'd sign up and I'm just over 30.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  I hate to break it to you but when your beloved pet gets sent to a farm upstate, it's a euphemism for being put down or sent to the glue factory.
  - joshmn 4y ago
    Neurologically I am usually the last to understand the point of a joke. I completely missed this.

time_to_smile 4y ago

It's not doomscrolling, its reality. The writing has been on the wall for over a year, and yet people still refuse to see it. We're at the beginning of a major contraction in tech. It might not be pleasant to hear about but if you work in tech it's important to pay attention. It really saddens me how often the HN communities general reaction to unpleasant news is to immediately stick their heads in the sand and claim everything is fine.

noodleman 4y ago
I'm not an economist, so I'm looking out for an informed opinion on this. What are you basing this on? I either see the dismissive takes or the doomsayer comments but it all just seems like speculation. I'm not sure if we're in a genuine period of tech decline or it's just overblown companies trimming the fat.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  I'm surprised people working in tech can not see this coming, haven't you ever looked at the current tech industry and thought to yourself "something is not right here?" Tech has been a massive game of shuffling around VC money to create the illusion of a massive part of the economy when it's really all the same money being shuffled around looking for profit and failing to find it. The heart of the problem boils down to this: There are basically two types of tech companies a.) unprofitable ones, and b.) profitable ones who make most of their money from companies in group a. For over a decade investors have been focusing more and more on growth while completely forgetting the basics about how a business need to run. This same issue happened in the dotcom bust, PG even has a great description of this from a earlier essay [0]: > It was not just our price to earnings ratio that was bogus. Half our earnings were too. Not in the Enron way, of course. The finance guys seemed scrupulous about reporting earnings. What made our earnings bogus was that Yahoo was, in effect, the center of a Ponzi scheme. Investors looked at Yahoo's earnings and said to themselves, here is proof that Internet companies can make money. So they invested in new startups that promised to be the next Yahoo. And as soon as these startups got the money, what did they do with it? Buy millions of dollars worth of advertising on Yahoo to promote their brand. Result: a capital investment in a startup this quarter shows up as Yahoo earnings next quarter—stimulating another round of investments in startups. I remember the dotcom bust and the big difference between then and now is that the duration of the bubble was much smaller during the dotcom. People back then proclaimed we where in a "new economy" where profits didn't matter anymore. The boom was only a few years and so those critics where proven correct in a short window of time. This time we've been in a bubble so long people don't even remember that companies need to make profits and be sustainable. During the period of cheap money VCs flooded the industry with so much cash it started to get weird. Wayfair is a great example of this, they had 150 data scientists at one point, what in the world does a furniture reseller need with that many DS people? Now we're starting to see the conditions that allowed this bubble to form relax very quickly. Not only is cheap money no longer a thing, but the consumers who have been gleefully pouring their extra money into apps that don't quite make sense are starting to feel their wallets get tighter (actually the data looks like they're starting to max out their credit and being forced to reduce spending). And that's just tech. We truly are in an "everything bubble" [1] were asset classes across the board are wildly overvalued. Unlike the dotcom, this will not stop with tech. 0. http://paulgraham.com/bubble.html http://paulgraham.com/bubble.html 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_bubble

MangoCoffee 4y ago

a lot of layoffs seem to be trimming fat from over hiring during covid

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Didn't Wayfair have a massive layoff right at the start of Covid, though?
- burbankio 4y ago
  Yes, they laid off ~500 folks in Feb 2020 right before covid gave them a huge (and in retrospect, temporary) shot in the arm.
- mandeepj 4y ago
  > Didn't Wayfair have a massive layoff right at the start of Covid, though? You missed the following one from last year https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/wayfair-to-layoff-5-of-its-workforce-or-nearly-900-employees/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/wayfair-to-layoff-5-of-its...