6 ms·

This really is the techpocalypse, huh? I’m young (35) but I’ve never seen layoffs so continuous. I wonder how far into the year this will go and if we’ll ever c

This really is the techpocalypse, huh? I’m young (35) but I’ve never seen layoffs so continuous. I wonder how far into the year this will go and if we’ll ever come back. Maybe companies truly will start offshoring.

shadowgovt 4y ago
You missed them by that (tiny-fingers-gap) much. I'm just old enough to have witnessed the dot-com crash a few years before I went into industry; this feels very similar. In fact, it feels a little less intense; the dot-com crash was about an entire business model consolidating under an absolute handful of winners (example: most independent online stores went "We can't compete with Amazon" and bankrupted, laying off everyone) while this one seems to be a lot more "All these firms will continue to operate but they don't think they need to employ this many people to do it." It will be interesting to see if the consequence is new startups competing with the incumbents as those laid off find each other and some capital or if the consequence will be something else.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Yeah this is more of a downturn where successful companies are laying off a percentage- the dot com bust was thousands of companies just ceasing to exist overnight. Not really entirely comparable.
- mquirion 4y ago
  This is right. The dot-com crash was an absolute crash. Not "we're laying off 5-15% of our company." It was a lot of "This media darling that had an IPO after 2 years of operations no longer exists." In my social group of about 30 folks, I think at ~25 of us all experienced months of unemployment, at the least.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I was lucky enough to grab a new position through someone I knew fairly quickly. But, in the month it took for the company to actually extend an offer, I didn't have so much as a nibble from anyone else. And I definitely knew people who just got out of the industry.
  - RHSeeger 4y ago
    I was out of work for about 13 months, and it was miserable.
  - ben7799 4y ago
    This, think companies going out of business left and right. Not 5-15% layoffs after the company doubled or tripled in size over 2-3 years. Almost no one I knew worked right through it without being impacted, and some people had huge impacts. I worked as a contractor for 2 years afterwards before getting back into a startup. I knew some people who were out of work 6 months or a year and came back with huge pay cuts. Tons of people I knew ended up with furniture and servers in their house they took when the company closed and management/investors didn't want any of it. I got a desk and a nice office chair that way.
- 015a 4y ago
  Yeah; its really important to keep in mind that in the majority of these layoffs, these companies are still employing at or above the number of people they were in Dec 2019. This isn't a business model correction; this is a "free covid money" correction. Everything that is happening was predicted by economists the moment the government started writing billions in checks during 2020; the fact that its only 10% in most cases, and hasn't substantively spread beyond Tech and Finance, is actually extremely good news, not something to feel dread about.
- acdha 4y ago
  One notable contrast I see is that many of the dotcoms which failed had been predicted years in advance based on poor business models where they had no plausible way to make a profit. There are some companies like Uber which are struggling with that but most of these are profitable & won’t be leaving room for newcomers. Related to that last thought, a lot of people bailed out into Boeing corporate jobs. They didn’t have Aeron chairs but they needed a lot of IT workers as they moved more online. I’m curious how that’ll go now where that process is much further along and things like cloud services have been soaking up geeneric demand.
  - ben7799 4y ago
    One thing I see different is back then there were tons and tons of small startups that vaporized. Now we have a bunch of absolutely massive companies like Uber that have no way to make money, but the overall # of them is a lot smaller.
    - twelve40 4y ago
      could you expand on the Uber having no way to make money part? > Uber reported $595 million in profit
lolinder 4y ago
I would wager that you also had never seen such an insane tech hiring market as we did during the pandemic. I think it remains to be seen whether this is just a correction of the pandemic tech bubble or something more permanent.
JohnFen 4y ago
This is a regular cycle. These companies will eventually overhire again, then they'll lay people off again. This has been the pattern in the industry for a very long time.
dehrmann 4y ago
This is nothing compared to 2000, or even 2008. You might have a point about offshoring. With tech workers insisting they're just as productive working from home, you might as well hire people in countries with cheaper homes.
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  which is why America needs deflation, or deflationary pressures (such as devaluation of the dollar against foreign currencies expressed as local price inflation) .
  - shaoonb 4y ago
    Honest question: how can devaluing the dollar be deflationary?
    - maerF0x0 4y ago
      The key is in the combination of words. > Devaluing the dollar against a foreign currency. Ok, so labour traded for global goods intermediated by cash means we can remove the intermediary and think about the just the work for goods trade. Imagine I work 1 hour for 10 loaves of bread. If I get more bread for my time, my value has inflated, if I get less bread for my time my value has deflated. Ok now lets add money to the picture. (please excuse unrealistic exchange rates and the lack of profit margins to help illustrate the point) If I work 1 hour for $20 and it currently buys $30 CAD and $30 CAD buys 10 loaves of Canadian bread, then we have the same scenario as describe before. The price of bread on the shelf in USA is $2 USD, or 6 minutes of my time. Now looks what happens when we devalue the USD... I work 1 hour for $20 and it buys $20 CAD (Less than before), and $20 CAD buys 6 2/3rds a loaf of bread. The price of a loaf of bread on the shelf is $3 USD ($20 USD/6.66) or 9 minutes of my labor. See how the price in USD went up? That's the deflation of a currency against another currency. And that's how US labor becomes "cheaper" because the rest of the world now gets 9 Minutes of your time for one loaf of bread.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
softwaredoug 4y ago
Maybe the techcorrection back to the already lucrative prepandemic days.
Ekaros 4y ago
It is all cyclical really. The last cycle was very long, but now it will go down again for a while and then later pick up again. I have kinda been expecting some sort of downturn for a while. Covid bit messed the time line, but now it seems to be happening with vengeance.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yamtaddle 4y ago
This is following some insane hiring numbers the last three or so years, to a degree that I don't think was present in the run-up to the last couple times (some, yes, but not this much). There also hasn't been a large wave of companies failing outright. This one doesn't seem anywhere near as dire, despite the large numbers flying around (at least, not yet)
maerF0x0 4y ago
To be honest we're not yet .com bubble level. That saw many many _bankruptcies_ . It took microsoft ~17 yrs to go from it's .com bubble to breakeven, though others rebounded faster. Also, if you're an engineer, keep in mind the org mix in layoffs. AFAIK It's more like the recruiter-pocalypse as companies do not foresee needing those headcount to increase headcount... Yes some engineers in the mix, but not a major component...
- andrew_ 4y ago
  Too many are missing this. Recruiting, marketing, and sales are getting run through. There's been a glut of recruiters in the industry for at least 10 years. Anecdotally I'm under the impression most are low-skill workers.
potatolicious 4y ago
> "I wonder how far into the year this will go and if we’ll ever come back." We'll be back, but not until the industry discovers something of actual value. My internal narrative of all of this is that many of us came up during the smartphone revolution which legitimately created a ton of new value. Products that could not exist before now could (and did!), resulting in a flurry of new companies, new products, and new ways of making money. This was the driving force during the past tech boom. Then I think we started reaching the end of the smartphone boom. The industry needed to find some new technology that would similarly open a similar phase of rapid growth. It chose to bet on the gig economy, followed by crypto. Both of those were near-complete busts. I think a lot of the pain we're experiencing is rooted in this. We're past the smartphone explosion but no real technology since then has actually unlocked a whole lot of new value, and in fact has burned investors badly. Until we actually find this next-step technology things will be in the doldrums. Lots of people are betting on "AI" (or really just LLMs), and time will tell - I suspect it will be pretty transformative for some players and product areas but not in the industry-shaking way that is currently being hyped. I have no doubt we'll find this at some point - after all technology continues to march forward, but I'm not convinced there is anything necessarily imminent that will drive the kind of growth smartphones did.
- 0xmarcin 4y ago
  The invention of Radio, TV, Internet and Smartphone all have a property that they eventually reached even the most tech averse individuals. Crypto market is very limited as it requires technical (read nerdy) knowledge to do it right, or you will risk your money due to scam exchanges. But digital money is still a very good idea, Central Bank Digital Currency is a thing and I bet we will have you use in the future. AI has the property that it can reach all the people around the world. From AI that teaches you a foreign languages to automated advisors that can e.g. recommend a diet based on your needs or even AI dating where instead of sweeping AI will do the match (I would pay for the last option). The problem with AI is that there was already "AI winter": high expectation in the beginning, but nothing workable delivered in the end in the late 70s if I remember correctly. I hope it will not end up like this, this time. I also don't see much potential in metaverse. For one we are crazed about healthy lifestyle and siting with glasses to walk though some virtual landscape makes no sense to me. It will only make you weak and tired. For the second the tech is not there yet, we may fool our sense of vision and hearing, but we cannot fool our sense of orientation, neither our muscles.
vngzs 4y ago
The last few years were marked by a truly outrageous hiring spree fueled by near-zero interest rates and, by extension, tons of cheap VC money. Because of greed or mismanagement, tech companies over-hired during the pandemic expecting record growth to continue indefinitely. These layoffs are a sign that pandemic-era business growth plans were brittle, unable to tolerate even temporarily raised interest rates and the ceasing flow of cheap cash.
papito 4y ago
US unemployment is the lowest since the Moon landing in 1969. We are not looking at some tech decimation. The companies were spending like drunken socialist sailors during the pandemic because the oracles in upper management saw us all staying home forever. And now they are snapping back to the sizes they actually were.
willio58 4y ago
It's really nothing to worry about for the average dev. Companies are taking this opportunity to cull the heard of the under-performers. Doing so at this time means they'll stir up less controversy since every tech company is doing the same. Github grips immense power and money. Just look at their position. 1. Owned by Microsoft but allowed to operate independently. 2. Microsoft owns VScode and now works closely with OpenAI, OpenAI is used for Copilot. 3. Created Copilot. For some this is not a big deal but for me in my tech stack it's been life changing. I save about 15-20% of my time by using it. This is an insane advancement that's only rivaled by ChatGPT for productivity (Another OpenAI project). Because Microsoft owns VScode, of course there's tight integration with Copilot there. 4. It's freaking Github, they house code for a huge portion of all code projects. 85% market share I think. They use the code to train copilot and whatever else. Now you tell me why a company in this position had to lay off 10% of staff today. They didn't. They wanted to. That's fine, they're a company and sometimes culling the heard is the right thing to do. It just grinds my gears when companies act like it's what they needed to do. I'd rather they be honest and just say their true intentions.
- slut 4y ago
  10% of the company is not underperformers. 10% of the company probably hasn't even worked there for a year. They like everyone else hired too fast and the free covid money boom is over.
theironhammer 4y ago
It's class war. The hedge funds see workers purely as a cost. They ignore the value workers create. This class war has been going on since Reagan and even before that (oil crisis early 70s). It's just only now spread to tech workers. See the chart here: www.epi.org/productivity
- mathverse 4y ago
  Especially tech workers in the US were incredibly cocky not realizing they are the working class too. It was inevitable that we will all get hit because of that attitude.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
mbesto 4y ago
> I’m young (35) but I’ve never seen layoffs so continuous. Go read up on the .com bubble popping. The layoffs look huge because the increase in headcounts were so huge in the past 2 years: https://bsmedia.business-standard.com/_media/bs/img/article/2022-11/22/full/1669140051-3184.jpg?im=Resize,width=640 https://bsmedia.business-standard.com/_media/bs/img/article/... It's like saying "I lost a ton of weight recently! I'm down 20 lbs!" when you gained 50 lbs over the last 2 years.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Have to remember that this is happening when we're not even in a recession. I can't imagine what things will be like when that eventually happens.
thinkharderdev 4y ago
Since you are 35 I guess you just missed the financial crisis in 2007. I can assure you that was WAY more intense than what we're seeing now. In fact what we're seeing now isn't an apocalypse of any sort. Basically a bunch of huge tech companies staffed up during the pandemic years and now a combination of high interest rates and a slowing (relative to expectations) economy is battering their stock price. So the activist investors push them to reign in costs (eg reduce headcount). It's what happens in mature industries. Meanwhile, headlines aside about big name tech companies laying people off, the general market for engineering talent is quite strong. Not the level of insanity we were seeing a year or two ago but stronger than I've ever seen (excepting 2021-22) in my entire career. The days of a senior engineer pulling in mid-to-high-6-figures in total comp from a FAANG (or FAANG adjacent) company are probably gone but that was never sustainable anyway.
- JasserInicide 4y ago
  Yeah it's really annoying seeing so many people talk about this recession like it's catastrophic. They clearly were too young for the dotcom bubble, let alone 2008. Getting tired of everyone in their mid 20s to early 30s experiencing baby's first recession and thinking the world is ending.
  - majewsky 4y ago
    Well, everyone has a first recession. Same situation as https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
  - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    What recession? GDP is growing steadily and unemployment is at record lows.
  - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    Technically 2020 was a recession. I guess we forgot already.
    - 4y ago
petsormeat 4y ago
Imagine refreshing FuckedCompany.com manually (no browser capacity for async fetch yet) to see which lavish VC-funded money laundering scheme in South of Market would now have tumbleweeds blowing past the empty Aeron chairs. This was my everyday for over a year, until I got a public sector job and could stop the era's equivalent of doomscrolling. Yes, we came back. Nobody learned from the experience.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ylee 4y ago
I wrote the below in 2006. <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178846&cid=14824754 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178846&cid=14824754> >I moved from NYC to the Palo Alto area in May 2000. That's right, just one month after the start of the long stock-market collapse and two months after the NASDAQ's peak, although of course no one knew these things at the time. I thus got to experience both the highs (insane traffic on 101, Sand Hill Road absolutely packed for two hours each afternoon) and the lows (significantly-better traffic on 101--admittedly a good thing in and of itself--and hordes of people losing jobs and moving back home each month). >It's important to distinguish between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The Valley has recovered--traffic on 101 has long since become awful again, as today reminded me--but San Francisco still hasn't regained the equivalent of all those bubble-related jobs that vanished into the wind in the 2001-2002 time period, and probably never will. (I've been living in San Francisco for going on two years now and have yet to meet anyone who is working in a "Web" or "e-commerce" job up here. It's like a neutron bomb; the people went away but the buildings stayed.) By contrast, yes, the Valley lost tons of jobs, too, but at least the Valley had, and has, a longtime core of companies that made real products that do real thing dating back to the Fairchild/HP/Intel days. And on the Web side, of course, Google and Yahoo! are leading the charge. They're down there, though, and not up here. Unless and until another bubble develops, I expect San Francisco will remain a remarkably tech jobs-free (but with plenty of finance, retail, and other non tech-related companies) city on the edge of the world's greatest concentration of tech jobs. Obviously I didn't know that there indeed soon would be another bubble in SF, this time a social media-driven one.
hgsgm 4y ago
The layoffs are mere fraction of the COVID era hiring. This is a minor correction.
tflinton 4y ago
Eh, same thing happened in 2000's and 2010's... it's honestly about 3 years late.

shadowgovt 4y ago

You missed them by that (tiny-fingers-gap) much. I'm just old enough to have witnessed the dot-com crash a few years before I went into industry; this feels very similar. In fact, it feels a little less intense; the dot-com crash was about an entire business model consolidating under an absolute handful of winners (example: most independent online stores went "We can't compete with Amazon" and bankrupted, laying off everyone) while this one seems to be a lot more "All these firms will continue to operate but they don't think they need to employ this many people to do it." It will be interesting to see if the consequence is new startups competing with the incumbents as those laid off find each other and some capital or if the consequence will be something else.

bombcar 4y ago
Yeah this is more of a downturn where successful companies are laying off a percentage- the dot com bust was thousands of companies just ceasing to exist overnight. Not really entirely comparable.
mquirion 4y ago
This is right. The dot-com crash was an absolute crash. Not "we're laying off 5-15% of our company." It was a lot of "This media darling that had an IPO after 2 years of operations no longer exists." In my social group of about 30 folks, I think at ~25 of us all experienced months of unemployment, at the least.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I was lucky enough to grab a new position through someone I knew fairly quickly. But, in the month it took for the company to actually extend an offer, I didn't have so much as a nibble from anyone else. And I definitely knew people who just got out of the industry.
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  I was out of work for about 13 months, and it was miserable.
- ben7799 4y ago
  This, think companies going out of business left and right. Not 5-15% layoffs after the company doubled or tripled in size over 2-3 years. Almost no one I knew worked right through it without being impacted, and some people had huge impacts. I worked as a contractor for 2 years afterwards before getting back into a startup. I knew some people who were out of work 6 months or a year and came back with huge pay cuts. Tons of people I knew ended up with furniture and servers in their house they took when the company closed and management/investors didn't want any of it. I got a desk and a nice office chair that way.
015a 4y ago
Yeah; its really important to keep in mind that in the majority of these layoffs, these companies are still employing at or above the number of people they were in Dec 2019. This isn't a business model correction; this is a "free covid money" correction. Everything that is happening was predicted by economists the moment the government started writing billions in checks during 2020; the fact that its only 10% in most cases, and hasn't substantively spread beyond Tech and Finance, is actually extremely good news, not something to feel dread about.
acdha 4y ago
One notable contrast I see is that many of the dotcoms which failed had been predicted years in advance based on poor business models where they had no plausible way to make a profit. There are some companies like Uber which are struggling with that but most of these are profitable & won’t be leaving room for newcomers. Related to that last thought, a lot of people bailed out into Boeing corporate jobs. They didn’t have Aeron chairs but they needed a lot of IT workers as they moved more online. I’m curious how that’ll go now where that process is much further along and things like cloud services have been soaking up geeneric demand.
- ben7799 4y ago
  One thing I see different is back then there were tons and tons of small startups that vaporized. Now we have a bunch of absolutely massive companies like Uber that have no way to make money, but the overall # of them is a lot smaller.
  - twelve40 4y ago
    could you expand on the Uber having no way to make money part? > Uber reported $595 million in profit

lolinder 4y ago

I would wager that you also had never seen such an insane tech hiring market as we did during the pandemic. I think it remains to be seen whether this is just a correction of the pandemic tech bubble or something more permanent.

JohnFen 4y ago

This is a regular cycle. These companies will eventually overhire again, then they'll lay people off again. This has been the pattern in the industry for a very long time.

dehrmann 4y ago

This is nothing compared to 2000, or even 2008. You might have a point about offshoring. With tech workers insisting they're just as productive working from home, you might as well hire people in countries with cheaper homes.

maerF0x0 4y ago
which is why America needs deflation, or deflationary pressures (such as devaluation of the dollar against foreign currencies expressed as local price inflation) .
- shaoonb 4y ago
  Honest question: how can devaluing the dollar be deflationary?
  - maerF0x0 4y ago
    The key is in the combination of words. > Devaluing the dollar against a foreign currency. Ok, so labour traded for global goods intermediated by cash means we can remove the intermediary and think about the just the work for goods trade. Imagine I work 1 hour for 10 loaves of bread. If I get more bread for my time, my value has inflated, if I get less bread for my time my value has deflated. Ok now lets add money to the picture. (please excuse unrealistic exchange rates and the lack of profit margins to help illustrate the point) If I work 1 hour for $20 and it currently buys $30 CAD and $30 CAD buys 10 loaves of Canadian bread, then we have the same scenario as describe before. The price of bread on the shelf in USA is $2 USD, or 6 minutes of my time. Now looks what happens when we devalue the USD... I work 1 hour for $20 and it buys $20 CAD (Less than before), and $20 CAD buys 6 2/3rds a loaf of bread. The price of a loaf of bread on the shelf is $3 USD ($20 USD/6.66) or 9 minutes of my labor. See how the price in USD went up? That's the deflation of a currency against another currency. And that's how US labor becomes "cheaper" because the rest of the world now gets 9 Minutes of your time for one loaf of bread.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

softwaredoug 4y ago

Maybe the techcorrection back to the already lucrative prepandemic days.

Ekaros 4y ago

It is all cyclical really. The last cycle was very long, but now it will go down again for a while and then later pick up again. I have kinda been expecting some sort of downturn for a while. Covid bit messed the time line, but now it seems to be happening with vengeance.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

yamtaddle 4y ago

This is following some insane hiring numbers the last three or so years, to a degree that I don't think was present in the run-up to the last couple times (some, yes, but not this much). There also hasn't been a large wave of companies failing outright. This one doesn't seem anywhere near as dire, despite the large numbers flying around (at least, not yet)

maerF0x0 4y ago

To be honest we're not yet .com bubble level. That saw many many _bankruptcies_ . It took microsoft ~17 yrs to go from it's .com bubble to breakeven, though others rebounded faster. Also, if you're an engineer, keep in mind the org mix in layoffs. AFAIK It's more like the recruiter-pocalypse as companies do not foresee needing those headcount to increase headcount... Yes some engineers in the mix, but not a major component...

andrew_ 4y ago
Too many are missing this. Recruiting, marketing, and sales are getting run through. There's been a glut of recruiters in the industry for at least 10 years. Anecdotally I'm under the impression most are low-skill workers.

potatolicious 4y ago

> "I wonder how far into the year this will go and if we’ll ever come back." We'll be back, but not until the industry discovers something of actual value. My internal narrative of all of this is that many of us came up during the smartphone revolution which legitimately created a ton of new value. Products that could not exist before now could (and did!), resulting in a flurry of new companies, new products, and new ways of making money. This was the driving force during the past tech boom. Then I think we started reaching the end of the smartphone boom. The industry needed to find some new technology that would similarly open a similar phase of rapid growth. It chose to bet on the gig economy, followed by crypto. Both of those were near-complete busts. I think a lot of the pain we're experiencing is rooted in this. We're past the smartphone explosion but no real technology since then has actually unlocked a whole lot of new value, and in fact has burned investors badly. Until we actually find this next-step technology things will be in the doldrums. Lots of people are betting on "AI" (or really just LLMs), and time will tell - I suspect it will be pretty transformative for some players and product areas but not in the industry-shaking way that is currently being hyped. I have no doubt we'll find this at some point - after all technology continues to march forward, but I'm not convinced there is anything necessarily imminent that will drive the kind of growth smartphones did.

0xmarcin 4y ago
The invention of Radio, TV, Internet and Smartphone all have a property that they eventually reached even the most tech averse individuals. Crypto market is very limited as it requires technical (read nerdy) knowledge to do it right, or you will risk your money due to scam exchanges. But digital money is still a very good idea, Central Bank Digital Currency is a thing and I bet we will have you use in the future. AI has the property that it can reach all the people around the world. From AI that teaches you a foreign languages to automated advisors that can e.g. recommend a diet based on your needs or even AI dating where instead of sweeping AI will do the match (I would pay for the last option). The problem with AI is that there was already "AI winter": high expectation in the beginning, but nothing workable delivered in the end in the late 70s if I remember correctly. I hope it will not end up like this, this time. I also don't see much potential in metaverse. For one we are crazed about healthy lifestyle and siting with glasses to walk though some virtual landscape makes no sense to me. It will only make you weak and tired. For the second the tech is not there yet, we may fool our sense of vision and hearing, but we cannot fool our sense of orientation, neither our muscles.

vngzs 4y ago

The last few years were marked by a truly outrageous hiring spree fueled by near-zero interest rates and, by extension, tons of cheap VC money. Because of greed or mismanagement, tech companies over-hired during the pandemic expecting record growth to continue indefinitely. These layoffs are a sign that pandemic-era business growth plans were brittle, unable to tolerate even temporarily raised interest rates and the ceasing flow of cheap cash.

papito 4y ago

US unemployment is the lowest since the Moon landing in 1969. We are not looking at some tech decimation. The companies were spending like drunken socialist sailors during the pandemic because the oracles in upper management saw us all staying home forever. And now they are snapping back to the sizes they actually were.

willio58 4y ago

It's really nothing to worry about for the average dev. Companies are taking this opportunity to cull the heard of the under-performers. Doing so at this time means they'll stir up less controversy since every tech company is doing the same. Github grips immense power and money. Just look at their position. 1. Owned by Microsoft but allowed to operate independently. 2. Microsoft owns VScode and now works closely with OpenAI, OpenAI is used for Copilot. 3. Created Copilot. For some this is not a big deal but for me in my tech stack it's been life changing. I save about 15-20% of my time by using it. This is an insane advancement that's only rivaled by ChatGPT for productivity (Another OpenAI project). Because Microsoft owns VScode, of course there's tight integration with Copilot there. 4. It's freaking Github, they house code for a huge portion of all code projects. 85% market share I think. They use the code to train copilot and whatever else. Now you tell me why a company in this position had to lay off 10% of staff today. They didn't. They wanted to. That's fine, they're a company and sometimes culling the heard is the right thing to do. It just grinds my gears when companies act like it's what they needed to do. I'd rather they be honest and just say their true intentions.

slut 4y ago
10% of the company is not underperformers. 10% of the company probably hasn't even worked there for a year. They like everyone else hired too fast and the free covid money boom is over.

theironhammer 4y ago

It's class war. The hedge funds see workers purely as a cost. They ignore the value workers create. This class war has been going on since Reagan and even before that (oil crisis early 70s). It's just only now spread to tech workers. See the chart here: www.epi.org/productivity

mathverse 4y ago
Especially tech workers in the US were incredibly cocky not realizing they are the working class too. It was inevitable that we will all get hit because of that attitude.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

mbesto 4y ago

> I’m young (35) but I’ve never seen layoffs so continuous. Go read up on the .com bubble popping. The layoffs look huge because the increase in headcounts were so huge in the past 2 years: https://bsmedia.business-standard.com/_media/bs/img/article/2022-11/22/full/1669140051-3184.jpg?im=Resize,width=640 https://bsmedia.business-standard.com/_media/bs/img/article/... It's like saying "I lost a ton of weight recently! I'm down 20 lbs!" when you gained 50 lbs over the last 2 years.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Have to remember that this is happening when we're not even in a recession. I can't imagine what things will be like when that eventually happens.

thinkharderdev 4y ago

Since you are 35 I guess you just missed the financial crisis in 2007. I can assure you that was WAY more intense than what we're seeing now. In fact what we're seeing now isn't an apocalypse of any sort. Basically a bunch of huge tech companies staffed up during the pandemic years and now a combination of high interest rates and a slowing (relative to expectations) economy is battering their stock price. So the activist investors push them to reign in costs (eg reduce headcount). It's what happens in mature industries. Meanwhile, headlines aside about big name tech companies laying people off, the general market for engineering talent is quite strong. Not the level of insanity we were seeing a year or two ago but stronger than I've ever seen (excepting 2021-22) in my entire career. The days of a senior engineer pulling in mid-to-high-6-figures in total comp from a FAANG (or FAANG adjacent) company are probably gone but that was never sustainable anyway.

JasserInicide 4y ago
Yeah it's really annoying seeing so many people talk about this recession like it's catastrophic. They clearly were too young for the dotcom bubble, let alone 2008. Getting tired of everyone in their mid 20s to early 30s experiencing baby's first recession and thinking the world is ending.
- majewsky 4y ago
  Well, everyone has a first recession. Same situation as https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  What recession? GDP is growing steadily and unemployment is at record lows.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  Technically 2020 was a recession. I guess we forgot already.
  - 4y ago

petsormeat 4y ago

Imagine refreshing FuckedCompany.com manually (no browser capacity for async fetch yet) to see which lavish VC-funded money laundering scheme in South of Market would now have tumbleweeds blowing past the empty Aeron chairs. This was my everyday for over a year, until I got a public sector job and could stop the era's equivalent of doomscrolling. Yes, we came back. Nobody learned from the experience.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ylee 4y ago

I wrote the below in 2006. <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178846&cid=14824754 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178846&cid=14824754> >I moved from NYC to the Palo Alto area in May 2000. That's right, just one month after the start of the long stock-market collapse and two months after the NASDAQ's peak, although of course no one knew these things at the time. I thus got to experience both the highs (insane traffic on 101, Sand Hill Road absolutely packed for two hours each afternoon) and the lows (significantly-better traffic on 101--admittedly a good thing in and of itself--and hordes of people losing jobs and moving back home each month). >It's important to distinguish between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The Valley has recovered--traffic on 101 has long since become awful again, as today reminded me--but San Francisco still hasn't regained the equivalent of all those bubble-related jobs that vanished into the wind in the 2001-2002 time period, and probably never will. (I've been living in San Francisco for going on two years now and have yet to meet anyone who is working in a "Web" or "e-commerce" job up here. It's like a neutron bomb; the people went away but the buildings stayed.) By contrast, yes, the Valley lost tons of jobs, too, but at least the Valley had, and has, a longtime core of companies that made real products that do real thing dating back to the Fairchild/HP/Intel days. And on the Web side, of course, Google and Yahoo! are leading the charge. They're down there, though, and not up here. Unless and until another bubble develops, I expect San Francisco will remain a remarkably tech jobs-free (but with plenty of finance, retail, and other non tech-related companies) city on the edge of the world's greatest concentration of tech jobs. Obviously I didn't know that there indeed soon would be another bubble in SF, this time a social media-driven one.

hgsgm 4y ago

The layoffs are mere fraction of the COVID era hiring. This is a minor correction.

tflinton 4y ago

Eh, same thing happened in 2000's and 2010's... it's honestly about 3 years late.