18 ms·

The layoffs will continue until (investor) morale improves

230 points by fairytalemtg 4y ago

htrp 4y ago
a lot of founders also owe banks money tied to the value of their equity posiitons. As stock price goes down, they are incentivized to either pledge more stock, have their collateral liquidated, or take actions to move the stock price back up.
orsenthil 4y ago
Or until a competitor wins out on this opportunity.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
Layoffs will continue until we are fully prepared for the artificial recession induced by worker wage gains fear.
- jmclnx 4y ago
  This I fully agree with, companies want to move back to very low wages and are doing all it can to force a recession. So far not going well for them. On goes my Tin Foil Hat: So, SVB failed due to a Bank Run by rich people who mainly own their business. Coincidence??? I know people in retail, right now they are job hopping because those wages have risen a lot compared to Tech. Granted, those wages are not good at all, but some are now able to put a little away instead of living on those future payday loans. Most people let go in Tech, seems there is plenty of work out there anyway. edit: typos
  - latency-guy2 4y ago
    Of course, you'll have to answer a few questions for your conspiracy theory: Why wait until 2023? Why do it after hiring at such a rate that you effectively increased your company's headcount by 50%+ in the last 2 years? What events are currently happening that would allow for this to happen? You can pretend like you have a standing for your theory all you want, but it's all nonsense compared to the simple fact that Powell and Yellen are here to force a recession.
    - pandaman 4y ago
      What if these companies did not hire some concrete number of people but had a pipeline set up to pass a certain fraction of applicants? Seeing how people get hired by Google, for example, and then get into a "team assignment" it certainly looks to be a possibility. Then, what happens when the stock price doubles over two years and a significant fraction of the compensation is pegged to the stock price? Compensation grows too. And when compensation grows they get more applicants, I'd imagine. It's not like they had been getting few before but their hiring pipeline had been set up for the old rate of applicants, if this suddenly grew, they'd naturally get more hires. Especially considering that the additional applicants come from a cohort that had been compensated well enough to resist the pre-stock doubling comp numbers. When the headcount had hit backstops, some hard headcount limits they likely have had, only then they realized how much did they hire and now react to this by doing layoffs and, probably, revising their HR policies.
  - flyinglizard 4y ago
    Facilitating a bank run on your own bank is quite silly. Which again reinforces the proverb “never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity”.
- hashtag-til 4y ago
  Interesting - I’ve never thought about it this way. My only idea so far is to accummulate as much as I can and not get into long term debt. If I lost my job today, I estimate I could live ok without a job for about 2 years in my worst forecast inflation (in UK terms, something like 15%) It seems there is plenty of well paid work though (again UK reality). Are there any known ways to counter attack an artificially induced recession? Join a union and fight, perhaps?
  - jarsin 4y ago
    > Are there any known ways to counter attack an artificially induced recession? You can hedge for recessions. If you think the central banks are blowing stuff up and the economy is going to go into a recession putting capital into government bonds like TLT is a flight to safety trade. The reasoning is if a recession comes then the central banks will have to lower rates and money will come pouring in from risky investments and from savings accounts. I think all recessions are artificially induced since the creation of the fed.
    - shrimpx 4y ago
      Money will come pouring into bonds? Trying to understand the reasoning for buying bonds.
      - jarsin 4y ago
        government bonds trade opposite interest rates. Interest rates down TLT up. Interest rates down cash needs more yield comes running to tlt. A lot of data out there that stocks crash after the pivot meaning they see the pivot as a recession and go racing into safety. Doesn't all happen in a straight easy line though. Headline from decemeber and I checked tlt and its near top of etf inflows ytd. TLT saw its second-largest inflow ever, with a gain of $1.5 billion, Bloomberg reported.
        shrimpx 4y ago
        Thanks! TLT is only yielding 2.7% is that considered good in 6% inflation? I guess people bet inflation will go back to 2%?
- pas 4y ago
  why would the labor market be so special? (compared to the generic pharma market, because we have data for that, https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-research-cder/generic-competition-and-drug-prices https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-res... ) microeconomics works. to assume that there is a big effort to fight labor implies things that seem to be simply not true. what's more likely is that both the wage gains and the inflation are caused by the same thing(s), covid: stimulus, supply chain shocks, missing millions from the labor force coupled with historically low immigration rates (of course due to administrative limits).
potatofrenzy 4y ago
The sucky reality is that employees at big tech companies have little interest in running a sustainable and resilient business. We want constant team growth, never-ending promotions, ever-growing salaries. If another company is growing more aggressively and paying even less sustainable salaries, we tend to jump ship. It's not necessarily wrong, but we really shouldn't act surprised when that backfires every now and then. Tech leadership bears blame for nourishing that "there's no tomorrow" / "growth will continue forever" culture, but it's such an unhelpful take to portray this as some sort of a class struggle with shareholders. Especially since for a good number of big tech companies, shareholders don't actually have much say and founders hold controlling interests.
- maxlamb 4y ago
  “employees at big tech companies have little interest in running a sustainable and resilient business” By “employees” in your first sentence I assume you mean the C-suite?
  - hashtag-til 4y ago
    As a regular “individual contributor” it is very hard to fight ill thought plans coming “from above”. Those who complain are usually cast as “negative thinking folks” and get subtle punishments. If you are on a mid career senior salary range, are you going to pick a fight and risk being punished or carry on getting your good salary, bonus, stocks, insurance, retirement plan and perks - in exchange for slighly useless work?
    - rektide 4y ago
      Not even just fighting ill fought plans but whether we decide to execute well or dial it in. The pressure to ship ship ship comes from a lot of places, and relatively few of them have the technical competence to assess, care about, or evaluate code & quality. They don't actually understand what they're pressuring forward, so often. And most of them face no real consequences. They don't have to maintain or repair some grossly abomination of a system, that's the engineers job. They'll be leading new feature dev new business dev forever & ever.
whitemary 4y ago
> ...and now it’s time to right size to better fit a changing market. Come again? What is this supposed to mean?
- salawat 4y ago
  It means: Some idiot (Musk) decided to axe 90% of workers, and the company hasn't completely evaporated (Twitter). Investors; therefore, are jumping on the signal that a bunch of capital is allocated to non-productive work. Therefore, Welch it, trim the fat, give me back my money so I can stop being a source of welfare for techies, and start pouring money into something interesting.
  - orra 4y ago
    I don't know if this is why you were downvoted, but please avoid using the term Welch. It's an ethnic slur against Welsh people.
    - erik_seaberg 4y ago
      Jack Welch was CEO of GE, best known for dramatic divestments, layoffs, and stack ranking.
      - orra 4y ago
        That's a retcon. Use of Welch in a derogatory way predates him by hundreds of years.
        salawat 4y ago
        Was referring to the CEO mate, but henceforth noted.
        horns4lyfe 4y ago
        Ya and no one here has ever heard of it but you. How would that even make sense in that context?
sneak 4y ago
The narrative around this round of big tech layoffs seems wrong. The article opens: > Since the start of 2023, more than 150,000 people have been laid off at tech companies, large and small. That’s a staggering number of people who have been put out of work. Who says those people have been put out of work? There are lots of startups that have wanted to hire engineers that couldn't because the FAMAG paycheck money firehose made it nigh impossible. These people are mostly not going to be out of work. Most of them will still be earning way more than almost anyone in the country. This is a good thing for startups, as now the (frankly anticompetitive) big tech hiring practices are getting rolled back to sane levels.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  > Who says those people have been put out of work? The... the people who fired them? They made them stop working. Whether they find somewhere else to work doesn't undo that fact. And I don't think you should be so quick to assume that all of them will be just fine. Give it five years and then see how everyone feels about it. > This is a good thing for startups Incredibly so what. I can picture a wonderful world without startups I cannot imagine one without workers. Startups have "disrupted" a lot of the stability out of the world to the benefit of almost no one. They have contributed almost nothing positive for at least a decade now and it's not because of a shortage of workers.
  - erulabs 4y ago
    At the risk of being snarky, a world where no new businesses are started possibly does not look how you think it might look. Such countries exist today in the world and some of them will even let you visit!
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      Yes you sure did completely ignore the substance of my comment and make a quip about something almost completely unrelated did it feel nice?
- imwithstoopid 4y ago
thereare5lights 4y ago
paywall
imwithstoopid 4y ago
let's just simplify this so the next few years aren't too hard to figure out why are tech companies laying people off? because they can
- rnk 4y ago
  And because many of them see less sales, and they want to stay profitable. That's the obvious reason. Yeah some of them are just following the herd but some companies see less spending.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    Stay profitable? Most of them can’t even get profitable.
    - throwawayccp1 4y ago
      Yea they who die in the process sadly
- gruez 4y ago
  This is a technically correct explanation but doesn't tell us anything. Obviously they did it because they can, otherwise they wouldn't have done it by definition. But why did they do it? Why did they go from "can't" in the years leading up to it to "can" a year or so ago?
  - imwithstoopid 4y ago
    my point was that the layoff rationalization posts on HN are irrelevant a company can grow profits by moving the top line up or the bottom line down if they can't move the top line up, they will move the bottom line down
  - deathanatos 4y ago
    Because they've been gripped by a collective monkey-see, monkey-do type insanity of valuing the short-term savings of not having to pay those laid off over the much larger long-term opportunity cost of the work those people would have done. The entirety of this "current economic reality" is a self-fulfilling prophecy from those using those words to self-justify their actions.
WalterBright 4y ago
"We keep you alive to serve this ship. So row well, and live!"
- Galacta7 4y ago
  Never thought I'd see a Ben-Hur reference in the wild, but I love it. One of my favorite scenes.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Everything I know about business I learned from Ben-Hur.
eftychis 4y ago
I am curious at what point this violent recurring "dawn" to software engineers (in Silicon Valley specifically) is going to lead to the creation of a Guild. Consider that remote work is more prevalent, the healthcare situation is not getting any better in the U.S. and in this space it has become more common for employees to have to move between companies regardless. Then the certainty of having a comfortable job at Google or Meta evaporates violently. To the point, where mothers while giving birth learn they are fired. And then we have things like ...Twitter. Say you were laid off by FAANG or a notable startup and the same or adjacent company reaches out to you a year from now to rehire you, as the "bull market is here." What will you do? The instability is here to stay for a while. This can happen in 2025 again pretty easily. What is that critical mass of engineers that would demand a startup gets guild approved to join? I can see that happening if one of FAANG becomes a guild company but they will fight tooth and nail to avoid that. As an investor that is a nightmare, if a minority of startups are in this situation. On the other hand if that is the status quo to getting great people, I can accept that overhead.
- paulddraper 4y ago
  Every industry has gotten less and less unionized. Why would software buck the trend?
  - paulv 4y ago
    Starbucks has way more unionized stores now than last year.
    - paulddraper 4y ago
      True
  - techdragon 4y ago
    Because we’re smart enough to see the difference between a craftsman’s guild and a traditional workers union. For starters guilds tend to have progression by merit, requiring an apprentice prove they are competent enough to be considered a journeyman. And you know … not wanting to be exploited… healthcare sounds nice… ( on this point, I’d like to point out that as an Australian software engineer, I long ago resolved to never start a company in America because of how insane healthcare in America is. I can understand the guns, the polarised politics and all the rest of the things that make America what it is… but healthcare is just so fucking insane that i haven’t even seriously considered taking a holiday there to see the museums that have been on my bucket list for half my life… the idea of starting a business there is just an immediate non starter… I’ll take US cash and setup a holding corp if they demand US incorporation and employ people elsewhere… so having a guild where healthcare was provided would make American developers more competitive in the job market)
gumby 4y ago
The case of Amazon amazes me. This is the company that famously refused to worry about what investors thought 20+ years ago and just kept on being unprofitable (and instead, investing heavily in growth) to the considerable benefit of investors who stuck with them. Google is crazy too: they will spend more on stock buybacks than they will save through the layoffs, yet are investing nothing in fixing their actual, deep structural problems.
- refurb 4y ago
  This is completely unsurprising. I worked for a company like this as well. It’s easy to ignore investors when you’ve had an upward trajectory year after year. They’ll put up with almost anything when the stock price keeps going up. But as soon as your growth slows or stops, reality hits like a ton of bricks. Investors have lots of place to put their money. If Amazon cant deliver what these investors want, they’ll put their money elsewhere. Amazon is free to ignore them, they’ll just have to deal with the consequences of that. I mean, as an employee, would you stick around for less compensation? No, most people would find a better paying job.
  - tiedieconderoga 4y ago
    Amazon was in a somewhat unique position where they could ignore their investors, because they were raking in plenty of money. Choosing to reinvest that money in the business caused some consternation, but the consistent revenue and growth let them ride out periodic misadventures and hits to the stock price. It turned out to be a good move in the long run, because they weren't bluffing about their business fundamentals.
  - gumby 4y ago
    > Amazon is free to ignore them, they’ll just have to deal with the consequences of that. The consequences aren’t necessarily that significant: mainly the cost of raising further cash from the markets, which doesn’t look like Amazon will have to do for many years, if not decades.
    - 4y ago
29athrowaway 4y ago
The layoffs will continue until the people raising interest rates are voted out.
AttentionBlock 4y ago
Paywall-ed and extra not available in my country :(
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dannys80 4y ago
They do it not to impress investors, but because they feel they are doomed.
good_boy 4y ago
There is no other way. If they want something done they need someone to do it. Layoffs make them less attractive. So they will have to either rise the wages or accept less qualified candidates. The difference in performance between average and top engineers can be time. Or even infinite, when one simply cannot do the thing. And this is, BTW, applicable through the whole range. Just check Intel market capitalization, and guess what? It's now smaller then AMD, and 6x times smaller then NVidia. The reason: top management, they failed on AI, graphics, they failed on Cloud. Yes, they did something, not enough.
- vernon99 4y ago
  Wait, what? Why would layoffs make it harder for them to hire? If anything, it’s tge opposite, they can raise the bar significantly now, esp since it’s a buyer market now.
  - good_boy 4y ago
    I'm, for example, even not considering Amazon/Google/Facebook now. Job switch is quite stressful. There is no point without stability or fat paycheck. And looks like personal level doesn't matter much when the whole team is terminated.
mo_42 4y ago
Isn’t this mimetic desire at work? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory

230 points by fairytalemtg 4y ago

htrp 4y ago

a lot of founders also owe banks money tied to the value of their equity posiitons. As stock price goes down, they are incentivized to either pledge more stock, have their collateral liquidated, or take actions to move the stock price back up.

orsenthil 4y ago

Or until a competitor wins out on this opportunity.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

Layoffs will continue until we are fully prepared for the artificial recession induced by worker wage gains fear.

jmclnx 4y ago
This I fully agree with, companies want to move back to very low wages and are doing all it can to force a recession. So far not going well for them. On goes my Tin Foil Hat: So, SVB failed due to a Bank Run by rich people who mainly own their business. Coincidence??? I know people in retail, right now they are job hopping because those wages have risen a lot compared to Tech. Granted, those wages are not good at all, but some are now able to put a little away instead of living on those future payday loans. Most people let go in Tech, seems there is plenty of work out there anyway. edit: typos
- latency-guy2 4y ago
  Of course, you'll have to answer a few questions for your conspiracy theory: Why wait until 2023? Why do it after hiring at such a rate that you effectively increased your company's headcount by 50%+ in the last 2 years? What events are currently happening that would allow for this to happen? You can pretend like you have a standing for your theory all you want, but it's all nonsense compared to the simple fact that Powell and Yellen are here to force a recession.
  - pandaman 4y ago
    What if these companies did not hire some concrete number of people but had a pipeline set up to pass a certain fraction of applicants? Seeing how people get hired by Google, for example, and then get into a "team assignment" it certainly looks to be a possibility. Then, what happens when the stock price doubles over two years and a significant fraction of the compensation is pegged to the stock price? Compensation grows too. And when compensation grows they get more applicants, I'd imagine. It's not like they had been getting few before but their hiring pipeline had been set up for the old rate of applicants, if this suddenly grew, they'd naturally get more hires. Especially considering that the additional applicants come from a cohort that had been compensated well enough to resist the pre-stock doubling comp numbers. When the headcount had hit backstops, some hard headcount limits they likely have had, only then they realized how much did they hire and now react to this by doing layoffs and, probably, revising their HR policies.
- flyinglizard 4y ago
  Facilitating a bank run on your own bank is quite silly. Which again reinforces the proverb “never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity”.
hashtag-til 4y ago
Interesting - I’ve never thought about it this way. My only idea so far is to accummulate as much as I can and not get into long term debt. If I lost my job today, I estimate I could live ok without a job for about 2 years in my worst forecast inflation (in UK terms, something like 15%) It seems there is plenty of well paid work though (again UK reality). Are there any known ways to counter attack an artificially induced recession? Join a union and fight, perhaps?
- jarsin 4y ago
  > Are there any known ways to counter attack an artificially induced recession? You can hedge for recessions. If you think the central banks are blowing stuff up and the economy is going to go into a recession putting capital into government bonds like TLT is a flight to safety trade. The reasoning is if a recession comes then the central banks will have to lower rates and money will come pouring in from risky investments and from savings accounts. I think all recessions are artificially induced since the creation of the fed.
  - shrimpx 4y ago
    Money will come pouring into bonds? Trying to understand the reasoning for buying bonds.
    - jarsin 4y ago
      government bonds trade opposite interest rates. Interest rates down TLT up. Interest rates down cash needs more yield comes running to tlt. A lot of data out there that stocks crash after the pivot meaning they see the pivot as a recession and go racing into safety. Doesn't all happen in a straight easy line though. Headline from decemeber and I checked tlt and its near top of etf inflows ytd. TLT saw its second-largest inflow ever, with a gain of $1.5 billion, Bloomberg reported.
      - shrimpx 4y ago
        Thanks! TLT is only yielding 2.7% is that considered good in 6% inflation? I guess people bet inflation will go back to 2%?
pas 4y ago
why would the labor market be so special? (compared to the generic pharma market, because we have data for that, https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-research-cder/generic-competition-and-drug-prices https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-res... ) microeconomics works. to assume that there is a big effort to fight labor implies things that seem to be simply not true. what's more likely is that both the wage gains and the inflation are caused by the same thing(s), covid: stimulus, supply chain shocks, missing millions from the labor force coupled with historically low immigration rates (of course due to administrative limits).

potatofrenzy 4y ago

The sucky reality is that employees at big tech companies have little interest in running a sustainable and resilient business. We want constant team growth, never-ending promotions, ever-growing salaries. If another company is growing more aggressively and paying even less sustainable salaries, we tend to jump ship. It's not necessarily wrong, but we really shouldn't act surprised when that backfires every now and then. Tech leadership bears blame for nourishing that "there's no tomorrow" / "growth will continue forever" culture, but it's such an unhelpful take to portray this as some sort of a class struggle with shareholders. Especially since for a good number of big tech companies, shareholders don't actually have much say and founders hold controlling interests.

maxlamb 4y ago
“employees at big tech companies have little interest in running a sustainable and resilient business” By “employees” in your first sentence I assume you mean the C-suite?
- hashtag-til 4y ago
  As a regular “individual contributor” it is very hard to fight ill thought plans coming “from above”. Those who complain are usually cast as “negative thinking folks” and get subtle punishments. If you are on a mid career senior salary range, are you going to pick a fight and risk being punished or carry on getting your good salary, bonus, stocks, insurance, retirement plan and perks - in exchange for slighly useless work?
  - rektide 4y ago
    Not even just fighting ill fought plans but whether we decide to execute well or dial it in. The pressure to ship ship ship comes from a lot of places, and relatively few of them have the technical competence to assess, care about, or evaluate code & quality. They don't actually understand what they're pressuring forward, so often. And most of them face no real consequences. They don't have to maintain or repair some grossly abomination of a system, that's the engineers job. They'll be leading new feature dev new business dev forever & ever.

whitemary 4y ago

> ...and now it’s time to right size to better fit a changing market. Come again? What is this supposed to mean?

salawat 4y ago
It means: Some idiot (Musk) decided to axe 90% of workers, and the company hasn't completely evaporated (Twitter). Investors; therefore, are jumping on the signal that a bunch of capital is allocated to non-productive work. Therefore, Welch it, trim the fat, give me back my money so I can stop being a source of welfare for techies, and start pouring money into something interesting.
- orra 4y ago
  I don't know if this is why you were downvoted, but please avoid using the term Welch. It's an ethnic slur against Welsh people.
  - erik_seaberg 4y ago
    Jack Welch was CEO of GE, best known for dramatic divestments, layoffs, and stack ranking.
    - orra 4y ago
      That's a retcon. Use of Welch in a derogatory way predates him by hundreds of years.
      - salawat 4y ago
        Was referring to the CEO mate, but henceforth noted.
      - horns4lyfe 4y ago
        Ya and no one here has ever heard of it but you. How would that even make sense in that context?

sneak 4y ago

The narrative around this round of big tech layoffs seems wrong. The article opens: > Since the start of 2023, more than 150,000 people have been laid off at tech companies, large and small. That’s a staggering number of people who have been put out of work. Who says those people have been put out of work? There are lots of startups that have wanted to hire engineers that couldn't because the FAMAG paycheck money firehose made it nigh impossible. These people are mostly not going to be out of work. Most of them will still be earning way more than almost anyone in the country. This is a good thing for startups, as now the (frankly anticompetitive) big tech hiring practices are getting rolled back to sane levels.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
> Who says those people have been put out of work? The... the people who fired them? They made them stop working. Whether they find somewhere else to work doesn't undo that fact. And I don't think you should be so quick to assume that all of them will be just fine. Give it five years and then see how everyone feels about it. > This is a good thing for startups Incredibly so what. I can picture a wonderful world without startups I cannot imagine one without workers. Startups have "disrupted" a lot of the stability out of the world to the benefit of almost no one. They have contributed almost nothing positive for at least a decade now and it's not because of a shortage of workers.
- erulabs 4y ago
  At the risk of being snarky, a world where no new businesses are started possibly does not look how you think it might look. Such countries exist today in the world and some of them will even let you visit!
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Yes you sure did completely ignore the substance of my comment and make a quip about something almost completely unrelated did it feel nice?
imwithstoopid 4y ago

thereare5lights 4y ago

paywall

imwithstoopid 4y ago

let's just simplify this so the next few years aren't too hard to figure out why are tech companies laying people off? because they can

rnk 4y ago
And because many of them see less sales, and they want to stay profitable. That's the obvious reason. Yeah some of them are just following the herd but some companies see less spending.
- mym1990 4y ago
  Stay profitable? Most of them can’t even get profitable.
  - throwawayccp1 4y ago
    Yea they who die in the process sadly
gruez 4y ago
This is a technically correct explanation but doesn't tell us anything. Obviously they did it because they can, otherwise they wouldn't have done it by definition. But why did they do it? Why did they go from "can't" in the years leading up to it to "can" a year or so ago?
- imwithstoopid 4y ago
  my point was that the layoff rationalization posts on HN are irrelevant a company can grow profits by moving the top line up or the bottom line down if they can't move the top line up, they will move the bottom line down
- deathanatos 4y ago
  Because they've been gripped by a collective monkey-see, monkey-do type insanity of valuing the short-term savings of not having to pay those laid off over the much larger long-term opportunity cost of the work those people would have done. The entirety of this "current economic reality" is a self-fulfilling prophecy from those using those words to self-justify their actions.

WalterBright 4y ago

"We keep you alive to serve this ship. So row well, and live!"

Galacta7 4y ago
Never thought I'd see a Ben-Hur reference in the wild, but I love it. One of my favorite scenes.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Everything I know about business I learned from Ben-Hur.

eftychis 4y ago

I am curious at what point this violent recurring "dawn" to software engineers (in Silicon Valley specifically) is going to lead to the creation of a Guild. Consider that remote work is more prevalent, the healthcare situation is not getting any better in the U.S. and in this space it has become more common for employees to have to move between companies regardless. Then the certainty of having a comfortable job at Google or Meta evaporates violently. To the point, where mothers while giving birth learn they are fired. And then we have things like ...Twitter. Say you were laid off by FAANG or a notable startup and the same or adjacent company reaches out to you a year from now to rehire you, as the "bull market is here." What will you do? The instability is here to stay for a while. This can happen in 2025 again pretty easily. What is that critical mass of engineers that would demand a startup gets guild approved to join? I can see that happening if one of FAANG becomes a guild company but they will fight tooth and nail to avoid that. As an investor that is a nightmare, if a minority of startups are in this situation. On the other hand if that is the status quo to getting great people, I can accept that overhead.

paulddraper 4y ago
Every industry has gotten less and less unionized. Why would software buck the trend?
- paulv 4y ago
  Starbucks has way more unionized stores now than last year.
  - paulddraper 4y ago
    True
- techdragon 4y ago
  Because we’re smart enough to see the difference between a craftsman’s guild and a traditional workers union. For starters guilds tend to have progression by merit, requiring an apprentice prove they are competent enough to be considered a journeyman. And you know … not wanting to be exploited… healthcare sounds nice… ( on this point, I’d like to point out that as an Australian software engineer, I long ago resolved to never start a company in America because of how insane healthcare in America is. I can understand the guns, the polarised politics and all the rest of the things that make America what it is… but healthcare is just so fucking insane that i haven’t even seriously considered taking a holiday there to see the museums that have been on my bucket list for half my life… the idea of starting a business there is just an immediate non starter… I’ll take US cash and setup a holding corp if they demand US incorporation and employ people elsewhere… so having a guild where healthcare was provided would make American developers more competitive in the job market)

gumby 4y ago

The case of Amazon amazes me. This is the company that famously refused to worry about what investors thought 20+ years ago and just kept on being unprofitable (and instead, investing heavily in growth) to the considerable benefit of investors who stuck with them. Google is crazy too: they will spend more on stock buybacks than they will save through the layoffs, yet are investing nothing in fixing their actual, deep structural problems.

refurb 4y ago
This is completely unsurprising. I worked for a company like this as well. It’s easy to ignore investors when you’ve had an upward trajectory year after year. They’ll put up with almost anything when the stock price keeps going up. But as soon as your growth slows or stops, reality hits like a ton of bricks. Investors have lots of place to put their money. If Amazon cant deliver what these investors want, they’ll put their money elsewhere. Amazon is free to ignore them, they’ll just have to deal with the consequences of that. I mean, as an employee, would you stick around for less compensation? No, most people would find a better paying job.
- tiedieconderoga 4y ago
  Amazon was in a somewhat unique position where they could ignore their investors, because they were raking in plenty of money. Choosing to reinvest that money in the business caused some consternation, but the consistent revenue and growth let them ride out periodic misadventures and hits to the stock price. It turned out to be a good move in the long run, because they weren't bluffing about their business fundamentals.
- gumby 4y ago
  > Amazon is free to ignore them, they’ll just have to deal with the consequences of that. The consequences aren’t necessarily that significant: mainly the cost of raising further cash from the markets, which doesn’t look like Amazon will have to do for many years, if not decades.
  - 4y ago

29athrowaway 4y ago

The layoffs will continue until the people raising interest rates are voted out.

AttentionBlock 4y ago

Paywall-ed and extra not available in my country :(

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dannys80 4y ago

They do it not to impress investors, but because they feel they are doomed.

good_boy 4y ago

There is no other way. If they want something done they need someone to do it. Layoffs make them less attractive. So they will have to either rise the wages or accept less qualified candidates. The difference in performance between average and top engineers can be time. Or even infinite, when one simply cannot do the thing. And this is, BTW, applicable through the whole range. Just check Intel market capitalization, and guess what? It's now smaller then AMD, and 6x times smaller then NVidia. The reason: top management, they failed on AI, graphics, they failed on Cloud. Yes, they did something, not enough.

vernon99 4y ago
Wait, what? Why would layoffs make it harder for them to hire? If anything, it’s tge opposite, they can raise the bar significantly now, esp since it’s a buyer market now.
- good_boy 4y ago
  I'm, for example, even not considering Amazon/Google/Facebook now. Job switch is quite stressful. There is no point without stability or fat paycheck. And looks like personal level doesn't matter much when the whole team is terminated.

mo_42 4y ago

Isn’t this mimetic desire at work? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory