21 ms·

The real problem that author doesn’t call out is that at the end of the day, the people in charge don’t get hurt from these irresponsible boom and bust hiring p

The real problem that author doesn’t call out is that at the end of the day, the people in charge don’t get hurt from these irresponsible boom and bust hiring practices. These companies knew the growth wouldn’t last, nothing lasts forever. They all maintain control while the little people suffer. The dream is to become insulated from the economic storms like they are.

notho 3y ago
“Hurting” the elite has always been up to the public. Teacher strikes and unionization efforts have been winning; the financiers know nothing about self sufficiency. They know they rely literally on someone else to grow the food, kill the steaks. The white collar public have a credibility problem; they want to be served and not serve themselves. There is zero reason for most tech workers to login tomorrow; the vast majority will never move the needle. Yet they’ve learned helplessness and don’t know what to do. We carry on about ills of LLMs hallucinating while westerners hallucinate the they can just do data entry work and someone else will wear out their bodies procuring food. Our AI is more like us than we want to admit, which is why they’re so terrible.
- whitemary 3y ago
  > Teacher strikes and unionization efforts have been winning Citations needed
  - LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
    Among the urban working class in cities like Chicago, union interest has been rising rapidly across a variety of sectors. Retail, education, warehouse labor, museums are all seeing increases in union activity. The mayor-elect is a former union organizer. Chicago is certainly one of the more pro-labor cities in the US, but they’re not the only ones seeing growing interest in organized labor. The Democratic Socialists of America membership grew from 6,000 to 90,000 in less than 10 years. https://chicago.chalkbeat.org/2023/5/11/23720181/chicago-deputy-mayor-education-teachers-union-chief-of-staff-jen-johnson?_amp=true https://chicago.chalkbeat.org/2023/5/11/23720181/chicago-dep... https://www.afscme.org/blog/workers-at-another-chicago-institution-are-forming-a-union-with-afscme https://www.afscme.org/blog/workers-at-another-chicago-insti... https://chicago.suntimes.com/business/2023/5/8/23715750/rei-outdoors-retailer-staff-union https://chicago.suntimes.com/business/2023/5/8/23715750/rei-... https://chicago.chalkbeat.org/2023/5/12/23720406/chicago-public-schools-principals-union?_amp=true https://chicago.chalkbeat.org/2023/5/12/23720406/chicago-pub...
    - whitemary 3y ago
      The question was not about unionization, but the accomplishments of said unions, which remain to be seen. Unions that lack the strength to strike are a net negative. The mayor elect didn't even support Bernie Sanders lol. DSA membership has been nosediving for the past 2 years because DSA is effectively an appendage of the Democratic Party.
  - notho 3y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Oklahoma_teachers%27_strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Oklahoma_teachers%27_st... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_West_Virginia_teachers%27_strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_West_Virginia_teachers%... If you like some real numbers; <600 elected Federal officials, only 1 million LEO from federal to local, and very few billionaires and mega millionaires. All propped up by labor of tens of millions. Let Jamie Dimon go door to door for those mortgages. 10k NYC cops threatened to strike over vaccine mandates; only 34 did. Let them see police work for pay not fealty.
    - Paul-Craft 3y ago
      FYI, you appear to be shadowbanned for no good reason that I can discern.
jgalt212 3y ago
Agreed. Another way to justify this behavior is that "pessimists don't get promoted" So you're either a growth CEO or a restructuring CEO. Wall Street has no interest in administrator CEOs.
- Freedom2 3y ago
  CEOs are definitely something we should reconsider in this day and age. There's something about the kind of fiefdom that they command that I don't really know the term for it - immoral? Unnatural?
  - bratbag 3y ago
    Effective is the word you are looking for. Despite occasional anecdotal examples of incompetence, companies with them perform better than companies who lead by comittie.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      There is the king of Norway and there is the king of Saudi Arabia. Both are kings.
  - tayo42 3y ago
    You've made me curiously now if there are any like democratic companies.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      It's not just companies; almost no organisation is democratic. And this makes sense: how would I as a person leading a team making a bit of software understand all the information required to make top-level business decisions? That's more than a full time job.
    - detourdog 3y ago
      Ben & Jerry’s has a very unique origin story. Very Vermont and Bernie Sanders was the governor during part of the wild growth. When they IPOed the first stock offering were made available exclusively for vermont residents. I think there is a lot more freedom in the corporate world but very little original thought.
underratedbug 3y ago
You are presupposing that boom and bust hiring is bad, and worse than a more steady state approach. If one assumes perfection is impossible, it seems you suggest erring on the side of perpetually under-hiring as opposed to ever over-hiring. Why is that better?
- rcme 3y ago
  A boom/bust cycle is over-hiring to the point that you need to lay people off. You can over-hire or under-hire in moderation.
  - aeternum 3y ago
    >You can over-hire or under-hire in moderation. It's unclear whether that would be better. In control theory, underdamped systems are generally preferred as it allows you to reach the desired value rapidly even though you often overshoot. Overdamped systems (IE hire in moderation) can be very slow to respond and often spend the majority of their time in the un-desired regime. It's quite possible that tech over-hiring when people were forced to work from home yielded a net good for society even though many of those hires were let go a couple years later.
    - reaperman 3y ago
      He's advocating that the powers-that-be should consider targeting a slightly underdamped hiring system. Where they over-hire, and as they're overshooting the goal then reduce the rate of hiring, allowing the normal low rate of attrition to bring the PV back down to the SP. e.g. a one-half critically-damped system. something following a standard first-order ODE like: \frac{dh}{dt} = K_p (h^\* - h) - K_i \int (h^\* - h) dt - f(h) where h is the instantaneous number of employees, h* is the desired number of employees, f(h) is your attrition rate as a function of current number of employees, and Kp and Ki are "rate of hiring" coefficients which will be your proportional and integral terms of a PID controller to control your rate of hiring. The point is, the "rate of layoffs" here is zero and doesn't appear as a term. Is this a proper model for a human organization? Who the fuck knows but it's the model you're advocating for and I'm just re-explaining what the other guy you replied to was suggesting in the first place, but this time using your framing. Yes, he also mentioned they should consider a slightly over damped system but he 100% did advocate for considering an underdamped system.
AmericanChopper 3y ago
Why would it be reasonable to expect that employment rates remain steady in cases where demand for labor fluctuates downwards? A CEO isn’t failing by implementing a layoff any more than they’re failing when they increase headcount, they’re simply responding to market conditions. The real problem is viewing employment as some sort of charity businesses grant to employees, or even worse, an entitlement that people should receive even when a business no longer needs them. Employment is driven by ordinary supply and demand, and when demand goes down, so does employment. This isn’t a failure of leadership.
tschellenbach 3y ago
Would you propose that companies should pay below market rates to create a buffer against these cycles? Or perhaps not engage in competition with their competitors? I think the conclusion here is that companies don't control this. If the market pays people more, they pay more. If there's heavy competition they compete and hire aggressively. You can't predict these cycles. If you could you'd be a billionaire trading on the stock market. So anyone who says that now is just suffering from hindsight bias. I think the root cause here is government action on monetary policy and interest rates.
oxfordmale 3y ago
The problem is worse. Those in power actually benefit from such booms in form of performance bonuses. They may have a bad year or two as the markets crash. However, a crash gives new opportunities for growth, and associated performance bonuses.
listenallyall 3y ago
Not sure I'd characterize ex-FAANG employees, who are still likelier to get future job opportunities than people who loyally stuck it out at No-name Software Co in Des Moines, and who probably made 200k+ for a while, "little people".
- samsari 3y ago
  You are doing their job for them. A worker with slightly better prospects than others is still just a worker and ultimately still in the same precarious situation as they must still seek employment to earn a salary to live.
  - jrochkind1 3y ago
    So is the CEO also just a worker who must seek employment to earn a salary to live? Why or why not?
    - kiliantics 3y ago
      In some sense yes, if they couldn't live only from the return on their investments, they are technically a worker. That would be the Marxist definition but it's obviously more of a spectrum than a binary. CEOs in most large companies of course have enough wealth that they could live on that alone and they are only working as CEOs in order to increase that wealth. Their work also plays an anti-labour role in collaborating with the shareholder class against the interests of the worker.
      - jrochkind1 3y ago
        I suspect there are quite a few software engineers who have been making $250K+ for some years who could live on the return on their investments alone. I mean, I guess it also depends on live at what standard of living. At the standard of living they are "accustomed to", or at the standard of living of someone making $50K a year? Some larger number of software engineers who have been making $250K could live on their investment income alone for equiv of $50K/year after taxes. So, right, more of a spectrum than a binary -- you see why some people are dubious of whether a software engineer making $250K a year is really in the same class as a retail worker making $50K a year (or less; federal minimum wage is still $7.25; my state's minimum wage is $13.25, less than $30k/year, a shockingly small amount to many of us, that many people actually make) On other conversations, people have suggested that whether you are a "boss" and can hire and fire is determinative. But again, a fast food "manager" might be making only $50K a year, while a software engineer who does not manage people might be making $250K or more. The software engineer is a "worker" who definitely has the same class interests as a walmart worker, but the fast food manager is definitely not? Doesn't really check out. You say "the Marxist definition", but I think that's actually a huge over-simplification of a Marxist analysis. Your class position and interests have to do with your income, your "relationship to the means of production" (role in the economy), your wealth, and other things. And it's probably useful to consider more than 2 or even 3 classes, and sub-classes within classes. I think it's a huge over-simplification to claim that every software engineer making $250K surely is in the same class and has the same class interests as every fast food worker making $12/hour. That's not in fact a good Marxist analysis at all. The pandemic made it pretty clear to me that there is definitely a class divide between the people in jobs where they paid to work from home (or in many cases, especially at first, stay home and not work); and the people who had to come in to get paid and/or who were were told not to come/laid off because there was no work to do.
tombert 3y ago
Yeah; the thing that kind of triggered me on this was the Google CEO saying in December or January that he "takes full responsibility" for all these layoffs. "Full responsibiliyt"? Really? How are you doing that exactly? By still getting your full paycheck and bonus while you fired twelve thousand humans because you didn't consider that the economy after years of a pandemic might be volatile?
- whstl 3y ago
  Well, this is the equivalent of saying "it's not you, it's me" when breaking up. It's just a way of avoiding a discussion.
  - tombert 3y ago
    I know, it's a corporate platitude. It doesn't "mean" anything, but it just rubbed me the wrong way. "Taking full responsibility", to me, would imply some sort of sacrifice on your end. Words are cheap; hell, I can say that I take full responsibility for the Google layoffs. I have never worked for Google but I did about as much as Sundar Pichai to take responsibility for the layoffs.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      He's saying don't get angry at anyone else at Google, I think.
      - iinnPP 3y ago
        Wouldn't adding that to the statement have the same effect but also be honest? Perhaps the effect would be even greater given that people wouldn't feel like the need to guess at the real reason? I guess it's better than some approaches such as "we can do better."
        jonas21 3y ago
        Shouldn't that part be obvious? "I take full responsibility" means you should blame me and only me. That's the very definition of responsibility.
lopis 3y ago
They gamble with high risk and no stakes. If it works out, get win big. It it fails, they get to layoff people, restructure the company, and earn a small millionaire bonus. There's literally no losing for them.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  After a certain amount of accumulated wealth, there is no losing. The trick is to apply this to your life and be willing to live well below your means to get there.
  - berkethegrizzly 3y ago
    [flagged]
- berkethegrizzly 3y ago
  [flagged]
mschuster91 3y ago
> The real problem that author doesn’t call out is that at the end of the day, the people in charge don’t get hurt from these irresponsible boom and bust hiring practices. These companies knew the growth wouldn’t last, nothing lasts forever. It's one thing for small companies (such as Peloton) - for them, "overhiring" or "overbuilding" can indeed be fatal. But companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook? They all were wildly profitable - there was no need to reduce headcount other than making beancounters and stock markets happy. They could have simply cut goose-chase projects and rerouted the staff towards stuff making money without letting a single person go.
- sharemywin 3y ago
  But that's the bigger problem for stock prices. There are no more monopolies to conquer
singpolyma3 3y ago
No job can or should last forever. Being laid off is of course unfortunate, but suggesting that never hiring them in the first place would have been better seems... wrong?
scarface74 3y ago
It is naive for anyone to view a job as anything but transactional. Do you expect your employer to isolate you from economic storms? Would the people who worked at BigTech during the boom times have been better off not getting hired and making at least 3x-5x the median wage? I was hired at BigTech in 2020 going straight there from a 60 person company. I have used every single penny of my signing bonus + RSUs since then to improve my financial condition. I kept my resume up to date and my network strong.
- ragnot 3y ago
  A part of me thinks that many have failed to educate themselves about the realities of life. People are dicks (generally) and if they can step on you to better themselves they will. It's why capitalism works.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    And many of the people who are working in tech now, have never known anything but boom times and got high on their own supply thinking they are special snowflakes. I saw my BigTech job that I got late in my career as just another job. I was just as prepared to get laid off, pip’d as I would be for any other job.
sharts 3y ago
[flagged]

notho 3y ago

“Hurting” the elite has always been up to the public. Teacher strikes and unionization efforts have been winning; the financiers know nothing about self sufficiency. They know they rely literally on someone else to grow the food, kill the steaks. The white collar public have a credibility problem; they want to be served and not serve themselves. There is zero reason for most tech workers to login tomorrow; the vast majority will never move the needle. Yet they’ve learned helplessness and don’t know what to do. We carry on about ills of LLMs hallucinating while westerners hallucinate the they can just do data entry work and someone else will wear out their bodies procuring food. Our AI is more like us than we want to admit, which is why they’re so terrible.

whitemary 3y ago
> Teacher strikes and unionization efforts have been winning Citations needed
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
  Among the urban working class in cities like Chicago, union interest has been rising rapidly across a variety of sectors. Retail, education, warehouse labor, museums are all seeing increases in union activity. The mayor-elect is a former union organizer. Chicago is certainly one of the more pro-labor cities in the US, but they’re not the only ones seeing growing interest in organized labor. The Democratic Socialists of America membership grew from 6,000 to 90,000 in less than 10 years. https://chicago.chalkbeat.org/2023/5/11/23720181/chicago-deputy-mayor-education-teachers-union-chief-of-staff-jen-johnson?_amp=true https://chicago.chalkbeat.org/2023/5/11/23720181/chicago-dep... https://www.afscme.org/blog/workers-at-another-chicago-institution-are-forming-a-union-with-afscme https://www.afscme.org/blog/workers-at-another-chicago-insti... https://chicago.suntimes.com/business/2023/5/8/23715750/rei-outdoors-retailer-staff-union https://chicago.suntimes.com/business/2023/5/8/23715750/rei-... https://chicago.chalkbeat.org/2023/5/12/23720406/chicago-public-schools-principals-union?_amp=true https://chicago.chalkbeat.org/2023/5/12/23720406/chicago-pub...
  - whitemary 3y ago
    The question was not about unionization, but the accomplishments of said unions, which remain to be seen. Unions that lack the strength to strike are a net negative. The mayor elect didn't even support Bernie Sanders lol. DSA membership has been nosediving for the past 2 years because DSA is effectively an appendage of the Democratic Party.
- notho 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Oklahoma_teachers%27_strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Oklahoma_teachers%27_st... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_West_Virginia_teachers%27_strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_West_Virginia_teachers%... If you like some real numbers; <600 elected Federal officials, only 1 million LEO from federal to local, and very few billionaires and mega millionaires. All propped up by labor of tens of millions. Let Jamie Dimon go door to door for those mortgages. 10k NYC cops threatened to strike over vaccine mandates; only 34 did. Let them see police work for pay not fealty.
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    FYI, you appear to be shadowbanned for no good reason that I can discern.

jgalt212 3y ago

Agreed. Another way to justify this behavior is that "pessimists don't get promoted" So you're either a growth CEO or a restructuring CEO. Wall Street has no interest in administrator CEOs.

Freedom2 3y ago
CEOs are definitely something we should reconsider in this day and age. There's something about the kind of fiefdom that they command that I don't really know the term for it - immoral? Unnatural?
- bratbag 3y ago
  Effective is the word you are looking for. Despite occasional anecdotal examples of incompetence, companies with them perform better than companies who lead by comittie.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    There is the king of Norway and there is the king of Saudi Arabia. Both are kings.
- tayo42 3y ago
  You've made me curiously now if there are any like democratic companies.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    It's not just companies; almost no organisation is democratic. And this makes sense: how would I as a person leading a team making a bit of software understand all the information required to make top-level business decisions? That's more than a full time job.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    Ben & Jerry’s has a very unique origin story. Very Vermont and Bernie Sanders was the governor during part of the wild growth. When they IPOed the first stock offering were made available exclusively for vermont residents. I think there is a lot more freedom in the corporate world but very little original thought.

underratedbug 3y ago

You are presupposing that boom and bust hiring is bad, and worse than a more steady state approach. If one assumes perfection is impossible, it seems you suggest erring on the side of perpetually under-hiring as opposed to ever over-hiring. Why is that better?

rcme 3y ago
A boom/bust cycle is over-hiring to the point that you need to lay people off. You can over-hire or under-hire in moderation.
- aeternum 3y ago
  >You can over-hire or under-hire in moderation. It's unclear whether that would be better. In control theory, underdamped systems are generally preferred as it allows you to reach the desired value rapidly even though you often overshoot. Overdamped systems (IE hire in moderation) can be very slow to respond and often spend the majority of their time in the un-desired regime. It's quite possible that tech over-hiring when people were forced to work from home yielded a net good for society even though many of those hires were let go a couple years later.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    He's advocating that the powers-that-be should consider targeting a slightly underdamped hiring system. Where they over-hire, and as they're overshooting the goal then reduce the rate of hiring, allowing the normal low rate of attrition to bring the PV back down to the SP. e.g. a one-half critically-damped system. something following a standard first-order ODE like: \frac{dh}{dt} = K_p (h^\* - h) - K_i \int (h^\* - h) dt - f(h) where h is the instantaneous number of employees, h* is the desired number of employees, f(h) is your attrition rate as a function of current number of employees, and Kp and Ki are "rate of hiring" coefficients which will be your proportional and integral terms of a PID controller to control your rate of hiring. The point is, the "rate of layoffs" here is zero and doesn't appear as a term. Is this a proper model for a human organization? Who the fuck knows but it's the model you're advocating for and I'm just re-explaining what the other guy you replied to was suggesting in the first place, but this time using your framing. Yes, he also mentioned they should consider a slightly over damped system but he 100% did advocate for considering an underdamped system.

AmericanChopper 3y ago

Why would it be reasonable to expect that employment rates remain steady in cases where demand for labor fluctuates downwards? A CEO isn’t failing by implementing a layoff any more than they’re failing when they increase headcount, they’re simply responding to market conditions. The real problem is viewing employment as some sort of charity businesses grant to employees, or even worse, an entitlement that people should receive even when a business no longer needs them. Employment is driven by ordinary supply and demand, and when demand goes down, so does employment. This isn’t a failure of leadership.

tschellenbach 3y ago

Would you propose that companies should pay below market rates to create a buffer against these cycles? Or perhaps not engage in competition with their competitors? I think the conclusion here is that companies don't control this. If the market pays people more, they pay more. If there's heavy competition they compete and hire aggressively. You can't predict these cycles. If you could you'd be a billionaire trading on the stock market. So anyone who says that now is just suffering from hindsight bias. I think the root cause here is government action on monetary policy and interest rates.

oxfordmale 3y ago

The problem is worse. Those in power actually benefit from such booms in form of performance bonuses. They may have a bad year or two as the markets crash. However, a crash gives new opportunities for growth, and associated performance bonuses.

listenallyall 3y ago

Not sure I'd characterize ex-FAANG employees, who are still likelier to get future job opportunities than people who loyally stuck it out at No-name Software Co in Des Moines, and who probably made 200k+ for a while, "little people".

samsari 3y ago
You are doing their job for them. A worker with slightly better prospects than others is still just a worker and ultimately still in the same precarious situation as they must still seek employment to earn a salary to live.
- jrochkind1 3y ago
  So is the CEO also just a worker who must seek employment to earn a salary to live? Why or why not?
  - kiliantics 3y ago
    In some sense yes, if they couldn't live only from the return on their investments, they are technically a worker. That would be the Marxist definition but it's obviously more of a spectrum than a binary. CEOs in most large companies of course have enough wealth that they could live on that alone and they are only working as CEOs in order to increase that wealth. Their work also plays an anti-labour role in collaborating with the shareholder class against the interests of the worker.
    - jrochkind1 3y ago
      I suspect there are quite a few software engineers who have been making $250K+ for some years who could live on the return on their investments alone. I mean, I guess it also depends on live at what standard of living. At the standard of living they are "accustomed to", or at the standard of living of someone making $50K a year? Some larger number of software engineers who have been making $250K could live on their investment income alone for equiv of $50K/year after taxes. So, right, more of a spectrum than a binary -- you see why some people are dubious of whether a software engineer making $250K a year is really in the same class as a retail worker making $50K a year (or less; federal minimum wage is still $7.25; my state's minimum wage is $13.25, less than $30k/year, a shockingly small amount to many of us, that many people actually make) On other conversations, people have suggested that whether you are a "boss" and can hire and fire is determinative. But again, a fast food "manager" might be making only $50K a year, while a software engineer who does not manage people might be making $250K or more. The software engineer is a "worker" who definitely has the same class interests as a walmart worker, but the fast food manager is definitely not? Doesn't really check out. You say "the Marxist definition", but I think that's actually a huge over-simplification of a Marxist analysis. Your class position and interests have to do with your income, your "relationship to the means of production" (role in the economy), your wealth, and other things. And it's probably useful to consider more than 2 or even 3 classes, and sub-classes within classes. I think it's a huge over-simplification to claim that every software engineer making $250K surely is in the same class and has the same class interests as every fast food worker making $12/hour. That's not in fact a good Marxist analysis at all. The pandemic made it pretty clear to me that there is definitely a class divide between the people in jobs where they paid to work from home (or in many cases, especially at first, stay home and not work); and the people who had to come in to get paid and/or who were were told not to come/laid off because there was no work to do.

tombert 3y ago

Yeah; the thing that kind of triggered me on this was the Google CEO saying in December or January that he "takes full responsibility" for all these layoffs. "Full responsibiliyt"? Really? How are you doing that exactly? By still getting your full paycheck and bonus while you fired twelve thousand humans because you didn't consider that the economy after years of a pandemic might be volatile?

whstl 3y ago
Well, this is the equivalent of saying "it's not you, it's me" when breaking up. It's just a way of avoiding a discussion.
- tombert 3y ago
  I know, it's a corporate platitude. It doesn't "mean" anything, but it just rubbed me the wrong way. "Taking full responsibility", to me, would imply some sort of sacrifice on your end. Words are cheap; hell, I can say that I take full responsibility for the Google layoffs. I have never worked for Google but I did about as much as Sundar Pichai to take responsibility for the layoffs.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    He's saying don't get angry at anyone else at Google, I think.
    - iinnPP 3y ago
      Wouldn't adding that to the statement have the same effect but also be honest? Perhaps the effect would be even greater given that people wouldn't feel like the need to guess at the real reason? I guess it's better than some approaches such as "we can do better."
      - jonas21 3y ago
        Shouldn't that part be obvious? "I take full responsibility" means you should blame me and only me. That's the very definition of responsibility.

lopis 3y ago

They gamble with high risk and no stakes. If it works out, get win big. It it fails, they get to layoff people, restructure the company, and earn a small millionaire bonus. There's literally no losing for them.

mensetmanusman 3y ago
After a certain amount of accumulated wealth, there is no losing. The trick is to apply this to your life and be willing to live well below your means to get there.
- berkethegrizzly 3y ago
  [flagged]
berkethegrizzly 3y ago
[flagged]

mschuster91 3y ago

> The real problem that author doesn’t call out is that at the end of the day, the people in charge don’t get hurt from these irresponsible boom and bust hiring practices. These companies knew the growth wouldn’t last, nothing lasts forever. It's one thing for small companies (such as Peloton) - for them, "overhiring" or "overbuilding" can indeed be fatal. But companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook? They all were wildly profitable - there was no need to reduce headcount other than making beancounters and stock markets happy. They could have simply cut goose-chase projects and rerouted the staff towards stuff making money without letting a single person go.

sharemywin 3y ago
But that's the bigger problem for stock prices. There are no more monopolies to conquer

singpolyma3 3y ago

No job can or should last forever. Being laid off is of course unfortunate, but suggesting that never hiring them in the first place would have been better seems... wrong?

scarface74 3y ago

It is naive for anyone to view a job as anything but transactional. Do you expect your employer to isolate you from economic storms? Would the people who worked at BigTech during the boom times have been better off not getting hired and making at least 3x-5x the median wage? I was hired at BigTech in 2020 going straight there from a 60 person company. I have used every single penny of my signing bonus + RSUs since then to improve my financial condition. I kept my resume up to date and my network strong.

ragnot 3y ago
A part of me thinks that many have failed to educate themselves about the realities of life. People are dicks (generally) and if they can step on you to better themselves they will. It's why capitalism works.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  And many of the people who are working in tech now, have never known anything but boom times and got high on their own supply thinking they are special snowflakes. I saw my BigTech job that I got late in my career as just another job. I was just as prepared to get laid off, pip’d as I would be for any other job.

sharts 3y ago

[flagged]