16 ms·

What was behind Microsoft's layoffs of over 20k people in the last year?

216 points by vinnyglennon 3y ago

tivert 3y ago
Edit: Here's the full post: https://www.teamblind.com/post/How-we-got-here-Some-inside-scoops-from-Microsoft-on-handling-early-days-of-pandemic-to-cutting-over-20K-folks-in-2023-7ndQwLAU https://www.teamblind.com/post/How-we-got-here-Some-inside-s.... Their website kind of sucks: when you click to see "all posts" about Microsoft, it actually just shows you "trending" posts (that are all a bunch of junk about interviews and offers). Edit 2: It looks like it's Twitter's fault I can't see the content there, so it wasn't a tease on Blind's part. Original comment: So is this a tease just to install their app? The tweet only seems to be a screenshot of the intro to the post, no link or anything. Can anyone post a link to or the content of this "long post"?
- avg_dev 3y ago
  I don't know, for me, the link posted here seems to be a tweet thread, and each post in the thread shows a screenshot of some of the post.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > I don't know, for me, the link posted here seems to be a tweet thread, and each post in the thread shows a screenshot of some of the post. I'm not seeing a thread, just the single tweet with a single screenshot.
    - wombat-man 3y ago
      same, maybe because I'm logged out of X.
    - delecti 3y ago
      You can no longer see full threads without being logged in. The linked tweet is the first in a thread of 16.
      - Tempest1981 3y ago
        Their UI really needs some indication of that... "Replies: 16 (log in to view)" Maybe it's obvious when it looks too quiet?
        delecti 3y ago
        Originally, you couldn't see the reply count while looking at a tweet because the replies were just visible below the tweet itself. Then Musk pushed a ton of changes, and now there's still no reply count, but now you can't see those replies if you're not logged in. Really it's just that the sensible evolutionary changes haven't had a chance to catch up with the breakneck changes. > Maybe it's obvious when it looks too quiet? This is probably your best signal. The linked tweet currently has 37 retweets, 10 quote-tweets, and 240 likes, so it would be incredibly unusual if there were actually zero replies (barring tweets which have had their replies limited). But to know that, you'd have to know a bit about Twitter norms, and if you know that then you probably know that you can't see replies without being logged in.
- wombat-man 3y ago
  Blind is a good idea for a site but it is just so much worse than reddit for actually having discussions. Also pretty toxic community.
  - nine_zeros 3y ago
    It's not a good community for discussions. It is a great community to find inside scoop on companies - which unfortunately leans towards toxicity because companies often secretly have toxic policies.
    - jkubicek 3y ago
      Blind is all toxic. My former company had some good parts and bad parts, but the conversation on Blind was 100% negative. If I were trying to get a sense of what working at a company was really like, Blind would not be a great place to go. It was a great place to vent, though.
      - gascoigne 3y ago
        It often feels like product ratings. Only the people who didn't like it bother to write a review. The silent majority that's there for the subconsciously gets affected by the toxicity though.
        tivert 3y ago
        > It often feels like product ratings. Only the people who didn't like it bother to write a review. In my experience, product ratings are not at all like that. Tons of people who like stuff leave positive reviews, and frequently leave evidence they have low standards or are not good at evaluating quality.
      - nine_zeros 3y ago
        It's not a fair review place. But it is an honest review place wherein no one tries to paper over reality. Turns out, reality is toxic.
      - 3y ago
pydry 3y ago
tl;dr wage suppression was behind it, with the pressure coming from wall street. Since it was synchronized across all of tech this will likely mean that there is smoking gun evidence of illegal collusion lying around somewhere just like there was the last time this happened: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
- tivert 3y ago
  This seems like the juiciest bit: > Hiring market was booming late 2021 and early 2022. The RSU and signing bonuses were rising at an alarming rate irking wall st. The pace of stock grants for hiring talent was not sustainable. Wall st fund managers were especially critical about the dilution of the stock to sustain the hiring and retention. > Major wall st fund managers and stock holders started putting together a plan to put pressure on the wage and RSU growth. There were multiple leaks on Reddit (which is where I got the early wind of these planned industry wide layoffs) where hedge fund employees and staff were talking about dumping as high as 300-500K tech employees over year to put serious pressure on wage growth. > If the CEOs and CFOs were not receptive to the idea they would pressure the board. A lot of major share holders have their person on the boards of their major holding companies. Our overlords had made up their mind and nothing could stop them. > I heard much later from someone who was present at Jackson Hole Economic Symposium in Aug 2022 that these low-key discussions started taking place between CEOs, board members, large tech investors and large fund managers at Jackson hole. I would like to see an investigation of this. It sounds plausable to me, but you never know with posts like this if they actually reflect inside info or are just some guy LARPing being an insider.
  - dboreham 3y ago
    Genuine question: why does it need to be investigated? Is there a law against rich psychopaths being psychopaths with their own money?
    - tivert 3y ago
      > Genuine question: why does it need to be investigated? Is there a law against rich psychopaths being psychopaths with their own money? Because if there isn't, there should be. It's not good policy to let psychopaths run amok. An investigation is the kind of thing that could get the political wheels turning against those "rich psychopaths." But I wouldn't be surprised if something like this is illegal already. It has a smell of anti-competitive collusion.
hn_version_0023 3y ago
Obviously it was a concerted effort to reduce the power of tech workers across the industry. Other explanations are disingenuous.
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
> "major wall st fund managers and stock holders started putting together a plan to put pressure on the wage and RSU growth" that's what i thought. another hedge fund douchebag sent a letter to google demanding it should cut back its workforce and lower pay around the same time: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-investor-calls-on-google-owner-to-aggressively-cut-staff-and-pay https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-inv... they saw an opportunity to cut costs. the pandemic gave too much power to white collar wage workers and as churchill and later milton friedman said, never let a crisis go to waste.
- draw_down 3y ago
  [dead]
- jklinger410 3y ago
  The drive to cut staff was to push for a recession, and that was always clear. This same argument is being used to say wages or COVID relief are driving inflation. The argument about what is causing our current inflation is a battleground for class warfare. But we don't talk about things in that context in this country, because the war (and almost every single battle) is being won by the rich.
  - boringg 3y ago
    I think you misunderstand. The reason people cut staff was fear of the upcoming recession as a result of the overnights rates going up. It still might happen as it is clear people are feeling the pinch of the rates. Your argument is a bit of a stretch. Class warfare is some strong rhetoric that I don't think many people have adopted.
    - burkaman 3y ago
      https://twitter.com/FinancialReview/status/1701440109948887057 https://twitter.com/FinancialReview/status/17014401099488870...
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
>Late 2022 Satya started taking about overall employment at Tech companies dropping due to AI. He said something like ‘Tech employment overall will grow but employment at tech companies will shrink’. Normally, I am blase on the predictions that AI will replace dev jobs, but when one of the people saying this also happens to be one of the people with real power to make it happen I stand up and take notice. Yikes.
- burkaman 3y ago
  What does that quote mean? How can tech employment grow if tech company employment is shrinking?
  - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
    It's another riff on 'software is eating the world'. Lots of companies would like custom software to help run their business, but are not, in fact, tech companies. If AI makes writing this software cheaper, and there is higher elastic demand at this lower price, then you'll see more devs working for old fashioned non tech companies. Tech companies, meanwhile, can accomplish their goals with fewer employees, so the number of people working directly for FAANG companies will shrink. That's my take on his comment, anyway.
    - burkaman 3y ago
      Ok, that seems like generally a good thing for most of us? His prediction is that employment opportunities will increase, and there will be a much more diverse pool of companies you can choose to work at.
      - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
        It's mixed. The reason for higher demand would be lower cost. I.e. perhaps lower median wages for the vast majority of folks where we have a bimodal peak at tech companies who have a small percentage of overall workers.
      - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dirtybirdnj 3y ago
It's a class war. Lets call it what it is. One side is literally trying to kill the other. Whether you choke off oxygen or financial means to survival... you're killing people. One side is wealthy enough to engage in this for fun and entertainment. They are so disconnected from reality that their actions are justified and their ethics totally evaporated. How long till we conduct layoffs by allowing CEOs to meander open-floor offices and simply execute the employees they see as disposable?
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Class warfare against those making $400k/year...
  - Dig1t 3y ago
    By those making many millions per year. Yes. They are two classes of people, albeit the 400k class is not the lowest on the totem pole.
  - jwestbury 3y ago
    Yes, because we're threatening to become a true middle class again. Don't fool yourself: Software engineers are working class.
    - readthenotes1 3y ago
      Just because you work doesn't mean you're "middle class". If you're making $400k/year, you are upper class (on the income scale). $65k is the middle of "middle class".
      - seo-speedwagon 3y ago
        Your definition of “class” seems to be a kind of vague proxy for “income”. The original comment was using a more accurate definition aligning more with a capital vs labor distinction: are you paid in wages or are you paid in profits?
TradingPlaces 3y ago
>Everyone in the industry (except apple) was doing it so nobody wanted to go against the wisdom of the collective. Raising debt to finance things was really cheap (especially for Microsoft given our bond rating) so everyone in the industry began hiring and collecting employees like Pokémon cards. Except Apple.
- Beached 3y ago
  I mean Apple laid off recruiters and heavily slowed down hiring fall 2022, tried to force everyone back into offices and was.able to reap many resignations, and still laid off an undisclosed amount of working in the spring. it sounds like Apple did the same crap, just with better pr and more strategically.
Mistletoe 3y ago
Let’s take a less conspiratorial view and realize that when everyone showed they could work from home and clamored so vociferously for it to stay after the pandemic, that companies suddenly realized that meant you could pay someone across the world a lot cheaper for the same output, in their mind. https://www.cnbctv18.com/business/companies/google-microsoft-amazon-and-meta-are-hiring-low-paid-h1-workers-after-announcing-mass-layoffs-report-16697051.htm/ https://www.cnbctv18.com/business/companies/google-microsoft... I remember thinking “be careful what you are wishing for my dudes” when tech workers were loudly proclaiming how much work they could get done at home and never coming into the office. That office was your moat and now it’s gone.
- rblatz 3y ago
  | That office was your moat and now it’s gone. This seemed so obvious to me, and yet none of my colleagues would hear it when we discussed remote work.
- cageface 3y ago
  I’ve been working remote since 2010 with teams all over the world. People that are reliable and productive and that communicate well are very hard to find and are still in short supply. We made good money cleaning up messes caused by cheap offshoring deals.
- batshit_beaver 3y ago
  Imo, time zone, culture, language, data and privacy regulations are also moats, although being physically present helps a ton. I don't think there was anything stopping companies from outsourcing all engineering work pre-pandemic, but that model has been failing pretty consistently over the last couple decades.
- stringsandchars 3y ago
  > That office was your moat and now it’s gone. I don't think sitting in an office somewhere, with my headphones on is any kind of 'moat'. I'm judged on the quality and speed of work that I do. I'm also paid for understanding the underlying needs my company has for the application I'm building. I'm paid for the ideas I contribute, the work-culture I share, and for being present and consistent during work-hours - even though I work almost always from home. Twice in my career so far I've been involved in projects "paying someone across the world" for "the same output" and they were both total disasters: ending multiple-times over budget without even being completed. The time-difference alone would have been bad enough (where the feedback loop was often a couple of days even for the smallest change), but we found that the coders you were supposed to be dealing with would regularly be replaced, simply disappear altogether (sometimes reappearing in the project weeks later); the new developers would need to be re-briefed, and altogether the coordinating project manager halfway around the world would spend most of their time either bullshitting or stonewalling us. Payment, taxes and other problems all just added to the headaches. I don't mean that these developers were producing code that was lower quality (we barely saw enough to really judge), it's simply that working with someone "locally-remotely" is (almost literally) a world away from expecting to be able to just export that job to a low-wage coder in some other part of the globe.
FlyingSnake 3y ago
You can read the full tweet thread sans paywall here: https://nitter.net/TeamBlind/status/1706266044871086271 https://nitter.net/TeamBlind/status/1706266044871086271
hnisforfascists 3y ago
[dead]
FlyingSnake 3y ago
TL;DR 1. During early pandemic phase MS Sr. leadership correctly guessed that the demand will be sky high due to lockdowns. 2. Most leadership went overboard in memetic fashion and projected unrealistic and unsustainable growth numbers. Sane voices were ignored. 3. These numbers didn’t materialise and by mid ‘22 they made the mind to layoff people 4. OpenAI pulled a reverse MS-IBM on MS and Satya and others were enamoured by ChatGPT demo. 5. Investors saw the rapid hiring as diluting the stock value and backed the layoffs. 6. Layoffs happen and thousands are caught in that turmoil.
jdright 3y ago
related to oberall discussion:https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-meta-big-tech-companies-rehire-workers-employees-laid-off-2023-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-meta-big-tech-com...
octacat 3y ago
> Everyone in the industry (except apple) was doing it so nobody wanted to go against the wisdom of the collective. The main reason. Same with the hiring boom, same with the firing boom.
RajT88 3y ago
It's funny - how the author claimed he got shouted down when he started posting to Blind about the layoffs. Every single day of the week, people are posting on blind about upcoming RIF's. People have RIF fatigue. It's a case of "boy who cried wolf" and not the fault of the author, that's just how Blind is.
hedora 3y ago
This is coordinated cost cutting across the largest employers during a time of record profitability. The goal of this is explicitly to use their monopsony power to transfer wealth from the workers to the investors at the expense of product quality (since they will lose some people that they need to keep the lights on). These firms also happen to hold monopolies in many areas, so the amount of product enshitification the market will bear is practically unlimited. The wage fixing and enshitification halves of this scheme are probably both in violation of anti-trust law, though enforcement of the law in either way would probably be novel. Here's a long writeup showing how Amazon (accidentally?) pioneered industry-wide wage suppression for minimum-wage workers. I'm beginning to wonder if twitter was a dry run for the rest of the industry. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2598&context=law_and_economics https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... > As one industry analyst noted, “Amazon is almost becoming like the negotiator for all hourly wage workers to a certain extent.”90 It is tempting to argue that this is good for workers. But Amazon is an employer, not a union. While it is true that workers benefit when Amazon enters a labor market, Amazon has every incentive to use its wage leadership to ensure that a cartel wage is maintained rather than the competitive wage.
acjohnson55 3y ago
If you don't know, now you know. I think it's important that people understand what drives labor strategy within industry. First of all, you should understand how your salary gets paid, as a tech worker. Much of the tech industry is unprofitable, so where does the money come from? It comes from the investments into the company. That money comes from venture capitalists, but not out of their actual pockets. Their money comes from their limited partners -- pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, insurance companies, etc. Even when it comes to profitable companies, like Microsoft, folks should understand that the people who pull the strings in the industry are the investors. AKA the owners of the company. Yesterday's investors generally get paid by tomorrow's. When there's uncertainty of future investment, things change real quick. For a long period of time, we were in a zero-interest rate regime, and the investor class was obsessed with growth, over all else. Capital is easy to come by when interest rates are low, so the game they are playing is to try to pick sectoral winners, and worry about profitability in the long run. You can't win in the market without the best talent, and so there was an arms race to acquire that talent. Investors will endure dilution from employee stock grants as long as the growth makes up for it. When interest rates started increasing, to combat inflation, everything changed. Capital was no longer cheap and businesses needed to be able to become self-sustaining, or risk going bankrupt. It's hard to overstate how sharp a change this was from years of declining interest rates. Some leaders of companies are sociopaths, and others are great humans. In the end, both types of leaders need to be responsive to three forces: capital markets, supply chain markets, and customer markets. The latter two are peculiar to each business, but the macro capital market dynamics are pretty much shared. And that's why it seems like we've seen herd behavior among investors and executives. But I think it's important to be able to parse between what behaviors is vicious/selfish/exploitative vs. that which responding to changing market forces. I do think that when it's all said and done, we'll see which CEOs are actually able to guide their companies to produce value, and which CEOs just know how to do well with a tailwind.
- kridsdale3 3y ago
  Buffet's "When the tide goes out" line is something I thought of often during our Bull Decade. It guided my choices of employers. I missed out on some sexy trends by only ever choosing to go with extremely profitable monopolists, and within those companies I always try to be a key player on a project that leadership knows is what funds the crew on their yachts. It's my own insurance policy. I started my career in 2008, and I talked to a lot of guys who started theirs in 2000. I have played defensively since then. It's worked out pretty well to be conservative.
metaphor 3y ago
Disappointed that discussion has regressed into a naive "class war" narrative while no one is talking about the face value business implications of § 174 [1] now that the handout bankrolled by 2017 TCJA [2] is nerfed and tax code no longer permits outright expensing of software development. [1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-26/chapter-I/subchapter-A/part-1/subject-group-ECFRcc67ec453a5e514/section-1.174-2 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-26/chapter-I/subchapter-A... [2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/te...
- kevingadd 3y ago
  I've seen a ton of different opinions on these changes but every startup techie/indie dev I've talked to got different answers from their accountant. Mine said I was fine. Is there a basis for arguing 174/TCJA are why these layoffs happened?
itissid 3y ago
If your firm cannot afford >= 400K salary engineers you will/cannot be big tech(not in the US). Good Engineers(in the US, EU etc) who command this will leave. You can be a dollar printing tech company and have good engineers but you can't be small. A lot of the economy and US tech dominance is alive because of such jobs and the larger ecosystem of evaluations(linked to GDP) that support this. At the macro level the size of big tech is supported by evaluations: "How much it would cost to make the same thing?". This evaluation includes payroll costs. Those payroll costs are kept artificially high so that evaluations(in dollars) are high. the obscene salaries also keep the $ cost that companies charge for products, goods and services((daycare, medicine, labor, homes)) high which keep the evaluation high. You need the high evaluation to award Engineers wanting all those 400K+ salaries. Also at this macro level the dollarized based evaluation is critical because with US's dollar dominance it can just spend to eliminate any and all competition. The government can borrow endlessly by selling debt(or so it seems). So the key support thesis behind big tech is that if you can keep enough people, rich enough they will continue to buy and spend to support dollar evaluation of companies. The moment that is in jeopardy people(WS investors, Vice President of XYZ etc) will come out and defend it.
boringg 3y ago
Am I the only one who sees this random thread of anonymously sourced content from Blind with a lot of salt? It lacks any credibility.
nvm0n2 3y ago
[flagged]

216 points by vinnyglennon 3y ago

Edit: Here's the full post: https://www.teamblind.com/post/How-we-got-here-Some-inside-scoops-from-Microsoft-on-handling-early-days-of-pandemic-to-cutting-over-20K-folks-in-2023-7ndQwLAU https://www.teamblind.com/post/How-we-got-here-Some-inside-s.... Their website kind of sucks: when you click to see "all posts" about Microsoft, it actually just shows you "trending" posts (that are all a bunch of junk about interviews and offers). Edit 2: It looks like it's Twitter's fault I can't see the content there, so it wasn't a tease on Blind's part. Original comment: So is this a tease just to install their app? The tweet only seems to be a screenshot of the intro to the post, no link or anything. Can anyone post a link to or the content of this "long post"?

avg_dev 3y ago
I don't know, for me, the link posted here seems to be a tweet thread, and each post in the thread shows a screenshot of some of the post.
- tivert 3y ago
  > I don't know, for me, the link posted here seems to be a tweet thread, and each post in the thread shows a screenshot of some of the post. I'm not seeing a thread, just the single tweet with a single screenshot.
  - wombat-man 3y ago
    same, maybe because I'm logged out of X.
  - delecti 3y ago
    You can no longer see full threads without being logged in. The linked tweet is the first in a thread of 16.
    - Tempest1981 3y ago
      Their UI really needs some indication of that... "Replies: 16 (log in to view)" Maybe it's obvious when it looks too quiet?
      - delecti 3y ago
        Originally, you couldn't see the reply count while looking at a tweet because the replies were just visible below the tweet itself. Then Musk pushed a ton of changes, and now there's still no reply count, but now you can't see those replies if you're not logged in. Really it's just that the sensible evolutionary changes haven't had a chance to catch up with the breakneck changes. > Maybe it's obvious when it looks too quiet? This is probably your best signal. The linked tweet currently has 37 retweets, 10 quote-tweets, and 240 likes, so it would be incredibly unusual if there were actually zero replies (barring tweets which have had their replies limited). But to know that, you'd have to know a bit about Twitter norms, and if you know that then you probably know that you can't see replies without being logged in.
wombat-man 3y ago
Blind is a good idea for a site but it is just so much worse than reddit for actually having discussions. Also pretty toxic community.
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  It's not a good community for discussions. It is a great community to find inside scoop on companies - which unfortunately leans towards toxicity because companies often secretly have toxic policies.
  - jkubicek 3y ago
    Blind is all toxic. My former company had some good parts and bad parts, but the conversation on Blind was 100% negative. If I were trying to get a sense of what working at a company was really like, Blind would not be a great place to go. It was a great place to vent, though.
    - gascoigne 3y ago
      It often feels like product ratings. Only the people who didn't like it bother to write a review. The silent majority that's there for the subconsciously gets affected by the toxicity though.
      - tivert 3y ago
        > It often feels like product ratings. Only the people who didn't like it bother to write a review. In my experience, product ratings are not at all like that. Tons of people who like stuff leave positive reviews, and frequently leave evidence they have low standards or are not good at evaluating quality.
    - nine_zeros 3y ago
      It's not a fair review place. But it is an honest review place wherein no one tries to paper over reality. Turns out, reality is toxic.
    - 3y ago

pydry 3y ago

tl;dr wage suppression was behind it, with the pressure coming from wall street. Since it was synchronized across all of tech this will likely mean that there is smoking gun evidence of illegal collusion lying around somewhere just like there was the last time this happened: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...

tivert 3y ago
This seems like the juiciest bit: > Hiring market was booming late 2021 and early 2022. The RSU and signing bonuses were rising at an alarming rate irking wall st. The pace of stock grants for hiring talent was not sustainable. Wall st fund managers were especially critical about the dilution of the stock to sustain the hiring and retention. > Major wall st fund managers and stock holders started putting together a plan to put pressure on the wage and RSU growth. There were multiple leaks on Reddit (which is where I got the early wind of these planned industry wide layoffs) where hedge fund employees and staff were talking about dumping as high as 300-500K tech employees over year to put serious pressure on wage growth. > If the CEOs and CFOs were not receptive to the idea they would pressure the board. A lot of major share holders have their person on the boards of their major holding companies. Our overlords had made up their mind and nothing could stop them. > I heard much later from someone who was present at Jackson Hole Economic Symposium in Aug 2022 that these low-key discussions started taking place between CEOs, board members, large tech investors and large fund managers at Jackson hole. I would like to see an investigation of this. It sounds plausable to me, but you never know with posts like this if they actually reflect inside info or are just some guy LARPing being an insider.
- dboreham 3y ago
  Genuine question: why does it need to be investigated? Is there a law against rich psychopaths being psychopaths with their own money?
  - tivert 3y ago
    > Genuine question: why does it need to be investigated? Is there a law against rich psychopaths being psychopaths with their own money? Because if there isn't, there should be. It's not good policy to let psychopaths run amok. An investigation is the kind of thing that could get the political wheels turning against those "rich psychopaths." But I wouldn't be surprised if something like this is illegal already. It has a smell of anti-competitive collusion.

hn_version_0023 3y ago

Obviously it was a concerted effort to reduce the power of tech workers across the industry. Other explanations are disingenuous.

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

> "major wall st fund managers and stock holders started putting together a plan to put pressure on the wage and RSU growth" that's what i thought. another hedge fund douchebag sent a letter to google demanding it should cut back its workforce and lower pay around the same time: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-investor-calls-on-google-owner-to-aggressively-cut-staff-and-pay https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-inv... they saw an opportunity to cut costs. the pandemic gave too much power to white collar wage workers and as churchill and later milton friedman said, never let a crisis go to waste.

draw_down 3y ago
[dead]
jklinger410 3y ago
The drive to cut staff was to push for a recession, and that was always clear. This same argument is being used to say wages or COVID relief are driving inflation. The argument about what is causing our current inflation is a battleground for class warfare. But we don't talk about things in that context in this country, because the war (and almost every single battle) is being won by the rich.
- boringg 3y ago
  I think you misunderstand. The reason people cut staff was fear of the upcoming recession as a result of the overnights rates going up. It still might happen as it is clear people are feeling the pinch of the rates. Your argument is a bit of a stretch. Class warfare is some strong rhetoric that I don't think many people have adopted.
  - burkaman 3y ago
    https://twitter.com/FinancialReview/status/1701440109948887057 https://twitter.com/FinancialReview/status/17014401099488870...

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

>Late 2022 Satya started taking about overall employment at Tech companies dropping due to AI. He said something like ‘Tech employment overall will grow but employment at tech companies will shrink’. Normally, I am blase on the predictions that AI will replace dev jobs, but when one of the people saying this also happens to be one of the people with real power to make it happen I stand up and take notice. Yikes.

burkaman 3y ago
What does that quote mean? How can tech employment grow if tech company employment is shrinking?
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  It's another riff on 'software is eating the world'. Lots of companies would like custom software to help run their business, but are not, in fact, tech companies. If AI makes writing this software cheaper, and there is higher elastic demand at this lower price, then you'll see more devs working for old fashioned non tech companies. Tech companies, meanwhile, can accomplish their goals with fewer employees, so the number of people working directly for FAANG companies will shrink. That's my take on his comment, anyway.
  - burkaman 3y ago
    Ok, that seems like generally a good thing for most of us? His prediction is that employment opportunities will increase, and there will be a much more diverse pool of companies you can choose to work at.
    - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
      It's mixed. The reason for higher demand would be lower cost. I.e. perhaps lower median wages for the vast majority of folks where we have a bimodal peak at tech companies who have a small percentage of overall workers.
    - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dirtybirdnj 3y ago

It's a class war. Lets call it what it is. One side is literally trying to kill the other. Whether you choke off oxygen or financial means to survival... you're killing people. One side is wealthy enough to engage in this for fun and entertainment. They are so disconnected from reality that their actions are justified and their ethics totally evaporated. How long till we conduct layoffs by allowing CEOs to meander open-floor offices and simply execute the employees they see as disposable?

marcinzm 3y ago
Class warfare against those making $400k/year...
- Dig1t 3y ago
  By those making many millions per year. Yes. They are two classes of people, albeit the 400k class is not the lowest on the totem pole.
- jwestbury 3y ago
  Yes, because we're threatening to become a true middle class again. Don't fool yourself: Software engineers are working class.
  - readthenotes1 3y ago
    Just because you work doesn't mean you're "middle class". If you're making $400k/year, you are upper class (on the income scale). $65k is the middle of "middle class".
    - seo-speedwagon 3y ago
      Your definition of “class” seems to be a kind of vague proxy for “income”. The original comment was using a more accurate definition aligning more with a capital vs labor distinction: are you paid in wages or are you paid in profits?

TradingPlaces 3y ago

>Everyone in the industry (except apple) was doing it so nobody wanted to go against the wisdom of the collective. Raising debt to finance things was really cheap (especially for Microsoft given our bond rating) so everyone in the industry began hiring and collecting employees like Pokémon cards. Except Apple.

Beached 3y ago
I mean Apple laid off recruiters and heavily slowed down hiring fall 2022, tried to force everyone back into offices and was.able to reap many resignations, and still laid off an undisclosed amount of working in the spring. it sounds like Apple did the same crap, just with better pr and more strategically.

Mistletoe 3y ago

Let’s take a less conspiratorial view and realize that when everyone showed they could work from home and clamored so vociferously for it to stay after the pandemic, that companies suddenly realized that meant you could pay someone across the world a lot cheaper for the same output, in their mind. https://www.cnbctv18.com/business/companies/google-microsoft-amazon-and-meta-are-hiring-low-paid-h1-workers-after-announcing-mass-layoffs-report-16697051.htm/ https://www.cnbctv18.com/business/companies/google-microsoft... I remember thinking “be careful what you are wishing for my dudes” when tech workers were loudly proclaiming how much work they could get done at home and never coming into the office. That office was your moat and now it’s gone.

rblatz 3y ago
| That office was your moat and now it’s gone. This seemed so obvious to me, and yet none of my colleagues would hear it when we discussed remote work.
cageface 3y ago
I’ve been working remote since 2010 with teams all over the world. People that are reliable and productive and that communicate well are very hard to find and are still in short supply. We made good money cleaning up messes caused by cheap offshoring deals.
batshit_beaver 3y ago
Imo, time zone, culture, language, data and privacy regulations are also moats, although being physically present helps a ton. I don't think there was anything stopping companies from outsourcing all engineering work pre-pandemic, but that model has been failing pretty consistently over the last couple decades.
stringsandchars 3y ago
> That office was your moat and now it’s gone. I don't think sitting in an office somewhere, with my headphones on is any kind of 'moat'. I'm judged on the quality and speed of work that I do. I'm also paid for understanding the underlying needs my company has for the application I'm building. I'm paid for the ideas I contribute, the work-culture I share, and for being present and consistent during work-hours - even though I work almost always from home. Twice in my career so far I've been involved in projects "paying someone across the world" for "the same output" and they were both total disasters: ending multiple-times over budget without even being completed. The time-difference alone would have been bad enough (where the feedback loop was often a couple of days even for the smallest change), but we found that the coders you were supposed to be dealing with would regularly be replaced, simply disappear altogether (sometimes reappearing in the project weeks later); the new developers would need to be re-briefed, and altogether the coordinating project manager halfway around the world would spend most of their time either bullshitting or stonewalling us. Payment, taxes and other problems all just added to the headaches. I don't mean that these developers were producing code that was lower quality (we barely saw enough to really judge), it's simply that working with someone "locally-remotely" is (almost literally) a world away from expecting to be able to just export that job to a low-wage coder in some other part of the globe.

FlyingSnake 3y ago

You can read the full tweet thread sans paywall here: https://nitter.net/TeamBlind/status/1706266044871086271 https://nitter.net/TeamBlind/status/1706266044871086271

hnisforfascists 3y ago

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FlyingSnake 3y ago

TL;DR 1. During early pandemic phase MS Sr. leadership correctly guessed that the demand will be sky high due to lockdowns. 2. Most leadership went overboard in memetic fashion and projected unrealistic and unsustainable growth numbers. Sane voices were ignored. 3. These numbers didn’t materialise and by mid ‘22 they made the mind to layoff people 4. OpenAI pulled a reverse MS-IBM on MS and Satya and others were enamoured by ChatGPT demo. 5. Investors saw the rapid hiring as diluting the stock value and backed the layoffs. 6. Layoffs happen and thousands are caught in that turmoil.

jdright 3y ago

related to oberall discussion:https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-meta-big-tech-companies-rehire-workers-employees-laid-off-2023-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-meta-big-tech-com...

octacat 3y ago

> Everyone in the industry (except apple) was doing it so nobody wanted to go against the wisdom of the collective. The main reason. Same with the hiring boom, same with the firing boom.

RajT88 3y ago

It's funny - how the author claimed he got shouted down when he started posting to Blind about the layoffs. Every single day of the week, people are posting on blind about upcoming RIF's. People have RIF fatigue. It's a case of "boy who cried wolf" and not the fault of the author, that's just how Blind is.

hedora 3y ago

This is coordinated cost cutting across the largest employers during a time of record profitability. The goal of this is explicitly to use their monopsony power to transfer wealth from the workers to the investors at the expense of product quality (since they will lose some people that they need to keep the lights on). These firms also happen to hold monopolies in many areas, so the amount of product enshitification the market will bear is practically unlimited. The wage fixing and enshitification halves of this scheme are probably both in violation of anti-trust law, though enforcement of the law in either way would probably be novel. Here's a long writeup showing how Amazon (accidentally?) pioneered industry-wide wage suppression for minimum-wage workers. I'm beginning to wonder if twitter was a dry run for the rest of the industry. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2598&context=law_and_economics https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... > As one industry analyst noted, “Amazon is almost becoming like the negotiator for all hourly wage workers to a certain extent.”90 It is tempting to argue that this is good for workers. But Amazon is an employer, not a union. While it is true that workers benefit when Amazon enters a labor market, Amazon has every incentive to use its wage leadership to ensure that a cartel wage is maintained rather than the competitive wage.

acjohnson55 3y ago

If you don't know, now you know. I think it's important that people understand what drives labor strategy within industry. First of all, you should understand how your salary gets paid, as a tech worker. Much of the tech industry is unprofitable, so where does the money come from? It comes from the investments into the company. That money comes from venture capitalists, but not out of their actual pockets. Their money comes from their limited partners -- pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, insurance companies, etc. Even when it comes to profitable companies, like Microsoft, folks should understand that the people who pull the strings in the industry are the investors. AKA the owners of the company. Yesterday's investors generally get paid by tomorrow's. When there's uncertainty of future investment, things change real quick. For a long period of time, we were in a zero-interest rate regime, and the investor class was obsessed with growth, over all else. Capital is easy to come by when interest rates are low, so the game they are playing is to try to pick sectoral winners, and worry about profitability in the long run. You can't win in the market without the best talent, and so there was an arms race to acquire that talent. Investors will endure dilution from employee stock grants as long as the growth makes up for it. When interest rates started increasing, to combat inflation, everything changed. Capital was no longer cheap and businesses needed to be able to become self-sustaining, or risk going bankrupt. It's hard to overstate how sharp a change this was from years of declining interest rates. Some leaders of companies are sociopaths, and others are great humans. In the end, both types of leaders need to be responsive to three forces: capital markets, supply chain markets, and customer markets. The latter two are peculiar to each business, but the macro capital market dynamics are pretty much shared. And that's why it seems like we've seen herd behavior among investors and executives. But I think it's important to be able to parse between what behaviors is vicious/selfish/exploitative vs. that which responding to changing market forces. I do think that when it's all said and done, we'll see which CEOs are actually able to guide their companies to produce value, and which CEOs just know how to do well with a tailwind.

kridsdale3 3y ago
Buffet's "When the tide goes out" line is something I thought of often during our Bull Decade. It guided my choices of employers. I missed out on some sexy trends by only ever choosing to go with extremely profitable monopolists, and within those companies I always try to be a key player on a project that leadership knows is what funds the crew on their yachts. It's my own insurance policy. I started my career in 2008, and I talked to a lot of guys who started theirs in 2000. I have played defensively since then. It's worked out pretty well to be conservative.

metaphor 3y ago

Disappointed that discussion has regressed into a naive "class war" narrative while no one is talking about the face value business implications of § 174 [1] now that the handout bankrolled by 2017 TCJA [2] is nerfed and tax code no longer permits outright expensing of software development. [1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-26/chapter-I/subchapter-A/part-1/subject-group-ECFRcc67ec453a5e514/section-1.174-2 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-26/chapter-I/subchapter-A... [2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/te...

kevingadd 3y ago
I've seen a ton of different opinions on these changes but every startup techie/indie dev I've talked to got different answers from their accountant. Mine said I was fine. Is there a basis for arguing 174/TCJA are why these layoffs happened?

itissid 3y ago

If your firm cannot afford >= 400K salary engineers you will/cannot be big tech(not in the US). Good Engineers(in the US, EU etc) who command this will leave. You can be a dollar printing tech company and have good engineers but you can't be small. A lot of the economy and US tech dominance is alive because of such jobs and the larger ecosystem of evaluations(linked to GDP) that support this. At the macro level the size of big tech is supported by evaluations: "How much it would cost to make the same thing?". This evaluation includes payroll costs. Those payroll costs are kept artificially high so that evaluations(in dollars) are high. the obscene salaries also keep the $ cost that companies charge for products, goods and services((daycare, medicine, labor, homes)) high which keep the evaluation high. You need the high evaluation to award Engineers wanting all those 400K+ salaries. Also at this macro level the dollarized based evaluation is critical because with US's dollar dominance it can just spend to eliminate any and all competition. The government can borrow endlessly by selling debt(or so it seems). So the key support thesis behind big tech is that if you can keep enough people, rich enough they will continue to buy and spend to support dollar evaluation of companies. The moment that is in jeopardy people(WS investors, Vice President of XYZ etc) will come out and defend it.

boringg 3y ago

Am I the only one who sees this random thread of anonymously sourced content from Blind with a lot of salt? It lacks any credibility.

nvm0n2 3y ago

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