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This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in

This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in a minute or two). > For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool. Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed? It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. Yes, they want to hire the best engineers they can find and they will pay handsomely for it. Every company (even our small non-profit) wants to hire the best engineers we can find. It's not "corporate greed" or us wanting to control the talent pool.

ecb_penguin 1y ago
Sure, all those things could be "corporate greed". Opposite actions in different environments don't change the intent. > Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences. > blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? They explained their argument. > Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably. > Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? They explained their argument in the article > Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed? It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
- tickettotranai 1y ago
  If your framing is unfalsifiable, I question its utility.
  - antonvs 1y ago
    They're identifying a driving force, greed, behind a range of actions. That's no more "unfalsifiable" than the claim that gravity is variously responsible for objects falling, orbits, spherically symmetric bodies, and stars collapsing.
    - afthonos 1y ago
      So what would be impossible to explain in a world where “corporate greed” is indeed what causes all these things? The answer can’t be “nothing”—or “corporate greed” doesn’t mean anything. I can say, for example, that under gravity, an object will not accelerate upwards when entering else stays down; if you show me that happening, I either have to say gravity didn’t cause it, or that gravity is not what we thought it was (and we should probably get a new word for whatever it has).
      - antonvs 1y ago
        Any corporate behavior that doesn’t lead fairly directly to increased share price, profit, revenues, or market share would qualify. But in the American corporate model, corporations almost by definition don’t do muck of that, because there’s an entrenched belief that increasing shareholder value is their primary mission. Positions to the contrary, like https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v..., are not widely understood or accepted.
        thelaxiankey2 1y ago
        The argument your link suggests is legal, not empirical. Legally speaking, there is no mandate, and acting like there is is almost surely bad for society. So I don't disagree there. And as to the existence of exceptions, that is what makes humanities hard. Unlike physics, it is never all, it's always most, it's always shades and never direct. I use absolutist words in these discussions because it makes the points stick better, but I obviously do not mean them totally. I think corporations maximizing profit is the default, and so writing an op-ed about how corporate greed caused something to happen seems pretty dumb to me.
- ttoinou 1y ago
  It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably. Is the argument against layoffs purely based on the stock market value of the company ? That sounds very reductive
  - dietr1ch 1y ago
    Google's 2023 layoffs was pure for stock market as Google was pressured to do what everyone else was doing (like, no one got fired for buying IBM). After the layoffs the stock went up, and I remember people compiled data to try figure out the reasoning behind it without much success. It broke trust in the company and desire to work there, what for if the shareholders would be better off with the news of a new layoff? My manager who was doing a great job and took my team about 8mo to hire was laid off.
    - ttoinou 1y ago
      Oh, interesting. I meant the argument "they can afford it, they have enough money, look at the stock market", not "they are trying to save money and drive up their stock value"
- gruez 1y ago
  >> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? >It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably. >> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed? >It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably. So your logic is that it's "greed" to cut necessary expenses even if you can afford it? Does this extend to people? If some rich wall st banker decided to cancel his personal trainer because he realized that a group class basically does 90% of the job for half the price, is that greed? Or is there some sort of double standard against corporations?
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
    Per the banker analogy, it'd be like if the banker hired all of the personal trainers so other bankers wouldn't have access to them, give most of them nothing to do because it turns out the banker only needs one, and then fire them all once the other bankers won't be able to hire them as easily, all without any regard for the impact this strategy has on the trainers' lives and without being upfront and honest with the trainers about the strategy. Yes, that's greedy.
- yyyk 1y ago
  >A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? What happens when a company keeps redundant workforce? Ah, yes, 'Bullshit jobs'*. So there's no way to win here. Such pieces are much better understood from a class interest POV. * Also longterm damage to the economy from unused workforce.
danesparza 1y ago
Agreed. This article doesn't even touch on other factors like tax law changes that influenced corporate hiring (specifically for software development teams). That seems like a glaring omission.
bigbuppo 1y ago
The article is something known as "a blog post" with a bunch of words known as "an opinion". It's not a thorough economic analysis from an economist using validated data sources and empirical research backed by strict scientific rigor that passes all peer review but can't be repeated.
- johnfn 1y ago
  Are we not supposed to pass judgement on a blog post just because it's opinion-based? If I put the most nonsensical opinions into my blog post, I hope people tell me that it's not very good.
- szundi 1y ago
  Parent commenter presents perfect arguments to show this opinion or whatever it is is based on questionable grounds
- freedomben 1y ago
  I don't disagree, but I also don't think that gives the article a pass to make whatever claims they want without getting any pushback. Especially where they posted it to HN, they should be expecting to be challenged. I could (and probably should) have been nicer instead of calling it "terrible", but I don't think we (a site like HN dedicated to intellectual curiosity) should give bad claims a pass just because they are "opinion." We don't let journalists make unsubstantiated factual claims that are self-contradictory just because they listed it under the "opinion" section of the paper/site, and I don't think we should have different standards for a self-published piece. I'm not advocating censoring it or taking it down, I'm just critiquing it.
  - bigbuppo 1y ago
    Where is your peer-reviewed research that shows your opinion on this is correct? Do you have the numbers to back that up? Is there any verified source of data that says, "I love it when the people of HN find my blog post and start screaming at me for shit that doesn't matter."
sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
> This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will. It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said? Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.
- freedomben 1y ago
  > The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will. If you posted a comment on HN making huge claims with no evidence, it would be pushed back on. That happens constantly. You can say, "well, that's just like, my opinion, man" and that's fine, but I could easily say, "I think there's a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbiting the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars" and offer no evidence, and reply identically. Does that magically put my comment above criticism? > It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said? I agree my language was a little harsh and I could have been nicer. However, there are mountains of comments like "this is a terrible take" on HN comments all the time and they don't get flagged as long as they offer some justification (and otherwise follow the guidelines). If that was all I said, then that's a terrible comment and should be flagged, but I did offer some justification. > Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you. Great point. So should I stop trying to think critically and just accept any opinion without questioning? Or is it just the discussion around it that offends you? What is the bar for critical thinking? 95th percentile in intelligence? 99th? Below that we should shut our brains off and accept whatever we see on the internet?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
    You can do all that without being dismissive and telling everyone the post "isn't worth reading" (while believing your comment is).
johnfn 1y ago
+1 "Corporate greed" is a thought-terminating cliché. Why did "corporate greed" start happening all of the sudden? Why did those companies overhire, and why aren't they doing that any more - did the corporate greed go away? I suspect that what OP nebulously refers to as "corporate greed" is actually multifactorial - a behavior determined by a complex interaction of incentives and factors. Someone else mentioned tax law changes, which is an obvious one. Can we think of more?
- bryan_w 1y ago
  Cost of capital
netcan 1y ago
The hyperbole and cliche (corporate greed) makes this trashy, but let me fix it... Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum. So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thrown at them that it can start to get wonky. If you are actually hiring up to the point where the marginal 300k engineer causes a net loss of output (not just profit)... you are well into territory that just sucks. That kind of thing happens... and thats also where some of the highest salaries and best talent is. That said... I think AI projects have been a steam valve. This was worse 5 years ago.
- bluetomcat 1y ago
  Big Tech drove us towards techno-feudalism. It's a wider social phenomenon and their hiring patterns for programmers are only one aspect of the problem. Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their rules, or else they go bust. Programmers are forced to learn their APIs, so that their "app" can live in their walled gardens. They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines. This is a huge opportunity cost to society - that talent could be doing great creative stuff for small and medium-sized businesses instead.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their rules, or else they go bust. Programmers are forced to learn their APIs, so that their "app" can live in their walled gardens. ??? What are you talking about? For a typical fullstack app the proprietary bits probably account for less than 5% of the codebase. >They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines. That's just PR/advertising/sales. If the companies didn't exist it's not like those job or efforts will disappear, they'll be allocated elsewhere, classified ads in newspapers for instance.
graemep 1y ago
> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Both can be true depending in circumstances. The management of companies are primarily motivated by increasing their share price, as that is what remuneration is most commonly linked to, nor profits. For example, by options. When things are good they will over hire to make future growth look at good as possible, to increase investor confidence. When things are bad they will be focused on making numbers look better in the short term.
- freedomben 1y ago
  I don't disagree, but then it seems like the definition of "greed" that you are using is essentially synonymous with "running a company." If we want to use that definition, then the claims become true, but the term "greed" also becomes meaningless as it applies to everything we as humans do. "Greed" becomes the motivation behind why I took two slices of pizza instead of one, or why I turn the thermostat down in the winter to use less fuel (and thus save money), or why I turn the thermostat up in the winter (to get more comfortable, even though I'm using more gas). We greedily want to stay alive, so we use resources to procure food at the expense of other living creatures. For that matter, all life on the planet is driven by greed.
  - graemep 1y ago
    I do not think it is synonymous. Running a company means pursuing profits, but it does not mean you have to ignore all other considerations. You can have ethical limits, server customers, look after the interests of your employees, reduce your environmental impacts etc. Greed means running a company without due consideration of these things. IN this case the explanation I am suggesting is even less synonymous because by putting short boosts to the share price over long term profitability is not (in the long term) even serving the best interests of the shareholders.
j45 1y ago
Over hiring junior talent to keep talent off the market away from competitors was a known behaviour as well.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  Well, it was a widely and strongly suspected behavior. It was never proven, to the best of my knowledge.
  - j45 1y ago
    Yeah, seems like a behaviour that increased during ZIRP and started reversing when that went way. At the least it might have been let people grow as much as they can because the money's so cheap, maybe anything is better than nothing. It's too bad though where junior devs couldn't get access to senior mentoring capacity that might have been needed.
ManlyBread 1y ago
>This is a really terrible article. I am coming here less and less because it's either the AI spam or low quality blogposts like these, with very few worthwhile articles in between.
nullc 1y ago
> It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. I mean, for years Apple, Google, and others illegally colluded to rig wages... though I suspect the author was referring to the period of time after that as wages didn't skyrocket until the wage fixing ring collapsed.
benreesman 1y ago
TFA is largely vibes, the angst it expresses is about real things but the analysis is to your point flawed in the details. Here's a better one. The foundational technologies that have enabled the current high-cap pool of companies to wield disproportionate power in every aspect of modern life and escalate their influence with each successive administration to the point where in 2025 that Inaugeration seating is a caricature of gilded-age trust kleptocracy were developed in robust public-private partnerships funded by a combination of the DoD, ATT / Western / the Labs, NASA, the University system and grants. The taxpayer bought a technology lead over the rest of the world with tax dollars. This gigantic pile of wealth in everything from semiconductors to software has been getting privatized by a handful of companies for coming up on 40 years in the more extreme cases, some newer entrants about 20 years ago. This materializes as things that used to belong to everyone (ARPANet becomes the Internet, big free democratic thing) getting captured, controlled, and treated like the personal property of a small number of feudalist organizations masquerading as publicly traded companies on a stock market (dual-class share structures that have shared and market caps but no shareholder governance would be a good example). This group of people has had one nasty thorn in their side: their most scarce input was elite engineers, a notoriously prickly bunch as concerns unaccountable authority, and having this group of people as a key input led to both considerable pricing power in the hands of someone else, and being at the mercy of a weirdly principled group of people who don't necessarily share the agendas of a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. Thus, this cabal has run headlong into multiple rounds of prosecution by the Federal Department of Justice, who incidentally has to decide that something is serious enough to take limited resources off of chasing drug dealers and terrorists. They were most recently successfully prosecuted in 2012. In 2025, engineers everywhere are pretty pissed off about a pretty clearly bogus cover story that's really about this group of companies/lifetime-CEO-boy-kings trying again in a time friendlier to law-buying and other sanctioned law-breaking to break the back once and for all of one of the last truly upwardly mobile professions in the United States. There. FTFY.
- freedomben 1y ago
  Definitely a much better article :-) I largely (maybe entirely) agree with your analysis. I also have a large amount of anger against big tech for many of these things and think they more than deserve the criticism. Just how they've steered the internet toward their own control is enough to fill me with rage. That's before I go off on a rant about how they are locking down devices and treating the users (ostensibly the device "owner" as a primary security threat). That said I wouldn't describe what you described as "greed" but there's plenty of room for equivocation over that (and to be clear, you didn't use the word greed even once and aren't depending on it, so the previous point is more about TFA). Appreciate the discussion!
at-fates-hands 1y ago
I'm not buying the idea that "corporate greed" led to over hiring to control the labor market. In fact, if the companies were really greedy, they would only hire the LEAST amount of developers and actually increase their bottom line and ergo, more profit for their shareholders. Which makes far more sense then expanding your overhead which actually reduces the amount of money your company profits.
neuroplots 1y ago
TFA is simplistic and combative, but not entirely incorrect. When companies are cash-rich, they hire generously but invest in vanity projects that do nothing for the careers of the people staffed in them. When they’re poor, they fire people and use the fear factor to extract even more work. This all said, it makes no sense to attack corporate greed without using the C word: Capitalism. Corporations do exactly what their owners designed them to do.
ponector 1y ago
> For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool I also don't buy this argument. They can control talent pool in some locations. But globally, their workforce is a drop in a bucket. I bet one TCS is bigger than all FAANGs by body count.
rozap 1y ago
Volatility caused by short term thinking is bad for workers. Over hiring and layoffs are a symptom of that. That being said, yes the article is just a rant. But that doesn't mean it's wrong generally. I think it ascribes a bit more intent than was actually present. I think big tech is more like a school of fish than an elite cabal of serious thinkers.

ecb_penguin 1y ago

Sure, all those things could be "corporate greed". Opposite actions in different environments don't change the intent. > Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences. > blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? They explained their argument. > Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably. > Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? They explained their argument in the article > Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed? It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.

tickettotranai 1y ago
If your framing is unfalsifiable, I question its utility.
- antonvs 1y ago
  They're identifying a driving force, greed, behind a range of actions. That's no more "unfalsifiable" than the claim that gravity is variously responsible for objects falling, orbits, spherically symmetric bodies, and stars collapsing.
  - afthonos 1y ago
    So what would be impossible to explain in a world where “corporate greed” is indeed what causes all these things? The answer can’t be “nothing”—or “corporate greed” doesn’t mean anything. I can say, for example, that under gravity, an object will not accelerate upwards when entering else stays down; if you show me that happening, I either have to say gravity didn’t cause it, or that gravity is not what we thought it was (and we should probably get a new word for whatever it has).
    - antonvs 1y ago
      Any corporate behavior that doesn’t lead fairly directly to increased share price, profit, revenues, or market share would qualify. But in the American corporate model, corporations almost by definition don’t do muck of that, because there’s an entrenched belief that increasing shareholder value is their primary mission. Positions to the contrary, like https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v..., are not widely understood or accepted.
      - thelaxiankey2 1y ago
        The argument your link suggests is legal, not empirical. Legally speaking, there is no mandate, and acting like there is is almost surely bad for society. So I don't disagree there. And as to the existence of exceptions, that is what makes humanities hard. Unlike physics, it is never all, it's always most, it's always shades and never direct. I use absolutist words in these discussions because it makes the points stick better, but I obviously do not mean them totally. I think corporations maximizing profit is the default, and so writing an op-ed about how corporate greed caused something to happen seems pretty dumb to me.
ttoinou 1y ago
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably. Is the argument against layoffs purely based on the stock market value of the company ? That sounds very reductive
- dietr1ch 1y ago
  Google's 2023 layoffs was pure for stock market as Google was pressured to do what everyone else was doing (like, no one got fired for buying IBM). After the layoffs the stock went up, and I remember people compiled data to try figure out the reasoning behind it without much success. It broke trust in the company and desire to work there, what for if the shareholders would be better off with the news of a new layoff? My manager who was doing a great job and took my team about 8mo to hire was laid off.
  - ttoinou 1y ago
    Oh, interesting. I meant the argument "they can afford it, they have enough money, look at the stock market", not "they are trying to save money and drive up their stock value"
gruez 1y ago
>> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? >It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably. >> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed? >It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably. So your logic is that it's "greed" to cut necessary expenses even if you can afford it? Does this extend to people? If some rich wall st banker decided to cancel his personal trainer because he realized that a group class basically does 90% of the job for half the price, is that greed? Or is there some sort of double standard against corporations?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
  Per the banker analogy, it'd be like if the banker hired all of the personal trainers so other bankers wouldn't have access to them, give most of them nothing to do because it turns out the banker only needs one, and then fire them all once the other bankers won't be able to hire them as easily, all without any regard for the impact this strategy has on the trainers' lives and without being upfront and honest with the trainers about the strategy. Yes, that's greedy.
yyyk 1y ago
>A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? What happens when a company keeps redundant workforce? Ah, yes, 'Bullshit jobs'*. So there's no way to win here. Such pieces are much better understood from a class interest POV. * Also longterm damage to the economy from unused workforce.

danesparza 1y ago

Agreed. This article doesn't even touch on other factors like tax law changes that influenced corporate hiring (specifically for software development teams). That seems like a glaring omission.

bigbuppo 1y ago

The article is something known as "a blog post" with a bunch of words known as "an opinion". It's not a thorough economic analysis from an economist using validated data sources and empirical research backed by strict scientific rigor that passes all peer review but can't be repeated.

johnfn 1y ago
Are we not supposed to pass judgement on a blog post just because it's opinion-based? If I put the most nonsensical opinions into my blog post, I hope people tell me that it's not very good.
szundi 1y ago
Parent commenter presents perfect arguments to show this opinion or whatever it is is based on questionable grounds
freedomben 1y ago
I don't disagree, but I also don't think that gives the article a pass to make whatever claims they want without getting any pushback. Especially where they posted it to HN, they should be expecting to be challenged. I could (and probably should) have been nicer instead of calling it "terrible", but I don't think we (a site like HN dedicated to intellectual curiosity) should give bad claims a pass just because they are "opinion." We don't let journalists make unsubstantiated factual claims that are self-contradictory just because they listed it under the "opinion" section of the paper/site, and I don't think we should have different standards for a self-published piece. I'm not advocating censoring it or taking it down, I'm just critiquing it.
- bigbuppo 1y ago
  Where is your peer-reviewed research that shows your opinion on this is correct? Do you have the numbers to back that up? Is there any verified source of data that says, "I love it when the people of HN find my blog post and start screaming at me for shit that doesn't matter."

sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago

> This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will. It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said? Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.

freedomben 1y ago
> The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will. If you posted a comment on HN making huge claims with no evidence, it would be pushed back on. That happens constantly. You can say, "well, that's just like, my opinion, man" and that's fine, but I could easily say, "I think there's a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbiting the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars" and offer no evidence, and reply identically. Does that magically put my comment above criticism? > It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said? I agree my language was a little harsh and I could have been nicer. However, there are mountains of comments like "this is a terrible take" on HN comments all the time and they don't get flagged as long as they offer some justification (and otherwise follow the guidelines). If that was all I said, then that's a terrible comment and should be flagged, but I did offer some justification. > Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you. Great point. So should I stop trying to think critically and just accept any opinion without questioning? Or is it just the discussion around it that offends you? What is the bar for critical thinking? 95th percentile in intelligence? 99th? Below that we should shut our brains off and accept whatever we see on the internet?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
  You can do all that without being dismissive and telling everyone the post "isn't worth reading" (while believing your comment is).

johnfn 1y ago

+1 "Corporate greed" is a thought-terminating cliché. Why did "corporate greed" start happening all of the sudden? Why did those companies overhire, and why aren't they doing that any more - did the corporate greed go away? I suspect that what OP nebulously refers to as "corporate greed" is actually multifactorial - a behavior determined by a complex interaction of incentives and factors. Someone else mentioned tax law changes, which is an obvious one. Can we think of more?

bryan_w 1y ago
Cost of capital

netcan 1y ago

The hyperbole and cliche (corporate greed) makes this trashy, but let me fix it... Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum. So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thrown at them that it can start to get wonky. If you are actually hiring up to the point where the marginal 300k engineer causes a net loss of output (not just profit)... you are well into territory that just sucks. That kind of thing happens... and thats also where some of the highest salaries and best talent is. That said... I think AI projects have been a steam valve. This was worse 5 years ago.

bluetomcat 1y ago
Big Tech drove us towards techno-feudalism. It's a wider social phenomenon and their hiring patterns for programmers are only one aspect of the problem. Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their rules, or else they go bust. Programmers are forced to learn their APIs, so that their "app" can live in their walled gardens. They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines. This is a huge opportunity cost to society - that talent could be doing great creative stuff for small and medium-sized businesses instead.
- gruez 1y ago
  >Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their rules, or else they go bust. Programmers are forced to learn their APIs, so that their "app" can live in their walled gardens. ??? What are you talking about? For a typical fullstack app the proprietary bits probably account for less than 5% of the codebase. >They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines. That's just PR/advertising/sales. If the companies didn't exist it's not like those job or efforts will disappear, they'll be allocated elsewhere, classified ads in newspapers for instance.

graemep 1y ago

> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Both can be true depending in circumstances. The management of companies are primarily motivated by increasing their share price, as that is what remuneration is most commonly linked to, nor profits. For example, by options. When things are good they will over hire to make future growth look at good as possible, to increase investor confidence. When things are bad they will be focused on making numbers look better in the short term.

freedomben 1y ago
I don't disagree, but then it seems like the definition of "greed" that you are using is essentially synonymous with "running a company." If we want to use that definition, then the claims become true, but the term "greed" also becomes meaningless as it applies to everything we as humans do. "Greed" becomes the motivation behind why I took two slices of pizza instead of one, or why I turn the thermostat down in the winter to use less fuel (and thus save money), or why I turn the thermostat up in the winter (to get more comfortable, even though I'm using more gas). We greedily want to stay alive, so we use resources to procure food at the expense of other living creatures. For that matter, all life on the planet is driven by greed.
- graemep 1y ago
  I do not think it is synonymous. Running a company means pursuing profits, but it does not mean you have to ignore all other considerations. You can have ethical limits, server customers, look after the interests of your employees, reduce your environmental impacts etc. Greed means running a company without due consideration of these things. IN this case the explanation I am suggesting is even less synonymous because by putting short boosts to the share price over long term profitability is not (in the long term) even serving the best interests of the shareholders.

j45 1y ago

Over hiring junior talent to keep talent off the market away from competitors was a known behaviour as well.

AnimalMuppet 1y ago
Well, it was a widely and strongly suspected behavior. It was never proven, to the best of my knowledge.
- j45 1y ago
  Yeah, seems like a behaviour that increased during ZIRP and started reversing when that went way. At the least it might have been let people grow as much as they can because the money's so cheap, maybe anything is better than nothing. It's too bad though where junior devs couldn't get access to senior mentoring capacity that might have been needed.

ManlyBread 1y ago

>This is a really terrible article. I am coming here less and less because it's either the AI spam or low quality blogposts like these, with very few worthwhile articles in between.

nullc 1y ago

> It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. I mean, for years Apple, Google, and others illegally colluded to rig wages... though I suspect the author was referring to the period of time after that as wages didn't skyrocket until the wage fixing ring collapsed.

benreesman 1y ago

TFA is largely vibes, the angst it expresses is about real things but the analysis is to your point flawed in the details. Here's a better one. The foundational technologies that have enabled the current high-cap pool of companies to wield disproportionate power in every aspect of modern life and escalate their influence with each successive administration to the point where in 2025 that Inaugeration seating is a caricature of gilded-age trust kleptocracy were developed in robust public-private partnerships funded by a combination of the DoD, ATT / Western / the Labs, NASA, the University system and grants. The taxpayer bought a technology lead over the rest of the world with tax dollars. This gigantic pile of wealth in everything from semiconductors to software has been getting privatized by a handful of companies for coming up on 40 years in the more extreme cases, some newer entrants about 20 years ago. This materializes as things that used to belong to everyone (ARPANet becomes the Internet, big free democratic thing) getting captured, controlled, and treated like the personal property of a small number of feudalist organizations masquerading as publicly traded companies on a stock market (dual-class share structures that have shared and market caps but no shareholder governance would be a good example). This group of people has had one nasty thorn in their side: their most scarce input was elite engineers, a notoriously prickly bunch as concerns unaccountable authority, and having this group of people as a key input led to both considerable pricing power in the hands of someone else, and being at the mercy of a weirdly principled group of people who don't necessarily share the agendas of a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. Thus, this cabal has run headlong into multiple rounds of prosecution by the Federal Department of Justice, who incidentally has to decide that something is serious enough to take limited resources off of chasing drug dealers and terrorists. They were most recently successfully prosecuted in 2012. In 2025, engineers everywhere are pretty pissed off about a pretty clearly bogus cover story that's really about this group of companies/lifetime-CEO-boy-kings trying again in a time friendlier to law-buying and other sanctioned law-breaking to break the back once and for all of one of the last truly upwardly mobile professions in the United States. There. FTFY.

freedomben 1y ago
Definitely a much better article :-) I largely (maybe entirely) agree with your analysis. I also have a large amount of anger against big tech for many of these things and think they more than deserve the criticism. Just how they've steered the internet toward their own control is enough to fill me with rage. That's before I go off on a rant about how they are locking down devices and treating the users (ostensibly the device "owner" as a primary security threat). That said I wouldn't describe what you described as "greed" but there's plenty of room for equivocation over that (and to be clear, you didn't use the word greed even once and aren't depending on it, so the previous point is more about TFA). Appreciate the discussion!

at-fates-hands 1y ago

I'm not buying the idea that "corporate greed" led to over hiring to control the labor market. In fact, if the companies were really greedy, they would only hire the LEAST amount of developers and actually increase their bottom line and ergo, more profit for their shareholders. Which makes far more sense then expanding your overhead which actually reduces the amount of money your company profits.

neuroplots 1y ago

TFA is simplistic and combative, but not entirely incorrect. When companies are cash-rich, they hire generously but invest in vanity projects that do nothing for the careers of the people staffed in them. When they’re poor, they fire people and use the fear factor to extract even more work. This all said, it makes no sense to attack corporate greed without using the C word: Capitalism. Corporations do exactly what their owners designed them to do.

ponector 1y ago

> For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool I also don't buy this argument. They can control talent pool in some locations. But globally, their workforce is a drop in a bucket. I bet one TCS is bigger than all FAANGs by body count.

rozap 1y ago

Volatility caused by short term thinking is bad for workers. Over hiring and layoffs are a symptom of that. That being said, yes the article is just a rant. But that doesn't mean it's wrong generally. I think it ascribes a bit more intent than was actually present. I think big tech is more like a school of fish than an elite cabal of serious thinkers.