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> It seems like 5%/year is sort of industry norm. That's because the people running these companies learned the hard way not to write their collusion down, so
by Lammy 9mo ago
> It seems like 5%/year is sort of industry norm.
That's because the people running these companies learned the hard way not to write their collusion down, so now they just all totally coincidentally act in the same way that ends up driving wages down and keeping workers afraid and in line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- joe_mamba 9mo agoIt's not some global conspiracy, it just aligns with the end of the ZIRP era. Companies could ignore headcount and hire endlessly just to singla growth to investors, while free money was raining from the sky.
- dingaling 9mo agoAmazon made $17.4 billion profit in Q3 2025 alone. That is, they made so much money they couldn't find any way to spend over five BILLION per month even with this 'excess' headcount.
- readthenotes1 9mo agoAre you saying they should be a charity? Or is this like the old Soviet Union thing where people said they pretended to pay us and we pretended to work?
- joe_mamba 9mo ago>Amazon made $17.4 billion profit in Q3 2025 alone. I think investors would prefer if they made $20 billion profit next quarter. Hence the layoffs.
- loeg 9mo agoWhy would you explain this with a conspiracy theory of collusion instead of Occam's razor -- that they were responding to similar changes in market conditions, with input from similar shareholders?
- Lammy 9mo agoPlease stop validating the language of the oppressors
- groundzeros2015 9mo agoCan you defend your point?
- Lammy 9mo agoThey literally got caught colluding to depress wages. You're a fool if you expect that their goals have changed.
- zaphirplane 9mo agooccam isn’t a law of nature, it’s an expression or a sharp quip I don’t see a conspiracy here other than sheep herd mentality of hire hire hire then too many
- keeda 9mo agoThis is not a conspiracy theory, even though what I'm about to say will sound like it. If you can talk to someone from the exec class in confidence (which unfortunately may require a close personal relationship or high trust), they'll tell you there was a clear -- if somewhat tacit -- understanding that the job market had gotten too hot during Covid and something "had to be done" about it after ZIRP ended. Elon's layoffs at Twitter were basically the signal for the rest of the industry that it's time to reverse the trend.
- loeg 9mo agoResponding to identical market conditions in similar ways based on input from overlapping shareholders does not require collusion between execs.
- keeda 9mo agoRight, but I'm contending there is a form of collusion. Here's a paraphrased conversation I had with someone who's in the exec class when I remarked on all the layoffs happening at the same time: "Elon has signaled to the industry that you can layoff a 80% of your employees and things will still be OK, and the rest of the industry is following his lead." When I pointed out that that wasn't true, things were actually getting rather bad amongst the employees and from a product quality / safety perspective, the response was, "It doesn't matter. They've all decided the status quo must change and decided that they want to do the same things." This rhymes with what I heard from other senior people as well. And suspiciously the same anti-employee tactics have been happening across the industry at the same time -- layoffs, forced attrition, shifting jobs offshore, RTO, increased workloads with reducing headcount leading to record levels of burnout... Even if we charitably assume it's group-think, that's still a form of collusion.