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>In traditional industries like manufacturing you don’t hire 500 factory workers unless you have a production line that needs them. You don’t over-hire based on

• Bayramovanar 8mo ago
  Sure, factories also overhire sometimes or shrink their businesses but not at the scale or frequency we see in tech.
  • YetAnotherNick 8mo ago
    Manufacturing sector has the most job cuts over time because the prediction of China not surpassing them was wrong. Tech employment on the other hand almost never decreased.
    • paulnpace 8mo ago
      While the surpassing is true, something I've found interesting is that across very different industries that have nothing to do with one another, and including publicly traded and private (though still huge) companies, I have heard directly from buyers that top management has given them a directive to find new suppliers in China. From a supply chain management perspective, this does not make sense. The directive should be something like "find the best suppliers on the planet."
  • paulnpace 8mo ago
    I've never worked in tech, but I've worked at manufacturers of various different sizes and places in the manufacturing supply chain, including finished goods. Manufacturers can't hire beyond the places in production that someone can stand and do something. There needs to be some kind of equipment or process for worker to contribute in some meaningful way, even if it is merely for a projection of increased production (e.g., hiring a second shift for a facility currently running one shift). What I wonder is if in tech, the "equipment" is a computer that supports everything a developer needs. From there, new things can be added to the existing product. Manufacturing equipment is generally substantially more expensive than a computer and supporting software, though not always. Might this contribute to the differences, especially for manufacturing that normally runs 24-hour shifts?
  • ra 8mo ago
    that's true but does tech generally hold a more aggressive default-growth stance?
  • rcxdude 8mo ago
    Only because their margins usually mean that those who do go out of business much sooner.
• j05ev1f3 8mo ago
  The whole article rests on this false economic claim, that traditional industries don’t overhire based on expectations. They absolutely do, ALL THE TIME. Manufacturing, automotive, airlines, energy etc. all of them make demand bets and lay people off when those bets fail. Cheap money amplified this cycle, but this isn’t a tech specific "failure", it’s just how forecasting under uncertainty work. It’s incredible how some engineers assume they understand economics, then proceed to fail on some of its most basic premises. This tends to happen when engineering-style certainty is applied to systems that are driven by incentives and uncertainty.
  • Bayramovanar 8mo ago
    I will avoid getting into a “who understands economics better” debate. But factory workers usually require specialized machinery, tooling, and physical capacity, which makes overhiring slower, harder and more constrained. Those investments force more deliberate planning. By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie... That low marginal cost makes it far easier to hire aggressively on expectations and unwind just as aggressively when those expectations change.
    • thunky 8mo ago
      This, and I would also assume it's easier to spot idle factory employees, where idle devs (especially remote ones) can be easier to miss. And, (assumption again) the factory boss doesn't have an incentive to increase idle worker numbers, where a dev manager often benefits from being in charge of a larger number of hardly working people.
      • silvestrov 8mo ago
        It is a lot easier for a software engineer to overcomplicate things. All of a sudden it is no longer enough with a few shell scripts. No, we need a full kubernetes cluster to run a service used by 10 secretaries. No, we can't just use PostgreSQL as a queue, we definitely need Apache Kafka for 1 msg per second.
    • 8mo ago