7 ms·

It's #3 - it's always #3. All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhirin

• givemeethekeys 6mo ago
  Where did all the extra employees come from? Did this result in shortages in other industries that the employees supposedly transitioned from?
  • baxtr 6mo ago
    Other industries and other countries. Until recently, other industries were struggling very hard to find developers for example.
  • hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
    These West Coast tech companies had some of the highest salaries on the planet, so yes, they took employees from other locales/areas. But also, while there have been layoffs in engineering teams, Ive seen a lot of "support staff" get absolutely obliterated. Things like "agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers, marketing roles, etc. etc. While I've seen most of my laid off soft engineer friends find new jobs relatively quickly, I've seen lots of folks in these other roles suffer long bouts of unemployment, and often leave tech entirely. It's these folks I feel the most for. A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.
    • AbbeFaria 6mo ago
      My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value. And the QA is usually outsourced to service companies like MindTree, TCS etc anyway. Lot of these companies are bloated from having way too many Engineers anyway. Once you have mature software that brings in bagfuls of money, you don’t need that many people to keep the ship steady. I have seen this first hand at MSFT, we started a new team back in 2019 and it probably had ~40 people full time across US and India. By 2024 when I left, we had about 20 people in India who could easily run the service, the US team was dissolved and they moved to other teams in MSFT. The fact was that new features were few and the team was in KTLO mode. I have seen the reverse happen too, the team I was working on was dissolved and we were moved to different teams and everything moved to the US last year, managers were converted to ICs and a few folks were probably fired but it was a ~10 year old service that didn’t need that many people to run, even more so after AI tools became big last year.
      • Schlagbohrer 6mo ago
        What do you think about Cory Doctorow's theory that the AI produced code is going to come back to bite companies due to tech debt / unmaintainability? I am skeptical of Doctorow's theory because it looks like LLMs will continue to improve enough over the near term to be able to handle issues caused by AI-written code from the past few years.
        • byzantinegene 6mo ago
          the near term is not an issue, because most ai code is still reviewed by experienced engineers with experience. the problem comes in the future where junior engineers who never acquired enough experience to handle engineering problems
          • lazide 6mo ago
            Ain’t nobody reviewing the majority of vibe coded output.
  • michaelt 6mo ago
    Pulled from other technical fields, leading to them having an ageing workforce and struggling against far-eastern competitors. If an engineering graduate has a chance to make $0.8X at a US company that makes hobby drones, $0.9X at a US company that develops 3D printers, $1X at a US carmaker that's struggling to develop a good EV, or $1.5X at a US adtech company - you can imagine where they end up.
  • hnfong 6mo ago
    IIRC, CS majors in universities grew a lot over the past 2 decades in particularly past couple years. It can be argued that the demand for graduates in other industries might have stagnated or even dropped, and it's "spread over" many different industries, so it's not really that seriously felt. But if you were hiring in the software industry during the covid peak years, you would seriously feel the shortage. I used to interview candidates in a FAANG, and at some point it was more likely than not that a candidate that we liked and prepared to make an offer would tell us they already accepted an offer from another FAANG...
    • smm11 6mo ago
      You guys weren't very good, then.
    • nradov 6mo ago
      There was never any shortage. Your company wasn't good at recruiting, or moved too slowly, or had a bad reputation, or was making low offers.
  • steveBK123 6mo ago
    My observation is mag7 got less picky in hiring. Post-2015 and accelerated during Covid, many east coast techies I knew that didn’t go to the right school, get a 4.0 and take the “right path” suddenly started popping up on my LinkedIn ad having joined a mag7. And then everyone else lower on the food chain got even less picky. And then we had the whole PM / DS / etc new job path fads that pulled in non-CS and sometimes non-STEM people who did a bootcamp.
• sulam 6mo ago
  Stadia was a minor footnote compared to Android, Pixel, and the other large organizations at Google. But there was plenty of hiring there during the pandemic, so your broader point is not wrong.
  • mghackerlady 6mo ago
    the only thing I miss about stadia was the controller. Man, that was a nice controller. Also, playing games on a nest hub was a neat party trick
• konschubert 6mo ago
  > In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere I think it is hard to overstate the effect that Waymo will have.
  • oblio 6mo ago
    1. If it scales worldwide. There's a decent chance that considering current global geopolitics, China will never allow them in, India and the EU will probably do the same or favor local competitors, Africa/Latin America will probably not have the money to tier 1 markets, which kind of leaves the US + Anglosphere. 2. If it captures most of the transportation market. That's debatable because self-driving tech works even better for trains, trams, subways, buses, etc. And that's before we go into other self-driving car companies. 3. If it becomes truly production ready within the next 10 years or so. By "truly production ready" I mean a Uber/taxi competitor in at least 20 alpha global cities outside of the US. Otherwise yeah, it's going to be a great tech but with a 30+ years ROI.
    • konschubert 6mo ago
      I didn’t say that Waymo will be a commercial success or that there won’t be copycats more successful. But waymo created the category by showing it is possible.
• compounding_it 6mo ago
  > notable exception of Apple I don’t think Apple is an exception. I think they have also over hired but they are also scaling, albeit slower than they used to. The scaling elsewhere is not happening, especially meta where they are trying to extract money from every corner they can find out of desperation, and so the books need to become lighter. For Apple, hiring more than they need can be soaked into the books because their sales and profits keep increasing, though the rate of growth has slowed. However, if it’s an expense that can be avoided, then it’s an expense that should be avoided.
• ninjagoo 6mo ago
  > here are 2 main drivers of these layoffs: > 1. Correcting pandemic overhiring > 2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long? > speculative bets that never went anywhere ... think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself Organizations make speculative bets all the time. Is there an accounting of the profitability of Alexa/Nest etc.? > end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects if you plug in the years 2020-2026 in the Fed Rate - Unemployment chart here at [1], it shows that from 2020 - 2022, rates were near zero while unemployment spiked during Covid and then fell. From 2022 through 2023, rates rose sharply while unemployment stayed relatively low. 2024-2025 the labor market softened. You can add the Federal Funds Effective Rate and the Unemployment Rate easily through the menu. Unemployment stayed low through the rise in rates for almost two years prior to 2024. Given that companies operate on a quarterly reporting basis and program/project decisions are at least on that cadence, I don't think that the line you're suggesting that Rates-Go-Up -> Projects-Get-Killed -> Layoffs-Increase quite lines up with the economy-wide data in this exceptional case of 2022-2023. We may have to look elsewhere for the reasons behind the current labor market weakness ... cough..*economy*..*trade walls*..cough...*structural re-alignment* [2]...cough... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1duFv https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1duFv [2] 6% employment decline in 22-25 year old workers https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/CanariesintheCoalMine_Nov25.pdf https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...
  • trgn 6mo ago
    agreed. zirp has become a meme, it does not really explain any current dynamics.
  • malfist 6mo ago
    How many hall passes do CEOs get for pandemic over hiring? Its been four years, and four years of layoffs and hiring to go back to layoffs. Pandemic over hiring might explain the first layoff or two a year or so later, but not the tenth or so layoff nearly half a decade later.
• basisword 6mo ago
  Re: pandemic overhiring - haven't most of the big tech companies already corrected for that? Starting in 2022 we've seen very large rounds of layoffs multiple times a year. That's 3-4 years of layoffs now. Meta alone has laid off over 30k people since 2022, not to mention closing many open roles.
• canes123456 6mo ago
  It’s weird though because they could just cut the whole metaverse and it would matter exponentially more for profits and Wall Street. Maybe that is what this layoff is but I doubt it. They already laid off 10% of reality labs this year. Why do that if they were going to kill it completely. There also no financial reason to lay off people. The revenue and profit for employee is already way better than per 2020 levels. I suspect it really is to pour more money into AI capex.
• 52-6F-62 6mo ago
  But do you really think they accidentally over-hired to the tune of tens of thousands of individuals? Across these companies the numbers are close to 100,000 people. Maybe much more. That means that a large number of high ranking people in these companies projected they would need these people in the coming years, and then some. I think it may be darker than that, and the overhiring was a tentative measure to build up a charge, like electrons in a capacitor, to release a shock to the market that would achieve two aims: 1) drive salaries down through fear and contest 2) reduce the bargaining power of employees (software engineers were starting to look to unionizing in the past 5 years especially and that has gone deathly quiet even though working conditions have worsened and demands have increased on 'ICs') It's rudimentary electronics physics. Such physics is regularly applied to economic systems modelling to achieve predictable outcomes (usually making more money). Any objection as to whether these companies executive teams were collaborating should be seen as very empty by now, given we know they are all deeply circularly invested in each other and thus are bound to each other's success or failure.
  • ptdorf 6mo ago
    Keeping your employees on their toes can work in the short term. On the long term, prolonged stress kills innovation and engagement.
• ValentineC 6mo ago
  > Amazon's Alexa devices division Alexa devices had so much potential, if they'd only practised customer obsession like Amazon used to (still?) preach, and not stuff their products with ads.
  • hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
    How? Potential as cool devices, sure. Potential to make money though?? Nobody has really figured out how to make money from voice-only assistants.