61–70 of 94 posts
That some orgs overhired is not in question. What is _insane_ to me is that everyone being let go seems to be an engineer, while the DEI teams remain untouched. That section of the office sure seems to have a lot of free time, between shaming the rest of the company. Shows the power hierarchy I suppose. Wild world.
Engineers are probably a lot more expensive than a DEI employee
Does someone know a site where I can see the total number of employers of all major tech companies in time? I'm curious to see the difference between today and pre-covid, and also look for a correlation between headcount and market capitalization.
See above CNBC link.
All these post and articles should also mention what is the % of laid off people not only the absolute value, it's misleading.
Imagine for a moment you are the CEO and someone who may ultimately decide your pay or tenure asks “The future looks uncertain, what do you think?”. You’re very likely to think “I have no idea. I’ll ask the folks working for me.” and you do. You may get a mix of answers, a minority will be thoughtful but the majority will reflect the natural human tendency for self preservation, thinking along the lines of “Since the question was asked, it means I need to confirm the unstated assumption”, and be the one safe thing to say “We should cut spending”.
It’s just people being people.
This was even reinforced in the pandemic. Instead of worrying about all the fragilities exposed in society, the streched supply chains etc, this dramatic event was even turned into a tech positive (remote working etc). The tech sector was the only official speculative game in town (unofficially we also had crypto bubble) and management could get away with everything.
What happened since is not so much a recession but the invasion of Ukraine and the further disruption of global trade, inflation, simmering geopolitical tensions, acceptance of climate risk etc. Basically the virtual reality of tech got discounted in markets and people focus now on formerly unfashionable bricks and mortars.
So nothing personal or technically relevant, just stock prices, executive remuneration and incentives.
[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/comp?mod=market-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They all bet that this was a permanent 5-year jump-ahead. They were wrong This is the part that really needs explanation. How was every CEO of every major tech company wrong? Why aren't we having a big tech CEO layoff for massive wrongness? It certainly feels like there's a lot of groupthink here in any case. The Google severance looks pretty generous? That plus the last couple years of overhiring is going to end u…
The most favorable explanation is that they didn't really think it would be permanent. They just needed the headcount at the time, and they don't need it anymore. The rest is just marketing spin to not make it seem so bad. Now if they all balloon back up to the same headcount in the next year, but with lower salaries, then we will see if the real motive was to lower salaries. Someone had posted on another thread that…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They all bet that this was a permanent 5-year jump-ahead. They were wrong This is the part that really needs explanation. How was every CEO of every major tech company wrong? Why aren't we having a big tech CEO layoff for massive wrongness? It certainly feels like there's a lot of groupthink here in any case. The Google severance looks pretty generous? That plus the last couple years of overhiring is going to end u…
Two words. Record profits. https://fortune.com/2022/03/31/us-companies-record-profits-2... . Everyone saw an opportunity to make MORE money during the pandemic, and instead of focusing on long term health, focused on quarterly profits. This lead to massive expansion. The second answer is that these companies have mass layoffs every year. Are these really that abnormal, given the context of their mass hiring's the yea…
Amazon, Shopify, Wayfair, Google, Meta: all of these companies make money because e-commerce exists. The higher the proportion of all sales taking place on e-commerce, the more valuable the companies are. For Google and Meta, it's the advertising portion, but it's still impactful. If we track online sales as a proportion of all sales over the last 20 years, there's a pretty stable trend of increase. Then COVID hit, l…
> They all bet that this was a permanent 5-year jump-ahead. They were wrong This is the part that really needs explanation. How was every CEO of every major tech company wrong? Why aren't we having a big tech CEO layoff for massive wrongness? It certainly feels like there's a lot of groupthink here in any case. The Google severance looks pretty generous? That plus the last couple years of overhiring is going to end u…
The only job of the board of directors is to decide when to fire the CEO. (Waiting for Tesla's board to do their job..., but I digress)
Sure, capital is represented on the board, but what about labor? No representation, so a round of layoffs is not going to be a reason for this to happen.
Amazon, Shopify, Wayfair, Google, Meta: all of these companies make money because e-commerce exists. The higher the proportion of all sales taking place on e-commerce, the more valuable the companies are. For Google and Meta, it's the advertising portion, but it's still impactful. If we track online sales as a proportion of all sales over the last 20 years, there's a pretty stable trend of increase. Then COVID hit, l…
> They all bet that this was a permanent 5-year jump-ahead. They were wrong This is the part that really needs explanation. How was every CEO of every major tech company wrong? Why aren't we having a big tech CEO layoff for massive wrongness? It certainly feels like there's a lot of groupthink here in any case. The Google severance looks pretty generous? That plus the last couple years of overhiring is going to end u…
Like, it's reasonable for unprofitable companies to do layoffs. I can see investor pressure causing something similar in large public companies like Google and Amazon, even if they're profitable. But profitable private companies should be snapping up all the best talent now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big public companies need an excuse to fire as many people as they would "naturally" want to fire given 1. just how many people they hire, 2. how often those people turn out to be duds, and 3. how often they pivot strategies internally that no longer necessitate even better-performing people. They can't normally fire as many people as they want to fire, without looking bad / "appearing weak" and therefore losing stoc…
And yet, I'm looking at a team that was affected by layoffs where solid (or even high) performers were fired while also having been in meetings this week to discuss low performers who weren't fired. "Getting rid of duds" is clearly not what is happening, at least at Google.