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Ask HN: Why are big tech companies having mass layoffs?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are big tech companies having mass layoffs?

#71

Post by cratermoon »

jeffbee wrote: post #28
bell-cot wrote: post #3

Notice how badly the share prices of most such tech firms have fallen in the past year. Investors, Wall Street, and Boards of Directors are for-sure putting loads of pressure on tech firm CEO's to Do Something to fight that trend. Slashing some of the (supposed) payroll bloat that was built up "back when the living was easy" is a great way for a CEO to look like he's Doing Something.

Are we just looking at one year now? Shares of google have doubled in the past five years.

> Shares of google have doubled in the past five years

Doesn't matter. Investors care about the next quarter.

Re: Ask HN: Why are big tech companies having mass layoffs?

#72

Post by UncleMeat »

cratermoon wrote: post #70
UncleMeat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Getting rid of high-earners is more correct. Among the highest earners, they pick the bottom 10% of the performers. Or do some MBA-ish cost/productivity calculations and lay off based on some (probably nonsensical, for programmers) "valuation".

Also not what happened on my team. The system did not prioritize more senior vs more junior engineers (in terms of level). Nor did it prioritize people who had unusually large sign-on packages.

Re: Ask HN: Why are big tech companies having mass layoffs?

#73

Post by danaris »

lapcat wrote: post #17
mabbo wrote: post #8

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…

CEOs don't get laid off (or fired) for being wrong—not once, not a dozen times. At worst, they get sent off with golden parachutes when the company is doing flagrantly terribly, or they resign if they're hit by a scandal they can't just spin away.

There just aren't systems in place to evaluate CEO performance with anything remotely resembling objectivity. The job has become a way for rich people (on boards) to give their rich friends and colleagues another way to get richer and exercise unwarranted power.

Re: Ask HN: Why are big tech companies having mass layoffs?

#74

Post by yucky »

ergonaught wrote: post #30

"Safety in numbers" herd strategy. "Everyone else" is doing it, so they can "get away with it" now without as much "backlash" as they might otherwise experience. You will also sometimes see people referring to "bets that didn't pan out", but the more accurate term for the situation of having TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE as "bets that didn't pan out" is gross mismanagement and active negligence. Every one of these CEOs…

This sort of buries the lede though.

WHY they're laying off thousands isn't as important as HOW they're able to do that and still function. The reason tech companies are able to layoff all of these people is because they were so overly bloated and had too much deadweight.

When you can layoff tens of thousands of people and not miss a beat, maybe those people weren't adding much value to the company to begin with..?

Re: Ask HN: Why are big tech companies having mass layoffs?

#75

Post by Daishiman »

Silverback_VII wrote: post #66
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the main reason for the layoffs is AI accelerating jobs. As Sam Altman stated, programmers in the future will be much more productive than programmers today.

This is Altman selling snake oil. As of yet there is no evidence of this on anything beyond toy examples. And these gigantic codebases are anything but toys.

Re: Ask HN: Why are big tech companies having mass layoffs?

#76

Post by ergonaught »

yucky wrote: post #74
ergonaught wrote: post #30

"Safety in numbers" herd strategy. "Everyone else" is doing it, so they can "get away with it" now without as much "backlash" as they might otherwise experience. You will also sometimes see people referring to "bets that didn't pan out", but the more accurate term for the situation of having TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE as "bets that didn't pan out" is gross mismanagement and active negligence. Every one of these CEOs…

This sort of buries the lede though. WHY they're laying off thousands isn't as important as HOW they're able to do that and still function. The reason tech companies are able to layoff all of these people is because they were so overly bloated and had too much deadweight. When you can layoff tens of thousands of people and not miss a beat, maybe those people weren't adding much value to the company to begin with..?

No doubt, but I think that only reinforces "gross mismanagement and active negligence", and again, the CEOs should be out as a result, for cause and therefore without their "my family and I are even more permanently wealthy" severance packages.

Re: Ask HN: Why are big tech companies having mass layoffs?

#77

Post by bsg75 »

jollyllama wrote: post #42

10 years ago, they had access to cheap credit, offices full of people working hard 8 hours or more, solid product portfolios, no visible limits on growth, and foreign competition was weak. Fast forward to today. Credit is drying up. Devs feel entitled to WFH, and shorter work days (via WFH) and managers are nervous. Their products have regressed, they are actually worse than 10 years ago. Foreign firms like TikTok ar…

> Devs feel entitled to WFH, and shorter work days (via WFH) and managers are nervous.

_Shorter_ work days? If anything mine are longer, even considering time I no longer spend commuting.

Any Dev "entitled" to shorter work days seems unlikely to have a long tenure.

Source: Am manager, who codes 50% or more of my time. Nobody I work with feels "entitled" to work less.

Re: Ask HN: Why are big tech companies having mass layoffs?

#78

Post by jollyllama »

bsg75 wrote: post #77
jollyllama wrote: post #42

10 years ago, they had access to cheap credit, offices full of people working hard 8 hours or more, solid product portfolios, no visible limits on growth, and foreign competition was weak. Fast forward to today. Credit is drying up. Devs feel entitled to WFH, and shorter work days (via WFH) and managers are nervous. Their products have regressed, they are actually worse than 10 years ago. Foreign firms like TikTok ar…

> Devs feel entitled to WFH, and shorter work days (via WFH) and managers are nervous. _Shorter_ work days? If anything mine are longer, even considering time I no longer spend commuting. Any Dev "entitled" to shorter work days seems unlikely to have a long tenure. Source: Am manager, who codes 50% or more of my time. Nobody I work with feels "entitled" to work less.

A lot of people have posted here about how when the WFH they don't do a full eight hours, and because of that they say they would never not want the option to WFH. Ok, I'm not explicitly against that, but they should be arguing for a shorter work day. This then gets lumped together with people who feel entitled to WFH for other reasons.

Re: Ask HN: Why are big tech companies having mass layoffs?

#79

Post by s1artibartfast »

nickthegreek wrote: post #41
lapcat wrote: post #17

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 cost of being wrong in the other direction was a worse bet for them to make. Missing out on the growth was unthinkable to them. They would rather just fire thousands of workers than miss those possible profits.

I think this is the critical point. It's about if they thought it was likely to happen but if it could happen.

Maybe they thought it was only 5% likely, but still worth the risk and expenditure

Re: Ask HN: Why are big tech companies having mass layoffs?

#80

Post by ajoseps »

monocasa wrote: post #55
ReaLNero wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which game?

A bunch. 343 and Bethesda got hit particularly hard apparently.

was 343 considered that profitable? I always thought halo infinite was not panning out to be the live service they were shooting for, which to be fair, might be uncorrelated to how profitable they are.
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