Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 258 posts

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#131

Post by leroman »

plaidfuji wrote: post #9

My biggest question behind all of this is how interconnected is the tech bubble, and how self-perpetuating will a downturn be? The venture-backed startups that I’ve worked at have themselves utilized tools built by other venture-backed startups. It seems like there’s an entire cottage industry of SaaS tools designed to make it easier to scale up small companies. What will the effect of a startup downturn be on compan…

I’ve learned that B2B SaaS are actually a way to scale your company, there aren’t enough really good people to go around, so think of it as outsourcing good skills

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#132

Post by junofan »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #97
boringg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FED / SEC are completely different entities with completely different roles and market functions. It's like apples and oranges. And has nothing to do with a VAT tax. I am sorry, but your comment is almost incoherent - so my response is more of a broad general definition of what the Federal Reserve is doing to help you understand the macro context a bit more. As the Fed actions are intentionally moving the markets / e…

You are not addressing the fact that their lever deincentivize investment and therefore production, an argument worsening inflation and you are not addressing my point saying that VAT is obviously a direct measure to reduce demand, without impacting investment as directly, finally my VAT locality on the most critically underproducing sector yet non affecting the unaffected companies that produce just fine, is a third…

We have that. They’re called automatic stabilizers. There are a ton of them. For example, when people make more money, they pay a higher tax rate.

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#133

Post by dgfitz »

__alexs wrote: post #112
lumost wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have called Tech bubbles since 2012, There have been at least 2-3 similar sell-offs over the last decade that simply lead to higher tech valuations within a year or two. Hence the term "correction" is used, this also helps assuage nervous retail investors that another '01 or '08 crash isn't around the corner. The difference between then and now is that interest rates are blasting through the roof along with in…

> The difference between then and now is that interest rates are blasting through the roof along with inflation. The effective federal interest rate is 0.33% today. It was 2.4% before COVID...

> The effective federal interest rate is 0.33% today. It was 2.4% before COVID...

I believe it is actually over double that and sits around 0.84

https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/effr

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#134

Post by UncleOxidant »

nemo44x wrote: post #87
BoxOfRain wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What advice would you give to people who've not been in the tech industry during a recession yet?

Save money and have enough to live on for awhile. If you don't have savings then immediately cut your cost of living down. If you do lose your job then don't just accept anything (remember, you have savings + unemployment + severance to live on for awhile) and use this time to sharpen skills and learn new things. Make yourself more valuable. I can't see the future but I don't think it's going to be a bloodbath like t…

> I can't see the future but I don't think it's going to be a bloodbath like the .com crash

I think you're right, but I also think that we'll see a more general downturn than the .com crash was. Most people outside of tech didn't feel the .com crash. I suspect we're in for a recession that's closer to the '08 crash which means it's going to take a while to come back.

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#135

Post by nonameiguess »

warent wrote: post #72

People are calling this a correction... I don't understand the first thing about economics. Over the last quarter, the Nasdaq is down 25%. That's a correction? Seems pretty serious

It's not, actually. People are just using the wrong term. Finance uses "correction" to mean an at least 10% but not 20% index drawback, with the correction period lasting until a new high is reached. When an index declines by 20%, they call that a bear market. It's just colloquial usage not matching the industry jargon.

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#136

Post by matwood »

pc86 wrote: post #104
ctvo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta very publicly announced a hiring slowdown, Netflix is introducing levels and slowing down hiring, Coinbase is slowing down hiring, etc.. Even with the above names slowing down hiring, I would guess big tech uses this opportunity to stockpile even more engineers to come out of this stronger. I don't see the competition for engineers that can pass those interviews slowing down. Startups? Yes, the cohort that raise…

Coinbase has frozen hiring, and even if Netflix is still actively hiring they just laid ~2% of their workforce earlier this week.

> Coinbase has frozen hiring

The blog entry said they are slowing hiring. While that is a big change from originally wanting to triple the size of the company this year, nothing that I've seen said they froze hiring.

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#137

Post by sorry_outta_gas »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #129
DebtDeflation wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There’s a whole generation of tech employees that have never seen a down market. Indeed. I lived through both the 2008 financial crisis and the 2000 dot com implosion (also graduated high school and went off to college right during the 1991 recession). People who entered the job market after 2015 and know nothing except recruiters constantly hitting them up with mid six figure+ job offers are in for a rude awakening…

It's kind of telling that "after 2015" (so 7 years) is considered a whole new generation of people in tech.

Pretty much, that's the time horizon for entry-senior in a lot of places

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#138

Post by sorry_outta_gas »

csmpltn wrote: post #105
nemo44x wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Save money and have enough to live on for awhile. If you don't have savings then immediately cut your cost of living down. If you do lose your job then don't just accept anything (remember, you have savings + unemployment + severance to live on for awhile) and use this time to sharpen skills and learn new things. Make yourself more valuable. I can't see the future but I don't think it's going to be a bloodbath like t…

> "I can't see the future but I don't think it's going to be a bloodbath like the .com crash." The world has gone ever more dependent on tech since then. Tech is used everywhere now, pervasively. They're not re-introducing cash in cash-free economies. People aren't going back to carrying physical documents around and stashing them in high cabinets. Shopping online has only gotten more popular. Hanging out online, too…

none of that requires current levels of investment

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#139

Post by mirntyfirty »

ouid wrote: post #107
bearjaws wrote: post #22

I think this is just the correction that was inevitable as hiring had become a cargo cult. Everyone was hiring so everyone felt compelled to hire, creating a feedback loop of insane wages and offers. Now its time to pay the bills and many organizations realize the engineers they hired cannot possibly provide the value necessary to keep their job. I know one individual who got hired as a Sales Engineer for a platform…

I think you're misunderstanding the theory. Hiring without fixed length contract is just interviewing. It's somewhat expensive interviewing, but given the legend of the 10x developer, it is worth risking paying people more than what they are worth to try to identify them.

True, I’d claim that the 10x people exist but would be impossible to spot based upon resumes and many of their resumes would fail to hit the checkbox requirements of the organizations looking for them. Also, in general I’d claim that 10x people aren’t necessary for most projects and tend to get stifled by bureaucracy.

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#140

Post by robbomacrae »

bearjaws wrote: post #22

I think this is just the correction that was inevitable as hiring had become a cargo cult. Everyone was hiring so everyone felt compelled to hire, creating a feedback loop of insane wages and offers. Now its time to pay the bills and many organizations realize the engineers they hired cannot possibly provide the value necessary to keep their job. I know one individual who got hired as a Sales Engineer for a platform…

"cannot possibly provide the value necessary to keep their job."

It's actually very much possibly for software engineers, at least, to justify high valuations. As an example when I joined Reddit my first task was to remake a data engineering server in scala that cut down the needed AWS machines by 70%. That cost saving already covered more than my salary in perpetuity and I was only 3 months in.

Post reply on HN