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The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

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Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#151

Post by qiskit »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #85
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…

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

The standard 6 months of emergency fund, updated resume and just go about your life as normal. If you are a software developer, you'll be fine. Maybe it'll take you 3 months to find a new job rather than 1 month. Don't let fearmongering on forums and especially the news affect you or force you to make rash decisions.

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#152

Post by Apocryphon »

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…

Is this the sort of analysis that led to the invention of social credit by C.H. Douglas?

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#153

Post by crate_barre »

throw8383833jj wrote: post #121
crate_barre wrote: post #62

Someone needs to explain to me why our tech companies are so tied to interest rates. Are VCs borrowing with home mortgage equity??

in addition to the article mentioned by the replier, also, keep in mind that the way that equity markets work: it's all about the ratio of buying to selling. if there's even a small skew in buyers to sellers it can send prices up or down by quite a bit. IE: a 10 Billion$ fund, doesn't need to see 2B sold in order to go down 20%, a much smaller amount sold can affect the price quite dramatically, depending on the rati…

No post body was provided.

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#154

Post by quesera »

kqr wrote: post #125
mancerayder wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While stated like fact, you're espousing a relatively radical philosophical perspective about reality. It might drive radical social change (or desire to), but most people don't think like this.

I fail to see how it's anything other than a logical consequence -- much less radical. I know from first-hand experience that if a team don't believe they have a particular person as their manager, that person is, in fact, not their manager. It's impossible for that person to be their manager. I also know from first-hand experience that once a group of people no longer believe themselves to be a soccer team, they sto…

This is essentially nonsensical though. You can internally reject social consensus or even objective measurement, but you cannot choose the frame in which you are evaluated by others.

> I can't think of any social construct that does not require buy-in from the affected parties.

"Prisoner", "slave", and "taxpayer" spring to mind (but I repeat myself). These are artifacts of social consensus, enforced by people with stronger-than-usual opinions about the correctness of their evaluations.

Viktor Frankl, Nat Turner, and Warren Buffett, as exceptions, do not disprove the larger point.

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#155

Post by Animats »

"Following a series of “super clarifying” meetings with shareholders, Uber’s chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi emailed(opens a new window) employees on Sunday night with an arresting message: “we need to show them the money”."

So the stockholders finally got fed up with Uber's "lose money on every ride and make it up on volume" approach. No surprise. Uber's stock is at an all-time low since the public offering.

This isn't really about the "tech sector", though. It's about Uber. Uber is an over-funded cab company. It's not a tech company. It's a labor-intensive service company with a huge number of low-skill workers.

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#156

Post by lumost »

__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 absolute number doesn’t matter so much as the change.

If valuations rose because interest rates fell, then rising interest rates will do the opposite

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#157

Post by munificent »

Apocryphon wrote: post #146
kbos87 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that there’s money to be made not in industry X, but supporting industry X has been taken to the extreme in spaces like crypto where that’s pretty much all the space consists of. I can’t think of more than a few examples of successful, scaling companies that are actually using blockchain as a means to an end that doesn’t come back to “building the infrastructure for the use of blockchain” in some way.

We’re experiencing a glut of shovels.

It's like selling shovels to miners who are mining iron that is only used for manufacturing more shovels.

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#158

Post by Clubber »

matwood wrote: post #127
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. I agree. I've went through .com and the gfc, and key to both times was to make sure the company I was with was making money. While I think tech will see downward pressures on salaries, each company will be in a different situation. For example, if you're in a company that needs a runway, assume it may get cut short at any tim…

>Almost every company views tech as a competitive edge, and that is simply not going away.

I hope you're right. In my experience, most large companies see tech as a cost center.

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#159

Post by arcticbull »

neill wrote: post #67
htormey wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. This is well paid but not out of the ordinary for someone working at a top tier tech company in NYC/SF Bay Area. Think Facebook, Apple, etc. see https://www.levels.fyi/ for levels and comparison. Some of those companies are doing hiring freezes right now but many are not. Salary bands are adjusted within the USA by zones where NYC/SF/Seattle are zone 1, zone 2 is 90% of base, zone 3 is 85%. With equity component…

This is extremely out of the ordinary- Levels.fyi lists a salary of $224,000 for a Staff level SWE at Google

levels.fyi shows $498,910 in total compensation for a staff level SWE at Google. Different companies compensate using a different blend of cash and equity. At a public company like Google, it's all liquid. Similarly, an E6 at Facebook gets $576,886.

These are also roughly speaking first-year salaries. You can expect a refresh grant equal to 1/4 of a new-hire equity grant each year vesting over 4 years, plus a staff-level can get a signing bonus of $50-100K.

After 3-4 years in a staff role you can easily be making $1-2M/yr.

It's probably not 380K base, which is very high, it's likely 300K base + 25% bonus target = $375K, give or take. That's not hugely more than any of the mega-caps have been paying in cash comp for staffie's for like 5+ years.

Re: The tech sector teardown is more catharsis than crisis

#160

Post by mhmmbt »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #142
robbomacrae wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The vast majority of startups aren't doing anything remotely complex enough to be able to save money on electricity by paying for developers to write more efficient software. Or if they can - the instances are few and far between. The vast majority of startups are also heavily cash-flow negative - so anything you do likely won't pay for itself. It's almost always a bet on a rosy future.

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