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Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

mcsweeneys.net

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Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#111

Post by roenxi »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #95
roenxi wrote: post #31

Management needs to be made up of the sort of people who make economically optimum decisions. Without diminishing the horrible experience of being fired; if we have people who purposefully keep tens of thousands of people working on jobs that don't make sense to them, on aggregate society will be much worse for everyone. We have a system that allows people to do unpopular things, like this, because it works better th…

No it doesn't. It works better for 1% of the population. Everyone else is a health crisis away from bankruptcy. Literally. That's all it takes in the US for everyone who doesn't have an eight-figure-or-more net worth to be staring ruin in the face. Your comment is exactly the mythology that perpetuates the problem. Exploitation is sold as participation. "Well we're paid fairly well so I guess we must be privileged an…

Everyone is one health crisis away from death, no matter how much wealth they have.

Whatever your complaints here are, start with having people working at a job where there is literally no-one willing to stand up and pay them their salary. That isn't going to be a society that can comfortably sustain people being unable to work. To have the level of surplus where a healthcare crisis is easily dismissed requires extreme economic efficiency.

If you want someone to be unable to work and just sitting around dealing with a personal crisis, then we really need the people around them to be working on things that get a "wow, yeah, that is important!" type reaction.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#112

Post by dsparkman »

pas wrote: post #79
Yoric wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but oversimplified a little. Because that will buoy our stock price, which is important. Why? Because our stock price is also our operational funds. How comes? Because our actual funds are invested somewhere else. Why? Because it makes shareholder richer. Oh.

is that really true? or is it because a large portion of the global revenue is "parked" outside the US for tax reasons? or due to stock buyback there are not much "funds" at all?

Yeah, most of these companies park their cash outside the US to avoid having to pay taxes, then borrow money in the US against their assets/stock. It worked great when interest rates were essentially zero. Not so much now.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#113

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

zmxz wrote: post #96
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um. Last time I checked, Google interviews are not known for being easy to the point that just being interviewed says something about the candidate ( they either have an in with someone or have some level of expertise ) and bestows some credence for recruiters. If that is the case, was the person able to fool the entire sets of panels interviewing that person? If so, the failure may not be of the individual. The syst…

> Um. Last time I checked So every google interview is for dev position and not other positions? Also, dev interviews depend on the person who interviews and not all people are the same. Plus, the difficulty of interviews means absolutely nothing - checking the ability to solve trigonometry problems using C++ gives literally ZERO insight in how the candidate will be USED, managed, what the interaction with other peop…

I hesitated a little bit, but I will admit you got me curious. The position assumes that you know a better way to assess that viability ( which assumes I accept that framing at face value -- I don't, but I want to get to the bottom of this argument ). Would you be willing to disclose your personal favorite measuring stick?

I wholeheartedly disagree. It is trivial to generalize. Careful observation resulting in nuanced findings is difficult precisely, because we tend to crave simple answers.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#114

Post by benj111 »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #34
username_my1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wrong view / comparios ... in a 5% interest rate environment, companies fight for investors money .. if you don't do the cuts and find a way to be efficient investors will put their money somewhere else that's more profitable. this reasoning is pure and simple and correct, you start from the top, not from the fact "they can afford it" because their job is not to spend the money they have their job is to increase valu…

Let's do a little root cause analysis. Why do companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, with massive income streams combined with substantial cash holdings, need investor money? Maybe Toyota's "Five Why's" can shed some light on it. We need to fire thousands of people. Why? Because it will make us more attractive for investors. Why? So they put their money in our company. Why? Because that will buoy our stock pric…

But the b2b sourdough app is a potential driver of future growth. Yes it may help the bottom line today, but getting rid of employees today lowers future growth potential.

Investors know this. Investors would also question why there are layoffs in an apparently healthy company. All this means that CEOs don't want to do mass layoffs which even more strongly raises the question of why they did it to start with.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#115

Post by rightbyte »

mshake2 wrote: post #45
arrrg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it necessary to fire them? That's the relevant question we should ask ourselves. A hiring freeze and marking obsolete positions as obsolete (meaning if someone switches teams or quits that specific position will not be replaced) should be a workable model for all profitable companies with some cash reserves. Sure, it takes a bit longer and probably costs a bit more (though probably not tons and lay offs also have…

>Is it necessary to fire them? That's the relevant question we should ask ourselves. That's not the relevant question. The relevant questions are: were the layoffs illegal, and if they weren't, then why is it any of your business? If you don't want to live in that world, start your own startup, hire people, and never fire them. Nobody is stopping you.

> were the layoffs illegal, and if they weren't, then why is it any of your business?

If the layoffs were uneccesary you know to treat the company and its executives as worse to work for than they would be if they did necessary layoffs only.

I.e. increase the cost of hiring you.

The "none of your business" trope is silly. Why not warm each other of shitty things, be it a bad restaurant or MS as an employer.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#116

Post by RhodesianHunter »

Yoric wrote: post #107
pjc50 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> our stock price is also our operational funds. .. no it isn't? This is conflating "equity" with "free cash". Have a look at one of the balance sheets.

I may very well be misunderstanding some of this. However, until now, it has been my understanding that the way any large company works is by using their stock value as collateral against short term investments from banks, which then serve as operational funds. Am I wrong?

In the case of all of the companies in question here, yes you are wrong. They have significant amounts of free cash flow and cash on hand.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#117

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #38
kqr wrote: post #12

> The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face. And so we must make hard choices. Maybe I've hung around in the wrong circles too much recently, but this hit me hard. This is basically how the reasoning behind all top management decisions have been communicated to me in the past year: "There is indeed a clearly better alternative…

The thing to understand is the the companies primary product isn't the boring and annoying things employees are are working on and customers pay for. It's the companies stock and bond offerings. Every decision is subordinate to that.

Exactly that. Tesla did about $53B in revenue in 2021, but they gained about $300B in market cap (going by guesstimates based on https://companiesmarketcap.com/tesla/marketcap/).

A company and its owners doesn't get wealthy from revenue or sales, but from pumping up their stock. For some reason, investors love both layoffs AND headcount increases.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#118

Post by drdrek »

tkfu wrote: post #76
drdrek wrote: post #61

Not to rain on the common man parade, most of these layoffs are after even bigger hiring rounds. Microsoft hired 40K employees in 22 to layoff 10k in 23, that is still 30K more employees. In 22: Meta hired 12K+ Netflix 2k+ Google 20K+ Amazon 300K+ (!) But oh me oh my the free market that lets the companies hire lets them fire. Evil money man used to give me money to get compensation, that is good greed. Now evil mone…

Your numbers are massively wrong at a glance, when I went to check them. Microsoft's total number of employees increased by roughly 40k between June 30 2021 and June 30 2022, but a large portion of that increase was from M&A, not from hiring, and they started large layoffs in July 2022. Net hires are not public info, but it's probably more like 15k in the period specified. Amazon has 300k employees total, and they ob…

What? Amazon has more than 1.5M employees... its like the first thing you can see by googling amazon number of employees.

We can disagree on the interpretations but let's at least agree on the numbers. I will not accuse you of being neither misinformed nor in bad faith if you rectify your comment as to not spread misinformation :)

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#119

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

roenxi wrote: post #111
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. It works better for 1% of the population. Everyone else is a health crisis away from bankruptcy. Literally. That's all it takes in the US for everyone who doesn't have an eight-figure-or-more net worth to be staring ruin in the face. Your comment is exactly the mythology that perpetuates the problem. Exploitation is sold as participation. "Well we're paid fairly well so I guess we must be privileged an…

Everyone is one health crisis away from death, no matter how much wealth they have. Whatever your complaints here are, start with having people working at a job where there is literally no-one willing to stand up and pay them their salary. That isn't going to be a society that can comfortably sustain people being unable to work. To have the level of surplus where a healthcare crisis is easily dismissed requires extre…

> Everyone is one health crisis away from death, no matter how much wealth they have.

Weirdly though, the number of health crisis that will lead to death are fewer the more wealth you have.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#120

Post by paulcole »

cycomanic wrote: post #32
gorgoiler wrote: post #7

I grind away at our codebase day in day out causing me immense personal anxiety and burnout risk and all for what? Well! The honest answer is because software engineering is an incredibly satisfying intellectual pursuit. So satisfying that outside of work in my spare time I literally do it for free , giving away my work to strangers as free / open source software. Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I ha…

Because the people who decide exec salaries are execs in other businesses, so they generally have 1) An inflated view of the impact of execs compared to other employees. This is a well studied psychological phenomena. People tend to overestimate their "skill/contribution" even in poor luck or even rigged scenarios. (There was a study which gave some subjects a head start in monopoly, i.e. more money, the subjects ten…

> People tend to overestimate their "skill/contribution"

This can’t possibly extend to computer engineers right?

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