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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

#231

Post by Jensson »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #150
wildrhythms wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People tend to overestimate their "skill/contribution" even in poor luck or even rigged scenarios. I don't personally understand this one, although I don't doubt its veracity. I am an engineer with years of experience in the industry, but I don't think my contribution is high or important; I could be fired at any moment and would anyone notice? Maybe in the short term yes, but mostly no. I am easily replaceable, my…

I also think people underestimate what a CEO does. On HN coding is more respected than social skills. A software engineer is likely to crumble in 30 seconds when they are interviewed on CNBC.

> On HN coding is more respected than social skills

No it isn't, you see people saying "social skills are more important than technical skills" everywhere people discuss such things, and they get upvoted a lot. People saying the opposite tend to get heavily downvoted.

So to me it looks like even on HN social skills are more respected than technical skills, at least in threads where we discuss what skills are important.

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

#232

Post by brookst »

binarymax wrote: post #173
shever73 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. True...contrast Microsoft's decision to take an $800m hit in letting go 10,000 employees with its earnings report showing $16.4b operating profits.

Even harsher is that on the same day Microsoft laid off their staff, they announced a 10B investment in OpenAI.

Couple days apart, and they announced an investment, but the $10B figure is rumors. Could be right, could be wrong.

But so what? There’s no gotcha here; it’s not like Microsoft or Google or Amazon claimed they were cash poor and could t afford to pay people. They are changing the areas they spend money in. Would it be better if they were only cutting back and not also investing in new areas?

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

#233

Post by sokoloff »

IX-103 wrote: post #221
sokoloff wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll be holding a lot of your investments outside of stocks for a while, then.

In this market, is that really a bad idea?

Broad sentiment tends to lag share performance. (aka "be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful")

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

#234

Post by kneebonian »

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.

I really think this is the problem the financial world of numbers and spreadsheets and funny money has become almost completely divorced from the economic world where people actually make things and do things, and most of the "money" produced is really just by finding complicated ways to transfer risk from one person to another while retaining the money.

Too many people are busy trying to play financial games and not enough are actually looking to produce anything of value. It is worrisome where this long term trend takes us.

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

#235

Post by [deleted] »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #116
Yoric wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#236

Post by freeone3000 »

drdrek wrote: post #118
tkfu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.or…

You're counting warehouse workers as employees, instead of as disposable meat robots. The layoffs are of people that matter -- software developers and only software developers

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

#237

Post by AtlasBarfed »

htrp wrote: post #223
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I saved the company $800M, I should get 10% of that"?

>"I saved the company $800M, I should get 10% of that" Only at the executive tier.

At your level, you get a plaque. A cheap one. Plastic, maybe some aluminum.

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

#238

Post by Phlarp »

l1silver wrote: post #187
gavinmckenzie wrote: post #172

Amazing. There was a time, nearly 20 years ago, that I was let go from Adobe. My colleagues assumed that because of my position/tenure/knowledge that I was layoff-proof. I told them that I was just a number in a large organization, and that orgs of a certain scale don’t do layoffs in a way that looks at each individual. Sure enough I was let go and after 16 years at the same company, that was acquired by Adobe where…

But isn't the inbetween contract jobs a tenuous time?

Compared to what? Either you're on contract and they could simply not renew it when the 1/3/6 month timeline is up, or you're an employee and they could simply lay you off without warning on a completely unpredictable and arbitrary timeline.

Everything is tenuous compared to living off the safe withdrawal rate of a $10 million diversified investment portfolio.

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

#239

Post by 2devnull »

No sympathy for the average American worker, who is impacted even more so by inflation, which robs them of their life savings and job security at their min wage job. Over-entitled and over payed young tech workers who have displaced poorer people and haven’t been astute enough to save their extravagant salaries, spending it instead on $30 door dashed organic salads now want to bleat about how “boo hoo life isn’t fair.” They are correct but too stupid to blame the real culprit. It’s the fed dummies! The fed givith and then taketh away. A tale as old as time. If you don’t understand how economics 101 works, you probably didn’t deserve your high paying tech job, to say nothing of being an actual participant in society and voting in elections, where guess what, you can have a say in fiscal and monetary policy decisions once removed.
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