521–530 of 622 posts
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Despite specifying what they did, it's still framed in a negative way
If reality hurt's their feelings, maybe they should change their ways.
No one disagrees with you in principle, but there are realcitrant social practices punishing this kind of feedback. It is always taken as a grudge rather than an observation, and this makes you less attractive as a hire.
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Pretty bad argument when we in fact do have many of the numbers for public companies and those numbers show growing revenue and record profits...
I'm not an accounting nor a forecasting expert, but I'm comfortable theorizing that the current quarter's financials of a company doesn't necessarily dictate its next moves. I find people's tendency to generate outrage from nothing other than headlines to be very annoying.
Hearing how bad things are going to be for more than three months as they continue to not, in fact, be that bad, I started to wonder if they even believe what they're saying.
And if they do, that's fine, but then why use the money for buybacks/dividends rather than saving it for the downturn they're sure is coming?
I don’t get this - did every single company hire hundreds of people for no good reason? A global event forcing folks to temporarily use more online services is, well, temporary. I just don’t get the mindset that triggered all these companies to mismanage their teams so badly.
It's quite simple: If you don't follow the herd, you risk being blamed if you fail. But if you follow the herd and do what everyone else is doing, even if the herd runs off of a cliff, nobody points any fingers. You'd think somewhere, in at least one of these larger tech companies, there would be a leader boldly proclaiming "this is our time to increase our investments and beat our competitors!" But it turns out ther…
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Funny though, since Meta is actually fully controlled by Zuck. He wanted the metaverse and $40B buyback, otherwise he could just simply not.
Sort of yes, but also no. He pays his employees with that stock, and it being higher makes that a better deal. Additionally, being valued as a growth company is much better than being a value stock. Mind you, Im not interested in buybacks but if they paid a dividend I'd hold them till they lose their advertising business.
Could you elaborate, how does the buyback help them to be valued as a growth company? Also doesn't the fact that he paid for the buyback with employee layoffs really damage FB as a prospective employer when FB at some point in the future again needs to hire? What was the logic here?
Listened to a great podcast about layoffs yesterday ( https://hbr.org/podcast/2023/02/why-many-companies-get-layof... ) The takeaway is that layoffs are extremely trust destroying for employees NOT laid off, and in the end not clear they're a financial net positive. Both with direct and indirect costs (lack of engagement from employees, etc).
It takes long time for the layoff effects to hit the company. The main effect is that you lose the trust of the top performers. These will be the in the lookout for new opportunities the day after the layoffs are done. If you cut 10%, expect 10% from the top to flee within a couple of years. The second effect is related to the fact that companies usually target older people with expensive jobs. In an a big org these…
> The current macroeconomic environment is tough No, it isn't, and it's embarrassing at this point to continue insisting this. The macroeconomic environment is good, particularly in the United States. Business investment is growing at 3% a quarter (annualized), which is better than the average over the past decade. Employment is growing rapidly. Inflation has been tame over the past six months. And wages are growing…
> No, it isn't, and it's embarrassing at this point to continue insisting this. Your macro is not the macro that Gitlab is referring to. It's disingenuous to interpret it otherwise. All of these tech companies "overhired" (in hindsight) because they achieved unprecedented growth 2021~2022. If you're Gitlab - who sells to software development organizations - and the whole market has thrown hand over fist into the soft…
> A macro environment refers to the set of conditions that exist in the economy as a whole, rather than in a particular sector or region. In general, the macro environment includes trends in the gross domestic product (GDP), inflation, employment, spending, and monetary and fiscal policy. The macro-environment is closely linked to the general business cycle as opposed to the performance of an individual business sector. [1]
If Gitlab had simply said what you said, then I wouldn't have commented at all.
Instead, Gitlab explicitly blamed economy-wide conditions for these layoffs, and that is what I take issue with. The economy is doing well. It's not all rosy, but in general, most indicators are fair-to-good, and trending better. (Manufacturing is one area that continues to trend worse).
And frankly, my comment was not directed merely at Gitlab, but rather the slew of layoff notices we've seen that appear to be copied and pasted from each other. It's comical at this point, and the idea that the broad economy is in bad shape is simply not true, and not supported by the evidence.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/macro-environment.asp
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> If there are problems, they are Gitlab problems, not macroeconomic problems. Agreed. But pretty much every business is taking a hard look at their SaaS spend and are making cuts where possible.
It seems it's better to be a SaaS provider than a SaaS user. I'm curious how the pendulum will swing as this all plays out.
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Startups. Top performers at Google, if they've been smart about their finances, are sitting on a few million in the bank and have runways between ~10 years to infinity. They can afford to work for equity for a few years to take a slice of the pie when the company takes over another industry.
The highest performing, most expensive employees are going to be pretty senior and pretty experienced, ie older - the demographic least inclined to bet the farm on equity in a startup. They’re likely to be at the stage of their life where their “runway” is their kids’ college tuition, or their (possibly early) retirement plan. Most will be far more inclined to take a (stable) pay cut rather than make a risky bet. Plu…
You've got college, housing etc. covered, so it's fine to go take risks in order to get large lottery tickets.
At this point it's beginning to look like tech companies are doing this because it's the trendy thing to do, along with inserting a few words about AI in their websites and pitch decks.
We are a SaaS tool and we've has to justify our value to customers as everyone is looking to cut expenses. We also did cut our own spending on SaaS tools. So I think that this is sort of percolating through the industry. There is a real contraction in SaaS spending.