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

Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 315 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#261

Post by seuraughty »

mooreds wrote: post #253
theturtletalks wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple answer would be AI. That’s been the major change in the past year. I find it odd that everyone thinks Uber’s end game is automated cars, but no one seems to be talking about how tech companies end game is automated coders. LLMs are not even close, but what’s to say internally, they don’t have something that works. Or they have enough data to show they need fewer workers since they can leverage AI now.

> The simple answer would be AI. That’s been the major change in the past year. What about short term interest rates (in the USA) going from close to 0 to 5 percent over the past 2 years? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFEDTARU Even if you have no debt, your customers might. And your stock returns are being compared to a risk free rate that has increased rapidly.

This is really it right here. Recession fears and large layoffs correlated directly with the raising of rates, as they always do.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#262

Post by wilg »

nitwit005 wrote: post #247
leetharris wrote: post #19

This is going to be a controversial opinion. The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. All these huge companies wanted more products, more marketshare, more money, etc. They needed more people to pull this off. They started lowering hiring standards across the board because there just weren't enough people in tech. Simultaneously, a huge portion of the world saw tech sa…

If they overhired by 50%, and hired a bunch of idiots, the tech executives should be the ones on the chopping block.

Only if its the same executives. And those 50% would still have to go too.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#263

Post by nine_k »

theturtletalks wrote: post #110
allturtles wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't seem to me to explain why the layoffs are happening now. AFAIK Google has never done a true layoff until last January in the entire history of the company. Now it seems to be already routine. As someone who grew up in the 80s-90s, my historical sense of layoffs is that they were a response to economic hard times, whether industry-wide or company-specific. Companies laid off when profits fell or disappear…

The simple answer would be AI. That’s been the major change in the past year. I find it odd that everyone thinks Uber’s end game is automated cars, but no one seems to be talking about how tech companies end game is automated coders. LLMs are not even close, but what’s to say internally, they don’t have something that works. Or they have enough data to show they need fewer workers since they can leverage AI now.

We already had a revolution of automating coders, when Fortran first appeared. And a revolution of automating accountants, when a spreadsheet first appeared.

If anything, these revolutions increased the demand for programmers and specialists in finance. A person wielding a right automation tool is producing much more revenue, while demanding nearly the same salary; it makes sense to hire more of such people, as long as there is a market for the product or service your company provides.

The layoffs are a signal of this not happening. The AI is not helping enough to increase production and revenue per worker. Companies are out of new and efficacious business ideas. The companies don't know where to apply the intellectual / productive capability they have, so they are cutting it down, to save on its (substantial) upkeep.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#264

Post by mixdup »

vidro3 wrote: post #203
mixdup wrote: post #94

I'm convinced that it's because the recession that has been predicted for the past 3 years has not happened, and now we're in the election year and it must happen. The layoffs will continue until we get the macro outcome we're looking for It's the only explanation for companies that are at all time highs in revenue, profit, and stock value to be laying off double digit percentages of their employees

Why does an election year indicate a recession? Rather, who precisely wants a recession now, in your opinion?

>Why does an election year indicate a recession?

Alone, it doesn't

>Rather, who precisely wants a recession now, in your opinion?

I don't think you need more than one guess to figure out the average political leaning of most CEOs and Chairs of corporate boards and then combine that with who is the incumbent

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#266

Post by mooreds »

seuraughty wrote: post #261
mooreds wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simple answer would be AI. That’s been the major change in the past year. What about short term interest rates (in the USA) going from close to 0 to 5 percent over the past 2 years? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFEDTARU Even if you have no debt, your customers might. And your stock returns are being compared to a risk free rate that has increased rapidly.

This is really it right here. Recession fears and large layoffs correlated directly with the raising of rates, as they always do.

It's the hammer the fed knows how to use to fight inflation.

Hopefully this time it won't tip the entire economy into recession, but I feel for all the folks who are being laid off.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#267

Post by meheleventyone »

dijit wrote: post #240
pera wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years I find this opinion hilarious: Almost 30 years ago the second most popular software product was Windows 95 (Doom was the #1), which couldn't run for a few hours without BSODing. Almost 20 years ago the average tech worker was building atrocities with Visual Basic, MS Access and PHP. Meanwhile today it was announced that Google…

This is great, I find your opinion hilarious. Yeah, Windows 95 BSOD'd a lot; however the people developing it were doing it for the very first time, largely with single-digits of megabytes of memory to work with and with a CPU that not only contained bugs[0] but was so slow that every single operation would take milliseconds of wall time[1]. It's not comparable, it's almost to the level that rendering a character on…

On [1] aren’t you off by several orders of magnitude, 1MHz is 1,000,000 Hz. You’re correct for 60Hz but then use that value for MHz which is quite a lot more clocks per second.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#268

Post by dijit »

meheleventyone wrote: post #267
dijit wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great, I find your opinion hilarious. Yeah, Windows 95 BSOD'd a lot; however the people developing it were doing it for the very first time, largely with single-digits of megabytes of memory to work with and with a CPU that not only contained bugs[0] but was so slow that every single operation would take milliseconds of wall time[1]. It's not comparable, it's almost to the level that rendering a character on…

On [1] aren’t you off by several orders of magnitude, 1MHz is 1,000,000 Hz. You’re correct for 60Hz but then use that value for MHz which is quite a lot more clocks per second.

ah, quite right, none-the-less, missing a clock or a cacheline is incredibly consequential meaning optimisations turn out to be pretty... high risk.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#269

Post by scme0 »

drewcoo wrote: post #77
babyshake wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, the engineering interviews still typically revolve around Leetcode algorithms instead of the messy but hardly CS-intensive day to day work that engineering typically involves.

That's (very charitably) because those are weed-out questions for early-stage engineers. Lots of companies feel they need weed-out questions because they're swamped with applicants. How does applicant approach a problem? Does applicant describe their thought process figuring it out? Can applicant figure it out? Did that tell anyone how good the applicant is at the job? No. It just provided some gates for the intervie…

I was recently looking around at jobs in a different country and at least one place had a FAANG style interview process. I currently have 10 years experience in software engineering so I wasn't too keen to do it but I am considering doing it because they offer higher salaries than other companies.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#270

Post by seabird »

armitron wrote: post #218
ljm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more experience you rack up in your career, the more likely you are to walk away from jobs with laborious hiring processes too. I will politely decline any opportunity that requires me to do multiple code and architecture tests and several other lengthy meetings, usually spread out over the course of months, because it’s not worth my time to jump through so many hoops. It signals to me that there is already a ten…

That's all well and good if you're willing to leave a lot of money on the table. All the companies that hand out half-a-million to a million-dollars/yr total compensation packages operate using similar hiring processes. That's a lot of money over the span of even a few years to miss out on.

That sort of compensation is largely limited to places with exorbitant costs of living. It's nowhere near as lucrative as it sounds.
Post reply on HN