Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by Swizec » Wed, Jan 25, 2023, 7:05 PM UTC

gavinmckenzie wrote: post #267

sybercecurity wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this is due to lack of job experience at that young age? Prior to that, young adults were in school, which fostered a community view beyond just paying for classes/degree. I know I learned about how large corps view labor when I worked summers at a big box retailer. I viewed that as purely transactional as well: I stock shelves, you give me money. Plus Gen-X often watched our parents get laid off when we…

Ha, yes our Gen-X “slacker” generation (LOL) started out with a potentially different worldview. I think you’ve described the challenge 20-somethings face when it comes to resisting the tribal messaging from their employer pretty well — coming out of school many people want to continue that sense of belonging. People develop close friendships, and romantic relationships, and they connect that to their work experience…

To put my cynic's hat on: All young people, men especially, look for a sense of purpose and belonging. Militaries have exploited this for eons. Governments exploit it for propaganda. Gangs exploit it for recruitment. Fringe political groups lean on it. Religions use it. Cults are crazy good at it. Brands use it all the time to sell us more stuff.

Really, a modern future unicorn is just using that same cult/religion/government/brand playbook. Often unknowingly. It happens to work best on the young.

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

#302

Post by ruko » Wed, Jan 25, 2023, 7:07 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #294

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…

> So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary? Because their decisions make or break the company, and your's do not. For a well known example, Steve Jobs took over Apple when it was 90 days from bankruptcy. With the same group of workers, he took it to the biggest company in the world. Just by making different leadership decisions. That's why he made the big b…

no, founding a company does not make a person more virtuous or deserving of orders of magnitude more money than people who don't. even if we lived in a fantasy world where everyone had equal opportunity to do this, those people would not actually have a greater claim to a higher standard of living

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

#303

Post by John23832 » Wed, Jan 25, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #295

John23832 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll reply down here. > This narrative is counterfactual to how capitalism actually works. Your worth is determined by supply and demand. Investors would never agree to paying American developers twice as much as European developers if they knew they would be on the hook for them until their cash reserves bled dry. Supply and demand works best when the data about the market is symmetric. In the job market it is not.…

> Supply and demand works best when the data about the market is symmetric. It works efficiently despite information asymmetry. It's called "risk". Risk always factors into prices. You pay more at a dealership because your risk is less. You pay less for a used car because your risk is more. A job that is more secure pays less. A job that is less secure pays more. The market efficiently prices in information asymmetry…

Hello Walter. Nice to see you. Thanks for D.

But this is not true. An economically efficient market is one where goods and services produced are delivered at their most valuable. The job market is the antithesis of that.

If there is asymmetric information (and asymmetric risk) AND that asymmetry is known by the side with most information (like it my job example), then the side with more data can price more optimally than the side with less. If we extend that into the tenure of the job, you can be pressured to work longer and harder than you are actually paid for if the risk of losing your job is greater than the risk of you company having to replace you. Just look to Japanese salarymen or Chinese 996 workers. Those are not efficient markets. They are markets skewed towards the owners of capital.

Your example of used vs new cars is an example of a risk discount, but it really doesn't fit here, imo.

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

#304

Post by NickC25 » Wed, Jan 25, 2023, 7:13 PM UTC

hgsgm wrote: post #224

christophilus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public companies have an incentive to focus on the short term (quarterly reports). This really makes a difference in management behavior. Bill Clinton and Warren Buffett have both talked about this, and presented regulatory approaches to fixing it, but here we are.

> Public companies have an incentive to focus on the short term (quarterly reports). Why? Incentivized by whom? This is choice they make. See the OP.

Incentivized by the stock market.

If you go on an investor call as the CEO and said, "hey we didn't make any profits this quarter because we invested it all into projects that will grow our revenue X% in the next quarter or half" you'll get fired by the board very quickly, or an activist fund will buy up shares and vote you out as quickly as they can.

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

#305

Post by automatom » Wed, Jan 25, 2023, 7:33 PM UTC

IX-103 wrote: post #292

automatom wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the fed dummies! Why is it that the C-suite folks, who are supposed to understand macroeconomic trends or "Economics 101" as you're calling it, didn't see this coming and didn't make better decisions to not over-hire and mitigate reactionary cost-cutting. These companies have billions of cash on hand, but they choose the easy short term route of slashing labor costs to appease shareholders. I would argue this is…

Why didn't the C-suite folks do better? Because their contracts hold stock prices above all else. That means that making any group of stockholders unhappy risks reducing their earnings. Many stockholders don't understand macroeconomics. Many see the news and start calling for action, however misguided. When enough demand action, the C-suite is forced to act, even when they know the actions are symbolic at best or cou…

The C-suite command their salaries not because of what they know, but because of who they know. So making economic predictions may not be their strength.

This is literally the opposite point of this:

If you don’t understand how economics 101 works, you probably didn’t deserve your high paying tech job,

Why not apply the same logic to tne C-suite folks rather than just individual contributors or the regular rank and file. Why are tech workers who exchange their labor and knowledge of working with technology dummies if they "don't understand the fed" (which I can guarantee you is not an expectation when working as a software engineer, product manager, etc.), but the C-suite gets a pass? Arguably the execs should understand how to navigate different economic climates if they get a leadership role, regardless of who they know. Also on an anecdotal note, every job I've ever gotten I've had to know someone, whether it be someone who works there or a recruiter, and I'm a worker in tech. So that argument doesn't hold up from my point of view.

Maybe you are an executive, or someone who has an acquired a taste for their carpet-protected rubber soles, and it's just a difference in opinion. But it seems to me by your own logic the executives are even dumber than the workers, there's really no reason for the original commenter to be so hostile. The whole point of the article is that it satirizes the decisions tech CEO's make because they are completely driven by the shareholder, but they are also major shareholders whose compensation is in equity.

Many stockholders don't understand macroeconomics

Including the C-Suite, they are forced to act out of their own self-preservation, which after a certain point, is just pure greed.

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

#306

Post by s1artibartfast » Wed, Jan 25, 2023, 7:33 PM UTC

wmeredith wrote: post #209

chewz wrote: post #159

You might be a proud and valuable person in your personal life. But for a company, you are just an asset - low yielding asset with high depreciation. So it is rational decision for an enterprise to let you go and free some liquidity that could be deployed elsewhere. Even buying Treasury bill yields more then an employee and is more liquid option. Liquidity is important when times get tough and recession is coming.. J…

Google's average salary is $124k/ year and its revenue per employee is $1.365 million. Show me a t-bill with that 1100% annual return.

The average is meaningless. What matters from the company perspective is the additional revenue for the last employee.

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

#307

Post by carapace » Wed, Jan 25, 2023, 7:40 PM UTC

akkartik wrote: post #285

carapace wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think programmers didn't need unions. Then that massive no-poaching collusion amongst dozens of the top tech companies in the US surfaced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... It wasn't just "Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay", the practice spread to "dozens" of other companies: > Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles o…

How would unions help against such no-poaching collusion?

Good question. I have no idea. (That's why I said "or something" above, eh?) I know almost nothing about unions, and I don't work for large corporations.

(FWIW, I mostly worked for startups, but I did try the corporate thing for a couple of years, mostly for the experience. What I decided was that corporations are not bad, in fact I'd say they are mostly a huge improvement over previous forms of large-scale human organization, but they're not for me. This isn't a judgment thing, it's a matter of personal taste.)

- - - -

edit to add: I started a non-profit mutual benefit corporation a couple of months ago to pursue a simple tech stack w/o the overhead (pun intended) of being a for-profit startup. It's way too soon to say whether it will work or not, but at least I'm living my values. :)

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

#308

Post by s1artibartfast » Wed, Jan 25, 2023, 7:43 PM UTC

username_my1 wrote: post #14

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…

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…

To be fair, stock price for large profitable big companies has almost nothing to do with investment money. When someone buys a stock, the company doesn't see any of that money.

The real driver is shareholder returns. The shareholders would rather make more money than provide more jobs / run a charity.

Maybe you were saying the same thing, but the companies don't see the new investor money, other investors /owners do

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

#309

Post by steve76 » Wed, Jan 25, 2023, 7:45 PM UTC

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

#310

Post by ShroudedNight » Wed, Jan 25, 2023, 7:47 PM UTC

brookst wrote: post #289

t-writescode wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment thread you're responding to is reflecting on how painful it is to be laid off when: * showing profits * showing multi-billion in investments in new companies * when the money saved is tiny compared to the increased year-over-year profits on a topic that's a short story in the form of a letter written by someone pretending to be a CEO and telling the story's real truth about a layoff: that they don't feel…

Apologies if I sounded like I was unsympathetic to the people. I’ve been laid off, I know it hurts. But I guess I don’t see how empathizing with that means. . . What? Microsoft should cancel an investment they think is strategic? Microsoft should keep job roles they no longer things are important? Highly profitable companies like Microsoft are not zero sum. Nobody said “let’s lay people off so that we can invest in o…

There is a third option: Redeploying existing talent to the new strategic objectives.

Especially in software, skills are pretty fungible, and most of the support organization's on-going requirements are likely to be highly agnostic of what, specifically, is being engineered.