Every day there’s more big job cuts at tech and games companies. I’ve not seen anything explaining why they all seam to be at once like this. Is it coincidence or is there something driving all the job cuts?
Okayokayokay, this isn’t the point, I know… but those are some really shitty, ill-fitting suits. They look like crap.
Actually… I see your point.
Are they made of leather, or just… super fake looking low quality fabric?
The latter, probably, given that they look identical. At first I thought: “AI”, but the fingers are pretty good. I think they’re just generic prop suits.
Tailoring makes or breaks a suit. They don’t tailor suits for stock photos.
I’m assuming they were provided by the photography company taking the stock photos
One factor I haven’t seen mentioned is that because of rising interest rates, tech companies have had to shift from being focused on growth to actually turning a profit. Because of this, companies are having to shed employees because they over hired in anticipation of that continued growth. People are expensive so that’s an “easy” way to try to get the line closer to positive.
This is kind of a rough overview and I’m by no means an expert on economics. Just someone who works in tech and so has been following things closely.
Michael Hudson, Jun. 2022: The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages
To Wall Street and its backers, the solution to any price inflation is to reduce wages and public social spending. The orthodox way to do this is to push the economy into recession in order to reduce hiring. Rising unemployment will oblige labor to compete for jobs that pay less and less as the economy slows.
This plus the changes to section 174 meaning R&D costs have to be written off over five years instead of all in the year they’re incurred. That’s hurting startups a lot and many have had to switch from building new stuff to licensing/selling their existing stuff, and firing some expensive engineers/developers, to be able to afford to stay open. https://www.axios.com/2024/01/20/taxes-irs-startups-section174
It also takes time to realize the costs of shedding workforce, and by then you might have a different CEO. As long as it’s next quarter, it’s fine.
It’s Q1. Companies always push hard for Q1 profits above all else. There’s usually hiring freezes and cuts to maximize profits, come Q2, they’ll hire a bunch of people and the cycle will continue.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates in order to cause layoffs. The capitalist class wanted to enlarge the reserve army of labor so that workers would be too worried about losing their jobs to demand raises.
‘You Are Gambling With People’s Lives’: Warren Rips Powell Over Job-Killing Rate Hikes
This is a thing that sounds like some crazy uncle bullshit but it is actually completely true and non-controversial.
The scariest thing to a central banker when it comes to inflation is that wages might start to go up. When that happens the inflations is basically permanent.
People need to understand that the Federal Reserve is the cartel of the US private banks, and that they have captured the US Treasury as well, which is the US sovereign fiat money printer. Just look at the history of people in executive positions at the Treasury and the Fed. It’s a revolving door between those positions and the executive positions at major US banks and corporations.
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Bitcoin solves this. Clear, unambiguous, unchanging monetary policy that doesn’t constantly increase the supply and take a portion of your dollar’s value to give to anybody else. It is not aligned with any country or even block of countries and is truly the first international currency in that sense. No politician or even national or supra-national government can force Bitcoin do do anything that isn’t part of its protocol because it’s so decentralized.
It has been running 24/7 365 for 15 years without a single major security issue in the protocol or a single hour of downtime. With lightning network upgrades, transactions confirm in under a second internationally with fees 1000x less than credit cards, often under a single cent.
It is accessible to anybody in the world with a cell phone and internet access, including the billions, with a B, who don’t have access to stable banking infrastructure or local currency. No credit checks, no needing six forms of ID, no overdraft fees, no bank holidays, no middlemen, no nonsense. And it does this with less electricity than you’d think, less than 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewable sources as miners chase the cheapest electricity and the cheapest electricity is from renewables and over-provisioned grids.
For anyone remaining in the world who still believes cryptocurrency nonsense, I have a bridge to sell you.
I agree this has got to be the root reason. They are scared.
Which is ironic because one of the Fed’s chartered purposes is to maximize employment. I guess maximizing profits is more important, even though it’s not on the list.
Yup. From an article I linked to in another comment:
The Federal Reserve Board’s ostensible policy aim is to manage the money supply and bank credit in a way that maintains price stability. That usually means fighting inflation, which is blamed entirely on “too much employment,” euphemized as “too much money.” In Congress’s more progressive days, the Fed was charged with a second objective: to promote full employment. The problem is that full employment is supposed to be inflationary – and the way to fight inflation is to reduce employment, which is viewed simplistically as being determined by the supply of credit.
So in practice, one of the Fed’s two directives has to give. And hardly by surprise, the “full employment” aim is thrown overboard – if indeed it ever was taken seriously by the Fed’s managers.
Big companies are inefficient at monitoring themselves and can have a lot of employees that aren’t contributing to the company’s health… it’d be nice if those were the folks laid off but it can also be difficult to determine who is valuable and who isn’t so usually the cuts try and target low performers but metrics are used that cut a lot of high performers… then you’re still in the hole and try more cuts.
This continues (obviously never affecting upper management) until the company collapses or you get lucky as hell.
It starts with C and ends with M and bringing it up will get the white tyrants crying to the pinkertons.
EDIT: DAMN IT ITS NOT CUM.
I can’t believe it’s not cum
Lol ok I’m sorry, is it cum?
White tyrants is what I call cum too
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I cannot think of any other word that starts with c and ends with m. What is wrong with me
Communism
It can’t be that because that doesn’t make any sense as an answer
My thinking cap finally revealed it to be capitalism.
Cum on Nappa! Damn it!
It can’t be a coincidence that this is happening as AI technology is getting better at what these fired people do at work
Edit: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tech-layoffs-artificial-intelligence-ai-chatgpt/
Maximizing shareholder’s profits, as St. Friedman commanded.
It’s an election year in the midst of an onsetting recession, so shareholders want to consolidate. I think on top of that models are being sold as something that can replace certain task forces - normally there would be rehires, and there still will be but I think it will be after its seen that they aren’t ideal replacements.
It’s likely the election won’t take place until next year.
Overhiring during covid is definitely a major part of it, combined with a slight investment bubble bursting
I don’t like calling it overhiring as if it was accidental or something. They didn’t hire thousands of people over covid thinking covid would never end, they just knew they could pick up people to fill the role for now and kick them to the curb as soon as they weren’t needed.
It wasn’t an oopsie, it was by design.
Another factor was the PPP and other “totally not bailouts” that were part of the COVID relief spending.
Of the roughly $800 billion dollars from PPP which was provided as uncollateralized, low-interest loans 66-77% went directly to companies and ~92% of those loans were completely forgiven.. In other words an ~5-600M bailout predicated on keeping positions open long enough to maintain plausible deniability that is what the goal was.
They’ll give corporations all the slack and handouts but look at those trying to feed their children and scrutinize every little detail. It’s so sad.
Yeah, here in Germany, workers have stronger protections, laying them off isn’t as easy, and I feel like the layoff waves have largely not occurred here, because companies didn’t hire so much during the pandemic.
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I actually think it’s just bandwagoning by a bunch of cowards.
We saw this same phenomenon early last year too: Facebook laid off a bunch of employees, then Apple announced the same, then Microsoft, then Google, then Salesforce, then the infamous Twitter layoffs.
I think big tech is so sensitive to negative press that they all just wait and lay off folks at the same time so no single company takes all the bad press.
It doesn’t even have to be Illuminati-level coordination, either. All it takes is for some exec at Tech Company B to see that Tech Company A is firing people. Then Tech Company B decides to clean house too. The cascade is just a bunch of morons deciding to hop on the “let’s fuck over our employees to help our balance sheet” train.
Definitely agree it’s not an Illuminati cabal meeting in hoods and masks.
But it’s not not that either - there’s lots of overlap on boards of directors and VCs invested in these companies. They’re in the same circles and probably play golf together. Or, they hang out on the tarmac before their Davos keynotes on saving the world.
I live in Silicon Valley and I’ve heard that there’s a WhatsApp group with a bunch of “big tech” CEOs and CTOs in it and they chat and share memes with each other 👀
“They’re just like us!”
It’s more devious than that. If company A lays off 1000 people due to “legitimate” reasons (e.g. twitter generally doing poorly), that’s 1000 people looking for new jobs. Company B, C, and D can then take that as an opportunity to lay off 1000 people each that aren’t immediately vital to the success of the company. Company A might not have the funds or desire to rehire right away, but the other three will slowly start building back up. You end up with 4000 people competing for 100 open positions. Many may not be willing to accept a pay cut, but some percentage will, and gradually the rest will be slowly starved down to accepting less pay.
Software engineering is notoriously a high paid career path, and executives at these companies hate that, so any opportunity they get to suppress wages, they’ll jump on. Especially if you know every other big company is doing it to, so they won’t be able to turn that into an advantage against you
Apple did not announce any layoffs last year. It’s been news worthy because some many of the other tech companies have had multiple rounds
Overinvestment and strong labor demand led to very high salaries. Investors hate high salaries. Firing people they can replace at a discount now that supply is increasing
It’s this.
With inflation, everyone deserves a higher salary. And programmers are able to command it.
CEOs hate this, so they’re playing chicken.
They’ll all get fired and pull their golden parachute in the next three years, when the shit hits the fan because they decided they could get by without XYZ critical skill.
Then they’ll go to the next place and evangelize about how “you’ve got to invest in talent”.
And soon they’ll be surprised the employees are less and less loyal and blame it on the new generations.
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Greed. They are making more profit than ever
Late stage capitalism
Finally. Thanks.
