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Comment by kinkora | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if a bit of confirmation bias on my side but seems like there is a recent big uptick of layoffs at Silicon Valley companies? Popular ones like Quora, TripAvisor, Ebay, Mozilla, Uber, 23andMe, etc we hear about but among my own network, i am even hearing it from smaller startups & businesses.

Just wondering if it is just me but I am surmising that it seems to indicate a wider systematic.. issue? Maybe issue is not the word for it. Symptom is probably a better description and it feels we are at the precipitous of an incoming storm/crunch/etc.

Please tell me I am imagining things.

Edit: I guess my question is more are all these layoffs an indicator of an incoming recession or is it something more nefarious like the big tech (FAANG) are taking steps to widen their positions while they are still in a "strong" position to do so (e.g. google).

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I mean, there's barely been 2k layoffs that I've heard of in a year. Google's hired more than that in The Bay alone. I'm sure Facebook and Apple have hired just as many.

I really doubt we're at a net negative.

This might just be a post-holiday rush. It's a dick move to lay people off between ~Nov 15 and Jan 1, and if you can afford to avoid it, it's best to avoid burning people affected and making the remaining employees a little more bitter and anxious.

Modern recessions are caused by 2 things: 1) Some very inflated assest class being spread out among a large number of folks suddenly failing or 2) the fear of 1) happening, which can lead to a self fulfilling prophecy. Since we’ve always seen recessions in the past, nobody believes we can achieve sustained economic growth... and they are mostly right. If enough people believe there is a recession they will start behaving in ways that ironically contribute to the recession.

What’s really protecting us from recession today, in my humble opinion, is that all of humanity is so interconnected and so hates recession that we’re willing to help out others who are on the brink of disaster of limit their failures to a small region rather than let it blow up in everybody’s face.

Also... small layoffs are not necessarily an indicator of recession, they can also be course corrections by overly optimistic companies whose wildly grandiose plans didn’t pan out as planned. While these well known businesses lay-off folks, my inbox is flooded by recruiters looking to fill multiple positions in a bevy of startups. In other words, business as usual.

For what it’s worth, I came to say the same thing, then saw you already did.

It’s hard to disentangle the effect HN has on our thinking, though. Just because layoffs have popped up on HN, are we both imagining that it’s part of a global trend? Or do global tech trends inherently appear on HN? Hard to say.

I doubt on the later part. You might wanna check this thread out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681

I read a few comments before I realized they were written in 2010, and not 2020. It's surprising how many of those predictions (easily most of the ones I read) seem completely applicable to the coming decade.

People may still be voting on comments in that thread.

I keep waiting for someone to realize Bay Area rents have gone up 100%-200% since 2008, but the max unemployment in CA is still $450 per week. I was laid off in 2009, and between that and severance, I could manage. It's going to be a lot harder in the next recession.

You realize jobs are abundant and rents are affordable outside the Bay Area?

My mortgage on a huge historic cotton mill loft with brick walls, 23'' ceilings, and city views in Atlanta is less than your rent.

You could consider getting out.

Suppose you rent a one bedroom for 4k in SF. You can do better than this, but let's go with it. And suppose your mortgage is 2k, and you make a solid salary of 200k in Atlanta.

It seems like a no brainer to move. But you're ignoring the fact that someone of equivalent experience could get a paycheck of 500k here.

That pay differential swamps trying to optimize by tightening the budget.

My total comp (salary plus RSUs) is 400k, and my (now fully vested and liquid) stock options are worth 2.5M. I realize not everyone can replicate that, but I did this in Atlanta, not SF.

I also can drive 7 minutes to work or run 30 minutes on the Beltline and shower when I get in.

There are more trees here than SF, and we have full seasons. It's also way more diverse. Not everyone is in tech. The dating scene is great.

SF isn't all it's made out to be.

SF is pretty much exactly what it's made out to be. The odds of getting a high paying job in tech are vastly higher in the bay area than in Atlanta, and SF is much friendlier to non-car methods of transportations. That said, yeah it's expensive as all hell.

> The dating scene is great.

Yeah, assuming you're a dude, the gender balance in Atlanta is probably much better, plus you're making excellent money in an area with much fewer people making bank; in SF, making 250k isn't even really that unusual, that's a mid-level dev position at Google, not even senior.

Re:diversity, I find there's this thing in the states where people count the percentage of black and Hispanic people as highly relevant to diversity, but Chinese and Indian people don't count, hence all the articles about how big tech companies are "mostly just white guys". Because the bay area really isn't very white, compared to the US as a whole.

Hello friend. I would advise against making these numbers so public and traceable to your name.

I've actually been thinking of moving to Atlanta recently. I live in Portland OR right now, so the sprawl of Atlanta scares me, but I've heard there are good walkable pockets of it.

I walk my dog 2 hours a day; are there places where the sidewalk density is high enough and the busy road density low enough that I could do that and have some route optionality so I'm not just doing the same walk all the time?

Sorry for the late reply.

The Beltline plus Piedmont Park is a perfect fit. The Beltline is linear, but long (it circles the city), and all of the connected neighborhoods are extremely walkable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeltLine

Piedmont Park and Ansley are beautiful.

The Beltline will eventually connect to the Silver Comet trail, which is a completely paved bike path that extends all the way to Alabama.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Comet_Trail

If you're willing to get in the car, the Palisades, Kennesaw Mountain, and more are not far. They're extremely dog friendly, and I visit them often.

https://www.atlantatrails.com/hiking-trails/hiking-east-pali...

Also, Fetch Dog Park is freaking amazing. It's a dog park with alcohol. It blew up, and now they're opening four more locations in two other states.

https://atlantapetlife.com/fetch-dog-park/

You shouldn't have any problem.

My point wasn't that CA rent is expensive, just that benefits need to keep up with cost of living, and I'm ~fine with paying for in taxes for it.

I'm fully aware that I pay the "California Tax" to live somewhere with good weather, outstanding universities, and to work with some of the smartest people in my industry. But that's what I value right now. Different people are looking for different things.

By tracks, by any chance? Doesn't narrow it down much in Atlanta (specifically with mills), but if you're talking where I think you're talking, I'm ~2 mi from you. ;)

Nailed it!

:) There aren't as many places with ceilings that high. Cool space!

Fingers crossed Atlanta makes good moves on the housing / transportation front in the next 20-30 years.

This part (and the city as a whole) feels like it could go either way.

The Fed is pumping money, the yield curve inverted, job openings are flat/declining, people have been predicting recession for 2 years... the precise date of an actual recession is not declared until long after the fact, but I certainly wouldn't bet on the recession not having started already. And there are strong political reasons to avoid any mention of recession, so we might see economic indicators getting distorted in the coming months.

Alternatively

The fed is ensuring liquidity in the overnight markets via short term loans which are paid back the next day (no one seems to know why there’s less liquidity there, could be higher asset values require greater liquid reserves, or some form of capital outflow tightening usd liquidity due to the strength of the dollar, or something else?)

Unemployment is exceeding low, which means more jobs are filled, which means there are less job postings.

People have been predicting doom since the dawn of mankind and sometimes they’re right.

Not sure about the yield curve enough to offer any explanation or even what it means when you say it’s inverted.

Not sure who’s right or what signs are meaningful. Dimension reduction of a search space is a difficult problem. Lots of times people see what they want to see.

I can’t help but just throw my hands up these days and go back to ViM, if it was Vegas I’d split my money fifty fifty on doom and gloom and outstanding success.

Job openings were a leading indicator in the last recession, see "Planned Next Three Months and Current Job Openings" in https://www.nfib.com/assets/SBET-December-2019.pdf (I ignore planned as it seems noisier). There has been no substantial decline since 2010. The decline in recent months is bigger than in 2017 but could still be noise.

The yield curve is relatively standard economic news: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2020/12/31/th...

Unemployment is used to define the recession so once that starts increasing again the process is already well underway.

I agree though, predicting a recession is like reading tea leaves. The data is so fuzzy and updated so infrequently that it's useless for practical decisions.

> no one seems to know why there’s less liquidity there

It's because JPMorgan Chase and friends think there is too much risk of intraday bankruptcy right now and no one wants to be left hanging on their loan.

here's an interesting thought experiment.. what happens to your loan when your bank goes bankrupt ?

Your loan is an asset of the bank. The administrators or liquidators of the bank can sell that asset to someone else.

Or the entire bank can be purchased/merged in which case your loan becomes an asset on the purchaser's balance sheet.

Bankruptcy doesn't mean "all bets are off".

Sure the fed is doing repo market operations (the overnight lending you talk about), but the vast majority of that money is going to bond buying. 300 billion (or some gigantic number like that) has been infused in the econ. This is much of the reason stock market does well. Since money doesn't go to consumer price inflation, it goes to a different kind of inflation, inflation of real assets, like stocks.

People do know why there is less liquidity there. Something like the repo crisis doesn't happen out of the blue.

> the yield curve inverted

The yield curve is no longer inverted.

Right. For example, after the yield curve inverted in 1998, it normalized and inverted 4 more times before the 2001 recession started. It doesn't say much besides "something weird is happening with the economy".

Tripadvisor is boston right?

GMAFIA, not FAANG.

These are signs of the upcoming global economic crisis. Companies funded by the FED are simply not sustainable.

In general, these seem to be Softbank companies, more than anything else, and ultimately, those are funded by Saudi petrodollars.

What does FED stand for in this context?

Federal reserve; the central bank that keeps interest rates below natural market price in order to pump growth, thereby putting too much cash in investors hands to possibly use constructively.

You end up with an investment bubble, which pops.

I assume the Federal Reserve Board aka the central banking system of the US

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