Ask HN: Who is firing right now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who is firing right now?

19 pointssyllogism8 comments

It's really hard to gauge how the crisis is affecting tech. On the one hand there will obviously be a general recession, but on the other hand tech as a portion of the economy should grow through the crisis and also afterwards.

Is it business as usual at your company? A freeze on new investments? Doors closing for good?

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Leafly: 50% (~150) staff reduction

Compass: 400 heads cut

Vacasa: Staff reduction (unknown count)

TripActions: 350 heads cut

Whether and how tech companies will be impacted depends on who your market is - we have some market segments calling in, asking for help, asking for more services, while other market segments are refusing calls from sales people, saying they are not going to even entertain discussions during this crisis. It all depends on which markets you serve.

(Not speaking on behalf of my current or former employers, or drawing from inside information)

I don't think you can bundle all of tech in one unit. During the 2008 financial crisis some tech products weren't affected or even saw increased demand. Of note were analytics software (used for cost-cutting) and some SaaS offerings (ongoing costs vs upfront cash).

It’s early. I would expect massive waves of layoffs in May/June.

The delay of income tax and evaporation of sales taxes is going to break state and local government and you’ll see businesses with a lot of government business just die. Ditto with finance.

Hopefully the relief bill passes and is effective. Otherwise, we’re in a bad place.

Business is definitely not as usual, most companies here in Netherlands have freezed their hiring process till 2021.

O'Reilly firing events team, cancelling Strata etc: https://twitter.com/LauraABaldwin/status/1242517013878071296

For our own part: we haven't really noticed anything in our business so far, I guess it takes a while for any cost-cutting orders to filter down. I definitely expect a recession, but even in pretty extreme scenarios we wouldn't need to make any layoffs.

SpotHero

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