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Comment by puranjay | Hacker News Reader

Much of this seems to be a complete miscalculation of the “new normal” of the pandemic. There was a narrative that somehow all the wild growth we had seen in the pandemic years when everyone was forcibly locked at home would sustain forever.

Of course that wasn’t going to happen and should have been obvious to anyone. The pandemic is over and the “new normal” has just gone back to the “old normal” with marginal changes in work/play patterns.

This was always going to happen, with or without current rate hikes. The rate hikes just accelerated everything by 2 years.

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The great part is that tech (and other white collar) workers used that small window of opportunity where they had tremendous bargaining power to push for policies that will make it even easier to replace them.

It feels like a white collar repeat of what blue collar voters did in the US in the 70s and 80s.

> The great part is that tech (and other white collar) workers used that small window of opportunity where they had tremendous bargaining power to push for policies that will make it even easier to replace them.

Any examples of those policies?

Work from home. Even with the pandemic over and some big tech companies not wanting to fully commit, remote work has become dramatically more commonplace in the industry than it was a few years ago pre-pandemic. Even conservative companies like Two Sigma were forced to introduce flexible hybrid models.

The very obvious one is remote work policies. Before you were only competing against people in your immediate area or people who were willing to move. Now you're competing against everyone. That's a much broader pool of employees for companies to pull from.

Isn't that worse for employee wages though? More employees to pick from = more competition among workers = lower wages?

Employees also have a much broader pool of employers to pull from.

That’s just one side of the coin. With remote work, your pool of available jobs also increases. At least in Europe that’s a big win since the whole continent has only 2 or 3 hours of difference.

I'm guessing they are referring to remote work location/wfh

I think there is another way of looking at it, as a way for the incredible growth in startups to the finally being understood by the new and old entrepreneurs.

Hiring and such didn't only happen in the pandemic period but also overall in almost the entire past decade(2012-2021).

Hurting the understanding of the people in the market, we are now seeing the sudden shrinking to have caused them to figure out priorities of either growth or profitability in even later phases of the business. At least that's what it seems like to me.

Because the jobs market is almost just as good in tech as always, it's just big startups and companies are shrinking and increasing margins while smaller ones in early phases of growth are still increasing jobs or just in sheer numbers.

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