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Comment by zepppotemkin | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy to me that they pretty much doubled their headcount over the pandemic, I know there are economic reasons for some of the recent layoffs but the hiring sprees some companies went out seem crazy to me

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It's never surprising when companies try to capitalize on opportunities. The shock seems to be when they then trim back when those opportunities no longer exist.

Cheap money and tons of new opportunities with everyone stuck inside. Social media companies realize how huge the first mover advantage is so they scaled as quickly as possible to take advantage of the pandemic.

There was an enormous amount of liquidity pumped into the system by fiscal and monetary authorities. That all these companies massively increased headcount is entirely rational. Wealthy people and companies did very well during the pandemic because they were direct beneficiaries of the fiscal and monetary support.

> It's crazy to me that they pretty much doubled their headcount over the pandemic

Dunno, my impression was that selling stuff online (and thus adverts) went gangbusters over the pandemic, as did social media in general.

It was a bet that the world had changed forever and they didn't want to be left behind, if they were wrong they'd just fire some people and course correct. All in the game.

Normally they hired talent to prevent talents join competitive companies ?

I think it may just be taking advantage of the lose monetary policy of the last decade plus. It's easier to justify one-shots, experiments, or new product searches when loans are cheap and aplenty. The money spigot has dried up and you either adapt or die.

Just curious, are companies like Snap going out an getting massive loans to facilitate hiring?

Looks like snap has $4b in debt, up from around 1 before the pandemic.

I mean they initially raised ~$5 billion in multiple rounds when first started in 2011. [1]

I doubt they could raised an equivalent amount if they started in say 2018 in the current environment.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/snapchat

Snapchat just recently had its first ever profitable quarter, 2021Q4, since going public. That's a bad look, I also doubt this story will hardly be unique in the upcoming year (more tech layoffs from "unicorns").

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