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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

I've heard rumors that Meta and Google have massive layoffs coming as well. Good luck out there

I've heard the same, Meta for sure, and a few folks at Goog have told me as well they are coming. For google this will be the first time they have ever done layoffs in the company history(2009 had 200 folks leave so not really layoffs so to speak) so that tells you the scale of this tech downturn.

You can't have your stock down 60% YoY (META) without consequence. There is a whole lot of fat at both of these companies (and really all large firms that never had any bad quarters) and a reckoning has to happen

You absolutely can. Stock price is really meaningless as far as the day to day life of a company is concerned- if your cash flows haven't changed, and the market has just decided to shit on you for a bit for irrational reasons there are no consequences other than maybe looking into whether a buyback makes sense.

Equity markets are often irrational and wrong. IE Covid- essentially every stock was down significantly in March of 2020, not realizing that some businesses will actually benefit from the pandemic.

That said, your statement about fat at these companies is true, and its probably been long past time that they clean out some dead wood.

> Stock price is really meaningless as far as the day to day life of a company is concerned

Not when significant part of your employee compensation is equity-based.

The market is going to do what it is going to do, I am not sure if you mean that from an employee based perspective or from a corporate perspective, but either should not matter- I guess with a big disclaimer that I am assuming that your core business is still doing well, but its just the "market" that has decided you are out of favor.

From a corporate perspective, you are buying a fixed dollar amount of shares to compensate your employees- I haven't heard of a fixed number of shares being offered as compensation in years for pubic companies. This does not affect your cashflow, just the number of shares being purchased in the open market.

From an employee perspective, its definitely not fun to see the value of your grants drop by 50%. It should only really affect your decision to leave or not if you feel the drop is permanent, or just a temporary blip. IE if I was hired at Peloton in 2020, the stock has dropped 95% and while it will likely bounce back a decent amount, the equity part of your compensation is essentially worthless and not going to be a golden handcuff that will keep you around. Google/Alphabet, its down about 30% but thats likely just an overreaction and is to some extent welcome as you get more shares in your grant... it wouldn't stress me out at all- maybe if I was looking to cash out and buy a house right now, but this was a risk that was always there.

Mark is completely unaccountable to investors. He can do whatever he wants as long as he has good faith reason to believe it will benefit shareholders.

This is confusing to read. Shareholders are investors.

Facebook has a dual class share structure giving Zuckerberg >50% of the votes.

That's genuinely anxiety-inducing to hear. I have several friends who have signed offers with Google, with start dates set within the next few weeks/months.

Really hoping they don't start pulling offers. I can't put my finger on why, but somehow that seems like it'd be even more cruel than layoffs.

Pulling offers is always considered a _very_ bad look. I would be extremely surprised if Google did such a thing given the optics, but it wouldn't be the first time Google has surprised me with it's stupidity.

I have heard that the 2009 layoffs were limited to recruiting. If these layoffs occur, they may be the company's first engineering layoffs.

I find it surprising that they are considering layoffs. There have been a number of articles about Sundar's concerns over productivity [1,2,3], but layoffs have a tendency to reduce moral and productivity.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515458 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32322131 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32816105

2009 layoffs were technically just a bunch of radio DJs that were hired into a product around revolutionizing radio and then had nowhere else to go in the company when their project was canceled. The recruiters let go were contractors, and Google just terminated their contracts.

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