Over 50% of CEOs say they’re considering cutting jobs over the next 6 months
marketwatch.com
marketwatch.com
WHAT'S THE BASELINE?!
It could well be that 50% of CEOs are always "considering" cutting jobs in the next 6 months. I mean, I suspect that this number is higher than usual because, well, it does look like we're heading into a recession. But if I'm interpreting this number based on my perception of the recession, then this number is useless at the main point of this article: informing me on whether we're heading into a recession or not.
They are not. CEOs are generally optimistic. this is a very bad sign. 99.99999% of knowing what someone will do is what they say. people try to read way too much into other things, "what were they really thinking? how has that changed over time?" etc etc. sometimes you just have to snap out of it and LISTEN.
and what you hear is very bad, and far from 'useless'.
as far as whether we are heading into a recession or not, we are not. We are already in a recession. We've had 2 quarters of shrinking GDP. maybe we notch a positive quarter in between the next negative quarter, but its a recession. stop over thinking it.
That definition of recession is not codified.
The official definition is that we’re in a recession only after an octogenarian declares it (retroactively of course).
Using the 2 quarters rule (something that has no official bearing) means that 2 of the last 3 recessions (2000 and 2020) weren't recessions.
Begin using the data > Section 1 Domestic Product and Income > Table 1.1.5 Gross Domestic Product > Modify > First year 2016 (refresh table)
Only two though-- Q2 was so sharp that everything after that was recovery.
It wouldn't be unusual for a major economic calamity to occur within a single quarter. Both Covid lock downs and the collapse of AIG/LB happened within a matter of weeks.
But that's not receding, that's has receded.
If your implied definition is slipping below the growth trend, then any '50% collapse' is going to ensure 'recession' (by this definition) for probably (or even hopefully) a long time.
A recession is past tense. One can speculate that we are in a recession, but it's not feasible to collect all the information necessary to make that determination in real time. The best one can do is say, "a recession started six months ago, and I think the situation is better/the same/worse."
Shift the quarter to begin in Feb and you'd only have 1Q of decline.
That is why the 2 quarters rule is stupid and why 2020 doesn't fit the rule.
It's just a rule of thumb, not some profound maxim of economics.
That said, you can apply the same to GP's suggestion of months, if the timescales are even shorter.
How convenient!
Almost every situation in history of 1 0 1 is considered a recession but 2011, but that one wasn't considered one because Obama was president. however, every time that I know of, back to back shrinking quarters has always been a recession, as far as I know.
And it matches up, we all know its a recession now (except those who want to deny its one because of their political view). its a recession, you only look more wrong trying to deny the obvious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Two periods of negative GDP growth without a rise in unemployment is unprecedented, but that is largely the result of bullwhip effects of the pandemic which was unprecedented.
The actual recession is going to be substantially worse.
The people who argue that we're in a recession right now due to two quarters of negative GDP growth while discounting the fact that every other indicator of the economy has been pretty healthy up until recently just makes me think "tell me you were too young to remember 2008/2001/1992/1982/1980 without telling me you were too young to remember".
IDK it is probably pointless to argue about this with people who will double-down on the strict definition that they think they know. Wait for another 12-24 months and let me know if it feels and order of magnitude worse or not.
(Agreed, though, that CEOs are generally almost naive optimists and that when they're all pessimistic about the economy it can almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy)
It primarily exists to give you a believable model that promotes behavior of the masses towards the interests of the owners of the company or nation state that controls it.
It primarily exists to give me a believable model that promotes your beliefs.
That kind of statement is literally true for everything.
> Nine in ten CEOs in the U.S. (91%) believe a recession will arrive in the coming 12 months, while 86% of CEOs globally feel the same way
- So what? Most CEOs I know cannot foresee what they will eat tomorrow. No offence, but being CEO makes you no better at predicting the future as the janitor. "They have, more info, experience" yada yada... I knew just too many incompetent CEOs.
Also, what does it mean, cutting jobs... how many? why? which ones?
Seems like content, but completely empty.
Here is an interesting thought experiment: if McKinsey wanted to force a recession, could they invoke one by telling all the CEOs the worst possible news and making terrible recommendations?
No, really, most people have a stake one way or another, and when presented a chance to influence the populace, by making people afraid of losing their jobs and making other CEOs afraid of hiring like crazy, they’ll say the line whether it’s true or false.
This recession is a self fulfilling prophecy intentionally triggered by the Fed at the behest of Congress behind the scenes to curtail the public meta mind technology companies were creating via social media.
Don’t stop doing. There’s no reason our agency must be coupled to macro economic views of a coddled minority. The public gifts them their hallucination of being a valuable member of society. We don’t have to coddle their figurative identity.
Do you mind expanding on your statement that the current actions of the fed/congress are a reaction to technology companies?
Seems a bit circular to me.
We're not smarter than everyone else. No, we're just more clued in to what's happening with our capital markets, vendors, competitors, and customers.
Try to be forward thinking about what trends might be coming. It used to be easier to do this but now everyone hops on trends quickly so it's harder to maintain a head start.
I'm looking at my next venture right now and I'm mostly focused on the overall macro picture surrounding the growth prospects of an industry. Things like population dynamics are playing a bigger part of how I see opportunity. The best CEO won't accomplish much in a dying or flat industry.
Ignore people who say "X is saturated". Everything is saturated. What matters is if the market is going to grow.
Now I'm more focused on wealth deployment and preservation and trying to focus less on building new things. Building is where my passion is but it's high risk and I don't need to be taking risks anymore.
This is a company that I know previously to be quite ethical, yet here they are doing dirty tricks. Market falls can be a threat to companies, but by engaging with propaganda trolls can influence the market and make money. Read any mortgage or real estate propaganda and you'll see they're all using the same words, false comparisons, etc. Maybe the true signal of a recession is the defiance of admitting there is a recession.
I ended up asking my real estate agent for suggestions and she suggested a local hole in the wall originator that gave me significantly better rates than anyone else.
It’s stunning to me that people will outsource all decision making to an app they saw in an advert, for their most expensive life purchase.
Their rates are terrible, and even light research would show they were uncompetitive, but it seems many americans value convenience over common sense.
look at consumer debt levels and how several major banks in Europe are ready to blow up, not a sign of a healthy economy. Unemployment rates are a lagging indicator for recessions, companies don't start laying people off until revenue takes a hit. The Fed has outright said they are going to keep raising rates until people start losing jobs so inflation declines.
Another more conspiratorial take. Since wage growth finally started again for the average worker, talks of recession are an attempt to crush that growth.
Glad to see this FUD being shared still. Did we learn nothing over the last few years?
Much like when the papers write so much nationalistic tripe that the people reading them actually start both believing it, and expecting it.
No, they're writing what gets clicks or shifts papers. Saying WFH is bad pleases a (large) subset of managers and enrages a lot of the rank and file, but they all click. So that's what they write.
And I say that as someone working in tech missing the office.
With remote work, an employee can work multiple jobs simultaneously, and they're unbeholden to any one employer, what with how easy it is to apply and switch to a new one. So how do companies combat this? They introduce friction at the very start of the pipeline - hiring. Multiple rounds of oral exams, take-home exams, leetcode questions that can only be answered with weeks or months of deliberate studying (something an already-employed person has little time for) - flaming hoops galore. They'll still compete with one another, sure, but they've found it's in their best interests if they all agree to hire in this kind of fraudulent manner.
So, out of respect, I do perform tests.
But some employees who seem perfectly good during tests come into the company with plenty of grammar mistakes, then I notice that they only master the surface of everything and they get fired.
I should charge employees for passing my exams, since it lowers the risk of misadventures. I’m so tired of this “Employers are evil” trope often suffixed with “because going to a coding interview is like working for free.”
I should do lengthy tests just to filter out stingy employees. (and I talk as someone who gave a 78% raise to one employee who’s been here 10 months, and 30% to the other).
A subjugated worker doesn't make a very good problem solver. They're really good at following procedure, though.
I don't think employers are evil, they don't get value out of the interview process. I would say both employer and prospect employee gets a similar value out of it (the chance of hiring / being hired).
I think employers (or better, their middle managers in charge or recruitment) are mostly stupid and inefficient.
Working together for a bit is the only way of actually checking if someone will be fine doing the job or not.
Demonstrating some random knowledge is not a good predictor of success. I worked with people who passed leetcoding and were trash and people who didn't who were amazing.
I found out about their qualities only after a few weeks of work (not even full time, even just on and off).
But yes, I think it cannot be coincidence all those articles pushing the back to the office, when (at least what I have seen) the productivity has undoubtedly raised.
Can you expand upon this?
IIRC the wording on the form is simplified to make it seem like the question is "do you have another source of income?"
Oh and the amount of meetings skyrocketed.
Dumped my last client because it turned into basically 8hrs of meetings
I tried to check the overlap with /r/churning but it looks like overemployed isn't in the database.
https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/overemplo...
edit: the concept has made appearances on HN
but the difference here is the concurrency. In-person jobs require the person, so you cannot do two at the same time.
But a remote job, where the employer assumes you have their job at full attention, might be short-changed if you were to work two remote jobs at the same time. That is, of course, unless you work remote for two employers, in two different time zones (so basically the same as the two in-person jobs).
Not everyone just accepts the promise of automation to free us from tedium is lost to ever-growing corporate balance sheets.
I'm not saying all of the things you mentioned are a good solution to that problem, but I do believe they are how some organizations are (poorly) attempting to solve it.
We have now hired 3 (that we know of) people who turned out to be different from the person we interviewed. I suspect one other, and one of my colleagues suspects a fifth. The is a problem for several reasons.
We have talked about many of the ideas that you mentioned, and tried some, but ultimately decided that they are too burdensome. So, now we only hire remote people in cities where a long term employee already works and they can attend the interview in person to verify the person being interviewed in not cheating or getting assistance in any way. Our solution isn't perfect, but it's what we're doing until we can find a better solution.
The irony, as you can see clear as day, is that they achieved the record month while everyone was working remotely.
Someone actually called him out on it, surprisingly, but he simply backpedaled and said remote is just not his personal preference.
No -- they did not learn ANYTHING over the last few years and I suspect that the pandemic will be looked back on with a bit of nostalgia in a few years when we look back.
There will always be the horrors that came with it, but there will also be people who got time off work, fathers who got to spend more time with their kids, people who got a lot of their lives back by avoiding commutes, etc.
I realize I'm opening myself up to get completely roasted in the comments because the pandemic was really rough on people, but I hope I preemptively addressed that here in saying that the pandemic also shed a light in other areas of our life that need change.
Just as the covid and flu season starts up.
Who is more likely to get fired if you are choosing between two similar competent people and you have been told you need to pick one: The one you sit next to and have lunch with a few days a week and possibly lives in your general neighborhood? or the person which you have never met in person and lives 2000 miles away?
But for example, 5 years ago, I worked in a team, when I was only couple of days in the office. Others every day. I saw my team manager the days I was in the office... and also at weekends, because we were friends... so... it all depends.
Because people making decisions are often influenced by their own biases and social preferences, unfortunately.
"But what if they fuck off to play golf at 2:30 PM or sneakily take a vacation to the beach without using vacation time while in fact only working part of the time for that week?" says the exec, before fucking off to play golf at 2:30 PM and then help the spouse and kids pack for for tomorrow's vacation-disguised-as-a-business-trip.
My girlfriend's uncle told me over Christmas dinner, his job is to go golfing with US bank CEOs. That's how they do business! We're being scammed, and them too.
[1] I haven't finished the show, so maybe "at least one"
What is a very odd assumption, because if a company is firing based on competence, similar competent people will get on the same bracket and both fired or kept. And no large company knows enough to fire based on personal competence anyway. So yeah, it's FUD.
Even with the current uncertainty there are employees choosing to change jobs rather than go to an office. Even if you freeze hiring, you need to make sure you're retaining the employees you have.
People don't even have to similar in competence... the farther away from the headquarters you are the less influence and importance you have. common sense
I came to that depressing realisation a few months into Covid. The whole world suddenly learned
- remote work is fine
- it was so much better for the environment to not commute constantly
- you do not need mass migration for a services economy
and then we all promptly forgot it.
I’m privy to the boardroom setting and know the C suite personalities well enough. They make jokes about lazy inefficiency of WFH. They feel out of control if they can’t walk to your desk and demand something is a priority. They don’t know how to lead in a WFH world. Also, by definition their job is usually to be in meetings all day every day and they just don’t enjoy the zoom experience as much because of it. They like to wear fancy dry cleaned cloths when everyone else just wants to wear basketball shorts and a tee shirt at home.
If we convince employers that we're "more productive" at home, then whats stopping them from finding cheaper employees elsewhere?
Upper management is being much more assertive in their push to get everyone back in the office, away from the current 'hybrid 3-day a week but not really enforced' model to 'we need everyone back 5 days a week in all hands on deck mode to navigate the coming recession.'
In other words, the headline means less than nothing.
aren't we in a recession?
In America, half of the CEOs (51%) say they’re considering workforce reductions during the next six months
CEO's consider a lot of things, might be nice to see a graph of this over time.
So you're going to see some confusion on this topic until the politics around it settle down a bit.
Basically, in the US, we are in a recession when the Business Cycle Dating Committee says so.
This would be the same regardless of which party were in power, the government lies.
Here's the thing -- there is no "official" or "legal" definition of recession in the United States. Yes, you'll hear regulators and politicians defer to NBER, but that's it.
The most common definition used by economists and the financial industry is the same one used world-wide: two quarters of negative growth. And by that measure we're in a recession.
"What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle. Instead, both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data—including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes.
"[...] The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee—the official recession scorekeeper—defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”"
You can certainly make the argument that people shouldn't use this definition or that better measures exist, but it's objectively the official definition used by the US federal government.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2022/07/21/...
Similarly are we in a recession? Legally the National Bureau of Economic Research gets to make that call. The rule of thumb is it gets called when for consecutive quarters of GDP contraction. However they have said they refuse to call it because unemployment is low and wages are doing well.
So you can call it whatever you like, legally it is just another day.
Just stay professional and keep an open mind and rest assured that by now all our economies inherently depend on all these more or less complex information systems FWIW.
Successful CEOs understand the dynamic you expressed above, however.
Usually only upsides. New learning opportunities, remuneration, etc. Too much comfort isn’t good for the good worker either. Think occasional cold shower and fermented Sauerkraut.
Work on your safety belt though, but that should go without saying even during high times. You might miss the people, though you can still keep in touch.
We have it very good, still fight for your worth at all times. Peace.
We need a mechanism for scrutinising these media workers. They negatively influence our daily lives and are as much if not more corrupt than politicians. Wondering how much bribe marketwatch took for slipping in this crap?
https://cooleypubco.com/2016/07/25/new-study-shows-inverse-c...
But the second part (as much as I would like to believe it) makes little sense.
Our company willingly sourced candidates across the globe to find rare talents. They won’t let that effort go to waste. I would be more worried if you can’t express what your added value is for the company/strengths on the market.
I’ve told this to myself many times over my career. And been wrong so many times.
Software is still and ever increasingly eating the world FWIW…
Don’t fall for the doomsday folks, they either don’t understand the dynamics and/or are just in it for the drama.
It’s actually still a great time to negotiate for premiums. Keep calm and carry on.
I predict further race to the bottom in this way, similar to putting 14 year old girls in Olympic Gymnastics, as was done and eventually outlawed. Expect smart high school students in low-income economies to be in demand, and aggressive mob types to make front companies to handle anything about the money
It never hurts to pay attention to the macro economy, but in the end, just live your life and pursue the career you want.
Software development may eventually go the way of textile manufacturing (i.e. only done in poor countries with cheap, unskilled labor) but I doubt you or I will live long enough to see it.
“92% of WeWork users are considering upgrading their home Internet speeds.”
1 - Hire assuming people work < 8 hr day. 2 - Don't overburden them. 3 - Don't try to drive hyper-productivity. 4 - Do manage people for results; counsel those who are not performing at level* and yes, fire them if you can't help them get going.
* See point 2
Results (in my experience):
A - Less turnover B - Better quality (because people have time to think; less technical debt because less "I'm exhausted so let's just ship it" C - People have useful ideas because they have some time to think D - Customers happier; revenue more dependable E - in the inevitable but rare times there is a crunch people are more likely to have the energy for it and understand why/how it happened.
At least, this has always worked for me, as some other HN commenters can corroborate.
About the point: Yes, it seems there will be a recession and some job cutting. Please be prepared.