This is a good thing, overall, in the same way that the dotcom crash was a good thing to clear the field of all the frauds.
I have the feeling that a few of those large companies are in need of a wake-up call.
I have the feeling that a few of those large companies are in need of a wake-up call.
The tech industry is going to take a while to recover from the current economic shocks, and everyone – whether you work for the affected companies or not – will have to face some pain in the short term.
Not sure what conclusion to draw from that.
On Long Island (where I live), we have the Pine Barrens. These are areas of scrub and pitch pine trees, in a sandy soil. They require occasional fires, in order to reproduce (opens the cones, and fertilizes the soil).
Back in the early 1990s, we had a pretty major wildfire, because they had not been doing controlled burns. I think New Jersey suffered something similar, around the same time.
Since then, I hear they do controlled burns.
I have seen no "controlled burns" of the bloat that infests the tech industry, so this is likely to be a fairly significant wildfire.
Arguably it's better for the employee (assuming they actually underperform) because then they can recognize "this is me, I need to aim lower or upgrade my skills, etc" instead of "I was one of thousands laid off, I'm fine, it was the company".
How did you come to this conclusion? The doubling of headcount in 2020 and 2021 in a year didn’t signal that this can turn on a dime in either direction?
The delusional amount of overhiring at these companies was really something. Guess it was too ingrained in their DNA.
Everything that looked like bullshit turned out to be bullshit.
And I've seen a lot of delusional bullshit during the last few years, the wort of those coming from Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
But I’m curious - What ideas of Elon do you find to be delusional bullshit?
One may hate on Musk for a number of very good reasons, but it cannot be denied him, Shotwell and the rest of the SpaceX team have thoroughly kicked the established space industry mooches into their asses.
Anything he say should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.
I don't think he is a complete fraud, but I would not bet my shirt on his Mark colonization project.
What is a billionaire gonna do once they get to Mars?
Undergo profound physical atrophy leading to organ dysfunction and eventually cancer ...
... since Mars gravity is something like 1/3 that of Earth.
We barely have the capability of living long term on Antarctica, and it has plentiful water, oxygen, gravity, a magnetic field, and doesn't have lethal radiation. Until I see a 100K population colony on Antarctica, I'll be unconvinced that we even have a prayer of building a 1K population colony on Mars.
I'll admit that I'm not sure what the point of a mars colony is either, except for science and to act as a forward space outpost.. maybe it would be useful for industrial purposes? I guess you wouldn't have to worry about utterly destroying the environment.
If it were mostly self sufficient it could act as a seed to repair earth society in the event of a catastrophic asteroid strike or nuclear war, I guess
Maybe no visionary is going to get everything right. But there do seem to be some pretty major areas that have received critical feedback from people who seem to understand those domains.
On the other hand Tesla has been a huge thing. I'm a big anti-EVs guy because I'm, at heart, a petrolhead, and at the beginning I was of course very skeptic of him managing to pull it off. But that opinion of mine changed completely the moment when I realised that a Tesla vehicle is basically a piece of software running/controlling a battery that happens to have 4 wheels attached, and that the Tesla engineers have managed to make good on that.
The rocket stuff is also quite cool.
The rockets and car factories are impressive.
But the tunnels, the robotaxi, the hyperloop, the solar roofs... So far, a lot of over-hyped promises that are looking more and more like vaporware.
I hope that future doesn't happen, or that if it does its through a decentralized protocol and not owned by Meta. But if the Metaverse implodes I'd still consider it a failed gamble than delusional bullshit.
I can't defend Musk the same way.
They do not have to raise money to build the tech, so they don't even have to advertise anything until they have something really worthy to show and sell.
So why are they showing something that is clearly not ready?
Either they think that discourse can translate into reality if enough people believe in it (magical thinking), or they think they already have a product. In both case this is delusional.
It's a whole other thing to be cheering for people losing their jobs.
Remember, we have one of the weakest social nets in the world. And our medical is nigh exclusively tied to our jobs.
But people are losing their jobs en masse (and the C-levels get golden parachutes). Um, yay?
God forbid we take responsibility for the massive bubble we’ve created through fiscal and monetary excess and actually address inflation
These people will be reabsorbed elsewhere, but it will certainly be a sad world when 21 year olds can’t make 300k out of college with 0 experience.
Yes, it is. But declines follow peaks.
> People who lose their jobs will be reabsorbed elsewhere
...or they won’t, and very soon the unemployment rate will be farther than it is today from the lowest it has been in history.
5% unemployment means there’s a rotating set of job seekers that comprise 5% of the labor force.
It absolutely does not mean that 5% of the labor force is perpetually jobless and unemployable.
I hope those lamenting these layoffs were also against the extreme fiscal excess which made them necessary in the end. The road to hell is often paved with good intentions
If rates aren’t being slashed long before then, then either:
(1) the brief burst of layoffs were an aberration and the job market will have otherwise stayed strong, so scraping by isn’t an issue.
(2) despite a weakening job market, inflation has been so persistent that fighting it remains a higher Fed priority than stimulus, and a politically motivated loosening of monetary policy would be a recipe for slingshotting into hyperinflation.
Unemployment rate is simply the ratio of two patterns of individual experience (not employed and actively looking vs that plus currently employed), published after the fact.
> 5% unemployment means there’s a rotating set of job seekers that comprise 5% of the labor force.
5% unemployment means that (at the time covered by the report) for every 100 people either not employed and actively looking for work or working, 5 fell into the former category.
It absolutely doesn’t tell you how much of that group is “rotating”.
5% unemployment is never going to represent 5% of the workforce being perpetually unemployed, as many sob stories try to implicitly portray it as.
If an individual is perpetually unemployable, then it doesn’t matter if unemployment is 5% or 1%, they aren’t getting hired anyway
No, it doesn’t rotate “by definition”, and the rate isn’t a constant, it is a point-in-time estimate.
If there is both hiring and firing going on that isn’t at the edges of the work force some portion of the 5% is transitorily unemployed, but that could be a very large or very small portion, or anything in between.
Just because the general country-wide unemployment is a low number, does not mean with any sort of guarantee that an individual will be able to transition in a decent amount of time as not to unduly impact their life.
And given what the oligopoly of banks... err, the FED has been saying, 'they are hitting the brakes of inflation by raising interest rates significantly' - further exasperating the layoffs and slowing/reversing hiring at other firms.
Targeting them more precisely with aid is the way to solve that, not helicopter money into massive bubble and inflation.
In the end who got hurt the most by the very money handed to them?
With that attitude, there will be.
But there doesn't have to be.
> Targeting them more precisely with aid is the way to solve that, not helicopter money into massive bubble and inflation.
Not aid. Money. Straight up cold hard cash. Any thing else instead, like SNAP, housing vouchers, etc treats them like they have no agency. Yet with corporate handouts, we do no such thing. Look no further than the PPP debacle.
Sorry, you advocate economic collapse, not anything realistic or sustainable.
Wishful thinkers have inflicted a vast amount of deaths throughout history due to economic mismanagement. Famine, hyperinflation etc
They’ve lost 90% of their money, by definition
If an investor does poor due diligence and doesn’t put the work in to determine a reasonable fair valuation for a company, and then loses their entire investment, that is just.
If board members give bad advice and the stock falls, they incur losses.
These are just outcomes.
Most people would agree that attending a 6 week bootcamp shouldn’t entitle somebody to a 200-300k job. And it won’t in the near future.
You’ll have to do a lot more to achieve the same comp going forward, just like every other industry. There’s nothing special about tech, it was just a nascent industry in boom times. No longer
People agree with that because it's true, developers landing those kinds of jobs are people coming out of strong universities (Stanford, Berkeley, etc), already have connections, or are senior level positions.
Nobody comes out of a code camp having just learned react and lands a 250 K position. Not sure where you got that information from but that's a serious outlier.
And many with little skills could grind leetcode and make 200k with no past experience. I became wealthy through egregious tech pay, I’ve seen it all firsthand.
Were you asleep at the wheel through the whole Covid bubble?
Shareholders clearly get paid commensurately with their ability to make wise investment choices. There’s nothing more equitable than that
What other outcome could or should there possibly even be?
But here we're talking about people who made at least 300k a year, possibly up to a million. Those who stayed for few years likely never have to look for another job even again. The ones who didn't might still take few years sabbatical.
Are you suggesting that working "a few years" earning $300k in a high cost-of-living area means you likely saved enough money to never need to work again? Or are you suggesting that someone with the skills/experience working in a position that did pay that much for a few years will find it trivial to find another job?
Totally agree our social safety nets aren't the strongest. But precisely because of that, people -- particularly higher earners -- have a responsibility to build their own padding for the inevitable short, sharp shocks to their livelihood.
EDIT: I reflexively pulled Twitter numbers, but a quick glance shows the average FB salary is higher.
I lived in San Diego in the mid-90s. One thing I remembered was that the very first job I had doing QA for a COBOL vendor at $15/hour had not just one but multiple applicants with doctorate degrees apply. That was fallout from the Cold War: they’d all worked for big defense contractors on projects which were scaled back, suddenly going from comfortably above average income to nothing. One of the things a bunch of people found out abruptly was how bad it can be to have a lot of your net worth tied up in housing: the market slowed dramatically (nobody needed houses near those employers, many people were waiting to see how the market went, etc.) for everyone at the same time, so a house you could easily have sold before would be on the market for a year.
Things are better now in some key ways (remote work, portable skills, etc.) but I still would be surprised if a bunch of people aren’t getting a rough reminder about how badly correlated failures can suck, especially for the ones not making experienced software engineer salaries.