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Comment by selfmodruntime | Hacker News Reader

I actually think they're wrong here. Yes, a couple thousand people lost their jobs, but I really think it's just companies trimming some fat. Engineers are largely still employed, and except for maybe Meta billions of people are still using Big Tech's products.

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I don’t understand why you say “except for Meta”? Billions of people are still using WhatsApp, Instagram, and FB last time I checked.

Because their primary product is mainly Ads, which has been suffering under the new Apple privacy guidelines.

If companies could identify “fat” with precision, they wouldn’t wait for downturns to cut it. Measuring SWE performance is fraught. These decisions are usually made without involving line managers and sometimes not even skip levels. Even if it wants to be, I don’t see how it can be a real reflection of performance.

That's still the end of an era. The COVID years were a golden age for tech workers. Salaries boomed and WFH swept the land. That seems to be, at least somewhat, over. We're not going to see developers in the breadline but we're also not going to see the huge raises people got. At least not for a couple years.

The number is a little higher than a couple thousand.

why did they hire those people in the first place?

Why not?

If economic conditions continued going well then they had the staff to meet their needs.

If they didn't then they'd cut the worst performing employees and anyone else they didn't want. Since every other company would also be doing layoffs they'd get no bad PR for it and low risk of employees leaving for greener pastures (since all other pastures would likely be closed).

Layoffs aren't some massive horrible thing for a company. They're just another part of doing business.

Because execs don't do all the hiring. Middle management and project teams go wild when no one is looking too closely at the costs and things can blow out pretty quickly.

Then growth slows and suddenly there's a need to tighten the belt a bit and a lot of waste is found

There was tons of uncertainty due to the pandemic so big tech over hired with the idea that if things weren't as frothy as expected they'd just get rid of the low performers/non-revenue orgs.

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