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Comment by jstx1 | Hacker News Reader

10 000 out of 1 500 000

1,500,000 includes all the hourly workers but my understanding is that the 10,000 is corporate. Still only 3% of corporate workers which is less than they pip every year

This is the second time in these comments I've seen this distinction held out as self-evidently meaningful. I sincerely do not understand, can someone please explain why laying off salaried workers matters but hourly ones does not?

It is the nature of contract work to be temporary. A full time employee is definitionally a stricter contract between employer and employee that is expected to continue for a longer period of time and represents a more binding commitment.

There is a meaningful distinction between the expected nature of the role and benefits of a contractor vs full time employee.

This isn't to say that laying off contractors doesn't matter, but its not unexpected or as good of a means to understand a company's outlook.

Generally speaking the average annual wage of corporate workers (mostly engineers) will be in the six figures. Hourly wage workers take home (on average) median US annual wages. So laying of 10000 engineers (in terms of immediate $ costs) is the equivalent of laying of approximately 30000 to 50000 hourly wage workers.

Maybe the world is bigger than my brain can imagine but where are all these people going to go? If all big tech companies are having lay-offs and hiring freezes, who's going to absorb that amount of workers?

To other companies. Some are still hiring. Remember how everyone was saying that filling positions was difficult? Well, it's getting much easier now. Keep in mind that not all of these layoffs are for tech workers (many of them are business functions) and that these examples are very visible but the numbers aren't that big in the context of the overall labor market.

Of course it could get much worse than this but we aren't there yet.

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