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Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

Every time I read stuff like:

> "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."

I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. I can't believe that Google, Shopify, Coinbase, everyone, really believed that this was the new reality going forward. It was written in the sky since April 2020. Anyone with a semblance of understanding could guess that the COVID-fueled situation and artificial economic prop up would come due in the medium term.

Really either the folks writing this crap take us for fools, or they're really shortsighted fools themselves.

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>Every time I read stuff like: "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase.

How are they taking you as a fool? The point of a company is not to maximize employment, it’s to maximize profit.

That means hiring up in growth periods, and downsizing in contractions.

That’s exactly what they said they have done.

> That’s exactly what they said they have done.

But they're trying to frame it as if they cared more about employees than profits.

They're framing it that way because framing it that way is a strategy to maximize profits.

I don't think so: they say explicitly that they hired to "match and fuel [...] growth".

Would they be more “caring about employees” if the didn’t fire anyone now but they had not hired tens of thousands in the last couple of years?

> The point of a company is not to maximize employment, it’s to maximize profit.

Rant: If most people in our society simply decided this wasn't true -- and that, no, the point of a company is not to maximize profit, we could solve so many harms.

And frankly, believing this is optional. It's like saying the point of a person is to live as long as possible. Sure, you can choose to think that, but if you do, it would be easy to paint you as a villain. And, of course, thinking that way is completely optional.

And...just because many people do think that way doesn't mean we have to. We can choose to apply a different meaning to the idea of a company.

As someone that helps run a company, I very much think our company exists to serve our customers in a very specific way. Most of our economic success, actually, comes from many of the choices that would seem to fly in the face of short-term monetary gain.

Companies don't exist to maximize profit. Villains do.

Successful and well-regarded companies will indeed arithmetically maximize profits if they're around in the long term while they are likely to see short term profiteers fail. Maximizing profits entails rather more than making a quick buck.

Companies exist to maximize profits with existing legal rules and social norms.

I think this is aligns with Simon Sinek's philosophy in The Infinite Game[0], which I really enjoyed reading. I totally agree with your point: business mindset is a choice.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinite_Game

You are free to believe something else and go off and do whatever you want with your life. Nobody is stopping you, and more importantly, nobody is calling you a villain for believing differently.

And yet here you are, painting everyone who disagrees with you as some sort of maniacal evil-doer because what they believe is different than what you believe.

Mindless accumulation of wealth is evil. All major world religions and ethics systems acknowledge this.

"Help, my quest to maximize profit at the cost of human misery has people painting me as an un-empathetic, maniacal evil-doer! Why can't people understand that its actually just like, my opinion that causing societal harm for short term quarterly gains is good, is just like my opinion and every opinion is valid!"

Why does maximizing profit have to come at the cost of human misery? I would argue that maximizing profit is a direct result of reducing human misery.

I think it is maniacally evil to put peoples housing, healthcare, and ability to remain in the country at risk. It is inherently throwing 12,000 households into sudden insecurity. There better be a better reason than “whoops economic headwinds that we didn’t budget/prepare for”. Peoples access to food, housing, healthcare, and not being expelled from the country should be valued way more than this.

These are people making 3, 5, 10 times the median household income on their own. People with in-demand skills, with good resumes, and access to a remote pool of positions.

With even the slightest bit of foresight or financial planning, they'll be fine for months or longer.

I don’t really care if they’ll be fine for “months”. Months is not a lot of stability! Especially if you have dependents who need healthcare, or have a visa that requires you to find employment immediately or risk expulsion! Or just went into debt because everyone bought a new house with the low rates recently!

It shouldn’t be an individual family’s responsibility to plan for its massively growing, massively productive, massively profitable employer to treat them like a wrapper to be used and tossed in the trash when done.

It’s evil to treat being depended upon to provide a means of food, housing, healthcare, and continued residency as something that can just be shut off without warning, to no fault of the dependents.

> Companies don't exist to maximize profit.

As soon as this sentiment prevails, not only during times of personal loss, but also in times of personal prosperity, you can start to think of most humans as being part of the solution instead of this particular problem.

The idea is that if you pit those villains against eachother on a level playing field, they'll improve society on the whole.

To a certain extent it's true, and it's only failing in the case of Google/etc because we've allowed mega-companies to become a thing (which distorts the playing field). OTOH we're rapidly heading towards total planetary extinction, so something huge needs to change.

Maximizing profit should be the main signal of creating value, if you have a lot of revenue but no profit - you are actually destroying value.

There are dynamics where profit chasing can be perverted (eg. monopolistic pricing, fraud, etc.) which is why we have regulations. But profit chasing in itself is the best signal of value creation we have.

I've lived in a post socialist country transitioning from socialist to capitalist system and I don't want to live in a world where politics define value, profit chasing can lead to pathologies, but political value system is based on flawed principles.

The purpose of a company is not to maximize profits because that would mean you have to pay taxes.

The holy goal instead, is to maximize shareholder value. A small, but important difference (and helps explain the existence of companies like Uber and Twitter who have barely turned a profit in the past decade).

At some point there does have to be a cash-out, otherwise what would motivate the person at the end of the line to buy the shares that you're selling

The cash out is selling the shares and realising the capital gain?

For these types of business, there’s always someone next in line to buy, hoping for the same performance.

This perspective, implemented broadly, would considerably reduce the pools of available financing accessible to a given company. This in turn would reduce employment levels as companies contract in a more difficult capital environment.

If you are an investor, activist or otherwise, you benefit from the current practice that managers have a fiduciary duty to shareholders.

A company is a legal thing that is owned by shareholders. Like if I own a car, I want it to take me from A->B as expediently as possible. I don't want my car to have a social mission. I'm not sure why a company should be different. Now I do think that the disbursed profits to shareholders from the company should be used to fund many social missions, via charities and non-profits and the like.

If you own a car you don’t just want it to take you from A->B expediently. You should also want to do it presumably safely, without killing people, following laws, in a way that also keeps the car maintainable. If you want cars to slow down in school crossing zones that’s a social mission.

> If you want cars to slow down in school crossing zones that’s a social mission.

That’s risk avoidance - social mission would be driving around town giving free rides to people

Isn’t risk avoidance social in nature when it’s dealing with people?

Breaking the law is not expedient in the larger sense. What I meant is let's not hobble the car by for example like the sibling poster says giving away free rides or having to drop off free meals. These can be better achieved by Charities or Soup Kitchens.

I'm inclined towards your argument, but to play devil's advocate, I'd say you are making a false equivalence between a car and a company.

A car is exclusively a tool, and a company is a tool from some perspectives, but involves humans. Hence why ethics are involved and there is no clear answer.

If instead you replaced car with horses, or worse yet, with human powered transportation would your answer be any different.

Pretty funnily, quite a few companies in the US seem to exist not to maximize profit.

Some, like Amazon, immediately reinvest the profits into their growth and avoid taxes on the profits.

Some, like Uber, seem to exist to only sustain an illusion of future possible profits. Most of startups in the era of cheap money were manifestly unprofitable, and spent more and more attempting to achieve growth and grab the market share.

Beside these, there is a number of barely profitable companies that just exist to sustain their business and give the owners and a few employees some daily bread. Most small restaurants and small stores are like that. They maximize not the short-term profit but the probability to keep earning something in foreseeable future, a bit like subsistence farming.

> we could solve so many harms.

The only 'harm' in question is that the other evil profit seeking villains are losing their source of profit, left to go back to do wonderful volunteer work at charities or whatever it is that is considered more virtuous. Crushing 12,000 villains in one fell swoop, perhaps Google is the superhero here?

+1 for your sentiment. Thank you for articulating it.

Feels like so many people in the US has taken the Adam Smith self interest sentiment to the extreme, to the point that people seem to forget we are living in a society - a very interdependent entity that functions poorly if we don't work together.

Yep. This is entirely our choice.

"Oh, corporations have to be massively harmful entities that crush people under their feet in order to enrich their investors" is a choice. It is a system created entirely by humans.

This is what people say when they talk about how capitalism has so thoroughly won. People speak about it like it is a force of nature or a property of physical reality itself. There is no alternative. If megacorps don't abuse their employees and vacuum up dollars from their customers in every possible way then the line will go down, and we can't have that.

I agree with you. I think the purpose of a company is to help ensure social stability by providing productive and meaningful employment. If the government is doing its job and ensuring an environment in which firms can thrive (financial stability, infrastructural stability, social stability), then the firm's responsibilities should mirror those: take care of employees and customers by treating them fairly (financial, social stability) and the physical environment (infrastructural stability).

Just because Milton Friedman claimed that it is the main objective of a company to maximize shareholder value[1], doesn't mean it is true. Milton Friedman was a bad dude, and part of a bad school of economics[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine

I don’t think you can choose to apply a different meaning to Google, though. Ad tech is the Platonic ideal of a profit-focused enterprise, and even someone who’s not personally working on ads has to understand that’s where their salary and benefits are coming from.

I agree with you, but companies exist in an evolutionary environment where—broad strokes—anyone who doesn’t do this gets out-competed. You can have 99 companies that behave well, but just one that doesn’t can drive them all out of business if it’s willing to do what they won’t. The solution is not to chew them out, but to pass policy and vote with your wallet.

The argument is that the explanation is disingenuous. Which, I get that it's corporate speak, but when nobody buys it why bother with the lie?

Agreed. In this case, google isn’t even claiming this change was unexpected, just that the reality has changed. Seems way more honest than the other corporate-doublespeak layoffs we’ve seen.

First, just because we understand that Google wants to maximize profit doesn't mean they need to lie about it — it means they have no need to lie about it, because nobody's fooled. Either they consider at least some of us fools who would believe such an obvious lie, or they're engaging in a ritual of futile lying whose purpose I cannot grasp.

Second, why must the point of a company be to maximize profit? Why can't it be to make enough profit to remain stable in the long term, instead of growing rapidly to a size where it will eventually either have to engage in monopolistic behavior to survive or else, having extracted all available profit in its sphere, die?

This approach doesn't make sense when it comes to software. Expanding your dev team during a boom year to only contract it in the future bust year - will leave you moving slower in the bust years. While tech has never been known for it's stable job market, seeing the most profitable corporations in the world conducting layoffs doesn't sit well.

>will leave you moving slower in the bust years

How is this any different than any other industry? In manufacturing, slowing reduces the risk that supply will outstrip demand. In software, slowing down means reducing the risk that time is spent producing software that won't have an economic payoff. The effort is focused on the business lines that add to the bottom line and less on the speculative ones. If you look at where a lot of the tech industry layoffs are coming from, they tend to be the not-yet-viable moonshot ideas.

Imagine you had a factory. During the boom years you hire extra engineers to improve the factory. These engineers busy themselves adding new production lines and creating more complex manufacturing processes to support products. 2 years later you sack the engineers.

You are left with more complex product and extra assembly lines. You aren’t sure which ones you need or are obligated to continue - so you run them all.

Is this meant to be an analogy for software production?

It seems like the crux is here:

You aren’t sure which ones you need or are obligated to continue

This is essentially saying leaders/managers don't know how to prioritize. What much of tech is doing right now is prioritizing by cutting back on the programs that aren't particularly successful. It's the same thing done in manufacturing.

This is such a bean-counter MBA perspective. It’s tech, if you want real growth, you need moonshot ideas. If you want to just become a GE style dependable divided stock, then fine, but your shareholders aren’t going to triple their wealth again.

Nobody is saying reduce moonshot ideas to zero. There's a difference between "throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks" to having a risk/reward way of prioritizing what to fund. What you're alluding to is the "grow at all costs and find a way to be profitable later" strategy that is prevalent in SV, but tends to not work so well in real economic downturns. Sometimes I think people either forget, or are too young, to remember that the pre-2021 decade+ of near-zero interest rates are a historical anomaly.

Put differently, take a look at the R&D costs of google[1]. Note how, despite a constantly increasing amount of investment, they still derive 80% of their revenue from ads. Granted, some of the R&D will contribute to ads revenue, but it may also be indicative of a moonshot strategy that isn't contributing much in terms of "real growth" in alternative revenue streams.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/507858/alphabet-google-r...

Does a moonshot mean funding a team of 50 without tangible goals for ten years? The original google moonshots leaned heavily on individual engineers producing Herculean results eg gmail.

Not only that, but layoffs are not precise.

People on my team were fired today. They weren't my lowest performers.

any idea what was the selection criteria?

No.

We are still finalizing annual reviews. It couldn't have been current performance ratings. I know of some low performers on nearby teams who weren't laid off.

Some (many?) teams were entirely unaffected, so somebody up in my management chain decided my team was less critical. No clue how the individual people decisions were made.

Firstly, the sole purpose of maximizing shareholder value is a recent myth. Before that, it was understood that corporations are chartered to serve the public interest.

A few may argue that corporations are super-persons imbued with super-rights which outweigh the rights of actual persons. Please note that's a minority viewpoint.

Secondly, corporations are not the only cast members with agency in this narrative.

Our government, the source of all that free money, acting on the goals of full employment and bountiful future tax revenue, probably has some agency.

Us individuals, whose blood and entrails lubricate the gears of the machine built from our bone and sinew, also have agency. Stuff like get fat and happy and watch our grandkids grow up, have enough excess wealth and time to travel a bit, to not bleed out in a ditch, cold and haggard, after a lifetime of toil. And most of us aren't particularly invested in further enriching the latest cohort of robber barons.

It's not a recent myth, saying that the purpose of an organization or class of organization "is" something depends on legal and social context.

Friedman popularized the idea of fiduciary duty in the field of economics, and even popular left economists like Keynes didn't foundationally dispute that premise.

You can think it shouldn't be popular among economists for moral, aesthetic, or even empirical reasons - but to suggest somehow that the 1880s model of companies is "more correct" and assert it as truth is just as much a "myth" if you are framing these ideas about institutional purpose as "truth".

The robber barons you speak of have created the single largest reduction in poverty in human history. Most of the west, and even poor Americans are living truly historically blessed lives - and by letting the robber barons loose, the CCP was able to lift nearly 1b people to a standard of living unimaginable to Chinese people in 1970.

Capitalist thought and action is not immune to criticism, but the empirics are on capitalist ideas. Most of the common areas where Americans complain about "capitalist" processes are not capitalist under the hood at all.

They're taking me for a fool in that they say BS with a straight face, pretending that either they couldn't have foreseen or that I couldn't. If they'd phrase all this as "we surged in a hiring race to the bottom, with the intention of scaling back" that'd be the plain truth and no faked stupidity would be required.

Also it's beaten down that the purpose of companies is to make profits. Perhaps in some specific legal context or interpretation it might be, but the purpose of a company is mostly to do whatever the people in charge of it want it to do. A ton of companies' purpose is to principally do other things than just money. People running Apple and making phones like to make money & design beautiful consumer devices. People making rockets like mostly to go to space and hope they can also make some money. People running machine shops like to make moneys and they like to cut metal. People running industrial machinery like to make money and building CNC machines. People making cars like to make money and making cars. People running biotech companies like to advance life sciences and make money. And so on.

Give me a break. Everyone knew it wouldn’t have lasted, sure, in the same way we all know China won’t be the manufacturing hub of the world forever or the dollar may not be the primary currency.

When will the transition happen? If you knew exactly, like you seem to be indicating, you should make some money off of it. Otherwise hindsight armchair CEO is dull.

So, part of the issue is that those "last 2 years" also simultaneously felt a bit like an economic slowdown caused by the pandemic via lockdowns and infection fear. Maybe for some relevant areas of "tech", such as video conferencing, sure: people alone at home would make that stuff overly important in a way that would crash back down... but, I certainly had felt a world that went from being pretty awesome in 2019 to businesses shutting down left and right through 2020 and 2021 due to people all staying inside.

I had not just hoped but kind of expected that, if we ever again felt reasonably safe returning outside and eating at restaurants and shopping together at stores and going out to theaters and the such, that things--including, very relevantly, advertisements on Google for all of those physical products, services, and entertainment options people might now want again--would kind of explode from latent demand and pent up frustration during the COVID period... not that we would only THEN go into a recession!

But like, I guess this is why we can say with some certainty that I don't know much about complicated global- or even national- scale financial matters as I didn't know much about how--and very critically when--the Federal Reserve functions (having not had to care at all about this around 2008/9, when I had my bandwagon hitched strongly to the iPhone and everything looked amazing) and have never actively tracked inflation indicators as anything other than a dry numerical input for CPI wage increases :(.

Companies don’t need to be right, they need to maximise the chance of succeeding. Yes, it was obvious that the raining-money period wasn’t going to last… but what if it had? What if Google had decided to ignore it, and then by some ridiculous twist of fate, it did continue and a competitor did leverage it to beat Google?

Firing a bunch of people and killing some projects is a tiny price to pay for the potential upside. As humans, seeing people get fired is painful and we view the individuals responsible in a negative light — which I agree with! — but for Google the corporate entity, and Microsoft and Shopify etc etc it made complete rational sense even in hindsight.

But that's not the intended message when they send out these memos.

They're not saying: "Hey, we knew this wouldn't last, but we hired a bunch of people in order to milk the situation for everything we could, knowing we'd have to fire you today. So, sorry we willingly and knowingly did this. But you're fired."

I could respect the honesty in that, but that's not what they're trying to say. They're trying to act surprised by the economic shift. "Oops, sorry we have to let you go."

Of course it was rational for them to all do this. Lying is often a rational thing to do.

Right, because they didn’t know it wouldn’t last hence taking the risk. The message is being written after the fact, and the message isn’t a lie per-se, rather, it’s a human framing of the situation with the subtext of we are a company and a company is not a job factory but a shareholder value factory.

Every message every company ever writes that leans on any amount of humanity is, in your characterisation, a lie… and while, sure, that’s technically true, we all take part in this big theatre production where we expect companies to pretend to have humanity — your problem is with all of us participating in this system pretending a company gives a single solitary fuck about any of us.

These performative messages are just one small part of the performance, writing an “honest” message where they say “you’re all fired and we don’t care” wouldn’t change anything. They’d still be doing a million other pieces of performative humanity.

I think we can give Google executives a little more credit.

They care a bounded amount.

A rough approximation of how much they care would be the rational incentives to not produce a culture of fear in the regular workforce + the amount of being nice to employees that Google can afford due to their dominant market position.

Similarly, when I shop for employers there are fringe benefits, cultural differences, etc that matter - but they aren't going to matter in the face of another $100,000 in salary.

Definitely wouldn't go somewhere else for a few hundred bucks tho.

I don’t think nice things can be characterised as caring, though. If their decisions were actively harming the company in order to benefit the humanity of their employees, that would be reasonable evidence that they care, but I don’t think we can interpret every nice thing for a person as caring.

For example, providing benefits above and beyond what other companies provide has a clear justification for the business: happier employees means better work from people that are better retained.

A good question would be: if Google stood to benefit from making their employees lives miserable, would they do it? I’d argue, yes, absolutely, and there’s much evidence of it. For example, Google (and many other big tech companies) pay human moderators low wages to do work that causes psychological damage.

Caring about people as people and not employees isn’t demonstrated by giving them nice benefits around the edge, it’s demonstrate by putting their humanity above their employment.

Google does not have evidence that their outrageous salaries couldn't be cut some and still maintain the line outside of the door.

The gyms and perks are not purely a cynical ploy to make people stay later.

Google wouldn't make their employees lives miserable to increase revenue by 0.1%, because they care - the people at the top aren't literal lizardpeople.

This is where I bring in "bounded", because if that same choice would increase revenue by 100%, Google execs do it every time.

The exact lines change depending on local customs and competition (Google is a dominant market monopoly, so can afford gyms and adult playgrounds and all the really cringe Google perks) but it's also why low margin businesses have shittier working environments - there's more competition and less room for executives to care.

So if I buy a bunch of stock in $RAND because conditions favor their business, and then conditions change and I sell the stock, I’m lying when I say I changed strategy because of changing conditions?

In this oddly specific example: Only if you had every reason to expect things would change, didn't warn anyone, and felt the need to blame the market for your actions. In that case, technically, yes, I would consider that dishonest.

But: To whom did you owe honesty to when buying stock? I'm not sure you owed honesty to anyone there.

When you hire people, you're making decisions that have impacts on their lives and those of their families. In the case of companies like Google, they're impacting entire communities.

So I would say they have a moral (if not legal) obligation to be more transparent with their workers about their intentions. But you, in this stock situation, would not have any moral obligation whatsoever.

> we hired a bunch of people in order to milk the situation for everything we could, knowing we'd have to fire you today

Did people not also take jobs at google in order to milk the situation for everything they could?

Could those people not have foreseen an economic downturn, which happens at least every 8-10 years the last one being 14 years ago?

What specific lie did google tell, or are you speculating?

Nope, pretty sure Google is not the one being milked here.

The implied lie that this is just an unfortunate and unforeseeable circumstance. The unwillingness to be transparent about it. That's the lie, and it's not speculation if I'm observing their own words.

I think your framing of this as a predictable cycle is deceptive. This isn't about regular crashes. This is about a temporary pandemic-driven situation. Yes, employees hired in the rush could have seen this coming. But it's unfair to assume 100% of them did. I don't think it's unfair to think it would be shockingly foolish for the entire tech leadership class to not have seen it coming.

All I'm saying is: Own it.

I'm not saying it was evil. I would probably have made similar decisions.

But I would have been more transparent about it. I would have hired people on contracts with the explicit understanding that this was surge hiring. That way no one would be surprised when the contracts weren't renewed. That would have been honest.

They did - the employees. The annoying part is the execs pretending like this is all unexpected. They could have skipped that line, just stay quiet. Don't pretend like you didn't know it was coming.

Googles revenue grew 41% in 2021, which is higher than normal. But not crazy. It was not about future projections or anything real. It was about cheap money and asset inflation. I don't know the exact mechanisms but I'm not convinced that it was about projections and now a letdown. Revenue is falling sure but it's still growing incredibly fast for such a large company

2022 (TTM) $282.11 B 9.5%

2021 $257.63 B 41.15%

2020 $182.52 B 12.77%

2019 $161.85 B 18.3%

2018 $136.81 B 23.42%

2017 $110.85 B 22.8%

2016 $90.27 B 20.38%

https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/revenue/

"Revenue is falling sure"

Your numbers show that the revenue is increasing, but the growth is slower, which is very different than the revenue is falling.

The classic error.

> Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future.

I disagree. There's charts showing the proportion of commerce online vs offline and it slowly rises over time over the last 20 years. It's following a pretty stable trend. Until the end of 2021 or so, the data really really looked like there had been a 5-6 year jump ahead on the curve thanks to COVID-19.

The question was never "is this a temporary change", it was "how much of this is temporary and how much is permanent?". When the dust settled, would we see it go back to a 2-year jump-ahead? Stay at a 5-year? Go back to what was expected?

Nobody knew the answer. You didn't. You had a guess. And most people forget what their guess was once they know the answer, and believe they always knew the answer.

Agree with you that all in all those companies are still mostly bigger than they were pre-pandemic, and their business indeed get ahead a notch by the effect of the pandemic. And clearly now the dust settles and they're ahead, overall, but need to trim down headcount, because they're not as ahead as they could have been in an alternate universe. That's all fine, although it's not great for those fired.

I just can't stand the pretense "oh no we didn't know we over hired" like come on. We _all_ knew y'all were over hiring. Just cut the crap.

They needed the increased labor at the time, they got it, utilized it, juiced profits and now don't need it so are getting rid of it. They used the increased labor to increase profits by 41% in 2021. If they did not have the increased labor in that period would their profits have increased by that much?

I see this comment in much the same way I see a bear in a bull market. Stock X is $100 and Bob buys it. Carl tells Bob he is an idiot and the stock is going to go down. Stock X goes to $200. Bob sells. Stock X starts going down and Carl starts telling everyone he was right and he knew the stock would crash. In the mean time Bob is retired and has gotten everything he needed from that particular stock purchase.

Is this the "scalability of the cloud" I keep hearing about?

Pretty much. You don't want to know what happens at Amazon when you turn off your EC2 instance.

"I can't believe that Google, Shopify, Coinbase, everyone, really believed that this was the new reality going forward."

They didn't. They knew it wouldn't last. But what they had to do was stay competitive and/or meet demand by scaling up while they could. Now they have a larger pool of talent and can cut people/programs who are too expensive or are under performing.

Yup. And I'm annoyed that they pretend it was all a mistake, and try to pass me the reader for a fool by writing this sentence. That's all.

Yeah, but this sort of thing is common in many industries. The people in power explain things in a political way in the name of communicating with laypeople to avoid bad reactions. This can be CEOs, politicians, doctors, police, developers, etc.

> It was written in the sky since April 2020. Anyone with a semblance of understanding could guess that the COVID-fueled situation and artificial economic prop up would come due in the medium term.

Can you point to any comments that people with a semblance of understanding made back then in which they were able estimate the rough time window when things would come back down to earth?

Fair point! However, I suspect many people have, as I have, been screaming silently for a few years that we will have to pay for all of this at some point soon. I expected what we are seeing, and I'd be amazed if most others on this site are surprised.

I don’t have proof so you probably will dismiss me but I was saying privately back in March 2020 that we’d go back to normal in 18-24 months. This is just based on historical pandemics so it’s not like you have to be some kind of genius.

If you look the Spanish flu in particular, it eventually fade out after 2-3y, and people resumed life by a mix of adapting to the new reality and stopped caring, and the illness mutated to a less dangerous form. People (at least those I think sounded pragmatic) were talking about that back in Spring 2020.

I don't know of a comment in 2020 that specifically say that, mainly because I don't keep a log and will not go search for it.

In a similar vein, I would like to know what the "and I take full responsibility for this" line that CEOs always say in these emails actually looks like besides just saying it in the email.

That’s it. It just means that they are making a point of not blaming their reports (“today is a tough day, especially because Bob over-hired in marketing and Kate talked me into that engineering expansion”)

It's the corporate version of "It's not you, it's me." breakup line.

"It's not you, it's me, but I'm still deciding to breakup with you"

sure, but the problems back then were immediate for google et al: "we need more people to deal with the increased flow". they hoped those covid patterns will remain after covid. they didn't.

At that level of money decisions only make sense financially with complete disregard for anything else and without any efficiency in mind

You must be rich from being able to predict the future so well.

I did in fact make good money from these broad predictable things. Like these big corps did. And probably a ton of people.

They aren't fools, they just have their own agendas.

Sundar and other Google execs don't actually own that much Google stock, so they have relatively little lose by gambling with company money by over hiring.

From Brian Armstrong's perspective, Coinbase didn't overhire at all. They captured all the crypto revenue they could during the boom, which inflated their stock price while Armstrong was cashing out as much as he could.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g...

The top individual insider shareholders of Google are Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Sundar Pichai

That's my point. Larry and Sergey own 3% of Google each, but have long retired from making any decisions at Google. Sundar only owns .01% of Google and gets compensated in bonuses, so he tunes his strategy on maximizing his bonus.

"Every damn body" knows this in retrospect. At the time -- when we were washing our groceries and we weren't sure if the IFR was 1% or 10%, and if it was airborne or if it was morphing into something worse -- our new reality might have been very different.

That was only for a few months

>>Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future.

In hindsight, yes. But by that definition every decision is a coin flip, because no matter how good we get at predicting things, you are always and always making decisions based on past data, and that can't accomodate random 'act of god' sort of events COVID and Ukraine war was.

>>Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase.

There was no way to know COVID was a phase, we still can't say with confidence that COVID is over.

Can you cite you or anyone making specific claims in 2020 or 2021 that the online growth rates are temporary and not a shift? I was skeptical until mid 2021 when everything in person was opening again, but the shift to online frenzy wasn't slowing. I knew there would be some backsliding, but I thought there was a permanent shift for some people who realized online ordering, online activity is just easier. Some areas haven't backslid much at all (video meetings, WFH, online schooling, etc).

Can't really cite, because I consume a lot of material but don't take notes.

I think if you picture yourself as a population of 1000. Y'all are someone who hasn't used technology X before because you haven't yet had to, and suddenly you're encouraged to do so. The probability that you will do so now, instead of in X period of time, has increased. It's not going to happen all at once, but over some time, which means the adoption rate will compound. But like any adoption curve, some of y'all 1000 will churn, depending on how useful the technology proves out in the long term. What's the average lifetime before a user churn? You can guess for yourself, how quickly do you get bored with most of your new toys? Some toys stick around because you find them drastically better, some others you start ignoring.

So it's not that the online growth rate was temporary, but that it's (sorta) obvious that it was going to recede from it's peak. Like Pokemon Go, which is still popular but nowhere near as it was near day one.

These companies work not for their employees, but for their shareholders. I suppose shareholders would have revolted if they hadn't increased investment to potentially hit it big when they could. Turns out these investments didn't work out, so now they cut their losses. From a shareholder's perspective, I can understand this narrative as not foolish, rather courageous.

From an outside (and employee) perspective, it can seem foolish though.

> Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future.

Don't humans almost always extrapolate their present situation far out in the future?

Hindsight is 20/20.

The problem also is the justification for management pay is that they are able to predict these kind of things and avoid the kind of disruption to the organization that occurs in this.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really seem the case (that and no one gets the credit for just keeping the system running)

> Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future.

Are you making the same mistake they did and thinking in 0/1 terms? The last 2 years have shifted the future, but the shifts are gradients with few if any being absolute 0/1.

All of them are doing this to shore up short term value. Say this saves google 1 to 2 Billion over this next year, that's a billion dollars they can spend on stock buy backs and dividend payments.

What do you want them to say? "It's our right to fire people and we've now chosen to do so!" Technically true but sounds bad.

They're just putting a PR spin on it.

the worst part is that even when economics growth stopped earlier this year, they didn't stop hiring. They didn't adapt fast enough to reduce the damage. They didn't try to optimize their workforce, they just went on with it till the moment they need to fire 12K

Your clairvoyance must have made you extremely rich as you assess these events with accuracy and perfect timing, and thus made the right open-market financial bets to profit from them.

What bets would those have been? It’s not always straightforward to bet on economic trends, especially on the short side.

Either it was predictable or it wasn't.

Everyone knew things would change.

Nobody knew when and how.

They're shortsighted fools.

we are measuring something about humanity here

Really? Cause I'm making a public note here that I didn't know. I fully expected WFH and automation to continue to fuel the need for software development, albeit at a slower rate. I'm also making a public note that even if I foresaw a crash after printing free money, I didn't expect it to be compounded by the most drastic eco-legislation ever, plus a war in Ukraine. And I sure as hell didn't expect the last two to be so perfectly synergistic in increasing energy prices.

I’m a bit out of the loop. What is the drastic eco-legislation you’re referring to?

please elaborate on the "drastic eco-legislation", sounds like a talking point from a dubious source.

I assume the Inflation Reduction Act.

Not everything is about US :) In Europe they passed EU wide legislation, I think, around the end of 2020? Can't remember, really, and I'm too lazy too look. Either way, energy prices here were already very high in summer 2021, a full 8 months before the war in Ukraine started.

I think WFH and automation gained a boost from the pandemic and while the pendulum will continue to balance back, the overall effect will be more WFH and automation than if the pandemic hadn't hit.

Large scale disruptions cause governments to print money, and I think the IRA (which I assume is what you refer to) was in a way predictable, because government historically do infrastructure spending to keep the economy afloat after large scale disruptions. That the Democrats would push infrastructure spending on tech and eco stuff is not particularly surprising. Asian countries have been pouring their R&D in solar panels, chips, batteries, manufacturing, for years. The pandemic very early on made bare the US' dire positioning, versus Asian countries relative advantage in that aspect. I wouldn't have predicted the IRA but it's predictable that an infra bill would have come. That's what happened in prior cases.

I didn't expect the war in Ukraine, but we could expect wars. Trouble times create incentives (disparity) and opportunities. I sadly expect more large conflicts in the coming years. I think the average pragmatic person probably also does.

As for the current economic crisis, I'll go on a limb and guess it'll probably maintain itself for another 2-3-4y horizon, like prior ones did. And the boiling pot it will cause will be fertile ground for conflicts (and innovation).

Well at the height of the market euphoria, nobody listened to my warnings a year ago:

From [0] November 2021

Me: 'Finally' The start of the market crash is under way...

>> Stock market up 1% today on both this news and decades-high inflation. [0]

Then more concerns for preparing for the recession months later after I said we were already in a recession. [1].

>> No. That is completely false. We are most certainly not in a recession. [1]

So after many layoffs, rising inflation, US debt ceiling fears happening since then the lagging indicators of this have now take effect and so 'now' we are preparing for the recession?

It has already happened and is still happening which it is too late to prepare.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710

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