Hacker News Reader

Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that everyone is so certain that we're jumping off a bridge now with layoffs, instead of that we jumped off a bridge before with the hiring spree based on Covid-stimulus.

View on HN

I don't think that a covid-related hiring spree should have affected a company like Confluent. Yeah there were probably many product companies that got more money due to Covid that wanted a managed Kafka solution, but Covid also took down other kind of companies who might have been Confluent's customers.

I think it has more to do with cheap money not being cheap anymore.

The money was cheap because of COVID. https://www.brookings.edu/research/fed-response-to-covid19/

Covid made it dirty cheap but money was cheap before as well, or at least cheaper than it is now [1]. Anyway what I meant was that Confluent is not the kind of company that hired more because it thought that Covid changes in business where going to last forever (a la Shopify or Meta).

[1] https://www.fxempire.com/macro/united-states/interest-rate

Money has been cheap since the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, it wasn't just COVID, it's been that way for more than a decade.

Money was never cheaper in the history of the US than during Covid... with 10% inflation and 0% interest rates, and a 10% deficit spending on stimulus.

Overhiring doesn't affect the common people (except positively) - overfiring of course affects those fired.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com