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Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

Depends on the company but yes.

Stripe, as an example, drastically slowed down hiring when the pandemic hit expecting an economic slowdown. It then turned out that so much commerce moved to online—rather than stopped—so they ramped up hiring to meet demand.

The bet that companies like Shopify and Stripe [1] made was that COVID created a “new normal”; much of the economic activity that went online would stay there. They were wrong, so there were layoffs to correct it.

[0]: https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team

[1]: https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email...

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I’m not sure I believe that. It honestly sounds like an excuse to fire people. Or leadership has no clue.

The biggest thing I got from the pandemic is flexible work arrangements. But I and everyone I knew all wanted to get back out there. Just not back out on public transport to work. We were doing things online because there was no other option.

But once the borders opened and restrictions eased, everyone did what they said they would. Travel. Eat out with their friends. Play their old sports. Who in their right mind would think they would continue to stay home and do everything online?

The problem with hindsight is people often forget just how chaotic previous events like the entire pandemic was.

Even the "experts" were flip flopping globe affecting decisions, we had no idea what the right solution was and how long it would be... 3 months? 6? Permanent?

Long term decisions had to be with numerous unknowns, it is clear now they were wrong but I am not certain I would have made the right choice either.

I wouldn't go so far to say they wanted an excuse to fire, but they definitely bet the wrong odds.

You can however react to changes in circumstances when you get new inform. I got my first dose in Sept 2021. Surely people getting vaccines was the signal that things might start reverting a bit. How many employees did these companies add over 2022? Why didn’t they slow down? Because no one else was slowing down?

Tech also depended a lot on the zero interest backed money from investors. Now that interest is up, money costs money, so the situation as changed as well.

This is precisely the case and it's what is so often missing from the jobs analysis.

I hear this a lot lately, and intuitively it is true of startups and businesses that are pre revenue, but I have trouble seeing how it applies to companies with billions in profit.

Because it effects the whole economy (afaik) so from housing to banking to any industry. Interest is a compound factor in a complex modern economy. Even big companies have to factor in the effect of interest, even if they haven’t borrowed anything.

Google makes billions in profits by selling ads. Many of the buyers of those ads are affected by interest rates. Therefore, Google is affected by those interest rates.

This is fair, but general economic health applies to every company in the economy, and this large cap tech company segment is both profitable and seemingly laying off employees at a higher rate than the economy as a whole. So that blame seems misplaced.

From a theoretical perspective at this level of scale the number of engineers in particular does not scale with the ebb and flow of the selling of ads to the degree of the layoffs. Many were for divisions that were not related to ads, except for getting funded by them.

Obviously if there is not funding for these other divisions because the ad business dries up there would be large cuts, but these companies are still very very profitable even on lower ad sales. So perhaps they did not have a positive ROI, and that is fine, but a far different reason than waving vaguely at interest rates.

The calculation (for Google and for the advertisers on Google) is not "does this have a positive RoI as compared to zero?" but rather "does this have a more positive RoI than all my other alternatives?"

When the risk-free rate increases, the RoI hurdle for any investment also increases. That's how economic stimulus by lowering interest rates works, by creating incentive to "try things" (by removing the incentive to "park your money").

Advertisers on Google now bid on ads based on an environment where they are more conservative (because they have better alternative investments), where their input costs have increased (labor, raw materials, energy), where some industries (like mortgage refinancing) have been dramatically curtailed directly by the change in rates, and for some companies, buying back their own bonds is more attractive than advertising on Google with a portion of their spend.

Google can look out on the horizon and conclude "OK, we had a really great business when rates were near zero; now we have a pretty damn good business with rates several points higher than that, but it's definitely not as good as it was, so we need to tweak our frugality dial in response."

There was a solid stretch of not knowing if things might get much worse, if the vaccines might fail etc. Some borders have only opened very recently.

It's not like all those people who wanted to travel and go out were actually making plans and booking post pandemic flights back in 2020.

We're lucky that things are solidly back to normal this soon. Not just the restrictions that kept us inside, but the massive paranoia that made many fear the outside, and some new, worse virus

You’re being very absolutist, people don't have be doing “everything” online for the shift in habits to have a significant effect.

Yes on the whole most people do go out and travel again, but on average much less frequently than they used to because they retained the desire but not the same habits. They find they can scratch the itch with fewer outings.

All it takes is for people to go out 20% less than they used to, averaged out, and that’s a massive shift in economic terms that can heavily impact businesses.

You're absolutely correct that relatively small differences at the margin can have fairly large knock-on effects.

That said, I'm pretty sure the overall picture is that things didn't change as much post-pandemic as many predicted. Travel is pretty much back to normal. Dining out is somewhat back to normal--though you need to factor in inflation effects as well. If I drive into the nearest major city, traffic sure seems back to normal--especially mid-week. The shift to remote seen in tech is something of an outlier.

> Yes on the whole most people do go out and travel again, but on average much less frequently than they used to

You need to provide some data to back this up, because all of the data I've seen (and all of the full flights I've been on) says the opposite.

Eyeballing the TSA's checkpoint volumes (https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes), air travel certainly looks to be back at pre-COVID levels. And that's with a lot of companies watching travel expenses fairly closely.

I never wanted to commute. Not in busy trains and certainly not getting stuck in traffic jams. I also never wanted to shop or spend time in the supermarket getting spaced out by their weird lightning they install to make you make bad decisions.

I do want to visit friends, go out in nature and once in a while eat at a restaurant. But for me, I am so happy to wfh 80% of the time and do 99% of shopping and groceries online, that has certainly stuck. And while I am a bit more of a recluse than most people I know, almost everybody is happy to work from home at least some of the time and does far more online shopping than before the pandemic.

Maybe this varies between countries. Or social circles. I certainly see a lot traffic again so people do like to move around again and get stuck in traffic jams a lot, but something _has_ changed for at least _some_ people. A couple of years ago working from home was unheard of, now a company seems out of touch if they don't allow it at all.

Something that the pandemic has rammed home with my wife and I is just how poor the out of home dining experience is in general. The food is lackluster, the ambiance is awful, being surrounded by other people eating is terrible (my wife is a quiet talker and being fat always makes eating in public a shameful experience), so we'd MUCH rather eat at home. The quality of the ingredients are far higher, the food is tastier (my wife is an amazing and experimental cook), and we don't have to yell to be heard. We eat out when we're traveling but thats about it. Eating at home is better in every way.

For people that like to cook for sure it's better. My anecdata would put that number around 20% of people.

Whether the average person likes to cook or not, I'm pretty sure that between lack of easy access to good restaurants and or reluctance/inability to spend on eating out, the majority of people make most meals at home.

I've found that eating out varies a lot city by city (estimate: 50%+?). Some cities have excellent base-level food; others are terrible.

As someone who lived in Atlanta during the restaurant revolution, it went from "I could do better than this at home" to most places being able to put together an interesting plate I couldn't/wouldn't do at home. And oddly, pre-pandemic prices didn't change that much when it happened.

My working theory is that restaurants only strive to be a bit better than the average restaurant in an area.

I may be spoiled, but its extremely rare we eat someplace where I find the ingredients, flavor, and options to match what we have at home. We don't travel a crazy amount (compared to people with traveling jobs or a real wanderlust), but we get around a fair amount and I see the variability you describe--but only up to a point. There's obviously places where the restaurants are truly awful, and there's places where the food is ok. But no place where on average the restaurants are excellent.

I'm probably in the minority but pasta and frozen pizzas are about the extent of my cooking skill and there are about dozen excellent restaurants within a 10 minute walk... it isn't good for my wallet.

>I also never wanted to shop or spend time in the supermarket getting spaced out by their weird lightning they install to make you make bad decisions.

Not that I ever used grocery pickup during the pandemic, my anecdotal observation is that, at least around where I live, you see very few pickers in stores for curbside pickup at this point. Curbside delivery/home delivery/meal kits/etc. are by all indications extremely niche from what I can see. I'm sure things have changed for some small minority however.

> It honestly sounds like an excuse to fire people. Or leadership has no clue.

Neither of these are true. The truth lies somewhere in the grey area between these two things.

> Who in their right mind would think they would continue to stay home and do everything online?

Hindsight is a helluva drug. Covid has made several lasting, possibly permanent, marks on society and our habits. Nobody could say what those were going to be.

The world is a lot nicer when you (correctly) assume that everyone is doing their best with the tools and the information they have to work with.

There were a lot of predictions during the pandemic about permanent change. My observation is that a lot of those changes were either largely temporary (e.g. widespread grocery pickup or delivery) or were mostly limited to limited groups (e.g. full remote work).

Yes. Hindsight is amazing.

So is irrational exuberance.

I think you need to broaden your thinking horizons here. The thought in the midst of the pandemic was that it brought ecommerce/payments to the masses who would otherwise follow their old routines. Thus the large hire. I believe the theory was that once everyone starts on this new routine of convenience it would be difficult to return to old patterns.

Your comment reads as someone who likes to look back on the past with all the knowledge of today as if it was so incredibly obvious.

That said there will be some significant knock on effects from pandemic that will be favorable for those companies however not as large as originally thought.

Is it called a "bet" when you stand to win big, but if you lose it's the people you hired who've lost, and you don't lose basically anything?

You lose great people, you take a huge hit to culture and productivity, you spent a lot of capital that you otherwise wouldn’t have. It create doubts in leadership and cut projects with maintenance debt.

People quit after layoffs, which means attrition isn’t as balanced as when the layoffs were planned. Talent isn’t distributed equal to business need, meaning the company will lose great people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Depending on how it’s executed, the company could burn bridges. Even if they do it well, some people would never come back.

It’s not like the people hired were working for free so I’ve never personally put much stock in the, “employees were screwed over.”

But again, it depends on some of the items above. If a company is doing well, less-direct revenue teams are fine. In a sketchier environment, not so.

Who lost? Everyone who got laid off wouldn't have had at a job at all if they weren't hired, and they probably got severance packages for more than the average American makes in a year.

> Everyone who got laid off wouldn't have had at a job at all if they weren't hired

Maybe I've been lucky, but every time I've been looking for a job I've had AT LEAST two options.

People move cities, sell houses, buy houses, give up apartments, plan their finances, and plan their career around their job all the time. Investing a year learning the ropes at a company, finding ways to fit into the structures, etc. only to have the rug pulled out from under you just as you're starting to get the hang of things...

> and they probably got severance packages for more than the average American makes in a year.

Maybe I've been unlucky, but I've never had a job where my expectation of a severance package was anything more than 2-4 weeks wages.

Maybe I've been unlucky, but I've never had a job where my expectation of a severance package was anything more than 2-4 weeks wages.

The FAANGS have severance of several months pay, which to the OP’s point, is likely more than the annual median wage in the US.

These laid off workers have some of the best “job loss” conditions around.

If you feel like this, you shouldn’t take a job that can’t guarantee in writing that they will keep you for X number of years. If you took a calculated risk and took the job anyway, well that’s on you.

> If you feel like this, you shouldn’t take a job that can’t guarantee in writing that they will keep you for X number of years.

Those jobs don’t exist. If there are they are such a minuscule number of openings it is not worth thinking about them.

> If you took a calculated risk and took the job anyway, well that’s on you.

Let me break it to you: almost everyone works because otherwise they would go hungry, loose their home and die in sad circumstances. People who don’t are statistical anomalies.

Are you saying that by having the misfortune of not being born independently rich and working basically any job the poster “took a risk” which is “on them”?

> Are you saying that by having the misfortune of not being born independently rich and working basically any job the poster “took a risk” which is “on them”?

He is saying that. Its the Puritan Christianity's mentality of blaming the poor for not working hard. Repurposed into the modern free market capitalist ideology where its used to blame the ills of the system on the victims - "You havent worked hard enough" "You werent smart enough" etc...

> Maybe I've been lucky, but every time I've been looking for a job I've had AT LEAST two options.

You got many offers precisely because a lot of companies were (over)hiring. And the fact that you had many options on the table allowed you to get a better compensation (either because you negotiated, or because everyone else did so the industry standard increased). You benefitted from these hiring binges.

When that was the case, I saw a grand total of 0 complains by tech workers that tech companies were hiring too much; it benefitted them immensely but that did not translate in any article praising CEO for taking these risks.

Could these companies keep on these workers ? Many can ! But a hallmark of good governance is having a budget and taking care of your expenses. At your household level, you can probably afford to pay for Netflix, Disney+, HBOMax and Amazon prime at the same time. And maybe you did during COVID because you were watching TV more. But now that you are back to doing more "real life" things, you maybe don't need them all. It's not that you risk being evicted because you can't pay rent; you are probably still saving a bit of money every month. But that is not a reason to not ask yourself "do I really need these all now ?" and if the answer is negative, to do something about it like cutting one or two. What is someone then told you "But look, you can currently afford all these streaming services ! You should keep paying for them all for as long as you can, and since you have them, make sure you reorganise your life to schedule some time to watch them all !".

Can we stop using the household budget analogy for megacorps, governments and economies? It’s overly simplistic and wrong.

(For just one example, a household has a single non-varying income stream and everything else is expense. Large companies have many revenue making depts, lines of business, products, etc)

> You got many offers precisely because a lot of companies were (over)hiring

I got multiple offers when I was looking for a job in 1999, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018

> People move cities, sell houses, buy houses, give up apartments, plan their finances, and plan their career around their job all the time

Then those people are naive. I never plan my life around an employer. I plan my life around my employability. I wouldn’t move somewhere that there weren’t other jobs in the area. Well now I wouldn’t work at any company that wasn’t fully remote

>I wouldn’t move somewhere that there weren’t other jobs in the area.

While a good principle, I'll posit there are a lot of more or less specialized professional jobs--especially at more senior levels--where you can't just walk across the street and slide into a similar role at a different company. Even if it's in the same general area, a 2 hour commute each way is probably not sustainable.

And thats why I have a 25 year of paranoia about being overly specialize.

Yes I’m self aware enough to understand the irony of the only reason I fell into my role at $BigTech at 48 years old is because I did become overly specialized in enterprise dev + cloud.

It's hard not to be at least somewhat specialized as a very senior person.

If you're an embedded systems programmer, maybe you can hack on some Javascript but no one is probably going to pay you very senior comp to do junior programmer work.

It is certainly true you don't want to be too specialized in general. You didn't want to be the Y2K guru in 2001 or the world's expert in performance optimization for some specific computer architecture that isn't manufactured any longer.

When I took my current job, there were probably a few companies in the general area that would have been somewhat obvious potential matches. But it was sheer coincidence that the one I connected with first through a connection happened to be the closest major tech company to my house.

Is that really true though? How many of the 2.7 million developers in the US are just your generic enterprise CRUD developer writing apps using Java, C#, etc? They are basically interchangeable and for most of my career, I could throw a resume up in the air and get multiple offers for yet another generic enterprise CRUD job.

On the other side, how many jobs are (were?) available to the generic software engineer who could do the DS&A monkey dance (junior/mid) and “design Twitter” and talk about “scope” and “impact@ in STAR format (senior).

Looks like there are thousands (perhaps millions) of people who are just naive then, who just were thinking strategically, serves them right, etc....

I'm not disagreeing with you, but your tone lacks empathy. Fuck them, I got mine, those idiots deserve what they got for not being smart enough.

These are real people who lost real jobs, not just some cells in an excel sheet.

There are not “millions” of people being laid off. Unemployment is still at a historic low. It’s mostly the tech sector. I’ve been through this type of economy at least three times - 2000, 2008, and for a brief second 2020.

Even back in 1996 when “having mine” meant making $33K a year as a hybrid computer operator/programmer, I saved aggressively. Again, I was 22 years old and had enough sense to be paranoid about depending on one specific job.

> Everyone who got laid off wouldn't have had at a job at all if they weren't hired,

Incorrect. Many of those people already had a job when the moved to Amazon/Microsoft/wherever.

Since no one makes a horizontal movement, all the roles they vacated when moving where lower roles. And this argument goes recursively when the old company fills those roles.

This means that most people who did not have a job prior to the hiring explosion and had a job after the hiring explosion, had low-paying jobs, in very low roles.

People take lateral moves quite frequently.

Please don't forget all the people who lost their job outside of the US.

This is nonsense because the people that were laid off at Google (as one example) were not selected by their tenure or having been hired during pandemic or during the remote phase, nor was it based on performance reviews.

People who had been there 12, 13, 16 years; people who had been just promoted. People who were senior management. People who were engineers. People who were on mat leave...

Management there effectively fed people's employee numbers through a random generator. And people who (IMHO naively/foolishly) gave their lives to the company suffered.

Decisions to overhire during the pandemic impacted people who had nothing to do with that decision. And not just because of the layoffs, but also because the company growth during that period was so intense that it led to onboarding and project mgmt difficulties as well.

Not to minimize how much it must suck to get laid off when you haven't prepared for it, but when you say:

> And people who (IMHO naively/foolishly) gave their lives to the company suffered.

they didn't "give their lives" for nothing, right? Didn't they trade it for an incredibly desirable compensation package?

Yes, Google's compensation is extremely generous.

But my experience when working there is that there are definitely people whose emotional (and physical) engagement with their jobs goes well beyond just what is required to get that compensation.

Apparently all support check in were targeted so it was performance based

Depends: did you really get that much value out of those new people in the time you had them employed? It usually takes a while for a new tech employee to become productive, and just hiring a person costs a lot of money. If you, for instance, hired 10,000 new engineers and then laid them off after only 1 month, you would definitely lost a LOT of money, and not have gained anything for it.

You lose 30+% of your valuation. Those investments weren’t free.

Textbook capitalism is a society in which (among other things) companies belong to investors. In other words, when a company bets, it is typically with other people's money. In that case, it's other people's jobs, which extends a bit this textbook case, but not by much.

edit Rewritten to take into account sokoloff's remarks, thanks!

Capitalism defines nothing about whether the money invested in a company is yours or other people’s. In practice, it often is, but “in practice” is not nearly the same as “by definition”.

Good point. Edited.

I don’t get it. What did they lose? They got paid good money during the mean time and have the fact that they worked for $BigTech on their resume. What did they spend all of the money on? Coke and strippers?

I was also hired for a remote role at $BigTech in mid 2020. Fortunately I didn’t get laid off. But I wouldn’t exactly be bitter that I got paid 50% more during the interim. I save/invested/paid off debt with 80% of the difference in take home pay.

Yes, I’ve been laid off before when I was making a lot less in 2012. I made sure I had savings then

>They were wrong, so there were layoffs to correct it.

Aren't the cuts smaller in size than the increased head count going into the pandemic, which would indicate there was a shift, but not one as large as they had prepared for?

For some companies, hiring more engineering staff probably hurt productivity. Every team added and every engineer added to a team increases the time/effort/communication/planning anything takes. It's often the wrong decision. This of course depends on how work is divided up.

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