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Comment by anonreeeeplor | Hacker News Reader

Tech companies are a sort of talent Ponzi scheme.

They rely on a constant influx of gullible, industrious and ambitious people willing to jump through hoops for a bit before they get averaged into the grey mass of middle management.

Middle management is a scam where you let your eager workers feel they got somewhere but then get stuck for 15 years going nowhere because it mathematically doesn’t work to keep promoting everyone.

And you can’t promote people anymore who aren’t women minorities, anymore.

So then you have to clear cut middle management, especially if white and over 40.

The layoffs are basically a cover to do exactly that.

Then they refill the buckets with new dumb industrious people and ring another 3 years before doing it again.

It’s a talent Ponzi scheme and works everyone. And it only works with regular layoffs.

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> And you can’t promote people anymore who aren’t women minorities, anymore. So then you have to clear cut middle management, especially if white and over 40.

JFC. Stop making minorities your foil. There are plenty of white guys in middle management. There are plenty of all people in middle management. Middle management is just the rut that everyone gets stuck at in the American Dream (tm).

Seeing non-white or male people get promoted doesn’t mean that white men aren’t getting their fair shake. At the scale of these major companies (tech and non-tech), trust me there are many getting promoted. You’re just hyper focused on minorities and women because that bothers you.

They also left out how many of the diversity offices and related folks got fired in the recent layoffs.

Easy to signal when the money is good, but now the stock prices are tanking and you gotta cut fat.

I loved the part where you randomly blame minorities out of the blue. It reminds me of school, where I have seen classmates get visibly angry when a woman scored higher than them on exams. Clearly there was “favoritism” and that was the reason why she scored higher. It completely escaped their mind that she studied while they were playing league of legends non-stop.

In my mind it proves that a small number of people really do try to use minorities as scapegoats for no good reason.

Your classmates may have been witnessing a well known psychological phenomenon: https://scitechdaily.com/wide-and-lasting-consequences-teach...

This seems to be true. My friend and i talked about this yesterday. My Boss basically cut the entire old staff out of the loop and hired new staff, which he promised a lot of things. The old staff is very unmotivated because nearly nobody got what was promised three years ago. But the Boss got two Promotions in that time.

I have a growing pile of very different theories concerning the layoffs (actual cost cutting, irrational investor pressure, copycat behavior, systemic risk, AI risk, etc.etc.). The article wasn't particularly interesting, it basically argued hurr durr, big tech leadership is incompetent and is just winging it.

Your comment has a new angle, but it only says how, not why. To paraphrase, layoffs are a way to fire white people in middle management in favor of women minorities. But why is that so?

So, for this hypothesis to be true we'd expect to see

1. A disproportionate number of people who are laid off being middle managers.

2. A disproportionate number of people who are laid off being white men.

Rather than speculating, go find the data. You'd have a great lawsuit on your hands! Until then, this is just ridiculous speculation.

Nobody who isn't a member of a minority group can get promoted anymore? Come on. Like, we do promotions all the time. People can look around and just see that this is false.

This isn't new.

https://www.npr.org/2017/10/24/559604836/majority-of-white-a...

The corporate 4 stroke engine producing capital for the owners and burning people as fuel.

Its not just tech companies, its capitalism eating itself in hype cycles of bulls and bears.

>its capitalism

I see this type of comment and sentiment more and more in threads on tech companies, and I have to ask: what exactly is meant by it? Is the idea that cycles of cynical exploitation only exist in capitalism? That seems flatly false, on every level, when compared to the other options. Bureaucratic exploitation exists everywhere, always has, and always will.

It's not intended as a comparison to other systems. It's calling out a failing of capitalism on its own, since capitalism is the system we live under.

Viewed more fully, the argument points out that capitalism tends to concentrate wealth. On the other end, people without cash reserves get pushed to subsistence living, since they can be pitted against each other to compete for the lowest salary. And you can expect middle managers to side with the people with the most money, since they'll receive rewards for helping them concentrate their wealth.

That doesn't claim that you can eliminate bureacracy. It just points out areas where capitalism itself is the problem, and you can consider other systems. Or improvements to this one, though analysis of capitalism suggests that most improvements will be co-opted in favor of those with money against those who don't.

So that's what the phrase means. There's still a lot to unpack, but that's enough to suggest that there's more to it than just a buzzword.

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